British Public Opinion on Foreign and Defence Policy

1945-2017

Ben Clements

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9781351814256
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Military Policy
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book provides a long-term perspective on the opinions of the British public on foreign and defence policy in the post-war era. Thematically wide-ranging, it looks at the broader role of foreign and defence policy in British politics and elections, public opinion towards Britain's key international relationships and alliances (the United States, NATO, the EU and the Commonwealth), and public opinion towards the projection of 'soft power' (overseas aid) and 'hard power' (defence spending, nuclear weapons and military intervention). Assessing the main areas of change and continuity in the public's views, it also pays close attention to the dividing lines in wider society over foreign and defence policy.

Analysing an extensive range of surveys and opinion polls, the book situates the analysis in the wider context of Britain's changing foreign policy role and priorities in the post-war era, as well as linking public opinion with the politics of British external policy – the post-war consensus on Britain's overseas role, historical and contemporary areas of inter-party debate, and enduring intra-party divides.

This text will be of key interest to scholars and students of British politics, European politics, foreign policy analysis, public opinion, defence and security studies and more broadly to comparative politics and international relations.

1 Introduction

In recent years there has been an important step change in the research on contemporary public opinion and foreign policy in Britain, with many articles recently published in scholarly journals. This research has provided a rich and growing body of scholarly knowledge about the foreign policy views of the British public, including in relation to war and military intervention (Clements 2011, 2012a, 2012b, 2013a, 2013b; Gribble et al. 2015; Johns and Davies 2012, 2014, 2016, 2017; Reifler et al. 2014), attitudes towards other countries (Scotto and Reifler 2017) and the nature and structure of these foreign policy attitudes (Jenkins et al. 2004; Reifler et al. 2011; Gravelle et al. 2017). There have also been recent analyses of public opinion across countries on foreign policy, including the British public, making use of cross-country survey series established in recent years (Nacos et al. 2000; Everts and Isernia 2001, 2015).

However, no scholarly work has yet provided a detailed and comprehensive analysis of public opinion on foreign and defence policy in Britain, both over time and across issues. This book aims to do just that, and, in so doing, it offers a distinctive and rigorous contribution. Distinctive in that it offers a much broader piece of work that complements – whilst extending in significant ways – recent research analysing British opinion on a specific topic or case study, particularly by providing a longer term perspective. Rigorous as it is based on in-depth analysis of a wide range of survey and polling resources pertaining to British public opinion on foreign and defence policy issues. This book fills an important niche in terms of providing a more encompassing focus – both thematically and temporally – than is possible in journal articles – and by providing a sustained analysis of citizens’ views on foreign and defence policy. The breadth and depth of research contained within this book and the findings presented across issues and over time should therefore be of interest to scholars in political science with a more contemporary focus on public opinion and foreign policy, in Britain or elsewhere. The empirical research should also be of relevance to historians of post-1945 Britain, of both domestic politics and elections, and political parties and external relations.

In particular, the findings in this book will be of considerable relevance to two key areas of historical scholarship. First, the scholarly debate over a post-war consensus in British politics, from the late 1940s through the 1970s (Pimlott 1989; Kavanagh and Morris 1994; Seldon 1994; Owen 1996; Dutton 1997; Fraser 2000; Kerr 2001; Hickson 2004). Proponents of such a consensus, which involved both the style of governing and the substance of the policies pursued, have argued that it encompassed both domestic and external policy (Kavanagh 1992; Kavanagh and Morris 1994; Dutton 1997; Hickson 2004), though the former has received more detailed scholarly attention than the latter (Owen 1996: 157). Moreover, it was a consensus that solidified and endured at the level of political elites – across the party leaderships when in office and amongst senior civil servants (Kavanagh and Morris 1994: 13; Seldon 1994: 508). Kavanagh and Morris argued that, in foreign and defence policy, the mainstays were Atlanticism, maintenance of an independent nuclear deterrent, the process of imperial disengagement (or decolonisation) and a reluctant Europeanism (1994: 13). In the areas of external relations, Hickson notes that there was a high level of agreement on foreign policy: Britain’s ‘three spheres of interest – North America, Europe and the Commonwealth – were often conflicting areas of interest, but neither party moved decisively away from, or towards, one of them when in government’ (2004: 148). Some of the general works on post-war British foreign and defence policy also emphasised the existence of a broad consensus – or bipartisan approach – amongst the two main parties (Frankel 1973; Self 2010). In the context of these scholarly debates, this book is informed by Seldon’s observation, made over two decades ago, that ‘much more empirical research needs to be carried out before one can pronounce definitively on the existence of a popular consensus throughout postwar Britain’ (1994: 505). Moreover, Owen argues that consensus is a ‘contested concept’, identifying three core meanings: ‘consensus as policy settlement, consensus as partisan convergence and consensus as popular contentment’ (emphasis in original) (1996: 158). It is this third meaning which is of broad interest to this study – defined as follows:

Consensus as popular contentment involves the relative absence of divisions in the electorate and those non-party bodies which sought to influence the public (rather than the ministerial, parliamentary or official) debate, and is best indicated (if not by unanimity) by the existence of a broad-based middle ground.

(Owen 1996: 159)

With this definition in mind, the book undertakes detailed empirical research into the views of the general public and of specific societal groups on a range of foreign and defence policy issues, post-1945, some of which are core elements in the external or overseas dimension of the post-war consensus.

Second, the analyses and findings contained in this book, in particular the focus on the views of party supporters, are instructive in light of recent scholarship on how foreign and defence policy issues have featured in and been shaped by the intellectual traditions, policy agendas and internal debates within the major political parties. In the post-war era, it has been much remarked on that political conflict over foreign and defence policy tended to be more a feature of intra-party relations than inter-party competition (Kavanagh and Morris 1994: 91). Each of the two main parties have had distinctive and politically problematic areas of internal disagreement and dissent on particular issues, which were, to varying degrees, interlinked with broader factional conflict or diverging ideological tendencies within the ‘broad churches’ that are the Labour and Conservative parties. Much scholarly research has focussed on Labour’s thinking and policies on foreign policy, and the internal debates which have played out on different issues (Little and Wickham Jones 2000; Vickers 2004, 2011; Williams 2005; Callaghan 2007; Phythian 2007; Corthorn and Shaw Davis 2008; Daddow and Gaskarth 2011). As Vickers observes, ‘foreign policy has always been an area of contention within the Labour Party, providing the arena for some of its most intense tribal warfare’ (2004: 3). On issues of military intervention and national defence, the Conservative Party has tended to be more cohesive than Labour on key issues (Keohane 2003). Studies of the Conservative Party have, however, focussed on the party’s internal debates on foreign policy issues (Onslow 1997) as one key area of division internally in the early post-war era was the process of disengagement from the Empire and decolonisation (Kavanagh and Morris 1994). There has been much consideration of the European issue and Euroscepticism, given that this debate has been so internally divisive for the Conservative Party and raised significant problems of party management and external image for successive leaders over recent decades (Turner 2000; Crowson 2006; Patterson 2011).

Finally, recent events – both at home and abroad, which may affect the aims and conduct of Britain’s external relations – make a detailed historical review of public opinion towards long-standing features of Britain’s post-war international role both timely and instructive. The 2016 European Union (EU) referendum delivered a public rejection of Britain’s membership, and so as the country transitions towards a future outside the EU there is increasing debate – and much uncertainty, too – over its future international role and how it might re-engage with the Commonwealth and forge economic links with countries in other parts of the world. The Trump presidency in the US has shaken some of the complacency surrounding the accepted ways of doing things in UK-US relations and within the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) more broadly as he has advanced an ‘America First’ agenda and articulated – in a more combative way – recurring concerns surrounding levels of defence spending and the extent of military burden-sharing on the part of European allies. Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership of the Labour Party heralds a more leftwards shift on issues of defence, taking a more distinctive approach than the Conservatives, which has led to the reopening of internal debates over Britain’s possession of nuclear weapons and the appropriateness of the use of force. A prolonged period of austerity politics and retrenchment in public expenditure at home, in response to the global financial crisis of 2008 and subsequent economic downturn, has shaped debates over the merits of Britain’s commitments to overseas aid spending, the contributions it makes to the EU’s budget, the capabilities of and funding provided to its armed forces and the costs of renewing its nuclear weapons system. In this context, a careful and detailed review of the views of the British public – and of demographic and party-political groups within it – on these foreign and defence policy issues, in order to provide a historical perspective and a contemporary profile, is surely worthwhile.

Aims and scope

This book provides the most detailed and wide-ranging analysis of public opinion in Britain on foreign and defence policy issues, covering the period from 1945 to 2017. It is thematically wide-ranging, looking at the role of foreign policy in British politics and elections, public opinion towards Britain’s key international relationships and alliances (the US, NATO, the Commonwealth and the EU) and public opinion towards particular areas issues (relating to the projection of ‘soft power’ – overseas aid – and ‘hard power’ – defence spending and nuclear weapons). The book assesses the main areas of change and continuity in the public’s aggregate views and pays close attention to where societal groups have differed in their views on Britain’s external relations. Given the elite-level nature of the post-war consensus on foreign and defence policy mentioned already (Kavanagh and Morris 1994; Seldon 1994; Hickson 2004), the research presented here pays close attention to the views of the party supporters of British-wide parties – Labour, Conservative, Liberal (Democrats) and, more recently, the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP) – within the general public. The main questions this book seeks to answer are on which issues have Labour or Conservative Party supporters held distinctive or opposing views? And have any inter-party divides at the mass level shifted over time? Have there been notable demographic divisions within the British public on specific foreign and defence issues based on gender, age group and socio-economic status? The book addresses these questions and by so doing reviews the nature and extent of the key dividing lines within the British public on foreign and defence policy.

In scholarly research on public opinion and foreign policy in the US, Holsti’s monograph, Public Opinion and Foreign Policy (1996, 2004), is a seminal work for the scholars working on this topic. It provides a detailed and empirically rich treatment of US public opinion on post-war foreign policy, across issues and over time. Focussing on British public opinion towards foreign and defence policy in the post-war era, this book has three broad similarities with Holsti’s (1996, 2004) approach. First, to examine the content of opinions on foreign policy, it adopts a pluralist approach to source material, using a range of different sources of survey and polling data, to provide a more robust and comprehensive assessment. As Holsti observes,

One of the iron laws of survey research is that responses tend to be highly sensitive to the wording of the questions; a corollary to that law is that when differently worded questions about an issue yield essentially similar responses, the results are more likely to be robust

(2011: 30)

This pluralist approach to data collection and analysis to some extent makes a virtue out of necessity in the British case, given that there is no long-running foreign policy survey series like that which exists in the US (ICPSR: American Public Opinion and United States Foreign Policy Series, n/d). Moreover, the coverage given to foreign and defence policy issues on long-running social surveys in Britain – in particular, the British Election Study (BES) and British Social Attitudes (BSA) surveys – has varied considerably over time. Second, it examines how British public opinion in aggregate terms has changed over time and across different issue areas. Third, as Holsti (1996, 2004) does for the US public on foreign policy, the book pays attention to the social and political sources of foreign policy views in wider society. That is, it looks at whether and how debates over foreign and defence policy have divided different demographic and political groups.

Noting which aspects fall within the parameters of this book also entails acknowledging at the outset which key areas of scholarly research are not engaged with or given substantive consideration. These are areas of substantive scholarly concern where the book differs from the aims and content of Holsti’s seminal text (1996, 2004). Three areas of divergence are highlighted here. First, this book does not engage with debates around, or evidence bearing upon, the structure and coherence of foreign policy attitudes within the British public. Several recent studies have, however, focussed on this specific aspect of the British public and advanced theoretical debates and empirical research in this regard (Jenkins et al. 2004; Reifler et al. 2011; Gravelle et al. 2017). Second, this book does not provide any substantive focus on the analysis of the foreign policy views of political elites or decision makers, on their own merits and in comparison with the general public. The lack of available survey data for Britain, over time and with equivalent content, precludes this. Compared again to the richness of such data in the US context (ICPSR: American Public Opinion and United States Foreign Policy Series, n/d), such studies in Britain have been few and far between (Sanders and Edwards 1994). Third, this book does not analyse the role and influence (or lack thereof) of public opinion and other civil society actors – such as the media or pressure groups – in the making of British foreign and defence policy, an approach which requires careful and sustained attention to particular case studies of foreign-policymaking, which may necessitate archival research and securing interviews with those involved in decision-making (Holsti 2004). The next section discusses the methodological approach used and the key sources.

Methodological approach and source material

As already stated, the focus of this book is wide-ranging in both thematic and temporal scope. It assesses different areas of foreign and defence policy, and in its extensive use of available data assesses the British public’s engagement with and thinking on these issues in the post-war period. Consequently, it should be acknowledged that this book has involved an extensive exercise in secondary data analysis, based on a vast array of opinion polls and surveys. In sum, it uses a plurality of recurrent social surveys and historical polling data to establish patterns and trends more robustly, discern areas of divergence and convergence, and map change and continuity in the British public’s views on foreign policy issues. The book is deliberately data rich for three reasons. First, each chapter focusses in detail on a particular foreign or defence policy issue. Second, each chapter examines the historical evidence pertaining to public opinion in Britain in the post-war era. Third, as already indicated, to provide a more robust and comprehensive treatment, it uses multiple sources to rigorously assess patterns and trends in the attitudes of the British public. Given this reliance on retrieving, assembling and analysing data across multiple sources, the major sources are now discussed in more detail.

Data sources

Usually, the data presented and discussed in this book will be based on surveys and opinion polls which are nationally representative of the general adult population in Great Britain (so excluding the population of Northern Ireland). In some cases, when making cross-national comparisons based on cross-country surveys, the UK is used (including Northern Ireland). In terms of the wide range of data used in this book, there are three main sets of sources used which together provide an extensive and wide-ranging – over time and across topics – set of data on the foreign and defence policy views of the British public. First, two long-running recurrent surveys in Britain: the BES, using data from 1963 to 2017, and the BSA, using data from 1983 to 2015. Second, cross-national survey series. This consists of the Eurobarometer (EB) surveys – running since the early 1970s – and the more globally focussed Pew Global Attitudes Project (Pew GAP; running since 2001) and Transatlantic Trends (TT; running between 2002 and 2014). Generally, because of the breadth of questions asked on various topics and their longevity as survey series, the BES and BSA are used most extensively for the analyses undertaken in this book. The EB surveys provide particularly detailed coverage, across recent decades, of public opinion on European integration, while the Pew GAP and TT series cover some other foreign policy issues, such as the international role of the US and its leadership, NATO, defence spending and military intervention. Much of the analysis involving these sources has been undertaken by the author, carrying out extensive secondary analysis of existing survey data sets (many of which have been obtained from the UK Data Service or survey-specific websites). Where applicable, the survey data sets have been appropriately weighted before the author’s analyses were undertaken. Of course, the analyses and interpretations of the data contained in this book are solely those of the author. A full bibliographic list of the survey data sets used for secondary analysis is provided after the main bibliography.

Third, commercial opinion polling undertaken in Britain in the post-war decades is used extensively. For long-run historical data, this principally uses data from polls conducted by Gallup and National Opinion Polls (NOP) (Gallup 1976a, 1976b; King and Wybrow 2001). For compiling opinion data on more recent foreign policy and defence issues, YouGov, Ipsos MORI, ICM Re...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Foreign and defence policy as an issue area in British politics
• 3 The US and NATO
• 4 European integration
• 5 Overseas aid
• 6 Defence spending and nuclear weapons
• 7 Military intervention
• 8 Conclusion
• Appendix 1: Voting in the 1975 EEC and 2016 EU referendums
• Bibliography
• List of opinion polls cited
• List of survey data sets used for secondary analysis
• Index