Professor Richard G. Whitman
Professor of Politics and International Relations
Director of the Global Europe Centre 

>> I want to talk about Britain's place in the world and the future of Britain's foreign policy. 

>> In June of 2016, the British public voted to leave the European Union, and it's a moment that raises all sorts of questions about Britain's place in the world because for over 40 years, membership of the European Union has been a core aspect of Britain's foreign security and defence policy. 

>> And alongside that, with the election of President Trump in the US, you have question marks around the UK's relationship with a key ally. So for the UK, it's in a situation in which it's uncertain as to what the key organising ideas for its foreign policy should be, and therefore there are question marks about what Britain's future foreign policy should look like.

>> Now, most discussions about Britain's foreign policy, and if you go and look at textbooks on Britain's place in the world they always start by looking at Winston Churchill's ideas, which are articulated just after the end of the Second World War.

>> Britain, of course, had been on the victorious side of the Second World War but had come out of the Second World War as a sort of exhausted power, one which was seeing itself retreat from Empire and seeing itself in a context in which you had two superpowers: the United States and the Soviet Union. 

>> Winston Churchill was then an opposition politician and gave a speech in 1948 in Llandudno where he set out the idea that Britain really had to balance three things. It had to balance on the one hand the fact that it had a relationship with what was then its empire and has become the Commonwealth.

>> Secondly, it had to balance a relationship with the English-speaking world and by that he meant the United States, but also what were then called white dominions: places like Canada and Australia, for example. 

>> And it also had to balance those two things with its relationship with the European continent and Churchill talked in terms of a united Europe which was a Europe that was united for others, not for the UK, but the UK had a relationship with and was invested in. 

>> What we've seen subsequently, and since Britain joined the European Union, European Community as it was in the early 1970s, is that Britain has thought about its foreign security and defence policy in terms of a number of things.

>> One is that it's thought about its relationship with the United States as being some kind of privileged partnership, special relationship, the UK has wanted to be its primary partner for whatever the US decides to do in terms of its foreign security and defence policy. 

>> We sometimes hear this described as the special relationship. It's also had to think about what it can actually do in terms of its capacity for influence. You know the UK is what we would call a middle power. 

>> It doesn't have the capacity to provide order within the international system, it's not a superpower. 

>> It has significant capabilities in terms of diplomacy, its armed forces and so on but at the same time it also is constrained by what it can do globally and what it can't do which is generally not make the system or make international relations to its own advantage.

>> What the UK has tended to do or what the UK decided to do from the early 1970s onwards to join the European community as was in 1973, European Union as is now, as a way really of sort of amplifying Britain's foreign policy, providing a vehicle that allowed the UK to project its foreign policy interest through a bigger organisation of more countries and which has become, or moved on to, 28 countries since the UK joined. 

>> That route or that approach to Britain's place in the world is now closing as a consequence of the decision to leave the European Union.

>> So where does the UK go next?

>> Well the UK faces what I call a two-union problem. On the one hand it's going to be preoccupied with negotiating its relationship with the European Union. But also, on the other hand, and as a consequence of the vote to leave the European Union, the UK is also going to have to work at its relationship with its own Union, the Union of the United Kingdom. 

>> Because of course there has been the move to seek another independence referendum from Scotland and that raises questions about what the UK looks and feels like and whether the individual parts of what's currently the UK will relate to the outside world in a different way in the future if Scotland was to get independence. 

>> So even as the UK decides to leave the European Union it can't escape the European Union in terms of either a negotiating preoccupation or on the other end a preoccupation for its domestic politics and which has international consequences. 

>> There have been moments in Britain's history where Britain has thought about breaking free from Europe and if you look at this wonderful cartoon from James Gillray, who is a political cartoonist, this was drawn in the early 19th century. 

>> It represents what he saw, what Gillray saw, was a deal being done between Napoleon on the one hand, who is being given the continent of Europe as his sphere of influence and William Pitt, the then Prime Minister, carving off the rest of the world for UK influence. 

>> The UK looking outside Europe, looking to the high seas, looking for other places where it would seek to have influence. Just after this cartoon was drawn and published, the UK found itself sending troops to Portugal and to Spain to engage in a military conflict with Napoleon and it illustrates very well that even at those moments in which the UK may feel its most confident in terms its ability to sort of break free from the continent, it gets drawn back in.

>> And so the essential or the core aspect of Britain's foreign policy has always been its relationship with Europe and even with leaving the European Union it will still be invested heavily in the political economic and security arrangements that exist on the continent.

>>Thank you very much.