A Timeline of a Historical Semester

April 27th 2016:

We started off in the second session talking about the different theories on the end of the empire.

May 4th 2016:

I learned a lot about the differences between the European Economic Community (ECC), the European Community (EC), the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC) and the European Union (EU). We also talked about the upcoming Brexit referendum. The current mood during that week was that Britain would stay in the EU, but 10–15% was still undecided whether they wanted to vote to stay in or leave the EU.

May 11th 2016:

Our topic today was Britain’s entry in the European Community and the referendum just two years after the entry on June 5th 1975. We compared the two referendums from 1975 and 2016 in class and talked about similarities and differences.

June 22nd 2016:

Today we talked in detail about the referendum and everyone was sure that the outcome of the referendum would be very close. We basically expected the British not to vote to leave the EU, not anticipating that we would be wrong in the end…

June 23rd 2016:

The day of the referendum — a historical day that will enter the history books! If the British had decided to stay, this day would not have entered history books in the future.

June 24th 2016:

When I woke up on Friday, I was shocked when I heard the news that the British decided on leaving the European Union. I followed the news reports and realized how close the result was and also about the low turnout especially by people in their 20s and 30s. Over the weekend I kept trying to stay up-to-date and formed my own opinion on the Brexit and its consequences in the future.

June 29th 2016:

When we talked about the outcome of the referendum and possible consequences in class the week after the referendum, I was quite surprised when some people said that they weren’t even surprised about the decision the British made. We discussed the possible consequences and also the reactions of the leaders of the leave campaign which were in my opinion not only very surprising at that point, but also very cowardly!! I was shocked that they did not seem to really care about what their campaigns brought about Great Britain as a country. Neither Nigel Farage nor Boris Johnson stood up for what they had fought for after the decision on leaving the EU was made. Both of them disproved the promises they made earlier when the referendum was still coming up and were rather ignoring the fact that they won.

July 13th 2016:

I am looking forward to an interesting in class discussion on the future of the United Kingdom and the consequences of the Brexit. Furthermore, I think we should discuss in class, in how far the class title needs to be revised for the following semester as we have already had shorty addressed.

All in all, I must say that I would never have read and known as much about the Brexit as I do now if I hadn’t taken the class “From Empire to Europe”. Even though the Brexit was the most important historical event that filled more than one session of the semester, I still thought the other topics — e.g. India, Africa, Suez Crisis and the Commonwealth — were very important as well. It is necessary to know the whole path that the British took throughout the decades. Especially learning about the Commonwealth in last week’s session seemed very important to me because the Commonwealth and its members can become quite important for Great Britain in the future. We will not only see the consequences in the following years after the referendum, but might as well feel them ourselves here in Germany…