Absolute monarchy has vanished everywhere, and, apart from some rare exceptions, dictators no longer rule. The examples of Britain and the United States have played a part in this. Europeans are citizens, the British are still subjects. A union of the vanquished Click here to buy this book on Amazon. The difference between Britain and other European nations is not, however, that British institutions are natural and that French or German ones are not.
All political arrangements are a mixture of historical accident and human decisions.
The difference is that most Europeans, having seen their nations occupied, humiliated, impoverished, or taken over by thugs, have lost confidence in the nation-state as the only, or indeed the best, guarantor of liberty, prosperity, and peace. Britain never had this problem. So perhaps de Gaulle was right. The fact that Britain did so anyway, largely for commercial reasons, only confirmed the old suspicion that the British are nothing but shopkeepers at heart. It is certainly not a democratic state either.