April 30 2025 - 2:40pm
In advance of the UK-EU summit scheduled for 19 May, Britain’s Labour government has indicated that the occasion will be used to reboot its relationship with the EU, marking a “new strategic partnership”. The summit is being presented as Britain seeking shelter from the Trumpian storms currently sweeping through the world economy. The message is that liberal states will pool their collective strength in order to withstand global crises, and make good some of the damage supposedly wreaked by Brexit.
The leaked draft declaration taps into a “common understanding” on a number of shared interests, such as defense and “youth experience” programs. The document pledges “unwavering commitment to providing political, financial, economic, humanitarian, military and diplomatic” backing for Ukraine, as well as support of “multilateralism”. A day after this news, Donald Trump reportedly deemed a trade deal with the UK a lesser priority.
British Prime Minister Keir Starmer and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen want to project an image of a united Europe. They want to show that the continent is uniting to defend liberal stability and free trade in a world scarred by populist irruptions, hardening trade barriers, and autocratic challengers in China and Russia.
Although the new partnership will be presented as a response to the challenges of the outside world, Britain’s effort to restart European integration, in truth, is driven at least as much by domestic pressures. In this, it is in keeping with the historic pattern behind Britain’s European integration. For years, it has used Europe as a hinterland in which political elites can retreat from British voters. The great advantage offered by the EU and its predecessors is that it allows political leaders and state elites to compensate for domestic weakness: whether that be through grandstanding at conferences, deferring decisions to meetings with European partners, seeking economic and financial assistance, or simply imposing agreements on the grounds that our continental allies demand it.
This was the pattern of European integration reaching right back to 1973, when then-Tory Prime Minister Ted Heath joined Britain to the European Economic Community (EEC), the precursor of today’s EU. At the time, the EEC appeared to be a dynamic cosmopolitan hub, growing more vigorously than Britain and offering our political leaders respite from inflation and industrial unrest.
The UK was nonetheless still an industrial and military power, with manufacturing constituting roughly one third of the national economy, and the military 349,000 strong. Despite the macroeconomic strains of the time — the energy shock, inflation, declining productivity, growing international competition — the economy was still growing on average nearly 3% per year across the decade. Such figures would seem miraculous today. Many will be familiar with the dismal litany of contemporary decline: declining public services, wages stagnant for decades, flatlining productivity. As for the military, it is the smallest since the Napoleonic Wars, each branch under-recruiting.
Yet even the gross figures on GDP or military strength mask the real and most important decline of all: the collapsing authority of the UK state and its political elites. For all the strife and unrest associated with the Seventies, industrial militancy was also a marker of civic health and political vitality. It indicated a confident working class and a vigorous civil society that was densely interwoven not only through unions but also large and powerful political parties. The very fact that there was such strong contention for power helped give the state its authority.
It is this crisis that the Labour Party hopes the EU will rescue it from. But closer cooperation will offer no economic salvation. After all, unlike the Seventies, the EU is economically lagging even by comparison to Starmerite Britain, with German factories shuttering and the Iberian power grid collapsing. Nor will declarations about free and open trade, restoring “youth mobility”, and championing Ukraine’s defense against Russia restore the credibility of the central UK state or Labour in its old electoral heartlands. The evasion of responsibility is all too plain.
Philip Cunliffe is Associate Professor of International Relations at the Department of Risk and Disaster Reduction, University College London. He is the author of seven books, including, most recently: The National Interest: Politics after Globalization.
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