Friends, Not Roommates:
Why Britain and Europe Are Better Served by Cooperation Rather Than Integration
Opinion Piece by James Sciberras
When Malta voted to join the European Union in the 2003 Referendum, it voted to join a project that had already named its destination. The Maastricht Treaty was settled, the single currency became a fact of commerce, and the vision of a federal Europe, however distant it looked, had begun being named plainly. By contrast, Britain joined the EEC in 1973, agreeing to a different vision altogether. It was initially formed and presented to the British electorate as a common market and precisely that alone, with no prospect of centralising power to a supranational level yet. During her Premiership, Margaret Thatcher grew increasingly hostile to the project. This was no change of heart but a recognition that the terms of membership itself were shifting under her (Thatcher, 1988). Malta signed up to a Europe that had largely resolved the trajectory it wished to take, Britain signed up to a Europe that had not figured that out yet.
In 1946, Winston Churchill famously called for a continental union of states, in which he explicitly excluded Britain (Churchill, 1946). In 1963, Charles De Gaulle looked across the English Channel and initially refused to admit Britain into the emerging community (Deschamps, 2016). He believed that Britain’s deepest loyalty lay across the Atlantic rather than the continent (Sloan, 2016), mistakenly interpreting Britain’s Atlantic relationship for a trojan-style plot.
Nevertheless, De Gaulle correctly sensed that Britain had a different centre of gravity to Europe (Deschamps, 2016). The story that resulted in Brexit was not merely one of a difficult member state causing trouble, but a story of two entities that wanted different trajectories.
That difference was not simply a matter of Britain’s attitude towards individual policies. Were this merely a matter of resisting further integration, this argument could equally be made about numerous other member states, which have themselves resisted elements of European integration.
In Britain’s case, however, the question of European integration was rooted more fundamentally in its intellectual culture and constitutional tradition. The Westminster system is built on parliamentary sovereignty and adversarial majoritarian government, a political culture more commonly found across the Anglosphere and Commonwealth than in continental Europe. By contrast, the European project increasingly exercises a more interventionist authority through institutions above the national level, within a system characterised by consensus and coalition-building (Cowie, 2018; Torrance and Sandro, 2025). For Britain, this was not simply a question of whether a particular policy was desirable, but of where authority ultimately belonged.
Crucially, Britain was not a small member state capable of remaining sceptical while allowing the wider project to proceed around it. It was, and remains, a major economy, a nuclear power, a permanent member of the UN Security Council and one of Europe’s principal military and economic powers. When Britain resisted deeper integration, its objections carried considerably more weight. British Euroscepticism was therefore not just a more hardline version of what can be found elsewhere in Europe, but a fundamentally different constitutional understanding of sovereignty, combined with a state large enough to make that difference consequential.
It is this divergence that lays the foundation for my argument. Britain and EU member states would be better to progress as partners and allies, rather than roommates. Cooperation should not be reduced to ‘tolerating’ Britain until it comes to its senses and returns to the fold. Instead, both sides need to honestly admit that they were not suited to sharing a lease.
Through this lens, the 2016 referendum was not the beginning of this realisation but its climax. Its roots trace back to September 1992, when Britain’s ejection from the European Exchange Rate Mechanism (ERM) became the first piece of evidence of the mismatch de Gaulle had sensed thirty years earlier (BBC News, 2014b). On entering the ERM in 1990, Britain had pegged Sterling to the Deutschmark at a time when Germany needed high interest rates to absorb the costs of reunification, while Britain, in recession, needed the opposite. When markets judged this mechanism unsustainable, the government raised interest rates twice in a single day and spent billions defending it, yet it still failed (Wild, 2025).
At Maastricht, Prime Minister John Major secured opt-outs from both the Single Currency and the Social Chapter (European Union, 1992), establishing a pattern Britain would repeat at nearly every subsequent treaty, in which they would accept the market, but resist further integration. It increasingly became apparent that deeper integration would require the government to give up a degree of economic self-determination that Britain had never believed it signed up for. When David Cameron vetoed the proposed EU treaty change in 2011, after failing to secure sufficient safeguards for Britain’s financial services sector in the City of London, the pattern was already forty years old (Gibbon, 2011; Mann, 2011).
While Britain grew more reluctant to further integration, the concept of Eurofederalism was beginning to gain traction within the EU. Britain was not merely a reluctant participant in the federalist project. Its economic mass meant that when it chose to exercise its veto under the unanimity rules, the consequences were harder to absorb. The Social Chapter opt-out at Maastricht meant EU-wide employment and social policy advanced without one of its largest economies for years. Cameron’s 2011 veto did not just fail to stop the fiscal compact, it forced the remaining twenty-six states to pursue it as a multilateral treaty outside the EU’s legal framework (Mann, 2011).
Had Brexit never happened, a bloc attempting to build an ever-closer fiscal union and a more coordinated defence and foreign policy strategy, would have remained limited by a member state that did not share the same enthusiasm for this level of integration.
Since Britain’s departure from the European Union, NextGenerationEU was created in response to the pandemic, which included a programme of joint borrowing on a scale that would have been considerably harder to negotiate with a member still resisting similar measures on principle (European Commission, no date) . Conversations on removing the veto in favour of a qualified majority are more serious than they were pre-2016.
Britain on the other hand has not yet collected the dividends that withdrawal was meant to secure. Although the government gained the freedom to tailor regulation to its own advantages, for the life-sciences sector, fintech among others (Rutter, Marshall and Mills-Sheehy, 2021), it instead carried over a large body of EU-derived law into domestic law. The Retained EU Law (Revocation and Reform) Act 2023, which initially proposed an extensive programme of revocation, was substantially scaled back before enactment (Cowie, 2023). Businesses that were once reluctant Europeanists still operate under much of the same regulation that was simply moved into the domestic statute books rather than removed or altered.
None of this means that Britain and Europe need to remain distant. A war on Europe’s own border and a less predictable United States mean that cooperation is a necessity, not a choice. Britain still leads the Joint Expeditionary Force, trains Ukrainian troops through Operation Interflex and coordinates sanctions and arms supplies with the EU (Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office and Ministry of Defence, 2025). The aerospace industry offers another example, with Airbus wings built in Wales shipped to final assembly lines in Toulouse and elsewhere (BBC News, 2014a). The alignment on the conflicts in the Middle East, such as a shared position on the Gaza conflict and on Iran also demonstrates the trajectory of UK-EU relations under a changing world order (Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office, 2024; Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office, 2025).
If Britain were to rejoin the European Union, instead of building on the areas where Britain and Europe already cooperate well, Britain would be back at odds with European institutions on fiscal integration, freedom of movement, and the supremacy of EU law over Parliament. These aren’t disputes that can be sorted out in a day, they trace themselves to a constitutional tradition built for a different kind of politics, that of a centuries-old system of common law, the principle of parliamentary sovereignty, and a Westminster system built on adversarial majorities rather than coalitions. Britain and Europe are not rivals. They are two projects that happen to share a continent, that are pursuing different destinations at different paces. Pretending that this was not the case is what led to decades of opt-outs and vetoes. In hindsight, the 2016 referendum looks less like a rupture and more like a correction, it allows Europe to further its goal of an ever-closer union, alongside an ally that shares its values, but not that same goal.
The central argument is that withdrawal was, in principle, inevitable. Whether that withdrawal was executed as effectively as it might have been is a separate question, as is whether the resulting status quo is sufficient. Both are matters best left for another article.
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This piece reflects the author’s views, not necessarily the entire organisation’s.