Description
The UK was a major contributor to the EU sanction machine. Back in 2014, London played a pivotal role in building the three-staged sanction regime against Russia, leveraging the expertise and institutional knowledge of the Foreign Office and Treasury, all the while shoring up the necessary political support for sanctions against Moscow.
How has Brexit altered the cooperation and socialisation patterns between the UK and the EU-27? Has the UK’s departure actually curtailed the influence it used to exercise over EU sanctions policy? Or have alternative, extra-EU, channels of cooperation emerged?
Drawing on role theory and the socialisation literature, the paper relies on interviews with official involved in both the 2014 and 2022 Russian sanction negotiations to investigate (1) the venues of socialisation available to the UK before and after Brexit, (2) the mechanisms of socialisation at play in these different venues and (3) the roles performed by the UK in those venues.
Even though Brexit limited the channels of influence available to the UK, informal, extra-EU, coordination venues within which London maintains a prominent role remained in place. In turn, these alternative arenas – most notably the contact group on sanctions set up by the G7 Plus – allowed the UK to continue performing a leadership role similar to the one it used to fulfil as an EU member state.
The paper makes important conceptual and empirical contributions to the socialisation literature and the study of EU-UK relations post Brexit. For one, it develops the scope conditions for socialisation mechanisms outside of EU channels, formulating conditions of sufficiency and necessity for different types of socialisation (normative suasion, role-playing, strategic socialisation). More generally, it sheds light on how exactly the UK uses the remaining channels of cooperation to maintain its influence over salient policy areas, such as sanctions policy.
