Sitting where it does, and as a result of its history, and population, the current war in Ukraine, again reflects this reality, with a part drawn towards Western imperialism, and the other drawn towards Russia, but also with those same factors meaning that Russia will seek to exert its control over its own border, including its near vicinity, as NATO imperialism seeks to encroach upon it. Only apologists for the imperialist ambitions on either side (NATO and Russia), or "hopeless pacifist blockheads" can seek to deny this reality, and its implications. As Marxists, we are not moralists issuing ethical decrees of what “ought” to be, but materialists, basing ourselves on what “is”, and a scientific understanding of the social and economic laws that drive states, classes and other social forces to act.
And, although Britain is a more powerful state, still, than Ukraine, given its own long imperialist history, that concrete reality, and those same social laws still apply to it. Britain is, indeed, in a similar position to Ukraine, as a result of Brexit. Britain's leading role in the world ended a century ago, though its colonial empire enabled it to appear to continue for longer. By the latter part of the 19th century, Britain's economic power was already challenged by Germany and France, and by the early 20th century, the US and Japan. The First World War destroyed much of the economic power of Britain, France and Germany. It enabled the US to become the leading economic power, with Japan rising closely behind it.
What WWI and II represented was the playing out of these economic and social laws described above. The individual European states were just too small, on their own, to compete with the giant US economy, or even that of Japan, which was extending its domination over the Pacific region, itself becoming a challenger to US imperialism, and causing it to respond.
The European states, many of which had their own colonial and imperial histories (poor little Belgium was itself one of the most brutal and vicious colonial powers in Africa), needed to be merged into one centralised European state, but their own history meant this was going to occur as attempts by one or another to assert its dominance militarily over the others. France had been, historically, the dominant power in continental Europe, but once Prussia had created a unified German state, that position changed, as the Franco-Prussian War indicated. If Europe was to be unified, then, short of socialist revolution, it would be as a result of a hostile takeover, by either France or Germany. Britain, in the 19th and early 20th century, as dominant global power, resisted any such development, opposing a dominant France in the Napoleonic Wars, and siding with Prussia, and, then, siding with France, in the 20th century, against a dominant Germany.
But, by WWII, Britain's power had gone, despite all the nonsensical war nostalgia, about Britain's valiant role in that war, and the iconisation of the vile and disastrous leadership of Churchill. By 1940, Germany had rolled over most of Europe, and brought Britain and France to a humiliating defeat at Dunkirk, just as, also, Japan gave Britain its worst ever military defeat in Singapore. In every encounter, prior to the entry of the USSR and US into the war, Britain was defeated by Germany, and Japan.
Britain was defeated, trapped in its island bunker, being slowly starved into submission. That provided US imperialism with the ideal conditions to, again, step in on the side of the defeated Britain and France, as it had done at the end of WWI. Prior to that, the US had been focused on its main challenger, Japan, in the Pacific, and had even continued to allow giant US corporations like Ford and GM, to operate in Nazi Germany, their plants turned over, themselves to war production, just as also, US banks and finance houses continued to cooperate with Nazi Germany. As Trotsky had pointed out, at the start of the war, the idea that it was about fighting for democracy over fascism, or that the contending states would line up on that basis was a social-chauvinist delusion.
Britain became wholly subordinated to its former US colony, owing it billions of Dollars in debt, which it did not finish paying off until 60 years later, in 2006. With the main challenger to US imperialism, after WWII, coming not from Britain, France, Germany or Japan, but the USSR (despite the US continually refusing to open a second front against Germany, and so causing the USSR to bear the main burden of fighting, for three years, leading it to suffer massive physical destruction, and a loss of 30 million of its citizens) the US saw the potential, and need, to have a large client imperialism, on the USSR's border, and that European imperialism, was, itself, also heavily reliant on the US, as a consequence of the Marshall Plan, which tied it in to all of the giant US multinational companies that expanded into it, to exploit all of the available cheap European labour, and supply its rapidly expanding markets.
Britain, still with the delusion of colonial grandeur, remained aloof from this European project, and, for nearly a decade, its colonial possessions allowed that delusion to persist, as, every Sunday, BBC radio continued to broadcast Two-Way Family Favourites, sending messages and record requests to and from British imperial forces stationed across the globe. But, US imperialism, based upon industrial capital rather than commercial and interest-bearing capital, insisted upon the dismantling of those old colonial empires, to give its multinationals free access to them, just as it had also demanded the end of the role of Sterling as global reserve currency.
As I wrote 40 years ago, Lenin, in his “Imperialism, The Highest Stage of Capitalism”, had got it wrong, and was describing that old world of colonial empires, and not the new world of imperialism based upon large-scale industrial capital, and its need for ever larger single markets, global regulation if not planning, in the interests of the vehicle of that industrial capital, the footloose multinational corporation. Add in the fact that the ruling class is now a global ruling class, and that it holds its wealth entirely in the form of fictitious rather than physical capital, and so is even more detached from any connection to any given nation state, and that picture is complete. What we have is more akin to the kind of super-imperialism, described by Kautsky, than that of competing nation states, described by Lenin.
Britain's post-war economy simply fell into an even more rapid decline, precisely because the old colonial model was itself limited by the same conditions that limit the potential for unequal exchange by commercial capital, and interest-bearing capital, as against the ability of industrial capital to produce relative surplus value in production, and to also, thereby expand the economy itself. It is the difference between the ideas of the mercantilists, as against those of the Physiocrats, Smith, Ricardo and Marx, in relation to the source of the wealth of nations. To survive, and at least slow this pace of decline, Britain needed to join the European Economic Community, but its application was rejected, because France recognised Britain's historic role, as a wrecker when it came to European integration, and also recognised its role as an agent, in Europe, of the US imperialism that Britain was now subordinated to, in terms of its global military and strategic role.
Where Britain increasingly integrated its military systems, and, in particular, its nuclear deterrent with the US military industrial complex, France refused to put its forces, especially its nuclear deterrent (The Force De Frappe) under NATO control. The experience of Britain inside the EU confirmed the fears expressed by De Gaulle, as Britain continued to act as an arm of US imperialism, inside the EU, most visibly seen by the UK's unflinching support for the US war in Iraq, as against the opposition to it from France, Germany and other EU states. Britain, like Ukraine, is, thereby, torn between these two large imperialist blocs.
On the one hand, it is economically tied to the EU. The vast majority of its trade is with the EU, and necessarily so, because the majority of trade always occurs with near neighbours. That remains the case even after Brexit, whatever, the utopians might want to think about the prospect of resurrecting the colonial empire, or a global Britain expanding its trade with China (dead in the water as a result of NATO imperialism's economic war against it), or India (which, as a rising imperialist power, in its own right, would be the main beneficiary of any such trade). British-EU trade has necessarily declined, to Britain's cost, after Brexit, but it is still by far the biggest component, and in order to retain it, Britain had to essentially abandon Brexit, in all but name, and subordinate itself to the EU, accepting its single market and customs union conditions, but now with no political input or control over the formulation of those conditions!
That is also what makes ludicrous the notions of Starmer and Blue Labour, that somehow, the EU would give Britain the same kinds of political rights as an EU members state, but without being inside the EU! That would be like UNITE agreeing that non-union members, or members of a staff association, could turn up at union branch meetings, and vote, as well as enjoying all the benefits of union membership, but without paying union subs, or being bound by union decisions to strike and so on.
Brexit, was, then, a decision to give up the greatest amount of control over its destiny that Britain has ever made. Inside the EU, Britain had a significant influence over EU policies, both because of the size of its population (third behind Germany and France), and of its economy. And, the EU itself is the largest single market on the planet, bigger even than that of the US or China. In terms of the size of its economy, it is second in the world, not far behind the US. Consequently, when it comes to global negotiations over trade, the EU is able to hold its own against the other huge economic blocs of North America, China and the Pacific, and South America. As part of the EU, Britain enjoyed that benefit, but has thrown it away with Brexit. On its own, the UK economy is a minnow compared to the EU, US, China, or these other large blocs, and so, inevitably subordinated to them. In particular, it is subordinated to the EU, because of, rather than in spite of, Brexit.
On the other hand, Britain remains subordinated militarily and strategically to the US, acting as its poodle, as in Iraq, Afghanistan, the Balkans and so on, and now in Ukraine. That is, in part, a consequence of the EU itself remaining subordinated to US imperialism, via NATO, as well as the fact of Britain's historical subordination to the US, since WWII, and its dependence on it for military hardware, and so on. When, rather than if, the EU, as part of its process of political integration, into a fully fledged state, necessarily develops its own army, and separates from NATO, Britain will increasingly be drawn towards it, but will suffer the same kinds of tensions currently endured by Ukraine, as the Atlanticists pull fiercely in one direction, and the Europeans in the other. Both will be an illustration of the fact that Britain has no real national self-determination, nor control, but is pulled inexorably into the orbit of these larger gravitational forces.
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