The National Interest
Spring 2001

The Anglosphere Illusion

by Owen Harries

 

. . . In these circumstances, it is surely a serious error to believe that a traditional culture is capable of providing the foundation for a worldwide English-speaking union. After all, in the face of the reckless policies of Tony Blair—whom I have characterized elsewhere as the British Gorbachev, in that he believes that statesmanship consists of taking flying leaps into the future without any clear idea of where one will land—that tradition and that political culture are proving incapable of keeping even the United Kingdom united. Already the term "British" has a diminished application.

Please understand that I am in no way criticizing the United States in pointing these things out. I do so only to try to contest the argument—advanced by some of the most eloquent advocates of an English-speaking union—that cultural compatibility can and should form the basis of a common foreign policy. It cannot. Was it Nietzsche or was it De Gaulle who described states as "cold monsters"? In any case it was Britain's own Lord Palmerston who insisted that "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."

That unsentimental formulation is well known. What is perhaps less well known is that Palmerston was doing no more than paraphrasing something said several generations earlier by another statesman. George Washington, in his Farewell Address of 1796, had said: "The nation which indulges toward another an habitual hatred or an habitual fondness is in some degree a slave. It is a slave to its animosity or to its affection, either of which is sufficient to lead it astray from its duty and its interest." Any case for a foreign policy union or association of English-speaking peoples will have to be made in terms, not of culture, but of the national interests of the parties involved, and those interests will have to be continually re-interpreted and recalculated as circumstances change.

Bandwagoning and Balancing

The second point to make about the Suez crisis is that, immediately after it, the French and the British did make such a recalculation—and drew diametrically different policy conclusions from the experience. The French conclusion was that never again should they depend on the Americans. There thus began the pattern of—from an American point of view—infuriating French behavior as a prickly, independent, ungrateful, undependable, critical associate of the United States, always concerned with creating arrangements that would lessen its dependence on American power and challenge the dominance of Washington.

The conclusion drawn by the British, on the other hand, was utterly different. It was that never again must they get on the wrong side of the Americans; that the idea of trying to act as an independent force, or with partners other than the Americans, was not a good one. In his inquest on the Suez venture, prepared in 1957 for the chiefs of staff, General Keightley, the commander of the Anglo-French Force, concluded that "it was the action of the United States which really defeated us in attaining our object. . . . This situation with the United States must at all costs be prevented from arising again."2 All subsequent prime ministers have concurred.

Theorists of international relations have coined the term "bandwagoning" to describe the policy of states attaching themselves to a dominant power, accepting its leadership and adopting its policies in the hope of sharing the benefits accruing from its dominance. Ever since Suez, Britain has been the biggest practitioner of bandwagoning in our time—though it has gone to great trouble to disguise the fact and to preserve its dignity by much talk about Greeks and Romans, and a special relationship.

In fairness, it should be said that as long as the Cold War was a going concern, this policy was a sensible one, since the United States and Britain agreed on the fundamental and overriding goal of containing, frustrating and, if possible, defeating the evil empire. Any differences were confined to second- and third-order questions. But since the end of the Cold War and the emergence of the United States as the sole superpower, things have become a bit more complicated.

Bandwagoning with one superpower to thwart another and much less attractive superpower was one thing; bandwagoning with the sole superpower, the undisputed hegemon, is quite another. It goes against the long-established British tradition of attempting to balance—either alone or by the creation of a coalition—any power that is, or threatens to be, dominant. This, the classic principle of balance of power, has been the central tenet of British policy for the last four centuries. Its logic has been summed up succinctly by the Israeli statesman, Abba Eban: "The alternative to a balance of power is an imbalance of power, which has usually provoked wars and has never consolidated peace" . . .