Tara McCormack – The Heart of Starmer’s Government

Why Keir Starmer has pledged to put Ukraine at the heart of everything his government does

Tara McCormack is a lecturer in international relations at the University of Leicester

Originally posted at The Northern Star

Britain’s new Labour government can be accused of vagueness and even dishonesty in its campaign to get elected. However, in one area at least it has been entirely clear and consistent. Before the election, David Lammy (the new Foreign Secretary) and John Healy (the new Secretary of Defence) were dispatched to Ukraine to make a public commitment that a Labour government would not deviate from the support that had been given by the Conservative government. And, sure enough, within two weeks of the Labour’s election, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky was addressing the new Cabinet, the first foreign leader to receive such an honour since US President Bill Clinton in 1997. The day before, prime minister Keir Starmer explained that the reason for this unusual event was that ‘Ukraine is, and always will be, at the heart of this government’s agenda’.

On the face of it, this promise seems like a peculiar statement for a British Prime Minister to make. The government of Britain is elected by British voters and conventional political and constitutional thinking assumes that we do this because it is we who are at the heart of our government’s agenda—because we elect governments to act on behalf of British citizens. Notwithstanding a certain level of support for Ukraine reflected in polls, it is inconceivable that the majority of voters would want the interests of Ukraine to be ‘at the heart’ of a UK government’s agenda. In terms of voters’ main concerns, foreign policy and even defence and security remain low priorities. How then do we understand the pledge to put Ukraine at the heart of everything the government does?

The answer does not lie of course in the British government’s concern for human rights, democracy and sovereignty, as there is no Western government apart from the American that has been so complicit after the end of the Cold War in overturning state sovereignty (in Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya to name only the most obvious cases), and in supporting human rights abuses, ranging from support for dictatorships to enabling the torture in the CIA’s so-called ‘black sites’ during the war on terror. Rather the answer is that devotion to the supposed interests of Ukraine serves as a marker of the new government’s fealty to other European political elites and to America.

There are two main reasons for Ukraine’s status at the heart of the Keir Starmer’s agenda. The first is that the British government, as other European governments, no longer derives its sense of authority and legitimacy from the state’s citizens, channelled through representation in Parliament, but from other political elites. The second is that since the end of the Cold War, European political elites have increasingly become adjuncts of American foreign policy, and loyalty to those policies is now one of the primary ways in which European elites signal their legitimacy between themselves. The two processes are intertwined.

The decay of the political relations between state and citizens began in the 1980s, when political elites began to tear up the postwar national settlements. In the postwar era, the wage-earning majority represented by powerful trade unions were permitted to have an influence on policy—institutionalising full employment, trade union rights, public housing and extensive welfare rights—in return for accepting the fundamentally capitalist character of the state. The economic turmoil of the 1970s forced the representatives of the employers to bring down the post-war order, as it had created ‘a crisis of rising expectations’ among the population, expectations that elites could no longer meet. For governments in Europe and America this meant reducing the burden of the ‘social contract’ and shrinking the range of goods that the state would provide for citizens.

This transformation is often referred to as neoliberalism and misunderstood as a withdrawal of the state from the economy. But it is in essence a long-term political project of excluding the mass of citizens from the state. Political parties, particularly on the left, abandoned their old constituencies and converged around a narrow technocratic agenda. Citizens withdrew from politics and into private life. As the resulting ‘void’ between the state and its citizens developed, European political classes have sought out a source of political legitimacy for this process in the European Union. Post-Cold War European integration was one in which European political elites sought to rely on the European treaties and the EU’s secretive policy forums to seal off more and more areas of policy from public contestation. Nation-states were transformed into member-states, horizontally integrated with each other, but vertically disintegrated within.

The UK may have left the EU, but its political class has no interest in rebuilding the relations of political authority it once enjoyed with its own population nor any idea how to do that. Britain can be thought of as a post-member state, no longer in the EU but nevertheless still politically disintegrated—that is, internally still like a member-state. The government is, therefore, desperate to retain its links both to European elites and to the patron of the entire European order, the USA. And this is why Ukraine is at the heart of Starmer’s government.

Post-war Europe was, of course, a product of American hegemony. The European Union (EEC as it was) provided the economic and political track for the dominance of American capital post war, with NATO providing the military track. The post-imperial British ruling class liked to imagine itself playing the role of Greece to the Americans’ Rome, the wise elder statesmen, rewarded by the so-called ‘special relationship’ (a term only wheeled out by American presidents when they visit Britain in order to maintain British governments’ illusions of importance). Despite these grandiose ideas, Britain nevertheless joined the EEC, fearing irrelevance outside of it (being reduced to a mere ‘Greater Sweden’ as one Whitehall mandarin put it).

During the Cold War there was, however, still room for contestation and manoeuvre between Europe and the USA: for example, De Gaulle’s withdrawal from NATO’s military command or Harold Wilson’s decision not to get involved in Vietnam. The end of the Cold War brought changed this balance.

In the first place the collapse of the USSR permitted the Clinton government to lead expansion of the EU and NATO, steadily increasing the number of states within the US sphere. At the same time, the process of European integration accelerated in a way that has increasingly become bound up with supporting American policy regardless of whether that is in Europe’s interests or not. This makes sense once we understand that European integration is not really a process of developing a pan-European state or national interest, but of evading the needs and demands of Europe’s actual nations. This is generally done by invoking some wider global priority and, when it comes to security, these priorities are determined by the USA. As European elites have become more and more detached from their national electorates and instead turned to each other, they have in turn become more dependent on American policy. The bombing of Germany’s Nordstream gas pipeline denotes Europe’s full subordination to American foreign policy goals.

This is the context that explains why Starmer has made haste to proclaim that Ukraine will be at the heart of everything the British government does. His statement is not mere flattery for a foreign leader but really does express his regime’s fundamental priorities. It makes no sense if one thinks that the British government is motivated to resolve Britain’s cost of living crisis, crashing health service, non-existent borders, all top concerns with voters. It only makes sense once one understands that the government does not govern in the interests of the nation it ostensibly rules, even if we understand those interests in the most basic of ways: for example, a functioning health service. Ukraine serves as the signal between European elites that they are maintaining their support for each other and ultimately informs the USA that they remain dependent on its decaying imperium.

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