Britain’s Ukrainian Dilemma

Days before Trump’s inauguration the British Prime Minister, Sir Keir Starmer, turned up in Kyiv to guarantee 100 years of protection for Ukraine. Britain entered both WWI and WWII to defend similar pledges. Could a failure to step up to the challenge today discredit the UK and prove a necessity to re-join the European Union? Sir Keir may well hope so.

Despite having little effective means of supporting the Ukraine as a military power, Britain - along with France - has already guaranteed Ukraine’s territorial integrity, with Prime Minister Boris Johnson pledging that:

“No country can acquire territory or change borders by force of arms… and it so follows that we will never recognise Russia’s annexation of Crimea or any other Ukrainian territory.”

What is meant by this latest doubling down is that the Labour government intends to gamble its future on international support and use Britain’s unique constitutional setup to put the source of Western national legitimacy on trial.

Starmer is a man who believes that nations and their borders are defined by international legal status and civic apparatus. Despite cloying attempts to express this administrative nationalism (remember the NHS hospital bed dance at the opening of the 2012 London olympics?), most of Britain appears to disagree with this vision.

In fact, most of the World does - probably including most Ukrainians. Nations are always bigger and better than their governments and their constitutions.

However, principled to a tee, Starmer remains the very embodiment of the technocratic state, defending his Crown Prosecution Service to the hilt from the international exposure of its gross political bias and declaring that he would not even pay for private healthcare for his own critically ill child. True to form, then, his move in Kyiv seems designed to test an ideology so perfect (and perhaps so repulsive), to himself that he will drag the results into the limelight for the world to see.

The groundwork for this show-trial has been well prepared. For decades, the British parliament and the government’s decision making processes have gradually been cleaved from the source of their legitimising power: the Crown, its Barons and Bishops; the establishment on which Magna Carta, a fundamental law for almost a third of the world, rests.

Marching on under the banner of enlightened post-war legalism, Sir Keir is now the foil to a thousand years of Christian tradition and national mythos and Britain is the petri dish where both systems can be viewed working, side by side, almost entirely in isolation from one another. As of mid January, the signs are that the nation (and the wider world), are with the State, not its government. That’s a distinction which hardly exists in continental Europe, but one which the West will have to examine sooner or later.

One reason the British government has been superannuated is that people don’t wish their nation to be founded on the political ideology of an elected majority. As presidents of avowed revolutionary republics acknowledge when they turn out to pay homage at each coronation, this foundation proves surprisingly resilient.

The other reason is that British public discourse is now directed largely from abroad. Sir Keir may lead His Majesty’s government, but the most powerful man in British political life today is probably Nigel Farage. It’s not that ‘Mr Brexit’ commands as many votes as Starmer, or that his party, Reform, has as many members than the Tory opposition (although it now does). The simple fact is that Farage is the only person the Trump administration can be bothered to listen to and those in the Mar-a-Lago bubble effectively control the public discourse of the entire anglophone world.

On one hand, if a peace deal under Trump causes the Ukraine to drop its claim to the eastern territories, the constitutional legitimacy on which nearly all the West has been based since the end of the Napoleonic wars will be seriously threatened and ruthlessly tested. On the other hand, as the centre of British public life moves away from its elected government and the international consensus which Starmer aspires to, the West may take courage from that nations survive, and even thrive, by the easing off on heavy handed state controls and international red tape. Either way, it’s double or quits for Sir Keir’s already teetering government to prove otherwise.

According to Ukrainian MP Maksym Tkachenko, 150,000 Ukrainian refugees have returned home to Ukraine’s occupied territories, preferring to live as a minority under Russian rule than as displaced citizens in West Ukraine. If Trump offers to strike a peace deal which cedes that territory to Russia, the West may face a choice over whether to defend the idolatry of their own pledges or defend Ukraine itself.

This is a territorial dispute, but it is also an existential dispute between who gets to define what a nation is. The way this conflict ends for Britain might set an example for the way it ends for Europe. After all it is often in Britain - the last European holdout against the French Enlightenment - that national legitimacy is tested to its limits.

Neville Chamberlain’s 1938 dismissal of Czechoslovakia as ‘a country a long way away about which we know very little’ is still drilled into British schoolchildren in order to rile up their righteous indignation. Yet, decades after we sheltered Czechoslovakia’s grisly Communist leaders in London throughout the War, at the first given opportunity, Czechoslovakia peacefully dismissed itself from the map. Now that British outrage over Chamberlain’s snub has far outlasted Czechoslovakia’s own pretence of nationhood, it seems a good a time to remind ourselves that the radical notion of holding all legally sovereign territory equal under international law becomes both absurd and dangerous to the credibility of governments which stake themselves to it.

Alexander Shaw

Journalist