Britain and Germany: A Love-Hate Relationship?

Extract

It has become fashionable, in so-called ‘alterity studies’, to view self-identity as largely determined by a relationship to an outside ‘other’. If one went by the popular taunts on the football terraces of ‘two world wars and one world cup’, British identity in the late twentieth century appeared to have been profoundly and negatively informed by its encounter with Germany. This was the nation Britons apparently loved to hate. Yet, as historians are apt to remind us, Britain's allies and arch-enemies have altered over time and have not been the fixed categories which reassuring stereotypes would sometimes have us believe. If the historical clock were rewound 250 years to the mid-eighteenth century, some of Britain's closest allies would be found on the North German Plain, in Hanover and Prussia.1 During Frederick the Great's existential struggle for survival against the combined powers of Austria, Russia and France, it was Pitt's government who had financed Prussia to withstand a world of enemies. Likewise, when colonial Britain had fallen out with her North American colonies across the Atlantic, a large proportion of redcoats were in fact made up by Hessian mercenaries. When the monarchies were challenged by France's revolutionaries in the 1790s, the various counter-revolutionary coalitions inevitably included the houses of Hanover, Hohenzollern and Habsburg, culminating in the final defeat of Napoleon on the field of Waterloo. Although Wellington may have wished to claim the lion's share of the credit for the victory of 1815, revisionist histories now point to the vital role of the Prussians in carrying the day.2 Thus, in the European context of the post-Napoleonic order, Britain, Prussia and Austria appeared to be natural allies; France remained the traditional arch-enemy.3