Anglo-American Relations

Alan Dobson, Steve Marsh, Alan Dobson, Steve Marsh

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136164149
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politica e relazioni internazionali
• Subtopic: Diplomazia e trattati

This book provides an examination of contemporary Anglo-American relations. Sometimes controversially referred to as the Special Relationship, Anglo-American relations constitute arguably the most important bilateral relationship of modern times. However, in recent years, there have been frequent pronouncements that this relationship has lost its 'specialness'.

This volume brings together experts from Britain, Europe and North America in a long-overdue examination of contemporary Anglo-American relations that paints a somewhat different picture. The discussion ranges widely, from an analysis of the special relationship of culture and friendship, to an examination of both traditional (e.g. nuclear relations) and more recent (e.g. environment) policies. Contemporary developments are discussed in the context of longer-term trends and contributing authors draw upon a range of different disciplines, including political science, diplomacy studies, business studies and economics. Coupled with a substantive introduction and conclusion, the result is an insightful and engaging portrayal of the complex Anglo-American relationship.

The book will be of great interest to students of US and UK foreign policy, diplomacy and international relations in general.

1 Is there a ‘strategic culture’ of the special relationship?

Contingency, identity, and the transformation of Anglo-American relations

David G. Haglund

Introduction

For more than a decade the concept of ‘strategic culture’ has been gaining traction among political scientists and other students of International Relations (IR), by whom it has been embraced in the hope that it will advance knowledge in whatever particular subject area they find of interest. Thus it can come as no surprise that the concept should also be conscripted for service in the analysis of what surely ranks as one of the more significant subject areas in modern IR, namely that strategic dispensation we refer to as the Anglo-American ‘special relationship’, sometimes alternatively known simply as ‘Anglo-America’, occasionally even as the ‘Anglosphere’.¹ By whatever label it is known, the topic of this volume represents an aspect of interstate cooperation that transcends the ‘normal’ bounds of diplomatic conduct in the international anarchy, and does so in a way that can even, at the extreme, call into question conventional assumptions of how allegedly self-regarding states do (or should) act in that anarchical environment.

In a word, the special relationship has at times been invoked to suggest the ability of some states to so ‘empathise’ with others as to cast doubt upon assumptions rooted in the expectation that the ‘national’ interest trumps all other considerations in foreign policy. Instead, some say, a transnational interest, predicated upon a transatlantic collective identity, can at times emerge to inspire policy choices, and to put policymaking on a similar trajectory in both countries.² The purpose of this chapter is to trace the origins and evolution of that collective identity we know of as the Anglo-American special relationship, and to do so within a framework that makes direct appeal to the sometimes nebulous category of strategic culture. In what follows, I am going to argue two principal points, each derived from a particular reading of strategic culture. First, I am going to demonstrate why and how ‘path dependence’ can be employed in a bid to clarify the chronology of the special relationship, doing so in a manner that draws our attention to the crucial significance of 1940 as the effective starting date for that relationship. Secondly, I am going to invoke a different ‘cultural’ category, namely ethnicity, to show, somewhat counter-intuitively, how it was possible for English-descended Americans to discard what had been, for them, a long-time touchstone of their own identity as Americans, namely Anglophobia, in a process of ‘identity shift’ that would serve as a necessary (though not sufficient) condition for the creation of the special relationship.

On strategic culture and the special relationship

Even if one does not subscribe to the most robust reading of the Anglo-American special relationship – a reading that virtually emancipates policymaking from strict considerations of national interest in favour of a mooted collective identity (and therefore interest) – it is still possible for this volume's organising concept to be mustered into service as a means of accounting for efficient interstate cooperation, predicated on the assumption that in shaping their respective states’ discrete (i.e. ‘national’) interests, American and British policymakers take it as axiomatic that securing each other's cooperation is simply the ‘rational’ thing to do, and in most instances almost a necessary thing to do. As I intend to show in this chapter, strategic culture can be employed in two senses: a maximalist one stressing a transnational collective identity, and a minimalist one emphasising close coordination of otherwise self-regarding entities. Both can serve as a means of helping us gain insight into the Anglo-American special relationship.

Now, it is true that more than a few scholars would dispute there is anything particularly noteworthy in either the style or the substance of Anglo-American diplomatic ties – mythical ties, they say, which effectively represent ‘nothing special’.³ Indeed, Edward Ingram has gone so far as not only to deny the touted merits of the special relationship, but also to claim that under its cover the US actually made it its business to so undercut British might as to effectively knock it out of the ranks of the great powers altogether, hardly the kind of thing one should do to any ally, least of all a special one. Remarks this heterodox historian, in a thinly disguised attack upon political scientists who proclaim the significance of transnational collective identity, ‘[a]lthough the United States did not formally declare war against Britain during World War II, it did destroy Britain and may have done so deliberately’. Moreover, he continues, the special relationship is simply verbiage that masks a grimmer reality, and should rather be regarded as an ‘extreme version of an alliance of restraint in which the weaker partner commits suicide by inviting its stronger partner to strangle it’.⁴

At the risk of being regarded as yet another political scientist stumbling naively through wonderland, I am going in this chapter to take it for granted that we can employ the adjective ‘special’ to discuss the bilateral relationship between the US and the UK, even if it remains obvious that America and some of its allies happen to possess other ‘special’ relationships.⁵ Still, there is, empirically and normatively, something so noteworthy about the manner in which the US and UK engage diplomatically with each other as to warrant being adjudged exceptional – and whether we express this exceptionality by calling it special or, as the respective leaders of the two countries, Barack Obama and David Cameron, have recently taken to styling it, ‘essential’, matters not a whit.⁶ The point is that they display toward each other a certain policy attentiveness, even deference, that neither of them consistently displays toward most of their other security partners or allies. This pattern of behaviour is so long-standing as hardly to need empirical demonstration, though perhaps not as long-standing as is sometimes imagined (a point on which I elaborate later in this chapter). Withal, though some may disagree, it is not how they interact in such a ‘special’ way that is important, but rather why they do so. And in respect of the latter, strategic culture might be of some utility.

Two words of caution need to be sounded here. First, although this volume's emphasis upon contemporary features of the special relationship means that most of its chapters will take as their starting point the historic year 1940, my own chapter, notwithstanding its inherently theoretical nature, is going to rely upon a temporal analysis that begins further back, in the 1890s. Although I will have something to say about both 1940 and the current era, I will spend most of my time discussing the seminal half-century that preceded the destroyers-for-bases deal of the late summer of 1940. Second, this chapter is written mainly from the perspective of American foreign and, to a lesser extent, domestic policy.

Now, before we ask what, exactly, strategic culture can bring to the understanding of the special relationship, we need to know a thing or two about it. As one might imagine, there are almost as many definitions of strategic culture as there are scholars interested in it. I have wandered into this murky landscape myself, and though I would be the last to lay claim to having authoritatively defined the concept, I would happily be among the first to emphasise how contested it is, and will remain, among those who utilise it.⁷ By way of gross generalisation, let us say that there are two principal camps into which ‘strategic culturalists’ can be segregated. The first camp is peopled by scholars such as Colin Gray, who emphasise that what is important about the concept is to be found first and foremost in the context that surrounds any given state's foreign and security policy.⁸ Our second camp groups those who, like Alastair Iain Johnston, seek to breathe ‘causal’ significance into the concept, by stressing the importance for policymaking of symbolic means of expressing interests and goals; let us call this second camp the preserve of those who work on the cognitive side of the house.⁹

It is only with the contextualists that my chapter is concerned.Just as they might be distinguished from the cognitivists, so too do they require being distinguished from each other. The basic fault line running through the contextualists’ terrain differentiates those who seek to explicate strategic interaction in terms of how particular states have acted toward each other in the past, from those who highlight instead how states are thought, by their own and other peoples, as being likely to act based on the ‘way they are’. There is also a second distinction worth noting: for those who focus upon the past record of state interaction, the referent for strategic culture can be, and often is, more than simply the behaviour of a single state per se; instead, that referent can be the dyadic, or bilateral, interaction. In other words, the diplomatic relationship can be said to have developed and to express a ‘culture’.¹⁰ On the other hand, for those who examine identity, i.e. the way that states are thought to ‘be’, the referent in the first instance is the identity of the single state (or nation),¹¹ although it can and sometimes does turn out that a ‘transnational’ identity also becomes the object of investigation, as was the case a century ago when a construct known as ‘Anglo-Saxonism’ was often taken seriously as a conditioning element in British and American foreign policy, serving for a time to bring the two countries closer together.¹²

For the first group of analysts, who employ strategic culture as a means of accounting for prior behaviour's impact on current and future policy, historical sociology is often plumbed for guidance; those in the second group, who prefer to put the emphasis upon conceptions attending identity, similarly avail themselves of approaches with a long-established pedigree, subsumed under the rubric national character. If the two disciplinary wellsprings share the common characteristic of dating from the first half of the twentieth century, they differ in an important respect, given that historical sociology has regained scholarly respectability after having been for some years in eclipse,¹³ while national character studies, under that name, remain controversial, though when repackaged under the label ‘national identity’ they have attained a considerable cachet during the past decade or so.¹⁴ In the next two sections of this chapter, I will show how both contextual variants might help us to come more fully to grips with the Anglo-American special relationship.

In respect of the first of these sections, our foray into the past will be animated by the conviction that history must ‘matter’, which to some strategic culturalists implies a turn toward narrative as a means of supplying explicative energy. This turn to narrative will require a focus on the process (or phenomenon) known as path dependence. This constitutes the main topic of inquiry in the section following immediately upon this one, in which the focus will be upon the events accompanying America's rise to great-power status – events that, we shall see, various scholars have insisted served to ‘lock in’ a new cooperative pattern between the two countries, in effect making their shared future look decidedly different from their common past. Following that discussion, the chapter's fourth section will shift the analysis to our other contextual category, national identity, or what once was referred to regularly as national character. Itself a term that is open to various interpretations, national character/identity has at least one clear connotation, namely ethnicity. Accordingly, in this section, attention will be directed toward the phenomenon of ‘ethnic politics’, with a view to determining whether or how this might have been said to contribute to shaping the course of Anglo-American relations.

As the twig is bent: Looking for contingency in Anglo-American relations

Whatever else might divide them, strategic culturalists are dissatisfied with structuralist accounts of foreign policy behaviour, of the sort for instance that ascribe policy outputs to variables such as relative capability (‘power’), or cumulative wealth.¹⁵ These culturalists may or may not be in agreement as to the attainability of reliable causality, but they do accept that cultural context, and therefore history, should ‘matter’. How history should matter, no one can say exactly, but many analysts have been turning to narrative to supply explicative energy, via an approach sometimes called ‘narrative positivism’.¹⁶ The emphasis upon narrative has led many of them to focus on the process of path dependence. Path dependence, as Paul Pierson observes, stands in contradistinction to certain assumptions of rational-choice theory that claim ‘large’ causes should result in commensurately ‘large’ outcomes.¹⁷ As such, path dependence will have an ever more congenial ring in the ears of some strategic culturalists, whose anti-structuralist epistemology, coupled with their conviction that patterns of behaviour are ‘culturally’ significant variables, will entice them to search for the origins and defining features of path-dependent foreign policy choices.

It is, of course, one thing to invoke path dependence as the mechanism by which history can be said to continue to matter in the shaping of foreign (including security) policy, for instance in the general, and commonsensical, observation that choices made in the past can go on limiting policy options in the future.¹⁸ Yet it is quite another thing actually to tease out, or ‘trace’,¹⁹ the process(es) by which path dependence manages to yield the context called strategic culture. Strategic culturalists exploring the behavioural component of context will find themselves being drawn ever closer to historical sociology, and will as a result have to grapple with concepts closely related to path dependence. Among these latter, two stand out: temporal sequencing, and contingency. For if path dependence means anything, it cannot mean sensitive dependence upon ‘initial conditions’; rather, it must suggest a break point after which the ability of those initial conditions to shape the future is altered substantially.²⁰

Some will label that break point ‘contingency’, by which they will mean the development required to have set in train a new inertia, one in which the ‘path’ led either to the efficient reproduction of cooperation (sometimes called ‘self-reinforcing sequences’, or ‘lock-in’) or the reverse, the efficient reproduction of conflict and discord (called ‘reactive sequences’).²¹ An instance of the latter kind of bilateral interaction would be the France-US relationship, which has to be regarded as being ‘suboptimal’ in the main, notwithstanding occasional outbursts of reciprocated good will.²² By contrast, the Anglo-American relationship can be taken to represent the more positive sense of path dependence, in which previous episodes of successful cooperation give rise to expectations of continued such successes. But no matter the direction in which the twig is bent, toward or away from successful and sustained cooperation, the search for contingency becomes an essential component of foreign-policy analysis undertaken by culturalists for whom ‘context’ is first and foremost a function of historical behaviour patterns, and for whom, therefore, strategic culture becomes virtually unknowable apart from an examination of the country's diplomatic history.

Now, if one were to take the notion of ‘lock-in’ seriously, from when should we date it? Notionally, there would seem to be two major moments during which it might be said Anglo-American relations were set onto a new path, one from which there could be no going back to previous, unhappy, epochs of suboptimal cooperation. The first of these moments is the last decade of the nineteenth century, and the second is the late summer of 1940, which latter happens also to be the chronological and, indeed, logical starting point for most of the other chapters in this volume. Usually, scholars inquiring into the temporal sequencing of the special relationship turn to the earliest of these two periods, occupying the years between the ending of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth, a moment aptly characterised by one historian as the fin de siècle's ‘great rapprochement’.²³ Charles Kupchan, for instance, writes that this period of growing cordiality between the two large English-speaking powers set in motion an historic transformation in the manner in which they had previously related to each other – a transformation that was not only startling in its sweep but also continuous in its workings, resulting in a ‘strategic partnership that has lasted to this day’.²⁴

N...