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Welcome to Dan Snow's history hits everybody. It's the episode he's been waiting for is the big showdown is the Brexit history showdown. Now that breaks, it's over. I thought we could plunge in with both feet, try and change some minds. This is the episode in which I talk to Robert Toombes. He's just published this Sovereign Isle. He was a big supporter of the leave side during the Brexit debate here in the UK. He wants to leave the EU, the European Union.

I wanted to stay. This is not like the Lincoln Douglas debates between two evenly matched orators, both brimming with passion for their cause because we're not evenly matched. He is a professor. He's an author of wonderful books, particularly on French history. I'm just a Muppet with a podcast, but this was a chance to have a little discussion. Now, this all over in a friendly way about why someone so steeped in European history as Robert tomb's became convinced that it was in the best interests of Britain to leave the EU.

And this was a really enjoyable, thought provoking conversation. It's one that I wish I'd had a few years ago, and whilst we didn't change each other's minds, because that's not how it usually works. It was definitely good to hear some of the arguments made in such an articulate and thoughtful way by such an interesting man. If you wish to watch documentaries about that long Anglo-French rivalry, let me tell you, we got quite a few of them. You take your pick.

We got early medieval hot Norman Conquest on history, hit TV a little high medieval, a little 100 year war action going on there. You can see Jonathan Sumption talking about 100 years war and history hit TV. But we also come, of course, the long 18th century and the giant clashes for global domination between Britain and France, culminating at the Battle of Waterloo and the Battle Trafalgar, both of which have documentaries about, trust me, if you're interested in Anglo-French rivalry, we got it covered at history hit TV.

The Netflix for History had a good history at dot TV sign up. And so the whole new world of historical viewing, you can absolutely love it. Only the other day a listener to the podcast got in touch with me on the Internet on the interweb and told me that his parents were saying to the podcast they decided to upgrade their broadband just so their history hit TV. So if you listen to this, that particular family, I hope you're enjoying history dot TV.

Thank you very much for signing up. In the meantime, everybody enjoy this episode of me having a discussion with Robert Toobs.

Well, thank you so much for coming on the podcast, The Pleasure. Thank you for asking me. We sit on different sides of the old Brexit debate, but what we share is a great passion of history. You as a leading academic, me as a jokey broadcaster. But we share a passion of history, and I am sure you do as well. I see history everywhere in this debate. In fact, with so much modern politics, whether it's Trump appealing directly to history to make America great again, whether it's Putin's case for himself or Scottish independence, Brexit history is just central to all these debates, but it sort of gets overlooked by the mainstream.

Well, if I can be slightly heretical, I'd say I absolutely agree with you. History is everywhere. And I think in some ways we'd be better off if we had a little bit less of it sometimes. I think the debate about Europe and the other things you mentioned are all fundamentally, when you really dig down a bit, are all about the way people understand the past or the ideas they have about history. And they're often deeply felt ideas, but they're often not really very politically defensible ideas.

And I sometimes wish if we had a bit less historical rhetoric and perhaps a tiny bit more historical analysis, or sometimes if we just agreed that we'd leave history out of it, we'd find some of these debates rather less passionate and rather less heated. Yeah, I agree.

Funnily enough, it often comes up on this podcast as other ever occasions in which perhaps there's a bit too much history. And that is, as you say, heretical. And you point out in your book and in interviews you've done recently that almost the problem with the Brexit debate is that history was capacious enough to arm both sides with arguments that were really quite compelling. And I agree. We rehearse some of those arguments. Both make the argument for Brexit from the point of view of history.

Is it a Linda Colly? Is the British exceptionalism idea? Is it a, dare I say, a slightly Whig ish idea of history? What is the most compelling argument for Brexit, do you think?

Let me give you the pro-Brexit one first. It would be, as you say, that the Britain and perhaps particularly England have a unique relationship with Europe and the rest of the world. And this would be things like ancient devotion to parliamentary government, a long existing tradition of independence and self-government, the common law system very different from the EU's Roman law assumptions. You might even say great suspicion of the state, therefore, a dislike of a system that can be seen as constantly interfering and unnecessarily interfering.

So all those things you could say were pushing us towards Brexit just to stay on that for so fascinating.

And as a Canadian, I'm not unaware of the very profound links across the Atlantic and the fact that those imperial vestiges of a new dynamic countries Canada, Australia, South Africa, USA, they are very different to the remnants of the French and Portuguese empires. I absolutely see that. And I also think that Britain's kind of imperial journey over the last 200 years makes it less obvious to people why you should want to surrender sovereignty in order to seek advantage. It's more obvious when you've had German armies marching across Belgium in 1914.

In 1940, we've had a different journey. Okay. I'm going to say I'm sceptical about this argument, but I agree it's a very cogent one. And it appeals to people on both sides, on one side positively and on the other side negatively. Therefore, we have these links with other parts of the world in Europe, and this makes us less European. And that may well be true. And of course, as you say, our experience of the 20th century was much less traumatic.

And hence, I think it's demonstrable that we don't feel that the EU is saving us from a return to the 1930s in the way that people in some European countries do, or indeed for Eastern European to Russian domination. Or if you're a southern European from some countries, a return to dictatorship. You know, we haven't got those fears that are always, I think, in the back of the minds of many of my European friends who said, well, you know, if the EU broke down or if there wasn't an EU, wouldn't we be in danger of returning to Franco Salazar or whatever?

And I just think that those are not fears that most people in this country deep down feel. And so, yes, I mean, you did it very eloquently. You can produce arguments for saying why we should not be in the EU. And you can also produce arguments for saying why we don't need to be or why we don't feel the need to be in the EU. But as I said, I'm a bit sceptical about the extent to which these are the real explanation for Brexit.

And hence, although a historian, as you said, I'm kind of letting down the corporation by saying that I think that history is not the crucial explanation of this. Well, in that case, at the end of the conversation, I'm going to ask you whether it was Robert Tomb's, the historian that was campaigning for Brexit or just Robert tomb's citizen. And I'm too old for them to be separated.

You know this, too, as you were saying earlier, once you get really deeply into history, it. Does affect your thinking about practically everything, just automatically and you can't help thinking in historical terms, but I'm a European historian. I'm really a historian of France. Therefore, I think of it from a European perspective and not just from a British perspective. You certainly are a wonderful historian of France, your book, That Sweet Enemy, I think is one of the most brilliant books.

I enjoyed it enormously for anyone who is not familiar with the book. At the end of each chapter of the history, you talk in a more openly subjective way about what you think that history means and where the blame lay at various junctures of Anglo-French history. But it's wonderful. The only way I can ask. So if you're skeptical about that historical argument, what are the other historical influence on you as you made this decision to come out?

Well, it was partly my French historian hat, if you like, because this is a slightly roundabout answer. But when people say, oh, yeah, but Britain or England has a very different historical tradition, we're so attached to our independence to democracy, I think. Well, what about the French? They've had umpteen revolutions. You can hardly say the French are not attached to liberty, to freedom, to the idea of democracy in some ways even more so than we are.

And what about Italy? What about Poland? What about Hungary? All these countries in the 19th century, which is my period, had these struggles for independence in a way that we really haven't had to do. So you might say, well, why are they still willing to remain in the EU when we left it a thought experiment? If Hungary next week decided to leave the EU, then of course we'd be looking for historical explanations and say, well, of course, all this was predictable because of their history, but they're not going to do that.

The question I asked myself is, given all these historical traditions, which in many ways make it very difficult for European nations to accept a confederal system of power in Brussels and all that, why do they accept it? And we reject it. And therefore, I don't think it's because our history is wholly different or our attachment to democracy or liberty are so much greater. I think that's demonstrably not true. One of the things you have to look at, it seems to me, is the rather more boring circumstances in which we made the decision, and therefore not so much that the long historical story as the rather short term historical circumstances of our deciding to leave.

The 2008 crash rather than the Danish conquest of England a thousand years ago. Shall we talk about some of the reasons that you think that made Romania so certain that history is on their side? Where's the best place to start? I mean, this very difficult idea of the archipelago in which we live, Englishness, Britishness and the assumption of uniformity across the aisles recently, lots of historians have pointed to that. The complexity of identity, even within the isles, means that perhaps we're not so different to Europeans as we once thought.

Yeah, I think that's true. There are differences between all countries and also similarities or the fact that, as you point out in your book, for many periods of our history, we were in transnational polities of sorts anyway. Yes, that's true, though, of course, going back to the point you made earlier, the great transnational polity that we were in, which was the empire, was very different one from the continent of Europe. So I think, you know, there is something in the argument that Brexit has some connection with our imperial history.

Inevitably, that's not to say it's an attempt to recreate the empire, which seems to me to be silly. But your question was really about how one explains remain views. And it's partly because I'm on the other side. I have to admit, I find these somewhat more difficult to explain if opinion polls are helpful with a pinch of salt and all that. Quite a small number of people in Britain have said that they are deeply attached to the idea of European integration.

It comes out at about five percent of the electorate, so, of course, they're often very articulate people and so they can create a narrative which is one of the nation state being outdated, internationalism being the wave of the future, and also the other things that we kind of touched on. The EU keeps the peace in Europe. Leaving the EU is a backward looking and isolationist step and that kind of thing. There are people who believe all those things, which I don't, but I can see how they can be believed.

But for many people in Britain and all over the continent, the EU is essentially a practical arrangement, hopefully for making them better off. And most people who voted to remain said that they had voted because they feared the economic consequences of leaving. So I think one has to look in a sense that you are saying the very recent history and not the long term history, because you can go back to the Battle of Hastings and you can think of Henry the Eighth and you can think of the Spanish Armada.

But that doesn't necessarily mean that you will say we couldn't be members of the EU. It's clearly not the case. Lots of people did think we should be members of the EU. Therefore, I think it comes down really to a much closer look at how people understood their present circumstances are not only looking for some historically deterministic story that caused us to behave the way we did, but if I think of my own colleagues, of course, it's notorious that 90 percent of academics were opposed to Brexit.

For many people, it would be the thought that many of their students come from the EU. They have links with the EU academically, they get funding from the EU and so on. Therefore, if were to say, ah, yes, but what about the Battle of Waterloo? These sorts of things simply wouldn't count in their consciousness. They would think of them as irrelevant. And the sort of history that I guess does count for them is this rather broad and general sense that the tide of history is moving towards.

Supranational organizations, though, of course, that don't seem to be happy anywhere else, apart from in the EU. Yes, I feel a bit seen because despite not being super articulate, I feel I'm in that little weird five percent to have that kind of millenarian view about global government, which I often get derided for. But we can perhaps come to that. But I suppose the thing that I found compelling about many historians talking about Britain, in a way, it is a practical issue, which is that the fact that for the last 250 years Britain was a global hegemon has possibly blinded us to the fact that previous to that, as you point out in your book, invasions across the channel were very frequent.

Britain had huge entanglements with Europe. But a more fundamental point, which is what happens in Europe, affects Britain, whether we like it or not. It strikes me that policymakers in the south east of England have got to conundrums. One is the isles and it's the heterodox make up of the isles and the difficulty of establishing a satisfactory status quo, if that's the right way, split. The second is what on earth to do in the invasion ports of Europe.

What the hell do you do about the Belgians, the Dutch, the Normans, the Gallic tribes? And it strikes me that when Julius Caesar approached the channel coast, that's what our Celtic forebears had to decide, is do you intervene in France before he arrives in Kent? And whether you see it, athelstan trying to marry his sisters off the European princes. It's Élizabeth. The first intervening in the French civil war was much more about than I do or in the low countries.

We have scrambled over the years to have influence beyond the White Cliffs of Dover. And I think that's a bit of history that I did find quite pertinent. If you are presented with this gigantic reality on the continent, is it not best to engage with it? I'm sure we should engage with it as we shall with its various member states. The question is, do we want to be part of it now? As I said, I don't think history tells us what we have to do, but it does tell us what we have done in the past and as you say, exercising influence and being very aware of dangers from the continent.

And after all, there have been an awful lot of dangers as well as the benefits. You know, the attractions for trade, for culture meant that we were constantly engaged and no doubt we always will be engaged. But one thing that I point out in the book, I don't whether you think this is a good point, is that since the end of the hundred years war, since the reign of Mary Tudor, there's been no attempt by any British ruler, monarch, prime minister, whatever, until we joined the European Economic Community to have a permanent organic link with any part of Europe.

We've always wanted to be a free agent, engaging, as you say, reacting against threats, taking advantage of opportunities, but not as Mary Tudor wanted to marry Philip of Spain and Inherit Burgundy or some, you know, if she'd had one to inherit Burgundy. Elizabeth, the first was very keen to keep out of that kind of entanglement, wouldn't marry a French or Spanish prince and so on. And we had the Hanoverian connection, of course, for quite a long time.

But it was extremely unpopular and most people didn't want us to be too involved in European politics. Now, does that tell us anything? Well, it may tell us that we've always had other axes to grind or other fish to fry, and we're often much more interested in what was happening outside Europe than inside. Okay. The threats or potential threats are often been there, as you say. And I think it's certainly the case that when Macmillan applied to join the EEC, the idea of a united Europe could be a threat to us and therefore we should be in it.

To prevent it from being a danger was very real. It was certainly one of the motives. But I would say now, and you may say this is terribly complacent and reckless. It seems to me that the EU, as it has developed, is a rather weak collection of states, is not a threat to us, and that therefore we no longer really have to engage with it. To the extent that we thought for 50 years, from 1970 onwards, roughly, we had to do.

Does does you talk to Robert tomb's about Brexit on which we disagree? It's exciting. More after this. I was just thinking of the rot set in when Charles a second gave back Dunkirk, captioned with the grit of the new model army on the dunes of Dunkirk, as I referred to earlier. The other great question, and this is where our relations with Europe have always been also about relations within the Isles and sure of Brexit seems to have dealt an arguably mortal blow to the union.

We'll see. Who knows when we complacent in thinking of the United Kingdom as a settled constitutional arrangement where we complacent in our history. Do you think you guys priced in the potential upheaval within the island that Brexit might cause?

Possibly not. I take a rather different view and perhaps a more realpolitik view. Your view, I think, which is a very respectable one. And you might be absolutely right that in a sense that countries eventually do the things that their peoples feel deep down a good for them. So Scotland will become independent because now arguably a majority of Scots feel that that's what they want, therefore that's what they'll do. I sort of feel that people often don't do what they would like to do because they realize that the cost of doing it is so high.

And here my analogy would be with Catalonia, being a member of the EU makes it very tempting for parts of multi ethnic states to break away, because what's the risk you risk becoming like Luxembourg or Slovenia? Well, what's the problem with that? That's great. And I think that the membership of the EU, by making this all seem very safe and cost free, tended to encourage separatism or at least a strong sense of regional autonomy in many parts of Europe.

Now, that may be a good thing or it may be a bad thing, but it seems to me that Brexit makes that much, much, much less feasible for Scotland to become independent of the United Kingdom when the United Kingdom has left the EU and where there's no guarantee that Scotland will become a member of the EU. And if it did, it would be a very small and marginalised member of the EU. It seems to me that although Brexit might make many Scots very annoyed, it makes the possibility of Scotland becoming an independent country more and more remote.

You may well be right. You've talked in the book and you talked in this interview about there are no great currents of history. You know, Barack Obama probably wasn't right when he talked about the arc of history bending towards various things. But there's two very contradictory things go on. The moment I grew up in the 90s, when we were told the nation state was an anachronism and we were all going to be subsumed into these transnational blocks. And in a way, of course, globalization, technology is pushing towards that the growth of a kind of transnational liberal, highly mobile, middle class citizens of the world.

But that seems to also be producing pushback. And the nation state and indeed nationalist strongmen seem to be coming back into fashion from Brazil to Poland and various other places. Do you think it's in any way useful to try and think about the historical lifecycle of a nation state, or do you think we are just whistling in the wind? I think you put it very well. I think it looked as though globalisation was making the nation state anachronistic and that governments would simply not be able to control things, that they would become, in a sense, irrelevant.

They would themselves give away much of their power to international bodies or to other sorts of institutions, and we would all become much more footloose and less attached to a place. And that clearly is true for some people. David Goodhart famously called them anywhere people. I think many of those are the ones who are keenest on the EU, though, interestingly, more British people live in the Anglosphere than live in the EU. So there must also be quite a large body of this international middle class, if you like, which is not particularly tachy, which is much more attached to the relationships with America or with Australia and so on.

But there is certainly or there was at least a sense that globalisation was the wave of the future. But since China has been behaving in the way it has since, of course, the pandemic and also the political kickback which you rightly identify, which, of course, many people dismissed as populism. But it seems to me it's a wish by many people who feel that their interests are being ignored to hang on to the things that they have most confidence in, which is their country and their government.

This certainly has made for a very powerful reaction. Of course, it's tempting for people on the anti Brexit wing, as it were, to say, oh, yes, it's all the same thing. You know, Boris Johnson, Trump, all these people are the same. They represent the same in some senses. They come from similar grievances. They represent the same kind of desires among a large part of the population. But the kind of thing that this is manifested in is very much influenced by the political culture of the country in which it takes place.

In some countries you have populist politicians who are wrecking the whole. Medical system or who are creating new political parties? What have we got? We've got an old Italian prime minister who has, in a sense, rejuvenated the governing party that's been in power most of the time since the 80s. It's hardly a very revolutionary populist movement. These things have similarities, but they're not the same thing and they don't produce the same results. So I guess come back to that final question I asked you about earlier, really, but you made your decision as, of course, a historian, of course, armed with lots of context.

But you made your decision as someone looking at the present, trying to weigh up the short term practical benefits and drawbacks of being an EU. That is fascinating to hear. Well, I think I would say you can't stop being a historian. I'm sure you'd agree with that. And in some ways, my historical analysis was, first of all to say, is the EU going in a direction that seems to me historically viable? And I feared that it wasn't that it was moving away from the kind of democracy that Europe has been trying for a long time to build.

And it was probably trampling on the deepest loyalties of Europeans, which are to their countries. So I felt worried about the way the EU was going, and I think that was probably the main thing. The other thing was the feeling that thanks to David Cameron, we were being forced to vote and therefore one could say, well, what would be the effect of this vote on the next six months or the next five years? But I kind of, as a historian, felt what would be the effect of this vote in the very long term?

And if we vote to stay in the EU, is this something that we'll be able to live with for a generation or more? And I thought probably it wasn't what's the measure of success? So if you talk about it in a generation's time, what would a bad situation look like? And what will a good post Brexit situation look like? My worst scenario would have been for us, essentially through fear of change, to tie ourselves to an EU that was becoming more and more unpopular with its citizens, more and more economically unsuccessful, which was giving rise to extremist political movements in many parts of Europe as a reaction against the kind of high minded bureaucratic system that the EU really is, and that also we might well be heading to another eurozone crisis, which would cause another economic disaster.

So I was afraid of our being stuck in that system. What would success be like? Well, it would be for me, of course, for Britain to be able to maintain itself as a prosperous and secure independent democracy to level up. That's certainly an essential aspect of Brexit. If we don't do that, then you could well say, well, the whole thing's been a waste of time and effort, that we would be able to play a role in the world of a more creative kind than we have done in the last 50 or 60 years.

And, of course, to raise the very important point that you raised earlier, that Brexit will consolidate the union on that final point. I do think the Britons well, certainly politicians and lots of sort of intellectuals obsession with its role in the world is deeply confusing. Is the EU a method for somehow prolonging Britain's global relevance or is the opposite true? Well, I find all that deeply confusing and odd. Do French intellectuals talk about France charting an independent way in the world?

Well, they talk about France running Europe. In a sense. That's the great project that France has been following since the 1950s. This is the great gamble that France will build a European system to which it will hand over much of its independence, but that that won't matter because essentially France will be providing the brains and we'll be running it. Our idea has never been that. I think we've never really tried very hard to be running the EU. We've tried to be good members of the club and so on, but not really running it.

I don't think we've had a very clear international policy. It's tended to be either being the Americans best friend or being a good member of the European club or both simultaneously. And it seems to me that's not really a national policy. Maybe we can never have one again. But and here I'm a bit of a heretic. You earlier on were talking about how Britain had been the hegemon for 250 years and now we're not I'm not really convinced that we ever really were.

The way I think we should look at our history internationally is that we have for a long time been one of the half dozen or so most powerful states in the world, certainly since the beginning of the 18th century, along with Russia, Germany, France, and of course, more recently the United States and now China. But we've never run the world in the 19th century, we and often very little influence on what was happening in Europe. We were terrified of being invaded by the French.

We had endless imperial disasters by trying to do too much. And so I think now we're really in the sort of position that we've been in for a very long time. We haven't got an empire anymore. And if you think that's what really defines the greatness of a nation, then we're a nation in decline. But then everybody's lost their empire. And I don't believe that the empire was what gave Britain its influence or its wealth, rather the other way around.

And in any case, the empire was to a large extent a drain. So I think that we should actually be a bit less worried about what we do in the world. And if you wanted a somewhat cynical summary of our possible strategy, it would come from Lord Palmerston when he famously said England has a no permanent friends and no permanent enemies, only permanent interests, and we need to work out what our interests are and the countries with which we will cooperate in trying to bring them about.

Those interests include peace and democracy and so on. But I don't think we should fear we've got to attach ourselves, whether to the Americans or to the EU in order to have our proper say in what happens in the world which affects us all. Yeah, I don't deny that. I find that in this debate very peculiar. And it's tied up with the key question of the Winston Churchill bust in the bloody oath. Yes. If I hear one more thing about that, I'm going to tell you I agree.

It's terribly humiliating and demeaning to be obsessed with this. I was glad when I heard the prime minister on television the other day he didn't use the phrase special relationship. If all politicians would stop using that phrase would be an awful lot better off. It should be absolutely banned. Robert tomb's. We agree. At last we have reached the ultimate synthesis. I really enjoyed that. Thank you so much. Thank you very much for inviting me onto your podcast.

Tell everyone what the book's called. It's called this Sovereign Isle, Britain in and out of Europe. Lovely. Thank you very much indeed. Well, thank you.

In the history of our country. Ivan, thanks for reaching the end of this podcast. Most of you probably asleep, so I'm talking to your snoring folks. But anyone who's awake, it would be great if you could do me a quick favor, head over to wherever you get your podcasts and rate it five stars and then leave a nice glowing review. It makes a huge difference for some reason to how these podcasts do madness. I know, but them's the rules.

Then we go farther up the charts, more people listen to us and everything will be awesome. So thank you so much. I'll sleep well.

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