Abstract
This paper assesses British-German security cooperation towards Russia as the linchpin of the European leg of NATO's policy. The departing United Kingdom is Western Europe's prime military power, while Germany, as the EU's economic powerhouse, has the most leverage to act as the hub of a joint Russia policy; the United Kingdom has long preferred an assertive line while Germany sought accommodation, so a British-German consensus becomes the linchpin of an effective and cohesive European policy towards the Kremlin. Against a notable consensus to the contrary, the paper shows that the Brexit process has thus far strengthened security cooperation on Russia, both between the United Kingdom and Germany and in Europe more broadly. It argues that bilateral security cooperation towards third states persists, even amid normative and institutional disintegration, when both states perceive the third state as a threat and deem each other reliable and capable: the 2014 Ukraine crisis facilitated converging threat perceptions between the two, while Brexit caused both sides to signal ongoing reliability. The paper also offers a novel conceptualisation of bilateral security cooperation into its constituent goals, strategies and efforts, and draws on British, German and Russian primary sources alongside expert interviews.
Panel: Session IV
Joint Policy Workshop 2019 programme
Cite this presentation
@inproceedings{eiss-JPW2019-the-british-and-german-attitudes-to-russia,
author = {Jonas Driedger},
title = {The British and German attitudes to Russia},
booktitle = {European Security Studies Conference 2019},
year = {2019},
url = {https://eiss-europa.com/papers/JPW2019-the-british-and-german-attitudes-to-russia.html}
}