Pauline Schnapper was born in Paris. A graduate of the Ecole Normale Supérieure, she holds a post-graduate degree in English from université Sorbonne Nouvelle and a PhD in International Relations from Sciences Po Paris (1997). She was a visiting student at St Antony’s College Oxford between 1993 and 1995. Her first appointment was as Lecturer in British Politics at the university of Orléans. She was then a fellow at the Maison Française d’Oxford for two years (2000-2002) before lecturing at Sciences Po Lille. After her Habilitation à Diriger des Recherches in 2004, she was appointed as Professor of British Studies at the Université Sorbonne Nouvelle, a position she has held since. She was also a member of the Institut Universitaire de France (2010-15) and a visiting scholar at the Centre for British Studies, UC Berkeley (2013-2014).

She is the author of a number of books, including (in English) British Political Parties and National Identity : A Changing Discourse 1997-2010, Cambridge Scholars Publishing in 2011 and (with David Baker) Britain and the Crisis in the European Union, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan in 2015. More recently she published (with Emmanuelle Avril), Où va le Royaume-Uni ? Le Brexit et après, Paris, Odile Jacob in 2019 and La Politique au Royaume-Uni, Paris, La Découverte in 2022. She has completed a History of Contemporary Britain (with Thibaud Harrois) which will be published by Routledge in 2026.

Abstract

After a prolonged period of difficult UK-EU negotiations following the 2016 Brexit referendum, leading to the signing of first the Withdrawal and then the Trade and Cooperation Agreements, the British government seemed intent on distancing itself from the continent and embracing ‘Global Britain’. This included the economy, with the pursuit of free trade agreements with Commonwealth countries and emerging economies, as well as the political/strategic fields, with a ‘tilt’ to the Indo-Pacific and the ‘Anglosphere’, including the ‘special relationship’ with the United States. The full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 acted as a wake-up call, reminding London of the centrality of European security and the need to reconnect with its neighbours. This was made even more pressing by Donald Trump’s re-election as president in November 2024, illustrating the challenge of relying too much on the US. Domestic factors, including successive changes of governments and financial constraints, also spurred Rishi Sunak then Keir Starmer to engage with the EU and its member states, leading to the first UK-EU summit since Britain’s withdrawal on 19 May 2025. In this challenging context, I will examine the extent and limits of this rapprochement, focusing on Labour’s attempts to engage with multiple partners in multiple formats - bilateral, minilateral, multilateral and ad hoc - to protect its interests.