The EU is 60 – and it helped my generation fall in love with Europe

Happy birthday, the EU. Really sorry we can’t be at the party. I gave you my present last summer, you’ll remember. An X on a ballot paper. So did lots of my peers (25- to 49-year-old men are estimated to have voted 55:45 in favour of remain). Sadly, it wasn’t enough.

Still, there’s a good reason that lots of people in my generation think the EU is all right. We’re about as old as British membership. Our upbringing was tinged with an opening up to all things European. Not just Abba and Jeux Sans Frontières and Johan Cruyff. But exchange programmes and pen pals, InterRail and espadrilles, pizza and Chianti. Europeans, it turned out, were normal, cool, interesting and interested.

This was a huge comfort to those of us who paid attention in history. The first things British children of the 1970s and 80s learned about Europe was how beastly everyone had been to each other over the past 1,000 years. Waterloo, Trafalgar, the Somme and Agincourt. Crécy, Austerlitz, D-day. War without end, and how all those tiny little nations were forged by self-obsessed emperors and tsars and kings and despots who slaughtered anyone and everyone who didn’t think like them.

Against that backdrop, it was a relief to learn, in double German one day, that finally we’d found another way to deal with each other. It was called the Europäische Ekonomische Gemeinschaft. And if that was a mouthful, then at least it was a mouthful from a country that made excellent cakes. The EEC, as it was then, was an instrument for win-win cooperation, for solidarity, for cross-border fertilisation of many kinds, for the fellowship of nations. OK, it wasn’t sexy, but then neither is dying in a ditch. The chances of people like me being called up to fight the Germans for the third generation in a row seemed remote as long as the EEC was there.

It got better. Europe was open! You could just, like, go there. If the 80s marked the real beginning of Brits vacationing in Europe, the 90s was the decade that we moved there en masse. We explored the continent in ways that our parents never could. Campsites and cafes, Camels and new ways of doing coffee. Hitchhiking and railway stations and sleeper trains that started in one country and ended up in a totally different one the next morning. “Is it Austria?” my bleary-eyed, hungover fellow traveller asked one morning in 1989. “Germany,” I replied. “Germany till half past 11.” Freedom of movement in the 1990s had very different connotations to the dark undertones it has today. If you felt like it – and could afford it – you could just jump on a train and go live in Berlin, or Bordeaux or Barcelona. Eurostar, budget flights and cheap car rental. No visas, no hassle. Pick up a job on a building site, in a bank, in a bar.

Oh the irony: to us Europe meant an absence of petty rules and regulations, not an accretion of them. We got to know Spanish and Dutch, Finns and Italians. The telling thing was we had so much more in common with these young foreigners than with so many of our compatriots. Who knew – Germans are just like us really. We people are all the same really, give or take. It really felt like nationality didn’t matter, it was just a lousy trick of the past, an instrument for bad rulers to deflect criticism and give people something to cheer, however empty.

And while Britons relished Europe, Britain itself became more European: the food we ate, the footballers we watched, the clothes we wore, the cars we drove, the CEOs we employed, the friends we made, the people we married. Supermarkets brought in French cheeses, Italian hams, sparkling wines and Belgian beers. Licensing laws were relaxed. There were suddenly cafes, with bold outdoor seating. Culturally, we remained pretty Anglo-Saxon (notwithstanding the music of Kraftwerk, the novels of Houellebecq and the films of Kieślowski and Almodóvar). But socially we were more and more European.

Where did it all go wrong? Looking back, it’s clear that this Europeanisation was perhaps only relevant to an outwardly focused, relatively privileged minority, to people interested in a world beyond the end of their street and able to afford to investigate it. The tide turned in the 2000s, though it’s still quite hard to pinpoint precisely why. Immigration? Economics? Euro-crises? Elitism? Complacency? Boredom? Or perhaps simply that those who talked down the EU were just better at doing so than those who talked it up.

People say you can love Europe without loving the EU. That’s the wrong end of the telescope for my generation. It was the camaraderie and fraternity the EU fostered that helped us discover and fall in love with Europe. And that makes the divorce so much more bitter.