The first passenger train from England to France carried Queen Elizabeth II to Calais on 6 May 1994. Trains carrying less exalted passengers would not set off until November of that year, and the more arresting image of English and French engineers shaking hands beneath the sea had come four years earlier. Officially, though, today is the day: the Channel tunnel is 30. It is almost too old to be going to nightclubs, and is starting to worry about its back.
Its existence remains, by any sensible standard, astonishing: a physical link between Europe and its largest island, the first since the drowning of Doggerland around 6500BCE. It wasn’t just an engineering achievement, either, but a political one, the realisation of an idea discussed for nearly two centuries, and the moment that Britain would stop pissing about and accept it was a part of Europe. This feels, nearly eight years after the Brexit vote, both a lot funnier and a lot sadder than it did at the time.
From some perspectives, though, the idea that the two countries linked by the tunnel were ever really that separate is a bit of a convenient fiction. Sure, Britain’s identity is bound up with its status as an island, and England and France are the only two countries I’m aware of to have fought two different hundred years’ wars. But in the long sweep of history, the identities and territories of England and France have been as entangled as any pair of nations.
There’s some debate about how closely connected, culturally or linguistically, the ancient Britons and ancient Gauls really were. But what is clear is that when a Gallic empire briefly broke away from Rome in the 3rd century, it included provinces on both sides of the Channel; later, both would be part of the same imperial “prefecture”. A short sea crossing was an inconvenience, sure – but hardly more so than many journeys over land.
After Rome fell, there’s some evidence that the kingdom of Kent had links to the Frankish kingdom across the Channel. But the big thing that bound the people on either side of the sea together in these centuries was a common enemy: both faced attacks from, then conquest by, the same sorts of seaborne marauder. In 1066, one set of Vikings – who had conquered what had been Neustria, rebranded it Normandy and begun, rather pretentiously, to speak French – managed to conquer England, too. For the next 150 years, England was part of an Anglo-Norman world extending across the Channel. At its height, under the Angevin empire of the late 12th century, it stretched from Pennines to Pyrenees, and for a time Henry II could challenge his ostensible feudal lord in Paris for supremacy.
Later on, from 1337 to 1453, the first hundred years war was fought to assert surprisingly plausible English claims to the French throne, which the French opposed as much on the basis of early nationalism as because of diverging views on the rules of primogeniture. This time, the cross-Channel invasions went the other way, and it was England that conquered huge tracts of France. It only gave up the last foothold, Calais, in 1558; even then, its monarchs styled themselves as kings of France until 1801, by which time France no longer had a king at all.
The second hundred years war – the series of conflicts running from about 1688 until 1815 – was about great power politics, not territory (or at least, not any territory abutting the Channel). By then, French and English, then British, identities had begun to harden, and define themselves in opposition to one another. Even so, in the darkest hour of 1940, Winston Churchill and Charles de Gaulle cooked up a plan for a “Franco-British Union”, with common citizenship, economic and defence policies, in a doomed attempt to persuade the government in Paris to keep fighting the war.
The whole idea now seems absurd. Britain and France aren’t one nation but two, with different attitudes to food, sex, capitalism, the state, and just about every other noun you can think of. Maybe. But a couple of things make me wonder if the plan was really that mad after all. First, borders shape national identities as much as the other way around. Second, the opposite of love is not hate, but indifference: the manner in which Britishness and Frenchness define themselves as really, really different from each other suggests to me a couple who are very determined we should know they are over it, but who remain a couple nonetheless.
Lastly, I wonder, if you asked the many peoples across the world colonised by French or British empires, whether the two great European powers were really so different, you might get a different answer than you would get in Leicester or Lille. Tunnel or no tunnel, perhaps England and France were never that distinct after all.
A History of the World in 47 Borders by Jonn Elledge (Headline Publishing Group, £25). To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
