It’s the EU that’s imperialist, not little Britain

Brexit doesn’t equate to grandiose ambitions of expansion. It just means we want to be ourselves

What is Britain for these days? I hear it said that Brexit Britain has lost its mission in foreign policy, that we’ve cut ourselves off from the continent, that Donald Trump is abusing us, and so we splash about in the Atlantic like a drowning bulldog. We have no clear purpose because we don’t know if we’re European or American, conservative or liberal, imperial or in retreat.

And we’re nothing without a purpose, right?

Actually, if one listens to Vernon Bogdanor’s smashing history lectures on foreign policy – available on Youtube – one senses that Britain has always been as uncertain about its role as Selwyn Lloyd was when Churchill surprised him with a foreign ministry he didn’t want. “There must be some mistake,” said Lloyd, “I do not speak any foreign language. Except in war, I have never visited any foreign country. I do not like foreigners.” Churchill growled: “Young man, these

all seem to me to be positive advantages.”

Two key points emerge from Professor Bogdanor’s lectures. One is that we’ve long had a difficult relationship with the continent, caused in no small part by geography. We are a European country, undoubtedly, but the English Channel cuts us off physically and emotionally from the continent and, like any island nation, we must trade overseas to survive. Thus the argument was made before the First World War that if Germany conquered much of Europe it had nothing to do with us because we were all about Asia and Africa.

The second controversy is our empire – half criminal enterprise, half civilising project – which regularly divided a British public that wasn’t of one mind on what to do with it. Think of the tremendous debates over the Boer War or Suez.

Yet the idea of a global mission bestowed by providence undoubtedly came to define us and, when it disappeared, because of the English Channel, we didn’t all do as France or Germany did and redirect our imperial dreams into the European project. If anything, today’s Empire 2.0 is not Brexit; it’s the European Union. Guy Verhofstadt let the cat out of the bag recently when he said: “The world of tomorrow will be dominated by empires like China… We need a strong, united Europe to protect our way of living.”

So, the historic European empires are gone but the global aspirations of publics shaped by that era remain in spectral form, no less in Westminster than in Brussels. Left and Right in Britain yearn for a “cause”. Tony Blair thought it was to expand democracy. Jeremy Corbyn wants us to be a socialist light unto the nations. And there is a brand of Brexiteer who thinks free trade solves everything; that Britain should tear down its protections and jump into bed with China, India and the rest.

This is the Boris Brexit – an unexpectedly liberal Euroscepticism that also pushes a points-based immigration policy that could see us take more immigrants rather than less. Is that really what Leavers voted for? They tend to be the one bit of the population most sceptical about the idea of Britain having a Westminster-mandated purpose. Like Selwyn Lloyd, they might find themselves a bit confused by the turn of events if free-trading Boris becomes PM.

Common sense dictates that the best foreign policy is dictated not by what intellectuals want but what the country needs. Take the recent clash in the Gulf, when the Iranians spooked a British tanker and a Royal Navy frigate chased them away. This need not be the beginning of a war to liberate Iran from the Mullahs: it simply makes sense that an island nation that replies on imports and exports to survive needs military muscle to protect its shipping. That’s why, yes, we probably do have to spend more on defence; not for the bolstering of ego but to ensure our people can trade safely. We can’t rely in every instance on Uncle Sam to get us out of trouble.

It makes sense, too, that we will sometimes swallow our pride – perhaps accept the resignation of an ambassador for saying something that embarrasses Donald Trump, even if he is speaking the truth. We must occasionally say one thing and do another without getting overly moral about it: at the same time as we court Mr Trump’s approval our actual policy leans towards the European position on everything from Iran to climate change. We act not as a crusader but as a mediator, which is uninteresting but – for a country located in that position between two worlds – is what we need.

A country like ours is ultimately not for anything. It just is. It’s the product not of a revolution or constitution with written-down aspirations but of time and place. The Left, which exists to try to remake the world, hates this point of view because it leads to paradoxes, contradictions and cop-outs – all suffered, even enjoyed, rather than fixed. A healthy Brexit would abandon utopianism and see Britain, if not retreating, then recalibrating and doing some things a bit less. The last few decades have been exhausting. It would be nice to catch one’s breath.