This week’s In Our Time on BBC Radio 4, presented by the increasingly grumpy Melvyn Bragg, was a timely reminder of a key fact about Britain and Europe all too often denied by those who think of the United Kingdom as a place apart, unconstrained by either history or geography.

The subject was Garibaldi and the unification of Italy, one of the longest-running sagas of the nineteenth century. The great Italian patriot (born in Nice, now, of course, part of France) was a disciple of Giuseppi Mazzini, leader of the Young Italy movement. After a life of astonishing adventure, which included a central role in the liberation of Uruguay, his forces finally secured their goal, creating the united Italy that today is such an inspiration to us all in what may prove the latter days of the European Union. 

But my intention here is not to regurgitate the wisdom of Bragg’s guests, who found themselves constantly urged to “get on with it”. Rather, it is to point out that Britain played an important role in the process, both as a host to Mazzini and other exiles and as a provider of volunteers in Garibaldi’s struggle to overthrow foreign and papal domination.

It would be a stretch to say that Britain turned the tide. It did not. But by providing a home to Mazzini (and, briefly, Garibaldi himself) and by its supply of volunteers in the fight, we certainly played our part. Many among the British ruling class supported the Risorgimento, which they regarded as romantic as well as geographically obvious, while proto-Socialists were only too ready to take up arms against the Austro-Hungarian imperialists and, if necessary, the Pope.

Seventy years later, British intervention – or non-intervention – in the Spanish Civil War helped turn the tide in favour of the insurgent Francisco Franco. The Tory administrations of Stanley Baldwin and Neville Chamberlain, fearing that Spain could go Communist, withheld their support from the elected Republican government, refusing to supply it with desperately needed arms and ammunition. As a result, the Fascist Franco, ably supported by the Nazis and (as it happens) Italy, was able to win the war and subject his country to a protracted reign of terror.

Just to hurry things along, Baldwin managed to persuade the French prime minister Leon Bloom, who had previously authorised the transfer of weapons, including aircraft, to the Republican cause, to follow Britain’s example, thus sounding the death-knell of Spanish democracy.

But if the Government took fright, many ordinary Brits did not. With Orwell among their number, they rallied to the cause, fighting for two years as part of the International Brigades.

Again, my point is not to rehearse the ins and outs of what took place. It is to underline that Britain’s role in European affairs is often crucial even when our own interests are not directly threatened.

Britain’s European problem is that, while affecting to stand off from whatever is going on across the Channel, we invariably thrust ourselves into the middle of almost every quarrel. Europe is a big part of who were are. We are (leaving aside Commonwealth arrivals) part-Angle, part-Saxon, part-Jute, part-Viking, part-Norman, part-Huguenot and part-Irish, and soon, as their children join the tribe, part-Polish, Part-Lithuanian, part-Bulgarian and part-Romanian. In fact, we are one of the most pan-European nations in Europe –­ much more so than the Germans, the Italians or even the French.

Our wars for a thousand years were fought either in Europe or against other Europeans seeking to muscle in on our territory. William the Conqueror believed he had a right to the English throne, as did Norway’s Harald Hardrada, whose forces were defeated less than three weeks prior to the Battle of Hastings. The Hundred Years War was a family feud, fought largely in French. Philip II of Spain dispatched the Armada not only to defeat the Protestant cause, but because he wished to be King of England again as he had been while married to Queen Mary. William III, invited to the throne by Parliament. was Dutch. The Hanoverians were German, as, of course, was Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha. Most of Europe’s royal families are intimately (and “intimately” is the operative word) connected to the House of Windsor. Politically, the Congress of Vienna, which set the style of Europe in the century that followed the Napoleonic wars, was devised and written by Lord Castlereagh, an Irish aristocrat. World War I achieved its global status when Britain and France, acting within the terms of the Entente Cordiale, sought to put a break on German and Austrian aggression. World War II followed the same ineluctable pattern.

After 1945,  it was Churchill who issued a clarion call for the establishment of a United States of Europe (albeit with Britain as no more than father of the bride). The European Convention on Human Rights, of which Leavers are always complaining, was largely drafted by Sir David Maxwell-Fyfe, a liberal MP and barrister. Later still, it was Margaret Thatcher who, against the advice of François MItterrand, demanded the immediate incorporation of the old East Bloc into the European Community, and Tony Blair who, uniquely, allowed East Europeans to immigrate straight away, without a waiting period. And it was Britain again, in the person of Jack Straw, who first proposed the European Arrest Warrant that we now choose to regard as a poisoned chalice.

So, having said what my point is not, let me now say what it is. Britain is an integral part of Europe and its quarrels whether it likes it or not. History has proved this over and again ever since Julius Caesar first landed near Deal in 55 BC. It may prefer to see itself as a world power, which plainly it is not. It may like to imagine that the sea around it gives it a special status, though, if so, why don’t we have a navy worthy of the name? It may feel, with some justification, that the European Union is a step too far and that it is time to get back to basics, in which case isn’t it about time we laid out what it is we want from Europe and what we are prepared to offer in return?

Europe’s nations, large and small, form a natural entity, which doesn’t have to mean rule by bureaucrats in Brussels. What we need, as I see it, is not more Europe but another Congress of Vienna. The trouble is, who has the clout to propose it – not Boris Johnson surely? Where is our modern-day Castlereagh to be found?

In the meantime, while we wait, here is Orwell on the British (actually English) view of the world, published in his essay Boys’ Weeklies three months before the onset of the Battle of Britain. You will all know it, I’m sure, but it never ceases to make me smile.

“The year is 1910 — or 1940, but it is all the same. You are at Greyfriars, a rosy-cheeked boy of fourteen in posh tailor-made clothes, sitting down to tea in your study on the Remove passage after an exciting game of football which was won by an odd goal in the last half-minute. There is a cosy fire in the study, and outside the wind is whistling. The ivy clusters thickly round the old grey stones. The King is on his throne and the pound is worth a pound. Over in Europe the comic foreigners are jabbering and gesticulating, but the grim grey battleships of the British Fleet are steaming up the Channel and at the outposts of Empire the monocled Englishmen are holding the niggers at bay. Lord Mauleverer has just got another fiver and we are all settling down to a tremendous tea of sausages, sardines, crumpets, potted meat, jam and doughnuts. After tea we shall sit round the study fire having a good laugh at Billy Bunter and discussing the team for next week’s match against Rookwood. Everything is safe, solid and unquestionable. Everything will be the same for ever and ever.

Since that was written, much has changed, not least the pound being worth a pound, the n-word being unprintable and the grim grey battleships morphing into half-a-dozen destroyers with engines that don’t work in warm water. Isn’t it about time the national mindset caught up?