Britain does best when isolated from Europe
In Elizabethan times we were a pariah state, and the pope declared a death sentence on our Queen. So we turned our back on Europe and, from being an impoverished backwater, created an empire, and experienced a flowering of culture, epitomised by Shakespeare.
In Victorian times we had splendid isolationism, keeping aloof from sordid European affairs.
In WW2 Europe attempted to conquer and destroy us, but we found reserves of fortitude and self-reliance.
That's wrong for a start.In Elizabethan times we were a pariah state
Unless you mean that nobody owned us.
We didn't turn out backs on Europe because the Europeans and the Pope weren't nice to us, who would give a toss about that?
We developed a trading empire away from Europe because there was a big wide world out there.
There still is. The point is that when Europe occupies our attention disproportionately we tend to lose sight of the wider picture. And Europe is more stiflingly inward looking and economically mismanaged than before.Originally Posted by bornfree
In the Elizabethan age and before every English (Britain didn't exist) port from London up to Hull were part of the Hanseatic league, the largest and most powerful North European trading alliance in history. Elizabeathean wars with Spain were about making England a leading European power via capturing control of Spanish/Portugese dominated wealthy trade routes, not isolation.
'Splendid isolation' is a term coined by Lord Palmerston whose political life was dominated by maintaining the balance of power in European interstate relations, rather than entering into an alliance with Prussia or France.
Not sure who Europe was in the WW2 but you might be thinking of Germany. Again Britain wasn't alone it was in alliance with the Soviet Union (and then the US). Over 80 per cent of the Nazi war machine fought on the Eastern Front. And as much a warm glow as the Spitfire dogfights and John Mills escaping from Coldtiz might give us, the British war effort was peripheral against the big picture.
You might be confusing Britain and/or England with Enver Hoxha's Albania.
I just can't stand people who speak about people who have lived hundreds of years ago and still refer to those people as "we".
The same people that talk about The Real World Today™ and how they're ready to immerse in it while all those dimwits around them fail to see the light.
If it wasn't for Britain there wouldn't have been a "Big Picture".
@King Billy
All parts of a big picture are indispensable to that big picture.
The question is : what do you call the big picture here?
If one defines it as the fact that Britain was not invaded by Germany (with the exception of a few islands), then you are right that without Britain's resistance there might have been no Big Picture.
If you define the big picture more broadly as the fact that the war was finally lost by Hitler, then it is an entirely different matter. Had it not been for Dunkirk, Stalingrad, Pearl Harbour and many other circumstances some of which perhaps still unknown, Britain might have been on the losers' side.
Actually, the point could be made that if Britain had been invaded in 1940 that might have prompted the Americans and perhaps the Russians to intervene and finish the war much sooner.
The anteriority of an event in the chain of events does not mean that that particular event is the determinant of the final result.
And so many other "Big Pictures" may come to mind...
The Big Picture, we all played a part together to get rid of Hitler and the Nazi's, we were not split we were united, not one of us can take the glory, we were in it together.
...to which it must be added that there are very few Frenchmen not willing to recognize that the part played by Britain in 1940 was both an admirable and very effective component of the final result. JR
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