The New European Arms Race

Following on from a series of jingoistic statements by Starmer, reaffirming British support for Ukraine and opposition to Russia, his increase in military spending should be understood as part of a bid for European leadership — albeit one launched from outside the European Union.

There is an obvious conceit to this: the renovation of Britain’s military capabilities is dependent on American industry, their ultimate deployment conditional to strategic decision in Washington; and, as the US and the EU pull apart, Starmer will be unable to face in both directions. Nonetheless, his bid is in keeping with the new ‘zonal’ geopolitics, which is intensifying contestation of regional hegemony, while subjecting it to more inconsistent and unpredictable influence by the US and China.

This geopolitics has been brought about through a fragmentation of the post-war international system, not least by the US, in response to challenges to its global power since the turn of the millennium. It does not imply reversion to a system split into spheres of influence, but rather the elaboration of a much more unstable arrangement, in which recurrent crisis is likely to undermine new hegemonic formations before they are fully developed.

Induced into this new geopolitics by the US — especially Trump’s withdrawal of military support for Ukraine — the British government has adopted a militarism unembellished with humanitarian reason. As foreign aid becomes a more marginal endeavour, in symbolic as well as material terms, this suggests an eschewal by Labour of an internationalism formed in the period of decolonisation, bearing the residual influence of Fabian social-imperialism; it suggests an inability to sustain the illusion of empire that Labour conjured through its commitment to overseas development in the decades following this period. This, in turn, implies an end to what Tom Nairn called ‘the sour half-world of Great British “special relationships”’, inviting a geostrategy more in keeping with Britain’s present conditions, while plausibly undermining the internal legitimacy of the British state, which has long depended upon the international projection of power.

To Starmer, as to other European leaders, increased military spending also seems to represent a means of stimulating a sleepy economy. ‘This is the route to an industrial strategy where Britain becomes the leading military power in Europe,’ contended Maurice Glasman, Labour peer and founder of the Blue Labour tendency, in a recent interview. But a shift towards military-Keynesianism now would exacerbate the risk of more widespread war with Russia, which is not only unlikely to tolerate further European encroachment in its direction but is also interested in contesting European hegemony. Moreover, with constraints on the international influence of all European states, the new continental arms race makes intraregional war a more plausible prospect.

In justification of his militaristic turn, Starmer has invoked a threat to ‘British values’. This plays to the insecurities of Britain’s new right, which is obsessed with the possibility of invasion and replacement. As Labour also now adopts a more aggressive posture on immigration — ‘there’s no nice or easy way of doing it,’ asserted Home Secretary Yvette Cooper in December — the government typifies an emergent ‘national centrism’: contemporary social democracy’s sublation of the new right’s cultural politics. Though it was for the Fabian Society that Starmer wrote a pamphlet, in 2021, setting out his vision of a ‘fairer, more secure and prosperous Britain,’ his government seems to be tending more towards national-conservative tenets of Blue Labour.

Internationalism Beyond Aid

Among those lamenting the marginalisation of aid are former New Labour apparatchiks, fixers of its ‘special relationships’. Having used the revolving door into the aid sector, they now revert to their idée fixe — that the problem is a failure to appeal to the ‘movable middle’. ‘If we are to rewin the argument for global solidarity we need to once again build a consensus of middle Britain for this important cause,’ exhorted Justin Forsyth, former special adviser to Tony Blair, in a recent social media post. Those who earned their stripes in a government in which politics was considered an exercise in communication might well struggle to see any movement that occurs beneath the shallow surface of public opinion. But if the aid agencies presided over by Forsyth and others became too ‘focused on talking to themselves’, this is in large part because there is no longer much of a ‘middle’.

Accelerating after the financial crisis, the erosion of Britain’s modern work society has resulted in an emptying of the middle class, which provided the social base for the aid industry over previous decades. This has had a profound impact on public morality.

As Labour now attempts to occupy the political centre-ground through the incorporation of a defensive nationalism, there is indeed a need to build a constituency for international solidarity. But this must be part of a broader moral endeavour that also challenges structures of unfreedom.

A legacy of empire, foreign aid, not least as it flows from the West to the rest, has been functional to capitalist reproduction and complementary to systemic inequalities. Its withdrawal, however, will have immediate adverse effects for those who came to depend on it following its massive growth in previous decades. As catastrophic threats on the horizon already generate proliferating crisis in the present, the restoration of the aid industry will not free them from their predicament.

Their freedom can only come from a politics born of their self-organisation, and that of those experiencing radical needs elsewhere — including Britain. This, then, is the basis for constituting an anti-systemic internationalism today. Whether aid can be instrumental to this will depend on the ability of its proponents to mobilise it not through charity, but through political demands that expose ruling classes to jeopardy. This will require the creation of new institutions of the exploited and dispossessed, distinct from the professional organisations of the aid industry, which are now focused on managing their own decline.