In the aftermath of the February 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, Britain has reconsidered the priorities set in its strategic documents. The 2023 Integrated Review refresh aimed to rebalance Britain’s immediate post-Brexit ‘tilt’ to the Indo-Pacific and the country’s aspiration to reinforce bonds with Anglosphere countries in the region.

The country’s involvement in the security of the Euro-Atlantic area has since been revived, and the British government has displayed renewed interest for stronger cooperation with European allies, especially in the Nordic-Baltic area. Besides, the UK has once again defined itself as ‘the nearest neighbour to the Arctic region’ in its 2023 Arctic Policy Framework. With the militarisation of Russia’s arctic policy and the multiplication of actors with potentially conflicting political and economic interests in the region, the UK has sought to reinforce its presence in the Arctic, as well as in the Nordic-Baltic region.

Conversely, Russia’s attitude has reinforced Nordic and Baltic states’ reliance on NATO and their involvement in a variety of bilateral and minilateral cooperation formats, such as the UK-led Joint Expeditionary Force (JEF).

This paper thus aims to analyse the possible tensions between the UK’s post-Brexit aspiration to reinforce bonds with the ‘Anglosphere’ and the prevalence of security interests within a ‘Eurosphere’. I will examine the UK’s role in Nordic-Baltic security and seek to assess whether close security relations with the states of the region also reflect enduring shared interests and values that could simultaneously lead to include the UK within a ‘Wider North’ and to consider Nordic-Baltic states as members of a larger Anglosphere.

This article investigates the evolution of the European Union (EU) and the United Kingdom (UK)’s intelligence-sharing relationship and its reliance on mutual trust to overcome legal, political, and strategic challenges. Since the UK’s departure from the EU (‘Brexit’), the two have retained a degree of cooperation on foreign intelligence in the name of common security concerns; however, the lack of foreign policy and security stipulations in the Trade and Cooperation Agreement (TCA) required a reorganization of this relationship.

The article’s theoretical and conceptual contributions challenge the notion of intelligence cooperation as a rational-choice calculation. The Euro-British intelligence-sharing relation is framed as composed of three intertwined layers: building on sociological and relational approaches I individuate inter-polity, inter-organisational and interpersonal levels of interaction, and explore how trust is established and understood differently on each level.

Empirically, this framework is applied to Euro-British cooperation between 2019 and 2024. Through elite interviews with security professionals, I explore how each level reacted differently to change, due to varying reliance on more formal or informal elements of trust. For this reason, the paper concludes by offering policy suggestions for the relationship’s future in the long-term, contributing to the growing literature on informal European security cooperation and on the UK’s role in it since Brexit. At the same time, the theoretical and conceptual framework provides a valuable tool for granular investigations of evolving intelligence relationships, in Europe and beyond. This addresses a crucial gap in the discipline, that still focuses on alliance formation but lacks insight on how alliances survive in times of crisis.

Ongoing global geopolitical developments underscore the urgency for the European Union to effectively navigate non-traditional security threats related to its Green Transition. The EU has paid increasing attention to critical energy and green technology supply chains, with China, a pivotal source of critical minerals and green tech components, sparking considerable debate.

Scholarly literature identifies a significant shift in China's environmental policy narratives. What was once considered an external topic to be discussed in multilateral fora has become integral to China's socio-economic development under the 'New Normal' paradigm, through a shift from a pollution-intensive, growth-at-any-cost model to a resource-efficient and sustainable one, culminating in the adoption of the ‘environmental civilization’ paradigm. The New Normal model emphasizes self-sufficiency and technological innovation in green industries, raising concerns in the EU and elsewhere regarding potential monopolies, overdependency, and intellectual property, among others.

My thesis aims to deepen the understanding of China's climate policies to inform the EU's pursuit of a Green Transition while maintaining strategic autonomy. It conducts a comprehensive analysis of China's climate policies to further understand this narrative shift by focusing on its newest stage: the inclusion of green technology development as a new pillar of Chinese climate policy under Xi Jinping and the weight of external and domestic factors in causing it. Firstly, it scrutinizes the integration of this new component of China's new development rhetoric into climate policies through comparative diachronic content analysis of national climate policies. Secondly, it contributes to prior stakeholder analyses of China’s climate policy process by examining the climate policy interests and priorities of new actors introduced by Ahlers and Schubert in their 2022 proposal for an updated “fragmented authoritarianism 3.0” model, namely leading small groups (with a focus on the Central Commission for Comprehensively Deepening Reform) and digital actors (with a focus on civil society political activity through social media). By exploring these dimensions, the thesis aims to shed some light on the trajectory of China's environmental policies and their implications for green transitions at a global scale, thereby aiding the EU in navigating its environmental objectives effectively.