It would not be hard to capture the worldview of the British political class in one of those celebrated Saul Steinberg New Yorker magazine covers that depict the world as seen from 9th Avenue in Manhattan. That’s because so many of the people who practise politics in Britain have such a solipsistic view of the rest of the planet.

Most conspicuously absent would be any focus on the individual nations of Europe. No France. No Germany. Not even Ireland. For most British politicians and commentators, these places remain of no interest. There are a handful of individual exceptions to this generalisation. The mental maps of Labour’s Denis MacShane or the Liberal Democrats’ Nick Clegg would be compendiously crammed with European landmarks. That of Robert Jackson, the former Tory minister and ex-Labour MP, would be a veritable Gobelin tapestry of European threads. But in British politics, the numbers who can or wish to locate their sense of Britain in the context of where our national neighbours are going are small.

This is not intended as a pro-EU remark. It is merely a statement about who we are and how we have got here. We share a region, climate, history, demography, economic space and culture with these countries. Our business corporations, leisure time and intellectual life are all intertwined with theirs. We face shared problems in comparable ways. But our political and media culture barely engages. Nothing is more unnatural for our political class than to imagine itself in a European context or to think for itself about trends in French, German or Italian politics and society. This is stupid, it is lazy, and it is very much to our common detriment.

In recent times, each of these three countries has witnessed genuinely interesting and seriously important domestic political battles directly related to the same transition from late 20th-century national prosperity to early 21st-century global challenges with which Britain is also engaged. In France this is currently taking the form of a very large street upheaval directed at the prime minister’s very modest labour-market reforms. In Germany the issue has been the capacity of an economically reformist left-right coalition government to survive its first regional electoral challenges. In Italy, where there is a poll in a week’s time, the question is whether a mildly reformist opposition coalition has the strength to unseat the failed and opportunist modernising government of the right.

It would be untrue to suggest that these episodes are all interchangeable, and foolish to reduce them to different manifestations of the selfsame common crisis. Dominique de Villepin, Angela Merkel, Silvio Berlusconi and Tony Blair preside over different societies. But real connections and dialectics exist, partly because of the EU and partly in spite of it, and there is more in common between the issues facing these four European countries than there is between any of them and the US, the only foreign nation on which the British political class focuses. — The Guardian