Dear alexandra17,
From the seminar assignment above, I understand that there are four
important questions to consider in relation to Britain's international
role.
1. How does Britain's imperial past contrast with her current status?
2. What are her interests and points of prestige vis-a-vis other nations?
3. What is British policy with respect to the US, Europe, and the Commonwealth?
4. Does Britain seek to do too much in the world?
Before I set out one possible way to address these questions in a single
seminar, let me mention a few salient facts and references on each of these points.
1.
The British imperial era ended in two stages, first with the sudden
generational slaughter of the Great War and then with the attrition of
foreign holdings in the decades following World War II.
To see how the Great War disrupted an era of unprecedented prosperity
and industrial growth, leading to a second World War and eventually to
the loss of an empire, consult the following resources.
BBC Online: The (British) Empire strikes back
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/magazine/3889537.stm
The New Yorker: Critics at Large: Adam Gopnik: The Big One
http://newyorker.com/critics/atlarge/?040823crat_atlarge
BBC Online: The problems of Empire 1918 - 1939
http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/timelines/britain/cen_probs_empire.shtml
2.
British foreign interests today tend to be mercantile rather than
military. Where the British once carried out trade at gunpoint, they
must now compete in a global marketplace with other technologically
advanced nations.
The following resources will help you explore what it means for Britain
to have lost the military-industrial supremacy it held a century ago,
and how it can now confront the challenges of globalization.
Foreign and Commonwealth Office: UK Priorities: Global Economy
http://www.fco.gov.uk/servlet/Front?pagename=OpenMarket/Xcelerate/ShowPage&c=Page&cid=1007029394329
tutor2u: Measuring International Competitiveness
http://www.tutor2u.net/economics/content/topics/trade/competitiveness.htm
3.
The most distinctive characteristic of the current British
administration's foreign policy is its alliance with the United
States. Tony Blair has offered George Bush unwavering support in nearly
every matter, leading other nations to accuse them of seeking to erect
an Anglo-American empire in fact if not in name. It is interesting
that a warm diplomatic relationship should have formed between such
different leaders, when the ideologically far better aligned pairs of
Thatcher-Reagan and Blair-Clinton never forged nearly as intimate a bond.
buzzle.com: Business & Finance: Britain backs US in G7 row over
kickstarting global economy
http://www.buzzle.com/editorials/2-23-2003-36125.asp
The Spectator: Niall Ferguson: Britain first
http://www.spectator.co.uk/article.php?table=old§ion=back&issue=2004-09-25&id=5038
4.
It is not at all obvious that Britain punches above her weight. Indeed,
given her sizeable population and economic weight, it can be argued that
Britain plays a far lesser role in global diplomatic affairs than smaller
nations such as Norway, Switzerland, and Canada. Some part of British
foreign policy is dedicated to managing the small but complicated affairs
of her residual empire, including picayune territories such as Gibraltar.
On the other hand, some commentators argue that Britain's lately
belligerent foreign policy in alliance with an interventionist American
regime is a sign that she is once more seeking to influence the fate of
other nations.
MSNBC: Gibraltar celebrates 300th anniversary of British rule
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/5604055/
The Spectator: Christopher Caldwell: The fruits of victory
http://www.spectator.co.uk/article.php?table=old§ion=back&issue=2003-02-01&id=2738
I shall now give you an idea of what kind of seminar I would deliver on
this subject.
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Ladies and gentlemen, I am here to address the subject of Britain's
foreign policy and her standing in the world. One hundred years ago,
there was no question about Britain's status. Her navy ruled the seas
as it had for centuries, her traditional enemies France and Spain were
struggling to keep pace with her industrial output, and the sun never set
on her empire. But then, with the abrupt, epochal bloodshed of the Great
War and its sequel two decades later, the tides of prosperity rapidly
ebbed. The British, although victorious under the leadership of Winston
Churchill with a dogged insistence that fascism should not prevail, were
an exhausted people. Few of us today remember the austerity measures
that prevailed through the remainder of the forties and well into the
fifties, when eggs were scarce and books were printed in small type on
flimsy paper, but it was not obvious at that time whether Britain was
better off than the Soviet Union.
In matters of diplomacy, it was clear that the great powers were now the
Soviets, still prosecuting their socialist revolution and harnessing a
vast population to centralized production of everything from potatoes
to bombs, and the Americans, fresh from their victory on the Western
Front and eager to show that they had grown from rebellious colony to
super-competent modern country. Britain was too busy rebuilding within
her own borders and tending to a decaying empire to play a very serious
hand in the Cold War, which was the dominant theme of the international
policy stakes in the latter half of the twentieth century. While the
Americans and Soviets played a titanic tug of war, territorially and
ideologically, Britain was seeing to the dissolution of her colonial
holdings in Africa, Asia, the Middle East, and Polynesia. The hammer and
sickle opposed the stars and stripes, directly and by proxy, in Korea,
Cuba, Vietnam, Afghanistan. The British, an impoverished nobility, were
meanwhile furling the Union Jack in India and the Pakistans, in South
Africa, indeed in Palestine and Iraq.
The current Foreign Secretary Jack Straw has voiced the sentiment,
common in academic circles since the seventies, that immoral or inept
British colonial policy is responsible for much of the global strife
today. Whatever the truth of that argument, it is certainly the case
that Britain is too weak to correct the wrongs stemming from the Balfour
Declaration, which brought about the hotly disputed borders of the
state of Israel, and the irrationally drawn borders of Iraq, which cut
across ethnic and religious lines at the whim of colonial governors of
the time. Britain is hard pressed to protect whatever small territories
and protectorates remain to her. In a bizarre episode of the eighties,
she expended much energy in the defense of the Falkland Islands, a
windswept patch of grass in the South Atlantic populated by sheep and
a few people, which Argentina for some reason coveted. In the face of
widespread political corruption and crime in Zimbabwe, formerly known
as Southern Rhodesia after the famed imperialist Cecil Rhodes, and the
last great colony to slip from Britain's grasp, the Blair administration
can do little more than issue strongly worded but entirely impotent
denunciations. The sole bright spot in the residual empire is Gibraltar's
continued allegiance to Britain, and perhaps the easing of conflict in
Northern Ireland as the Irish have grown affluent in recent years.
The chief preoccupations of British foreign policy today are, on one hand,
the ongoing negotiations with the Brussels bureaucracy and continental
European governments over her place in the European Union, and on the
other, the close trans-Atlantic bond, recently renewed by an unlikely
personal friendship, between London and Washington, DC. The tendrils
of Europe have crept ever deeper into Britain's identity and curled
ever more tightly around her sovereignty with supranational rules and
regulations. This is the institution that began relatively humbly as the
European Economic Community in the seventies, was renamed the European
Community in 1992, and has emerged in the new millennium as simply the
European Union. It has progressed in its scope from a free-trade zone to
an ambitious socieconomic entity that threatens, many feel, to subsume
the British character. It is true that Britain's stance with respect to
the EU has been more independent-minded than that of most continental
nations. The Bank of England has not ceased minting the pound sterling
in favor of the Euro, and the movement of labor is still within the
ambit of British government policy.
Nonetheless, as continental Europe draws ever more closely together in the
face of American commercial and diplomatic interests, at the same time
that it seeks to extend further East toward the Urals and to reinforce
its bureaucracy in the West, Britain must choose on which side of the
walls of Fortress Europe she wishes to stand. In this sense, it is true
that Britain has not yet found a role in an age when it is not London but
Brussels that sets the tone of European commerce. The future of British
foreign policy is murky, especially because the people's voice has yet
to give full throat to an opinion. This is likely to occur within the
next few election cycles, however, as the polls ring judgment on Blair's
staunchly pro-American position and on the feasibility of a Conservative
party sharply at odds with a surging Ukip.
The evident unease of the British government with undiluted membership in
a monolithic Europe stands in sharp contrast with her warm relationship
with the United States. The alliance is not at all ideologically
motivated, given the sharp differences between Blair's and Bush's domestic
policies, and seems likely to continue regardless of the outcome of the
forthcoming American elections, although the same cannot be said for the
British side. This is where Britain expends most of her diplomatic capital
today, in taking the side of the United States in vociferous disagreement
with the United Nations, the Red Cross, the bulk of the European Union,
and other world bodies. There is no hesitation here, as there is in the
European accords. Britain has found a role as a strong sponsor, or rather,
given her inferior rank, as a booster, of American foreign policy. There
is a heavy irony in the contrast between this state of affairs and that
which obtained during the reign of George III, yet the British are not
ashamed of it, nor do the Americans gloat over it.
It is equally clear that the British Commonwealth, that weak and watery
substitute for the British Empire, is little more than a nominal entity
today. The qualifier "British" has even been dropped in favor of the bland
appellation "Commonwealth", giving a suggestion of unity rather than of
command, but of a unity that does not exist. Australia and Canada, the
populace and administrations of each scornful of the Queen as anything
more than a figurehead, would chortle at the suggestion that their
membership in the Commonwealth colors their relations with Britain, the
very progenitor of this association. The affairs of Zambia, Uganda, Kenya,
Singapore, Malaysia, Pakistan, and other foreign holdings are similarly
conducted without any pressure from the Commonwealth, or from Britain
through the agency of the Commonwealth. The benefits of Commonwealth
membership are felt largely or exclusively by its smallest members, such
as Vanuatu and Tuvalu, who do benefit from some diplomatic protection and
from a patina of British Imperial prestige, and of course by the many
athletes who take part in the Commonwealth Games each year. Otherwise,
Britain's relations with Commonwealth nations are governed by their
respective circumstances and not, in any serious way, by their past
common history. Britain condemns despots and offers a welcoming hand
to agreeable regimes regardless of their Commonwealth status. She is
rightly proud to do so.
In the age of globalized commerce, it may well be the case that Britain
stands some chance of exerting power economically and culturally rather
than diplomatically. Yet the competition is stiff. Consider the example
of Japan, whose imperial regime was widely despised throughout Asia
and in farther-flung parts of the world for its totalitarian traits,
and whose cities were bombed to moon craters by the United States, yet
whose inspired people rebuilt their infrastructure in the ensuing decades,
establishing Japan as a global power not diplomatically or militarily,
but economically. Japan has not been preoccupied with her imperial past,
which may be part of the reason for her swift ascent to international
prominence, and a good example for Britain to follow. A negative example
would be that of Russia, which is still mired in a very bloody and costly
effort to maintain sovereignty over lands that have historically but
not ethnically, religiously, or culturally been her possessions.
Britain is far from the dire situation of the Russians, of course, but
it is not clear that she stands a chance of heaving her weight about on
a world stage where, after the departure of the Soviet Empire, it is
the vast, disciplined, energetic China that will in the future face a
belligerent United States and a federalist Europe. Britain cannot send
her warships to China as she did in prosecution of the Opium Wars, but
must wade into trade battles with unyielding heart and, more importantly,
superior product. The British advantages in technology and industrial
production have long expired. To be successful and influential in the
global marketplace, Britain will have to find niche markets in which
she performs extremely well and concentrate on those. Already, we have
seen British prestige disproportionate to her size in fields such as
architecture, banking, and modern art.
It is questionable whether Britain does, at present and in general, punch
above her weight, when we consider that smaller or newer countries such as
Norway and Canada have at least as much influence on foreign affairs in
the Third World. On the contrary, I must conclude, from all the evidence
I have given in my talk, that Britain has been punching below her weight
since 1945. It is high time, I feel, that she shook off her gloom over the
loss of an empire and began to confront the challenges of the twenty-first
century like any other fully industrialized, technologically advanced,
democratically sophisticated modern country. Only in this way, I believe,
does she stand a chance of earning a place in the front rank of nations.
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That is just my take on the subject. Others will have dissimilar or
opposing views. For general information, I suggest that you peruse, in
addition to the links I gave above, the resources below. Here are three
online publications, the content of which often addresses questions of
British power and economic success, as well as two specialized sources
of information on British foreign policy.
The Economist: World: Europe
http://economist.com/world/europe/
The Financial Times: World: UK
http://news.ft.com/world/uk
The Spectator [a good source of views both for and against Europe]
http://www.spectator.co.uk/frontpage.php
Foreign and Commonwealth Office: News
http://www.fco.gov.uk/servlet/Front?pagename=OpenMarket/Xcelerate/ShowPage&c=Page&cid=1007029391629
questia.com: British Foreign Policy
http://www.questia.com/Index.jsp?CRID=british_foreign_policy&OFFID=se1&KEY=british_foreign_policy
I hope that you are satisfied with my efforts to assist you in preparing
for this interesting seminar. If you feel that my advice is lacking in
some way, please let me know through a Clarification Request so that I
have a chance to meet your needs before you assign a rating.
Regards,
leapinglizard |
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