France has the most to lose from Britain’s turn away from Europe

It was Napoleon who declared that ‘a state has the politics of its geography’. We do well to remember that in taking stock of European international relations as we speculate on a new year and beyond. By Europe is meant the European continent, ‘from the Atlantic to the Urals’, in de Gaulle’s words. Not the 27-member European Union, which Brussels linguistically and imperialistically conflates with the 44 sovereign states that the UN defines as Europe.

Of those 44 states, four are still the European great powers, as they have been since at least 1870: Britain, Germany, France, and Russia. They are still the continent’s most populous, wealthiest (except Russia), and militarily prepared (except Germany). Over the longue durée their geostrategic positions have changed little, bar post-war Germany’s. So how might each of them evolve over the medium to long term?

The great nineteenth century French historian Jules Michelet was in the habit of opening his College de France lectures on Britain with the statement: 

‘Messieurs, England is an island, now you know as much as me of her history’.

Through much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries a prominent issue in British diplomacy was the dilemma of a continental versus an imperial strategy.