This is a slightly expanded version of a contribution to a Politeia seminar held in the House of Lords on 10 September 2026 under the title, “Britain’s Global Role: Where do National Interests Lie?”
Introduction:
First, some general thoughts on the ethics of national interest. I start here, because it is not uncommonly assumed on the Left that, for a state’s foreign policy to be moral, it has to be altruistic, eschewing any special concern for the interests of a particular nation. This was the view expressed by Gus O’Donnell, then head of the UK’s civil service, during a discussion about large-scale immigration in 2011. “When I was at the Treasury, I argued for the most open door possible to immigration”, he told David Goodhart. “I think it’s my job to maximize global welfare, not national welfare”.[i]
The authority of the great Enlightenment philosopher, Immanuel Kant, is often invoked in support of this simplistic identification of morality with altruism—that is, an absolute concern for the welfare of the ‘other’—rather than with the pursuit of one’s own interests. But that is a mistake. It is true that Kant defined moral duty or obligation as what is done out of regard for the moral law, at whose heart lies respect for other rational beings.[ii] By this, however, he did not mean to say that the pursuit of interests in material or social advantage is necessarily wrong. He only meant that their pursuit should run within the limits set by respect for others. In other words, provided we pursue our interests with due respect for what we owe others, we act morally.
Understood in this way, Kant’s view is much the same as that of Thomas Aquinas’s medieval combination of the Biblical and Aristotelian thought. Rather than viewing all self-interest as selfish, Aquinas held that there is such a thing as morally obligatory self-love. Human individuals have a duty to care for themselves properly, to seek what is genuinely their own wellbeing. As with individuals, so with a national community and the organ of its cohesion and decision, its government: a national government has a moral duty to look after the wellbeing of its own people—and in that sense to advance its genuine interests. As the French political philosopher Yves Simon wrote during the Abyssinia Crisis of 1935, “What should we think, truly, about a government that would leave out of its preoccupations the interests of the nation that it governs?”.[iii]
The European Union
So, what are Britain’s international interests now? First of all, my own view is that they do not include rejoining the European Union. While I voted to Remain (just) in 2016, I would vote against rejoining now. My perception is that membership of the EU did not give us much of an economic advantage, that the immediate economic impact of Brexit was slight, that our current economic difficulties owe far more to other factors, and that being outside the EU does gives us an edge in the crucial competition to develop AI technology.
