British Foreign Policy and the National Interest

Identity, Strategy and Security

T. Edmunds, J. Gaskarth, R. Porter, T. Edmunds, J. Gaskarth, R. Porter

• Editorial: Palgrave Macmillan
• Año: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781137392350
• Categoría: Politics & International Relations
• Categoría: International Relations

Whose interests does British foreign policy serve? Is the national interest a useful explanatory tool for foreign policy analysts? This interdisciplinary collection responds to these questions exploring ideas of Britain's national interest and their impact on strategy, challenging current thinking and practice in the making of foreign policy.

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Introduction

Jamie Gaskarth, Robin Porter and Timothy Edmunds

Is the idea of a ‘national interest’ still relevant to British foreign policy-making? If so, how should it be defined and what policies should the UK government adopt to advance it? These are questions that have achieved a new salience in contemporary debates on British foreign policy. There are a number of reasons for this. The most prominent is Britain’s propensity to use force against other states in the last two decades. Interventions against the Federal Yugoslav Republic (FYR) Serbia, Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya, and the call for action over Syria’s civil war, divided domestic opinion and attracted criticism (Burall, Donnelly and Weir 2006; Bailey, Iron and Strachan 2013; Reifler et al. 2014). In addition, the global financial crisis of 2007–2008 led to calls for a scaling back of UK commitments abroad, reduction of aid spending and reappraisal of Britain’s place in the world (Hall 2013; Foreman 2013; Hutton 2009). The 2014 referendum on Scottish independence and the proposal to have one on British membership of the European Union (EU) have raised questions over British identity and future defence and foreign policy (Oliver 2013; Whitman 2012; Scotland Institute 2013). Meanwhile, within the policy community, there has been concern over the manner in which foreign policy is made, with numerous commentators suggesting a lack of strategic thinking at the heart of government (Strachan 2005, 2009; Cornish and Dorman 2009; Newton, Colley and Sharpe 2010; P. Porter 2010).

This call to self-consciously rationalise British foreign policy and consider whose interests it is designed to serve arguably represents a break from the trend of much of the second half of the twentieth century. Processes including interdependence, globalisation, the nuclear peace and rapidly advancing digital and computer technology seemed to render the national interest obsolete. The world was becoming far more interconnected. As a result, political communities such as states – the main institutional locus of understanding for national interest discussion – were of declining significance. It became a mantra of foreign policy speeches and texts that national interests were now global interests and vice versa (Cook 1997; Blair 2006; Hain 2001). Interstate war between great powers was now a thing of the past and the end of the Cold War removed the final state threat to the British mainland. Thus, foreign policymaking ceased to involve the kind of existential calculations associated with the national interest. Instead, the leviathan of the state was left to swat away the flies of terrorism and transnational crime, or engage in ‘wars of choice’ in distant lands in pursuit of diffuse goals that would supposedly advance global public goods.

However, as Britain’s military operations became financially burdensome and military casualties mounted up, the public started to question their utility. How were all these uses of force in the interests of UK citizens? The government could not offer a coherent answer. In Iraq, the intervention was designed to disarm Saddam Hussein’s regime of weapons, which it was soon found not to possess. Moreover, senior security personnel acknowledged that this action had increased the terrorist threat to the mainland (BBC 2010). In Afghanistan, the various interventions by UK forces had disparate and at times conflicting aims, from counter-terrorism to counter-narcotics efforts and then counter-insurgency. A discourse of humanitarianism, which had arisen in the 1990s, began to merge uneasily in government rhetoric with that of hard security imperatives. The result was a confused mix of policies advancing the goals of different communities.

Few came out of these debates with any credit. A generation of politicians with no personal experience of conflict deployed troops with negligible discussion of the political goals being sought, whether they were achievable and what strategy would be most effective at achieving them. Military chiefs seized the opportunity to highlight their continued relevance in the absence of a direct interstate threat, pushing for expensive equipment programmes and updating technology on the battlefield via urgent operational requirement orders. When their tactics failed in Basra and Helmand province, they turned on their political masters and, as generals are apt to do in instances of military failure, blamed a lack of political commitment at home (Norton-Taylor 2010). Academics contributed to this catalogue of errors, either by feeding a simplistic narrative of civilisational clashes or by offering criticism after the fact instead of constructive advice prior to action. Furthermore, far from retreating from interventionism to reconsider how effective this has been in promoting the British national interest, the coalition government has engaged in military action in Libya in 2011, assisted the French intervention in Mali in 2012 and sought parliamentary approval for strikes against the Syrian government in 2013. In each case, Britain’s self-interest in acting was not articulated with any rigour.

Meanwhile, important policy dilemmas, such as Britain’s relationship with the EU; the shifts in relative economic and political power in relation to rising powers, especially China; and the crises of capitalism in 1997–1999 and 2007–2008 were marginalised. In the case of the EU, a vital strategic interest has continued to be subject to tabloid distortions and immature political posturing (Daddow 2012). At the same time, the UK’s relationship with the US, so long a cornerstone of Britain’s strategic thinking, has led to a series of policy commitments that seem to have an increasingly tenuous link to the actual wants or needs of the British public (Wallace and Phillips 2009). Indeed, in the last decade British policymakers have often found themselves describing the US as an indispensable partner whilst pursing foreign policies, on climate change and international criminal justice (for instance), that were actively opposed by US administrations (Gaskarth 2011).

In short, avoiding hard thinking about how British foreign policy promotes national interests has, we assert, had a negative effect on the logic and quality of policy outputs. Talk of the decline of the state ignores the fact that governmental actors are still acting on behalf of political communities labelled states. In doing so, they will often justify their behaviour by invoking the national interest, albeit in an uncritical or unreflexive fashion. It is therefore imperative that such claims are subject to proper analysis. British foreign policy critics need to question these assertions so that policymakers are held accountable to the citizens they represent and policy inefficiencies or failures can be highlighted.

This book derives from a project which sought to do just that by resurrecting the idea of the national interest and demonstrating its continuing relevance to policy discussions. It brings together academics and recent practitioners to address many of the questions raised above, namely: what are the UK’s national interests and how should they be prioritised? How do British values inform national interests? Are national interests and global goods always compatible? What are the best ways to achieve those interests? Whose interests does British foreign policy serve? Does it make sense to identify a unified national interest and how would this be constituted? The answers to these questions may not be uniform, indeed, the editors have deliberately assembled an eclectic mix of authors from a range of different political and theoretical viewpoints to demonstrate the breadth of ways in which it is possible to engage with the concept. Yet, all utilise it to shed light on some aspect of British foreign policy and this arguably demonstrates its continuing importance in justifying or critiquing foreign policy.

To give a context to this discussion, this introduction proceeds with a summary of the main academic and policy debates over the concept of the national interest. It does not aim to be exhaustive but instead seeks to provide a platform for the later specific analyses relating to the British case.

National interest: The academic debate

The idea that states have interests is as old as diplomacy itself. Great statesmen of the past, such as George Washington in his farewell address, or Lord Palmerston in his speech on the Polish question in 1848, would invoke the idea of abiding interests as central to rationalising policy decisions. In one of the most famous axioms of foreign policy discourse, Palmerston declared: ‘We have no eternal allies, and we have no perpetual enemies. Our interests are eternal and perpetual, and those interests it is our duty to follow’ (Palmerston 1848, p. 142). For interests to be ‘eternal’, they would have to transcend particular times and circumstances. Perhaps as a result, policymakers would often not define them in any degree of detail.

Writing a century later, realist scholars such as Hans Morgenthau tried to introduce more specificity to the idea by reducing the national interest to the fundamental goals of survival and territorial integrity (Morgenthau 1948). These constitute the ‘national’ interest in that most citizens of a particular state are assumed to have a desire to ensure the continuance of their community and maintain a measure of safety from external threats. Safety and survival can only be achieved through a sophisticated awareness of a state’s relative power compared to other states, and capacity to exploit any advantages, and so Morgenthau defined interest in terms of power (Morgenthau 1948, 1950, 1952).

There is a curious irony in Britain’s more recent failure to articulate its national interest, as many classical realists used it as a case study of a state that had ensured its survival and physical integrity by having a keen grasp of where its interests lay. Britain did so in the nineteenth century by paying close attention to the balance of power on the European continent and placing its weight with whatever faction was weaker to ensure no one state or alliance could achieve dominance. Realists often write approvingly of the ‘unsentimental’ manner in which British statesmen shifted alliances according to their calculation of the strategic balance in Europe in this era (Kissinger 1994, pp. 95–96). Such a policy was defended on moral grounds as it was seen as providing a basis to judge individual actions (did it further the interest of the state – and thereby the state’s citizens?) and also introduced a common standard across state interactions. If all states pursued their interests defined in terms of power, then they could understand each other better and so hopefully avoid misunderstandings that might lead to conflict.

However, the realist interpretation of national interest attracted much criticism, both at the time, and subsequently. In the first place, ‘survival’ and ‘territorial integrity’ are contested concepts. It is not always clear what level of threat has to exist to constitute an existential threat; or what it is that statespeople are seeking to preserve (George 2006, pp. 9–10). Secondly, the survival of the state in its existing territorial space is not a universal goal of statespeople. Some states have voluntarily, and relatively peacefully, dissolved their political communities in recent years – the Soviet Union and Czechoslovakia being prominent examples. In each case, the statesmen who managed these changes are seen as paragons of leadership. Moreover, other states have shifted their territorial make-up and so the simple continuity of borders cannot be an irreducible aim. The willingness to grant Scotland a vote on independence, noted above, is but one recent example for the UK. Obversely, E.H. Carr suggested in The Twenty Years Crisis that not all statespeople wish to maintain the status quo (Carr 1939). Those with a grievance, ideological bent, or both, have been willing to risk their own state’s survival, from Adolf Hitler to Fidel Castro.

A further point of critique has been over whether a unified national interest is possible or even desirable. In the view of Ernst Haas, ‘the pluralistic nature of western societies’ means that ‘there is no unified, immutable and stable conception of the national interest’; rather, there is only ‘an amalgam of varying policy motivations which tend to pass for a “national” interest as long as the groups holding these opinions continue to rule’ (Haas 1953, pp. 382–383). Special interest groups within states have long been accused of working against the good of the community as a whole in the foreign policy realm. In 1858, John Bright described the pursuit of the balance of power in Europe as ‘a gigantic system of out-door relief for the aristocracy of Great Britain’ (Bright 1858, p. 192). More recently, a flurry of articles on the national interest in the US bemoaned the influence of ‘subnational commercial interests and transnational and non-national ethnic interests’ that were seen as having ‘come to dominate foreign policy’ (Huntington 1997, p. 29). For Joseph Nye, ‘The result is a narrow definition of the US national interest that often alienates other countries’ (2002, p. 234).

Furthermore, divisions were apparent within realism over the desirability of privileging one, universalised conception of the national interest at the expense of wider ethical claims (Rice 2008, pp. 276–280). On the one hand, Morgenthau saw a moral content to the link between a statesperson, the national interest and the citizens they represent. On the other hand, Reinhold Niebuhr sought to resist the notion that self-interested actions should be imbued with moralism since this might lead to the justification of relationships of domination/subordination as divinely ordained (Niebuhr 1953; Good 1960, p. 598). Pin-Fat has noted that following Morgenthau’s logic might lead us to universalise the particular values of any one state, as if they were moral laws of the universe (Pin-Fat 2005, p. 234). This is the kind of thing that totalitarian ideologies sought to do in the mid-twentieth century – with appallingly destructive results. In contrast to Morgenthau’s view that ‘As long as the world is politically organised into nations, the national interest is indeed the last word in world politics’ (Morgenthau 1952, pp. 972–973), Niebuhr saw more of a dialectic between self-interest and global public goods, in which ‘It would be fatal for the security of the nation if some loyalties beyond its interests were not operative in its moral life to prevent the national interest from being conceived in too narrow and self-defeating terms’ (as cited in Good 1960, p. 605). Similarly, Arnold Wolfers saw both possession goals, of a narrowly self-interested nature, and milieu goals relating to the maintenance of a wider international society, as fundamental aspects of foreign policymaking (Wolfers 1962).

The mid-twentieth century debates on the national interest thus threw up a series of dilemmas, such as: whether the national interest can be reduced to a few criteria; how far it could represent the whole (or even a majority) of the wants and needs of a state’s citizenry; the extent to which statespeople had to consider the interests of peoples outside their own community; and whether self-interest could, on its own, be a morally defensible rationale for foreign policymaking.

Following this initial flourishing of academic discussion, scholars’ attention to the national interest waxed and waned in subsequent decades. For some, such as the prominent foreign policy analysts James Rosenau and Steve Smith, the term was so vague as to effectively mean whatever policymakers wanted it to mean (Weldes 1996). Any lingering importance it continued to have resided in its ability to mobilise and justify political action (Weldes 1996, p. 225). This performative aspect of national interest means that it can continue to be relevant to foreign policy analysis – since it exposes how policymakers justify their behaviour – but makes it less useful as a potential guide for policymakers trying to choose between different courses of action, given its conceptual fuzziness (Williams 2012, p. 7).

An important contribution to this discussion, which is relevant to chapters in this book by Ritchie and Wearing, emerged in a fascinating article by Friedrich Kratochwil in which he compared the concept of national interest with that of the public interest (1982). Taking issue with the tendency to essentialise national interest to one criteria (a ‘platonic fallacy’ according to Kratochwil), or to list certain interests supposed to constitute it, Kratochwil sees the idea’s main usefulness in encouraging public deliberation over the common goods that national interest is designed to deliver. In contrast to the national interest’s external focus, the notion of the public interest is used to debate and gain support for policies designed to promote the ‘common weal (salus publica)’ internally (Kratochwil 1982, p. 4). This is problematic since it seems to assume that a common interest can be identified that suits the community as a whole. In reality, the costs and benefits of policy-making will be unevenly distributed. Nevertheless, as Kratochwil notes: ‘one needs criteria to weigh evidence offered in support of public interest claims. This might not enable us to decide once and for all the real public interest, but it provides the conditions for assessing public interest claims’ (Kratochwil 1982, p. 6). In other words, the fact that the public interest cannot be defined once and for all, and is the subject of much argument, is actually its primary advantage. This process reveals the often hidden assumptions of policy in the communal interest and exposes who is gaining or losing from decisions.

Translating this to the national interest, we can see the declining attention paid to the term by academics as a retrograde step. Political scientists’ love of terminological exactitude is preventing them from contributing to debates over national interest and assessing the claims made in the name of the political community of the UK. Consider how much of the academic critique of the Blair government’s decision to intervene in Iraq focused on its international legality and ramifications rather than whether the assertions of acting in the national interest were credible. (For rare examples, see Strachan 2009; Doig and Phythian 2005.) This imbalance of critical attention also hampers the ability of foreign policy analysts to make a reasoned assessment of claims that states are acting primarily for ‘humanitarian’ reasons, or in the interest of the wider international community, rather than out of self-interest. Instead, they are left to assume that policymakers are either wholly self-interested or wholly altruistic, rather than appreciate the dialectic between these extremes. As a corollary, the question of the extent to which the ‘interest’ being served is genuinely national is also marginalised (for an exception, see Ritchie 2011).

Underlying a lot of the confusion about the concept of the national interest is the way it sometimes seems to refer to an overall, unifying notion of the public good and at other times a specific policy goal. This ambiguity is potentially resolved by W. David Clinton’s assessment of the normative foundations of the national interest (Clinton 1991). Clinton notes that ‘national interest’ can be understood as the end to which policy is driving, whilst ‘national interests’ are ‘a number of narrower goals, which serve the broader end’ (Clinton 1991, p. 50). In other words, there is ultimately only one national interest – which is the abstract notion of the common good of the political community – and then lots of state interests that could be advanced to serve it, but which might also conflict with each other (Clinton 1991, p. 51). The challenge of the policymaker therefore becomes one of adjudicating between the various interest claims, some of which may have a national quality to them (i.e. serve collective goods) but which might harm the longer-term national interest if their utility is not continually reappraised. The history of British foreign policy is replete with national interests (e.g. maintaining the Indian Raj, keeping sovereignty over the Suez Canal, sovereign independence from Europe) that could be seen as having hampered the overall national interest when they outlived their original utility.

The difficulty for policymakers in weighing the merits of national interest claims lies in the extent to which these often become constitutive of the identity of the political community in their own right. Indeed, for Alexander Wendt, ‘identities are the basis of interests’ (Wendt 1992, p. 398). Rather than one being prior to the other in their formation, constructivists such as Wendt see interests and identities as ‘intersubjectively constituted’ (Wendt 1992, p. 401). Nevertheless, foreign policy analysts can trace the historical emergence of certain policy priorities, ‘national interests’, and note how they may either become core components of national identity conceptions or fade in salience over time. In doing so, it is possible to expose the contingent nature of these interpretations and so hopefully offer alternative descriptions – or at least compel their advocates to justify why a particular interest should continue to be considered as vital for the good of the wider community. There is a large and complex debate on the interaction between identity and interests in foreign policy – encompassing a range of theories, from constructivism to historical materialism, role theory to discourse analysis. For now, it is perhaps sufficient to note that any articulation of the national interest is, by definition, also making a claim about the identity of the political community under scrutiny.

To summarise this section, debates among academics have gone back and forth over whether the national interest can be defined objectively, or if it is a legitimising tool to hide the power of sectional interests, pursuing policies to suit their particular ends. Underpinning the arguments of those in favour of using the term is a sense that there is a collective good that policymakers should seek to advance. Furthermore, even if the costs and benefits of policy choices are not distributed evenly, the concept of the national interest does provide a framework for questioning the utility of policies in terms of the broader political community. If we are going to take governments seriously as actors pursuing notional collective goods, the concept of the national interest provides a descriptive term and a mechanism for appraising whether officials and policymakers are genuinely acting in the interests of the political community as a whole.

However, as Niebuhr and others have cautioned, the idea that self-interest is imbued with a moral force of its own can lead to policy that is actively harmful, both for international society as a whole, and the community whose interests are supposedly being served. This is because the cloak of moralism could be used to hide the baser motive of securing short-term advantage which might undermine the fabric of law and norms that keep that society functioning in the long term. For that reason, as Gilmore hints in this volume, claims that national self-interests and the interests of international society are one and the same should be continually questioned.

National interest: The policy debate

If academics have questioned the possibility of arriving at any consensus as to what a ‘national interest’ might be, policy debates among those charged with the actual practice of our diplomacy h...