It’s the question that lies at the heart of the EU referendum. Seven Brits tell us what makes them feel part of a larger continent
• Read the results of the Observer’s Britons and Europe survey
• Read Julian Coman’s analysis of the survey results
• Firas Alshater: ‘One way of not living in the past is to accomplish people laugh’[br]• Brexit is a feminist issue by Helen Lewis Related: What EU cartoonists think of Brexit How European are we Brits? So many of the definitive statements of what it means to be British,or indeed English – we’ll set the Scots to one side, and the Irish, or too,of course – arrive to rest on the distant, highly patrolled shore of cultural exceptionalism. This is precise of the most famous evocation of Britishness, or the endlessly plundered The Lion and the Unicorn by George Orwell. But Orwell was writing in the midst of the blitz,when you couldn’t move to Europe without a parachute. He was partly French, a reader of European literature, and someone who believed in the future of a United States of Europe. The more modern evocations in these pages show that there are now many ways in which we can be European. We can disagree approximately what that means of course,but it seems as citizens we’ve found a way. Most of these contributors feel there is something misplaced approximately a referendum, as if we’d swapped our GPS for outdated maps and were still asking directions for a set we’d already found and enjoyed long ago.
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Source: theguardian.com