Britain, Germany, and Brexit: The ‘Cradle of Democracy’ and the ‘Heart of Europe’ as Different Legacies of the Nineteenth-century Idea of the ‘Germanic’

Abstract

The 'Cradle of Democracy' and the 'Heart of Europe' as Different Legacies of the Nineteenth-century Idea of the 'Germanic'This essay traces the uses of the idea of the 'Germanic' in the nineteenth-century historical narratives of German and English identity and reflects on how the two ideas of Germanic liberty and of a common Germanic European heritage were deployed to tell the (national) identity stories that still preoccupy us today: Germany as the 'heart of Europe' and Britain as the 'cradle of democracy'. Today the notion of the Germanic has a rather mixed press: it tends to be seen as historically distant, somewhat old-fashioned -the term Germanic Languages has disappeared from the names for most German University Departments in the UK (less so in the U.S). It may even be considered vaguely suspect, with the whiff of white supremacy about it. Nineteenth-century thinking, however, had embraced the Germanic as modern and emancipating, an interpretation that may surprise today but that does not absolve the Germanic of notions of white supremacy (as the question is always who is to be emancipated).The following explores the common origin of German and British interest in the Germanic and its slightly different interpretations in each country, which, in the nineteenth century, were firmly rooted in the belief that the Germanic was an inheritance shared by both nations. While for nineteenth-century English and German contemporaries this commonality was self-evident, to the late twentiethand twenty-first observer, it tends to come as a surprise, having fallen victim to two world wars and to the interpretation of political and intellectual history that dominated after them. However, as we shall see, the public discussions around Brexit, the UK's departure from the European Union in 2019 following a referendum in 2016, relied heavily on nineteenth-century narratives of an English identity based on Germanic traits, while the official German willingness to support European integration, notwithstanding German Euroscepticism, appears to continue the nineteenth-century narrative of German lands as the crucible of European identity in which the Germanic legacy is a key part. Nineteenth-century notions of the Germanic have left their mark on both of narratives.This reliance on nineteenth-century discourses in contemporary concepts of Anglo-British and German identities tends to be covert but sits well with the two common metaphors cited in the title of this essay: the cradle of democracy for 1 Cf. "There was a time when the UK was regarded globally as the 'Cradle of Democracy' and there is no reason why it could not reclaim this title".