On the one hand, as the White Paper on entry to the Common Market emphasized in 1971, the experience of not being invaded was one of the genuinely distinctive things about being British: ‘Our physical assets and our economy had suffered less disastrously than those of other Western European countries as a result of the war: nor did we suffer the shock of invasion. We were thus less immediately conscious of the need for us to become part of the unity in Europe...’
