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For example, France wants Britain as a counterweight to West Germany's ever-growing economic and political strength. If London opts to stay out, the French would be tempted to play up to Moscow, and perhaps also to Britain, as a hedge against West German hegemony in Western Europe. Another bad effect would be the undermining of West German Chancellor Willy Brandt's Ostpolitik. Brandt cannot hope to establish a sound and peaceful basis for relations with the Communist nations unless he is backed by a strong, united Western Europe. An isolated Germany, moreover, has undertaken irrational and tragic actions in the past. In the U.S., Western Europe's failure to unite would intensify a budding mood of isolationism and heighten demands for a reduction of American defense commitments.
Economic Effects. Britain would experience the severest jolts of all. Most ranking British politicians feel that Ted Heath would have to step down as Prime Minister if Britain failed to get in. The Labor Party would also face an internal feud, since Deputy Party Leader Roy Jenkins and Shadow Foreign Minister Denis Healey are both publicly committed to Britain's joining Europe.
The economic effects would be similarly far-reaching. Anti-Market Britons like Professor Nicholas Kaldor, who was an economic advisor to the Wilson government, argue that Britain needs to remain outside EEC regulations in order to reform and revitalize its economy. Pro-Marketeers argue, however, that Britain urgently needs both tariff-free access to the larger Continental market and increased competition at home to snap its industries and stodgy unions out of their lethargy.
With Britain outside the Common Market, its economic growth, which has been the slowest among major industrial countries, would be further stunted. One official British study estimates that British per capita income would rise by $500 less during the next nine years if Britain fails to join the EEC.
What concerns many ordinary Britons most is that British entry will mean greatly increased food prices as the country moves behind the EEC's high agricultural-levy system. Almost equally important is a premonition that many of the best things about Britain—the peaceful villages, easygoing work habits, the uncommon civility that graces British life—will be endangered by EEC membership. There is a positive dread that chattering Frenchmen would monopolize London's sidewalks, that garlic-eating Italians in careering Alfa Romeos would shatter the tranquillity of the rustic British countryside, and that those too-efficient Germans would brusquely alter the cozy tea-break routine of British workers.
This bulldog nationalism and Dover Cliffs insularity interact with a suspicion that the Common Market is Catholic and capitalist and would corrupt Protestant and socialist Britain. In a recent issue of the New Statesman, British Journalist Paul Johnson divided Britons into insularists (King Arthur, Queen Elizabeth I, Cromwell, Anthony Eden) and Continentalists (Thomas a Becket. Charles I, Harold Macmillan). "Britain has always chosen the adventure of sovereignty in preference to the presumed security of a Continental system," wrote Johnson. "And history shows that in the end she has always chosen rightly."