Revelations from the France of the 1950s: the United Kingdom of Great Britain, Northern Ireland and France
January 29th, 2007 | 
Author: 
We watched with interest and some amazement at the recent revelations that France had proposed a unification with the UK back in the 1950s.
If it had gone ahead in either of the forms proposed there would have been much that would have been different in the last 50 years. The European Union would never have gotten off the ground for a start or at least it would have but in a very different form with countries joining either the United Kingdom of Great Britain, Northern Ireland and France or the British Commonwealth depending on which option they had ran with back then. Would the Commonwealth have once again become the British Empire?
Presumably either way the British Commonwealth would have remained a source of goods rather than being pushed to the one side as sourcing for bananas and the like moved towards European countries.
Would it have made a difference to how the settlement of France by the brits has actually happened in recent times? It certainly could have started to happen much earlier as it was only possible to move easily to France after various European laws came into force but with a UK including France that movement could have started nearly 30 years earlier.
I think that the timing of things is perhaps the major difference that there would have been. The channel tunnel would have been built a lot sooner as a means of tying the new kingdom together and we might even have had the BritishFrench Airways Concorde still flying as the symbol of a much larger nation.
‘Tis a shame that it didn’t get off the ground.
Copyright © 2004-2014 by Foreign Perspectives. All rights reserved.
Posted in 
The one big problem in this France-UK unification, is that the french folk who proposed the idea, said he didn’t think it would be much of a problem for the french to recognize the queen. Now it can seem a very childish thing to argue about, but I don’t think so. Regarding at the past history of our two nations, I think the french would never ever have accepted such sing !
France and the UK have very different cultures, and joining those two countries outside EU is a crazy idea.
I don’t know. Way back then there was quite a spirit of co-operation around. After all, that’s how Concorde (or is it Concord?) got going. That was the highest profile joint project but there were others.
Also, whilst it might not seem so at times, there’s an awful lot of mutual respect between the two countries. Where that falls down is usually in respect of America which is, to a large degree, considered as though it were still part of the British Empire.
Don’t forget too that UK culture isn’t just English culture. There are a LOT of commonalities between Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland and France. I’m told that Welsh and Breton are mutually understandable for instance. Even the area we’re living in at the moment is very much like parts of Northern Ireland and Scotland in terms of landscape and general culture.
Funnily enough, the part of England where the most Anglo-French problems come from is usually where the bulk of the descendants of the Norman settlers are now living!