Global Britain or globaloney

THE idea of a global Britain has become the foundation stone of Britain’s post-Brexit foreign policy. Theresa May says Brexit “should make us think of global Britain, a country with the self-confidence and the freedom to look beyond the continent of Europe and to the economic and diplomatic opportunities of the wider world”. Boris Johnson, Britain’s foreign secretary, declares that “whether we like it or not we are not some bit part or spear carrier on the world stage. We are a protagonist—a global Britain running a truly global foreign policy”.

But what does the phrase mean? The Commons foreign affairs committee, newly energised under Tom Tugendhat, summoned the great and the good of the foreign-policy establishment to answer this question. The results were disappointing. Some confessed that they hadn’t a clue. The Foreign Office submitted a memorandum consisting of little more than a set of aspirations with no details about how to put them into practice. Mr Tugendhat’s committee worries that “global Britain” cannot be the basis of foreign policy because it is little more than an “advertising slogan”. This columnist thinks the problem goes deeper. Global Britain is three badly thought out ideas rolled into one.

The first is that, thanks to its long history as a trading nation and imperial power, Britain is an irreducibly global country. Britain has a first-class army and a Rolls-Royce diplomatic service, with 154 embassies around the world. It is one of five permanent members of the UN Security Council. Britons play an outsized role in the most global markets—not just finance but consulting, art and pop music. Britain is home to 91 Forbes 2000 companies, 52% more than France and 78% more than Germany. Even Britain’s national sport, football, is thoroughly globalised, with foreign owners and foreign players.

All this is true up to a point. But Britain’s diplomatic and military establishment is a bit like an aristocratic family that has inherited a crumbling pile in the country and insists on keeping up appearances. The defence budget has fallen by 20% in real terms since 2007. The Foreign Office’s budget has fallen by even more. Many embassies in Africa consist of one man (or woman) and a dog. Look beneath the surface of Britain’s global companies and you find a long tail of ill-managed firms that know nothing of global markets. Talk of “global Britain” fosters dangerous illusions. It encourages grandiloquent promises about intervening here and providing aid there. It also distracts attention from serious economic problems. A sensible government would try to do something about dismal companies that trap people in unproductive work, rather than dream of freeing Britain’s successful multinationals from the (often imaginary) shackles of Brussels.

The second idea is that being global means embracing emerging markets. Since 2000 these have accounted for more than 60% of the world’s economic growth. The European Union is the economic equivalent of a “legacy system”: locked in the past, overburdened by entitlements and regulations, terrified of the creative destruction at the heart of capitalism. The emerging world, by contrast, is a bubbling cauldron of new opportunities and new consumers. The world’s economic centre of gravity has moved from the Azores in 1980 to Iran today and is likely to reach Tibet by 2050. Britain needs to move with it.

Yet this idea rests on a false antithesis. There is nothing about EU membership that prevents Britain from taking advantage of these booming markets, as Germany does rather more successfully. Emerging countries can also be difficult places to do business with, sometimes because they are run by problematic regimes, sometimes because they are riddled with corruption. In recent years Britain has swallowed its principles to attract Russian business. Now it has little choice but to engage in a costly diplomatic row at a time when, thanks to Brexit, the false choice between Europe and the world is in danger of becoming real.

The Anglosphere delusion

The third idea is that “global Britain” means the Anglosphere. This embraces countries around the world that share a common culture because they were once part of the British empire. “Outside the EU, the world is our oyster”, a Brexiteer once put it poetically. “And the Commonwealth remains that precious pearl within.” Supporters of this idea argue that the Anglosphere has deep roots in British history: in “The History of the English-Speaking Peoples”, Winston Churchill argues that England is a global island, scattering its people around the world. But they also point out that it is attractively modern. It is global where the EU is regional, networked where the EU is bureaucratic, bottom-up where the EU is top-down. In short, it is a ready-made alliance linked by a common belief in free trade and by technologies that increasingly render distance obsolete.

Pankaj Ghemawat, of New York University, says there is some truth in this. All else equal, a common language boosts trade to 2.2 times what it would be without a common language, and colonial links can boost it to 2.5 times. But then the qualifications start. Excluding Britain, the Commonwealth’s GDP is only 55% as big as the EU’s. The effect of distance trumps the effect of culture by a significant margin. And colonial links cannot be relied on. Narendra Modi, India’s prime minister, is less sentimental about British rule than his predecessor, Manmohan Singh, for example, and the American elite is less Anglophile than it was.

The phrase “global Britain” is well intentioned, designed to send a message that Britain is not withdrawing from the world by leaving the EU. It remains open for business, active on the world stage, bouncily cosmopolitan. But Britain needs to do more than remain open for business. It needs to work out ways of engaging without overstretching its abilities and of embracing globalisation without forgetting that it has downsides as well as upsides. Talking globaloney isn’t going to help.