Did UK keep Germany in check

[Spiderman]

I read that the attitude in the EU is submit to Germany or get out. Did the UK keep Germany in check before Brexit?

 

[Altfish]

Yes

 

[Flankerl]

The goal of British foreign policy was always and will always be discontent on the continent.
The UK always supported the enlargement of the EU even when France and Germany were against it.
Why did it want to enlarge the EU? The more members the EU has the less decisions can happen due to more dissenting voices.
This is why the UK was one of the few countries in favour of Turkish membership.

If Turkey had joined, the EU wouldn't have survived the banking crisis.

 

[Nakosis]

I read that the attitude in the EU is submit to Germany or get out. Did the UK keep Germany in check before Brexit?

“The Germans are a superior race. We have already read that in the speeches of Hitler.”
The Rest of Europe vs. Germany

It looks like the EU has been very beneficial for the Germany economy the last several years. Not so much for the neighborhood.

The Euro allows less control over their own economy so it's much tougher for them to compete with Germany in the World market.

One trouble with “beggar thy neighbor” is that the neighbors don’t like it. During the Depression, they could retaliate by devaluing their own currencies. Now they are simply getting angry, and hitting back at Germany the only way they can, with Nazi allusions and, in Athens, burning buildings.

2018 - Germany still seems to be doing better than its neighbors.

Imagine, for example, what would happen to the EU economy, to the rest of the world — and to U.S. export sales in general — if Germany were not living off its fellow Europeans with a massive 164.4 billion euro trade surplus.

That German surplus is stifling the economic growth in the rest of Europe, because it is a deficit for countries trading with Germany. You can think of those 164.4 billion euros as a large wealth transfer to Germany. Indeed, it is a structural foundation of Germany's export-driven economy, where sales to the rest of the world account for nearly a half of German GDP (compared with 14 percent in the U.S. case).
The US should break the German lock on the European economy

 

[Jumi]

Well it's basically quite an oversimplification. But if we go for oversimplified the answer is yes they did. But there has formed and a group of mostly former Warsaw bloc states that will replace that role.