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WWhat happened in London on September 16, 1992? Does the information that the day went down in history as “Black Wednesday” help? I did not drop a penny when this date was first pointed out to me. I am afraid that is the case with many contemporaries in Germany. For the British, this day is considered “the worst humiliation since Suez”. The Suez Crisis of 1956/57, as we remember from the “The Crown” series, is a central date in the decline of the British Empire. But “Black Wednesday”?
Rainer hank
Freelance writer on the economics of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung.
On that day, the European Community forced England to withdraw from the European Exchange Rate Mechanism, which sounds technical, but caused the country to devalue its currency and lose around £ 3.3 billion. The approval of the Conservative government and Prime Minister John Mayor fell from 42 to 29 percent. The blame for this humiliation fell on the Deutsche Bundesbank, which was unwilling to help the British with a rate cut, and the federal government, which many Britons believe has been the irresponsible hegemon in Europe since reunification. Speculator George Soros had the right nose from the start and bet successfully against the pound.
Much can be learned from the history of “Black Wednesday”. In the first place, that trauma lingers longer in the collective memory than victories. This could have something to do with the fact that we Germans have great difficulty understanding Britain’s exit from the EU. To this day, it sounds reproachful that one could be so foolish to renounce all the blessings of the EU for misunderstood national pride. As a result, Brussels’ insulted and inflexible position in the Brexit negotiations garnered a lot of approval from us: Great Britain’s copycats are warned!
Black Wednesday was a turning point
“Black Wednesday” was a turning point; Since then, Eurosceptics have had the upper hand in England. So I read it from the political scientist Vernon Bogdanor, a professor at King’s College London. In the years prior to 1992, the British government had struggled to gain popular support to join the European Community in 1972. Bogdanor’s recently published book “Britain and Europe in a Restless World” (Yale University Press) is recommended for accompany the current final act of Brexit. For me it is one of the best European books in a long time. In the end, the reader understands Brexit a lot, although or perhaps because the author is not a Brexiter, but believes that his country would have done better if he had stayed in the EU.
The thesis of the book: Brexit is not an industrial accident in history, but the result of an ambivalent relationship between the British and the continent. Britain has always been reluctant to join the common market, the European Community and more recently the EU, has avoided the euro and, even in the decades of its membership of the EU, has never been unconditionally oriented towards Europe. There are many reasons. One of them is centuries of domination over a global empire. Who suddenly wanted to let France or Germany convince them? Think of Neville Chamberlain’s radio address on the Munich Agreement in 1938: The Prime Minister said it was “incredible” that England was forced to deal with a conflict “in a distant land between peoples of whom we know nothing” . It is about a thousand kilometers from London to Munich. Chamberlain would hardly have spoken so blankly if there had been a conflict in Sydney, more than 10,000 kilometers from London.
