As the Channel tunnel turns 30, England needs to grow up and acknowledge its deep bond with France | Jonn Elledge

Tthe first passenger train from England to France transported Queen Elizabeth II to Calais May 6, 1994. Trains carrying less lofty passengers would not depart until November of that year, and the more enticing image of English and French engineers shaking hands under the sea four had come years earlier. But today is officially the day: the Channel Tunneler turns 30. He’s almost too old to go clubbing, and he’s starting to worry about his back.

Its existence remains astonishing by any reasonable standard: a physical link between Europe and its largest island, the first since the sinking of Doggerland around 6500 BC. It was not just an engineering feat but a political one, the realization of an idea that had been debated for nearly two centuries, and the moment Britain would stop being angry and accept it was part of Europe. This feels, almost eight years after the Brexit vote, both a lot funnier and a lot sadder than it did then.

From some points of view, however, the idea that the two countries were connected by the tunnel was once real that separate is a bit of a convenient fiction. Of course, Britain’s identity is linked to its status as an island and England and France are the only two countries I know of that 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 is some debate about how closely related, culturally or linguistically, the ancient Britons and the 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 English Channel; later both would be part of the same imperial “prefecture”. The short journey by sea was an inconvenience, of course, but hardly more so than many journeys by land.

After the fall of Rome, there is some evidence that the kingdom of Kent had links with the Frankish kingdom across the Channel. But the great thing that bound the people on both sides of the sea together during these centuries was a common enemy: both faced attacks and then conquest by the same kinds of sea marauders. In 1066, a group of Vikings – who conquered what had been Neustria, renamed it Normandy and began, rather pretentiously, to speak French – managed to conquer England as well. For the next 150 years, England was part of the Anglo-Norman world stretching across the English Channel. At its height, under Angevin Empire from the late 12th century, it stretched from the Pennines to the Pyrenees, and for a time Henry II could challenge his ostensible feudal lord in Paris for supremacy.

Later, from 1337 to 1453, the First Hundred Years’ War was fought to assert a surprisingly plausible English claim to the French throne, which the French opposed as much on the basis of early nationalism as on differences of opinion about primogeniture rules . This time the invasions across the Channel went the other way and it was England who conquered huge swaths of France. He gave up the last stronghold, Calais, only in 1558; even then its monarchs presented themselves as kings of France until 1801, when France no longer had a king.

The Second Hundred Years’ War – the series of conflicts lasting from about 1688 to 1815 – was about great power politics, not territory (or at least not territory bordering the English Channel). By then, French and English, then British, identities had begun to solidify and define themselves in opposition to each other. However, in the darkest hour of 1940, Winston Churchill and Charles de Gaulle drew up a plan for a “Franco-British Union” with common citizenship, economic and defense policies, in a doomed attempt to persuade the government in Paris to maintain the war.

Now the whole idea seems absurd. Britain and France are not one nation, but two, with different attitudes to food, sex, capitalism, the state and almost every other noun you can think of. Perhaps. But a few things make me wonder if the plan was really that crazy after all. First, borders shape national identities as much as vice versa. Second, the opposite of love isn’t hate, it’s indifference: the way the British and the French define themselves as really, really different from each other suggests to me a couple who are very determined that we should know they’re over it, but still remain a couple.

Finally, I wonder if you ask many peoples around the world colonized by French or British empires if the two great European powers are really that different, you might get a different answer than you would in Leicester or Lille. Tunnel or no tunnel, perhaps England and France have never been so different.