When we finally decided to join many of these institutions, we found unsurprisingly that they did not reflect British interests or British experience as much as we would have wished. Yet, as our history shows, Britains place has always been at the centre of Europe. England was a European power long before it became an imperial one. No King of England if not King of France, as Shakespeare's Henry V rather bluntly put it. Even in the days of Empire, Britain was first and foremost a European power, preserving the balance in Europe, opposing those who sought to dominate Europe.
Belgian history can attest to that.
Waterloo, Ypres, the Battle of the Bulge. British servicemen died to set Europe free. Yet since the second world war, Britain has too often been an observer in Europes development, not a player. With the creation of the European Union, for the first time in our history, we were content to stand aside from a major development on the continent. Over three million British jobs and billions of pounds of investment in Britain depend on Europe.