The only way for Britons to learn to appreciate life in the EU may be for them to try life outside it, argues Alex Warleigh-Lack

Another British prime minister, another setback in UK-EU relations. At least Margaret Thatcher turned up to EU summits to wield her handbag. Old clunking fist Gordon Brown couldn’t be bothered to show up to the EU’s Lisbon love-in last December.

The Downing Street spin about Brown having an unavoidable engagement in Westminster should be treated with the scorn it deserves; Brown is as much a fan of executive power as his predecessor Tony Blair. No, his late arrival in the Portuguese capital revealed something fundamental: that the EU is almost invisible in Britain.

What can I possibly mean by this? After all, we all think we know that most of the British press is profoundly Eurosceptic. But the reality is much worse: beyond the rabid imagination of the Daily Mail, the EU isn’t even on the radar screen.

Worse still, while there are occasionally EU stories elsewhere, they are usually brief and relayed in a way that minimises the EU’s role. Did you think, for instance, that Anglo-Franco-German cooperation on Iran had nothing to do with the EU? You would if you lived in Britain. I would bet my savings that most of those Brits who are so happy to travel, live and work in other member states have very little idea that it is thanks to the EU that they can do so. And that if they do know this, it makes them feel no more European.

I used to think this reflected Euroscepticism. Perhaps it does, partly. But more than this, I would argue that it shows how British elites – and indeed most British people – think of themselves, their state, and its role in the world.

It was not for nothing that US arguments about Britain’s potential role as a bridge between Washington and Brussels helped push the country towards EU membership. British people have never seen the EU as essential to rolling out a workable foreign policy and re-establishing the state as it was in postwar France, Germany, Italy and the Benelux countries. Neither has it been seen as a road to effective sovereignty and modernity, as was the case for Ireland, Spain and Portugal.

Few British people see the EU as a means of economic transformation or survival in the context of globalisation, unlike in Scandinavia or in central and eastern Europe. More often it is seen as of some marginal utility in business, but even that is subject to harrumphing about red tape by big companies and free market ideologues. For them, Europe is a distraction; the real gold dust lies in China and India.

Why does this matter? Because it fundamentally distorts the debate on the EU in Britain. It casts the Union as both wannabe-omnipotent (nasty Brussels grabs more power) and irrelevant (but that’s OK since the EU doesn’t matter anyway). This means that even supposedly expert politicians and political advisers have no idea about the real-world impact of the EU, what they have to do to make the system work, or why they should bother.

I will never forget receiving a visit from several leading policy advisers to the then-new prime minister in 1997, when I worked for a Labour MEP (a rather less malodorous role then than now). Their jaws hit the floor when I began to explain co-decision. As for talking about the powers – and limits – of the EU, a first-year undergraduate class might just have had more idea. Over ten years later, there are few signs that this has changed.

There are some bad reasons to kick the UK out of the Union. First is our reputation as an awkward partner. In all honesty, this can be overdone. Anyone who has ever tried to shape EU legislation knows that behind any member state saying “no” there are usually others seeking to free-ride. Indeed, in the Top 10 of member states inclined to throw a spanner in the EU works, France would be right at the top (remember the 1954 rejection of the European Defence Community, De Gaulle’s empty-chair policy in 1965 and the 2005 non to the constitution?) with Greece, Spain, Ireland, Denmark, Poland and Sweden all challenging Britain for chart position.

The second bad reason to make Britain leave would be that it wants to make the Union more flexible, with more opt-outs and less uniformity. Would it not be easier to get rid of London and move towards a lovely Monnet-style federation through stealth? This is shoddy thinking – and not just for reasons of democracy. The UK is actually very concerned about flexibility: yes, it has stayed out of the euro, the Schengen border-free area and much social policy, but so have other states, and if you are a hater of enhanced cooperation you’ll have no greater ally than London, which fears it might lead to a federal Europe through the back Delors.

The third bad reason to kick out the UK is the idea that it would frustrate the Americans. Well frankly, my dears, they wouldn’t give a damn. Washington would either not notice, or would just make it rather more obvious to all concerned that when it comes to foreign policy, if it bothered about “Yurp” at all, it would ring Brussels, Berlin or Paris – or perhaps Prague or Warsaw, to be mischievous.

The rationale for kicking Britain out, then, is this: it would Europeanise us. That will not be achieved by all the administrative structures and policies and procedures that fascinate us academics, or even the trade flows that businesses like, which exist already and would be imperilled by a British exit from the single market. By shutting Britain out of the EU system, the Union would make it clear that our massive economic interest is in trade with our neighbours, not in climate-busting fancies of centrality to India and China, and that our interests are with those who espouse some variety of the welfare state rather than turbo-capitalism.

With Washington paying far less attention to London outside the EU, foreign direct investment drying up (as it wouldn’t bring access to the single market), service industries dying for want of immigrants to work in them, travel more costly and less convenient, investment opportunities and sunny second homes for the middle classes getting harder to acquire and humiliation by Russia in negotiations over energy, we’d soon have to change our minds.

We Britons might not like it, and it wouldn’t make us ready to swallow everything from the EU as if it were holy writ (nor should it). But it would make us realise, hopefully never to forget, why being a member of the European Union is in our interest.

So, come on Brussels: be cruel to be kind, and kick us out. I guarantee we’d be back.

Alex Warleigh-Lack is professor of politics and international relations at Brunel University. This article first appeared in E!Sharp magazine - www.esharp.eu