YESTERDAY'S summit agreement between Britain and its EU partners on the beef controversy averts a potential crisis for the Union. But it is important, nonetheless, to examine the roots of Britain's troubled relationship with Europe.,
What lies behind much of it has been the emergence of a particularly virulent form of English nationalism. This is not merely inflicting severe damage upon the European states, but is also potentially disruptive within Britain. For this xenophobic ideology is not shared by the Celtic parts of the island of Britain, which often view Brussels and Strasbourg more positively than they do Westminster.
And, although Conservativ europhoes are mostly people who are also strongly committed to maintaining the internal cohesion of the United Kingdom, their extremism about Europe tends to undermine that very cohesion.
Perhaps because we are so close to this phenomenon - and have lived through the period of its emergence - most of us find it hard to understand just how this transformation of an important section of the Conservative Party came about. And it has been a veritable transformation.
For it was the Conservatives who originally led Britain proudly into Europe, throwing the anti-European empire loyalists out of their meetings. This followed de Gaulle's resignation from the French presidency, and his veto on British entry was set aside by his successor, Georges Pompidou.
The Labour Party, by contrast, was then largely hostile to the European Community. When returned to power in 1974, the Labour government threatened to leave the Community unless British membership was renegotiated.
To the Tories of that period, under a militantly pro-European leader, this was a betrayal. "An appalling aspect of the whole affair is that Britain has lost respect and support by so blatantly dishonouring an international treaty obligation," was how the Conservative Party leader described to me the Labour government's action in demanding that renegotiation which, in the event, did not amount to a hill of beans.
TED Heath? No, that was not Ted Heath. Those were the words of the new pro-European leader of the Conservatives, Margaret Thatcher, when I first met her in her room in the Commons, almost immediately after her surprise election to that position.
And nothing she said during the times we met over the next couple of years, mainly to discuss European affairs, either in the Commons or at breakfast in our Embassy, gave me any reason to believe that during those years in opposition she had yet modified her positive view of the Community.
(I might add that when, a month after our first encounter, we met for the second time at a conference in Turkey, she waxed eloquent also on such themes as the undesirability of polarising politics on a right-left ideological axis and the need for a political consensus on a free society and a mixed economy.)
The truth is that almost everyone has now forgotten what the original Margaret Thatcher stood for. The stridency with which she subsequently proclaimed her commitment to views exactly opposite to those she held at the time she became leader of her party seems to me to have induced a general amnesia about the early Margaret Thatcher.
And just as she later managed to forget that she had ever held such views, a large chunk of the Conservative Party also managed simultaneously a similar loss of memory as it remade itself loyally in her new image.
Historians will, no doubt, have much to say about Margaret Thatcher's impact on Britain. There will be praise for the success in breaking the power of the trade unions which, in Britain, had for so long been disastrously abused, and for the improvement in Britain's industrial productivity during her term of office.
But there will also, I believe, be criticism of economic policies which simultaneously destroyed a large part of Britain's manufacturing industry; of the manner in which she intensified divisions in British society, both social and geographical; and of the vulgarising and materialistic effects of the individualist doctrine she so ardently promoted - sometimes, most unfairly, in the name of the Methodist religion in which she was raised.
And there will always be some puzzlement about two aspects of her period in office.
Firstly, the extent to which almost all her ministers allowed themselves to be dominated by her to an extent that has no precedent, so far as I am aware, in the history of British cabinet government.
Secondly, about how she managed to turn what until then had been a one-nation, empirical and pragmatic British Conservatism into a jingoistic, ideological and doctrinaire liberalism, totally foreign to the history and traditions of the party she led.
THE beef war has now ended with a whimper rather than a bang. The climbdown by the United Kingdom in the face of a solid European determination to stand its ground against the tactics adopted by the Major administration will, no doubt, be presented in Britain as a victory.
Whether the Tory government can get away with that remains to be seen. The Labour opposition and the Tory Europhobes in parliament - the latter backed by the foreign-owned Europhobe newspapers - will do their best to discredit any "deal" by presenting it, with some reason, as an ignominious surrender.
But what is more important than any, possibly transient, further embarrassment of the present, already discredited, British government, is how the mood of the British people will swing in the months ahead. Spurred on by the Europhobe newspapers there could be a hardening of British opinion against Europe. However, so far public opinion in Britain has not been overly aroused by the endless row over Europe.
There is, of course, as there has always been, a good deal of scepticism about Europe and a certain amount of xenophobia. But the passion that Europe arouses within a section of Tory MPs and activists has not found many echoes among the Europhobes may have made a serious mistake in succumbing to the triumphalist temptation to shift the debate from the single currency - which, at this stage at least, is unpopular in Britain - to the issue of a possible British exit from the Community. British public opinion may not much like the EU, but a clear majority recognises that it is in Britain's interest to remain a member.
Moreover, once this fundamental issue of a possible departure from the Community has been raised, all kinds of groups and individuals who have hitherto preferred to stay out of what they have seen as largely an internal Tory Party row may well be galvanised into launching a counterattack against what they will see as a most dangerous development.
One of the most surprising and depressing features of the recent period has been the inertia of those who recognise the importance to Britain of an active and positive European involvement. They have been unwilling to stand up and fight the almost totally dishonest propaganda of the Europhobes.
If the pro-Europeans, alarmed by the emergence of a campaign not just against the single currency but actually favouring British withdrawal from the Community, are now spurred for the first time to enter the fray actively and purposively, the tide of British Europhobia could yet be turned.