Britain’s Continental Connection

Fergus Randolph is old England and new Europe.

Born in London and educated at exclusive Harrow, Randolph is a British trial lawyer who enjoys rugby and supports England in European soccer matches.

He also lives in Brussels with his Belgian wife and bilingual children, argues before the European Court of Justice in Luxembourg and commutes to his London office each week on cross-channel trains filled with European professionals like himself.

“I am quite English and the bar is a traditional place, but at the same time one is open to the European approach,” Randolph said in a British stab at introspection. “At the end of the day, one is rather less insular. I am English and European.”

That puts Randolph, 38, in a small but growing class of Europeans for whom nationality and boundaries are becoming less relevant. They are multilingual citizens of the European Union who live, work and even marry across borders and frequently discover that they have more in common with each other than with their compatriots.

Britain’s new Europeans are as comfortable in Munich and Madrid as they are in the Midlands. They may have traded Yorkshire pudding for Continental cuisine and a holiday in the Cotswolds for Mediterranean sun, but like Randolph, they have not given up their national identity so much as added a European layer on top.

While this cultural integration is taking place throughout the EU, it is most remarkable in Britain because this island nation has always held the Continent at arm’s length. Randolph grew up in a family that viewed Europeans as “foreigners” in an era that subscribed to the adage “Britons are best; I wouldn’t give tuppence for the rest.”

Even now, Britain is ambivalent about its relationship with Europe. Conservative former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher plucked on British heartstrings last year when she proclaimed that all of the country’s problems during her lifetime had been caused by mainland Europe.

Labor Prime Minister Tony Blair countered in a recent speech that “Britain’s destiny is to be a leading partner in Europe.” But aware that public support for joining the common European currency is at its lowest--26% for and 58% against, according to a Market & Opinion Research International poll published in March--he is postponing a referendum on the issue until well after next year’s national elections.

The possibility of a coordinated European defense policy or joint force is greeted with derision by many citizens of this former imperial power who believe that the French cannot be trusted and that, half a century after World War II, the Germans still must be kept in check. As one British public opinion pollster confided, “I mean really, would you want to depend on the Belgians for your security?”

Despite such stereotypes, Britons continue to integrate with the French, Germans and Belgians, notes Michael Maclay, director of the London-based political consulting firm Hakluyt and, incidentally, a Scot married to a German.

“The paradox is that, year by year, Britons become more European even as they stamp their feet and say ‘no’ to Europe,” Maclay said. “However, making political capital out of that change is very difficult.”

Free Trade Helps Blur Boundaries

The change is a product of free trade, corporate mergers, an open labor market and affluent economies. The Channel Tunnel makes it as easy to travel from London to Paris as to Liverpool. About 85% of the 7 million cross-channel train rides last year were taken by Europeans, including Britons, who can use their mobile telephones and watch television in their own language anywhere in the EU.

New low-budget airlines make it possible for the middle class to travel to Milan or Barcelona for a weekend soccer match, while EU labor laws have meant that even a home team such as Chelsea has an Italian coach and a cast of star players from the Continent.

Britain’s top jockey is an Italian--Frankie Dettori--and one of its chic fashion designers is Nicole Farhi, a Frenchwoman married to British playwright David Hare. Success for British designer Stella McCartney--daughter of Paul--is measured by the popularity of her fashions on the Continent.

This cultural cross-pollination is particularly evident in London, where Britain’s new Europeans live next door or work side by side with hundreds of thousands of other EU citizens.

“We are not all waiters either,” joked foreign policy analyst Gilles Andreani, one of about 200,000 French citizens living in Britain.

“A weekend in London used to be the next thing to the end of the world. Now it’s completely different. This has become a much more cosmopolitan city,” added Andreani, who nonetheless commutes home to Paris on weekends to be with his family.

London is so cosmopolitan that the boroughs of Chelsea and Kensington are sometimes referred to as arrondissements or Petit France. The streets are lined with patisseries, rotisseries and sidewalk cafes catering not only to French residents but also to changing British tastes.

Asserting that busy Britons have abandoned the Victorian Sunday lunch, a London women’s magazine recently suggested that cooks replace the old-fashioned midday roast with a “modern supper” that starts with antipasto peppers, goat cheese marinated in olive oil and garlic, and rosemary focaccia.

There was scarcely a mention of Italy in the recipes for these Italian dishes with “easy-to-find” ingredients. Olive oil is as common in British supermarkets as French brie, Danish ham and English brown sauce.

A classic English furniture maker, meanwhile, advertised its new rattan collection in the Independent newspaper’s Sunday magazine with a photograph of a soccer fan lying contentedly in front of the television, a glass of claret in hand. English football, French wine and Mediterranean furniture: This is the picture of a new European man.

Just how many of these “new Europeans” there are is difficult to determine. The number of EU citizens who reside in another EU country is still very small--less than 2% of the population. According to the European Commission, the EU’s executive branch, at least half of all Europeans still cannot hold a conversation in a second language, making cross-border communication a chore.

But although the new Europeans are a minority, their numbers and influence are increasing, says Mark Leonard, author of the booklet “Rediscovering Europe,” a study of attitudes toward the EU.

During the 18th century, cross-border marriages were largely restricted to royalty, undertaken primarily for political reasons. A century later, the grand tour of Europe was still a luxury of the privileged.

In a 1997 study, by contrast, 57% of European youths said they had traveled to another EU country in the previous year. Among those 15 to 24 years old, 5% said they had gone to another EU country to visit a boyfriend or girlfriend.

“The grand tour has turned into a cheap package holiday,” Leonard said. “Statistics show that contact among Europeans is more banal.”

Attitudes toward family, religion and the state are converging along with consumer tastes, he says.

“There is a distinctively European way of looking at things that is different from, say, the United States,” Leonard said. “Our attitudes on the balance between work and leisure, growth and the environment, economic dynamism and social cohesion are similar. European countries spend 40% of GDP on public spending, twice as much as in the United States.”

But although Britain is uniting socially and culturally with Europe, its attitudes toward a united Europe remain very British. Britons may travel and spend extended periods abroad, but two-thirds live within five miles of where they were born and raised.

Skepticism About Common Institutions

Even many of Britain’s new Europeans are skeptical about the European Commission and the common currency. Whereas the French and Germans feel proprietary toward European institutions and acknowledge a stake in their success, Britons tend to see them as a potential drain.

“In the last few years, the European Union has shown itself to be a big bureaucratic organization,” said Rebecca Renfro, 26, a British public relations executive in the London office of a German electronic media firm. “I sometimes wonder whether it is the best way for Britain to go.”

Renfro’s colleague at I-D Media, project manager Lex De Wynter, 33, is equally cautious. A trilingual aficionado of French cinema, German literature and Italian art, De Wynter says he feels at home in any country in the EU. Nonetheless, he prefers to consume European culture with the British pound.

“It’s all very well to relinquish your cultural identity, but in stages,” he said. “You can’t bridge the economic differences by arbitrarily imposing a currency.”

Britons living on the Continent are more likely to reflect the pro-European views of their neighbors and colleagues there, according to James Patrick Walston, 50, a British political scientist at Rome International University.

Among Britons living in Italy, “you get a fairly broad spectrum of views, far less negative than in London and closer to the general Italian view that monetary union and the European institutions are positive,” he said.

For Walston, who has lived half his life in Rome, identity is a more difficult question.

“Emigration is not the way it used to be 50 years ago when you upped stakes, left and made your new life somewhere else. Your children became part of that, and you lost contact,” he said. “Today, between physical movement, cheap travel and electronic communication, it’s not quite as if you were living in London, but almost. So you maintain contact with your home country as well as integrating here.”

Like so many new Europeans, Walston cherry-picks from multiple European cultures. He supported the Italian yacht Luna Rossa over New Zealanders in the America’s Cup but prefers British Formula One driver Eddie Irvine to Ferrari’s team. He likes theater in London and architecture in Italy.

Spanish and Belgian efforts to prosecute former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet made Walston feel European. “And when the House of Lords accepted the validity of the extradition proceedings, I did feel a certain amount of pride in the sense that this was a moral piece of law,” Walston said.

During last year’s war between the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and Yugoslavia, by contrast, Walston was upset that Italy was reluctant to stand up to the Serbs because of opposition from the Italian left and the Roman Catholic Church.

“They fudge the issues. In those terms, I feel very British,” he said.

By contrast, British barrister Randolph finds the issue of identity far less complicated or even important.

“I work with English, Belgian, Dutch lawyers,” he said. “We’re all pretty similar under the skin.”

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Richard Boudreaux in The Times’ Rome Bureau contributed to this report.