Identity under pressure: ontological security and the UK-France divergence on China policy

Between 2017 and 2023, the United Kingdom shifted from hailing a ‘golden era’ with China to characterizing it as an ‘epoch-defining challenge.’ Meanwhile, France engaged in cautious balancing vis a vis Beijing. Why did the two European liberal democracies diverge sharply? I argue that ontological security operates as a domain-specific scope condition for the activation of material threats and ideological pressures into hawkish foreign policy. Brexit destabilized the configuration of Britain’s identity narratives. The subsequent ontological insecurity in Britain’s international-role domain rendered confronting China functional for national self-reconstruction. The ‘Global Britain’ project required the UK an ideologically distant great power against which to demonstrate relevance and moral purpose. In contrast, France’s relatively stable strategic-autonomy identity, despite contemporaneous disturbances in domestic politics and African policy, allowed it to process the same external pressures without comparable identity-driven escalation. Employing structured comparison and process-tracing across strategy documents, parliamentary records and elite discourse in English and French, I specify how ontological security conditions complement Foreign Policy Analysis mechanisms and securitization theory.