• Thursday, March 28, 2024
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Britain and Russia are Europe’s odd couple

Britain and Russia are Europe’s odd couple

The current deep antagonism between Russia and Britain disguises some important similarities between the two countries. Those parallels are likely to become more obvious after Brexit — in ways that should worry both the UK and the EU.

Britain and Russia are on the fringes of the European continent. Partly as a result, the two have traditionally had a dual identity — regarding themselves both as European and as something more. Nearly 80 per cent of Russia’s landmass is in Asia. The British empire was built outside Europe and the country still has strong cultural ties with the “Anglosphere” in North America, Australasia and south Asia.

So it is unsurprising that the UK and Russia are likely to end up as the two major European powers that stand outside the EU. However, both countries will continue to worry about the EU’S collective power. As nations on the periphery, they have traditionally feared the rise of a single power dominating the European landmass — which partly explains why they ended up as allies in the Napoleonic wars and the two world wars. Each country has built its modern identity around the memory of victory in 1945. And both are shaped by nostalgia for imperial power.

For Britain, the Russian parallel is not encouraging. It underlines the danger that Brexit could lead to a long-term souring in relations with continental Europe, and a politics of embittered nationalism in the UK.

For Brussels, the danger is that the EU will ultimately be faced with two angry and alienated neighbours, in Britain and Russia. Both are great powers in European terms, with considerable capacity to make mischief.

It is of course true that Britain has a liberal and democratic tradition that is absent in Russia. That aligns London’s political values much more closely with Paris and Berlin than Moscow. Those values make it much less likely that the British political class will allow the country to “go rogue” in the manner of Russia under Vladimir Putin.

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But geopolitics is not driven by values alone. There are also emotions and strategic interests involved. And here the parallels between post-soviet Russia and post-brexit Britain are concerning.

The economic turmoil and strategic setbacks of the 1990s convinced many Russians that their country had been taken advantage of by the west. Russian anger focused on the US and on Nato expansion. But the Kremlin also came to see the EU as a threat — since, in Moscow’s eyes, it was expanding into Russia’s natural hinterland. The Kremlin’s decision to intervene militarily in Ukraine was triggered by the fact that the country was about to sign an association agreement with the EU.

If Brexit goes badly wrong, it could trigger events reminiscent of the collapse of the Soviet Union — the break-up of the country, accompanied by a profound economic shock. English nationalists would undoubtedly see the EU as complicit in such malign events: some critics already accuse Brussels of manufacturing artificial problems on the Irish border, unreasonably delaying a free-trade deal and encouraging Scottish independence.