A new world role for Britain

Britain’s imperial past distorts the debate about our place in the world, but not in the way that is commonly assumed. It is often asserted that claims about this country’s international importance are a form of nostalgia. It would be more accurate to say that Britain tends to underestimate its power because it is no longer the global hegemon.

Britain might not be, in 1066 and All That terms, ‘top nation’ any more. On any objective reading, however, the United Kingdom is still an influential global player. It is a permanent member of the UN Security Council, the sixth largest economy in the world, a nuclear weapons state, a member of the world’s most powerful intelligence agreement and a cultural superpower.

When it comes to acting on the world stage, British prime ministers can be damned if they do and damned if they don’t. If the UK joins the US in military action, it is dismissed as merely the Americans’ spear carrier. If it sits it out — or, even worse, is not invited to participate — then this country is branded an irrelevance. It is striking how concerned the Foreign Office has been this week about the possibility of France and the United States responding to Syria’s use of chemical weapons without Britain.

One of the questions that this country must begin to answer in the next few years is what its role in the world will be after Brexit. To many of those who backed Britain’s entry into the European project in the first place, the idea was that Britain would maintain its relevance by becoming one of the leading nations in the European endeavour. The fatal flaw was that this country was never keen on the idea of ‘ever closer union’. It clashed too strongly with the understanding of sovereignty that had developed here since 1532 and the Act in Restraint of Appeals to Rome.