A new BBC Radio 4 series written and presented by the former British Museum director Neil MacGregor finds other nations dismayed and distressed by Britain’s “incomprehensible” decision to leave the EU.

In As Others See Us, MacGregor talks to people from Nigeria, Canada, Egypt, Germany and India, some of whom are shocked at the public discourse around Brexit in the UK.

“Because the rest of the world sees the EU as such a positive force, our language about it as the enemy, our comparing it with Nazi Germany, is not only seen as incomprehensible but also unacceptable,” he said.

“The rest of the world do not understand any rhetoric about Europe as a repressive, dominant, constraining force. They see it as an enabling phenomenon that has been achieved at great effort and which is also a model for the rest of the world.”

A comparison to Nazi Germany was made by Boris Johnson, who said in 2016 that EU bureaucrats were trying to unite Europe under a single authority, as Adolf Hitler attempted to do.

MacGregor was impelled to make the series partly through his experience of viewing the UK from Germany, where he has spent much of his time as founding director of the Humboldt Forum in Berlin since leaving the British Museum in 2015.

“Following the debate from Germany, it became so obvious that what was being said in the UK was incomprehensible. Either it was historically untrue or else it was a misreading of the EU as it actually is,” he said.

“There is growing bewilderment at the language used, at the desire to cast the EU as the enemy, which brave little Britain alone was resisting.”

The five countries were selected partly because their history and politics have been shaped through historical engagement with Britain. Not one of his interlocutors, chosen to represent different generations and regions of their countries, thought Brexit was a good idea.

Interviewees included the Indian businesswoman Shobana Kamineni, the Nigerian artist Femi Kuti, the German politician Wolfgang Schäuble and the Canadian-Chinese novelist Madeleine Thien.

“Particularly in Nigeria, Egypt and India, I said surely you must understand the desire to be independent, why the idea of being in control is so appealing,” MacGregor said. But they did not.

The Egyptian writer Ahdaf Soueif, for example, pointed out the EU “is not occupation” and Brexit “is not to be compared with independence in the colonial sense”. The EU, in her view, was more like a marriage.

MacGregor said he was surprised at the fondness expressed towards the UK, even by those from countries formerly ruled or occupied by Britain. “We haven’t properly understood what it is about us that people like about Britain and want to see flourish,” he said.

“It’s not the caricature of traditional Britain – it’s not the Beefeaters, as it were. It is, of course, Shakespeare, but it is also the openness, the parliamentary tradition, the humour – the lovely thing is how much our humour is everywhere admired, and how absent it seemed from the Brexit debate.”

All MacGregor’s interlocutors viewed Britain with affection. “That’s the first thing that struck me – the warmth,” he said. “Someone like [the Nigerian playwright] Wole Soyinka talked about coming to London in the 1950s, how welcome he felt, how wonderful it was.”

His interviewees valued the openness of Britain, especially in London. “I was really struck that whether I was talking to Madeleine Thien or to Yasmine Shihata, the editor of the Egyptian magazine Enigma, they both said that when you come to London, you feel you are a Londoner,” MacGregor said. “All of them felt that was under threat, that the Brexit decision was a turn away from that openness.”

However, those he spoke to were concerned about false and damaging myths of British exceptionalism. The idea that the UK “stood alone” during the second world war is especially incomprehensible in Germany, he said: “There’s no doubt for the Germans that the second world war was won by the Russians and Americans, with help from the British.”

Their aforementioned affection was tainted with sadness at the new political atmosphere. “Many of them saw this as part of a global shift of countries thinking less in terms of global cooperation, and many of them compared it to Trump,” he said.

The decision to hold a referendum on EU membership was seen as a perversion of parliamentary democracy, said MacGregor, especially in Germany.

“Schäuble talks very eloquently about the role British parliamentary democracy played in setting up the Bundestag and German parliamentary democracy,” he said.

“What is very striking reading the German press over the past three years is that every German political commentator knows British constitutional history from beginning to end.

“One of the things that bewilders them is that a democracy that had so invested in being absolutely clear that authority rests in parliament should surrender and confuse that in a referendum. That seemed to them to be an abandonment of the most important political achievement of the United Kingdom.”

The five-part series begins on New Year’s Eve. The title comes from a Robert Burns poem, which is prompted by the narrator seeing a louse crawling over a woman’s bonnet. If only, says the poem, we could “see ourselves as others see us”.