WI: Earlier French-British Alliance

What If some how France and Great Britain or as early as England made a alliance earlier than World War 1 and made it was a lasting one? What would be the implications and when would it happen? and how would Europe change?
 
You would need a common threat to unify them, like the German Empire of OTL. So if you could arrange for an earlier German unification or more likely keep Spain very powerful (unify Iberia?) that could do it.
 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anglo-French_Alliance ?

How long do you consider "lasting"? Before the modern world, which is shaped by such disastrous wars that there is a near-universal desire to actively avoid warfare (at least, warfare on a large scale), the idea of an actual perpetual alliance is frankly unrealistic as it was simply a given that if two countries found that their goals and ideals had diverged, then the alliance was off and there was no more need to act nicely to each other. No alliance lasts forever, invariably two friendly countries are going to at some point realise that they're actually better off being friendly to someone else...
 
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