More recently I have come to suspect that “democracy,” at least as an international cause, was far less important to a certain kind of nostalgic conservative than the maintenance of a world in which England continued to play a privileged role: a world in which England is not just an ordinary, middle-sized power like France or Germany; a world in which England is special—and perhaps even superior. That was part of why some of the nostalgic conservatives were always suspicious of the Single Market that Britain did so much to create.
