Imaginary Empire
The Special Relationship: Anglo-American Relations Since 1945.
by Wm. Roger Louis and Hedley Bull.
Oxford University Press. 408 pp. $59.00.
The widespread use of the term “American imperialism” must be counted among the more significant features of the post-1945 political world. Its deployment is confined neither to Left nor to Right; neither to supporters nor to critics of U.S. foreign policy; neither to idealists nor to adherents of realpolitik; neither to neutralists nor to “cold warriors.” The basic idea underlying the term is that there exists a “tacit” or “informal” American empire, synonymous in geographical land mass with Latin America, Western Europe, large parts of Africa, Southwest Asia, and the Far East—in fact, with what is usually known as the non-Communist world. We are asked to believe that behind the apparently haphazard, confused, self-serving, and short-sighted maneuverings in Washington there has unfolded the coherent grand strategy of an imperial power.
But it is all very odd, since before 1941, and despite the annexation of the Philippines or Guam or Puerto Rico, hardly anyone would have dreamed of describing the United States as an imperialist power. And even today there is something strange in ascribing imperial proclivities to a nation which, to say the least, hardly possesses that sense of imperial destiny, that overriding moral purpose, that unconditional commitment, which we normally associate with empires and empire builders. Indeed, so “tacit” and “informal” an empire is this that both rulers and subjects seem quite happy to keep the details of their relationship a closely guarded secret.
All this is brought to mind by The Special Relationship, which explores in considerable detail the negotiations, the rivalry, the wheeling-and-dealing that took place from 1945 on between the newly arrived nuclear superpower and the leading, albeit steeply declining, imperial power of the period. But the picture that emerges from this book—the result of a collaboration between the Ditchley Foundation of England and the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington, and based on papers delivered at three conferences held in 1984-85—is very different from the fashionable one in which the Americans are supposed to have coveted the British empire, helped themselves to its prize exhibits, and obtained all the perquisites of empire without any of the costs. If the picture presented here is true, the notion of the tacit and informal American empire becomes meaningless.
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The Britain that came out of World War II was desperately impoverished but still in possession of a potentially lucrative empire, whose upkeep, however, required a considerable expenditure of resources no longer at its disposal. But the British did have something big going for them. This was their wartime alliance with the most formidable economic and military power in the world, an Anglophone nation possessed of social and political institutions similar to their own. Surely such a close friend and ally would help out. It was with something like that very much in mind that Churchill invented the term “special relationship.”
The only problem was that the United States, having originally come into existence by fighting a war against this same British empire, had no intention now of underwriting it, especially when—as in the economic system of Imperial Preference which discriminated against imports from outside the British empire—it was detrimental to American interests to do so. To the disgust of the British political class, the Americans appeared to be serious about free trade, national self-determination, and constitutional government. The high-minded rhetoric concerning the “right of self-determination” in the Atlantic Charter of August 1941, taken by the British to refer exclusively to nations suffering under Nazi subjugation, was understood by their American counterparts to refer to all peoples living under the rule of foreign masters, and that meant the millions of Asians and Africans having to endure the domination of the Europeans.
Nevertheless, within five years of the issuing of that document American attitudes were to undergo substantial modification. From 1945 onward the threat from Communism in general and the Soviet Union in particular meant that the vexed issues surrounding decolonization, the future of the relationship between the West and Asia and Africa, the kinds of government that would succeed the colonial administrators—all became matters of secondary importance. True, American officials constantly expostulated on the need to move rapidly toward independence, and on the danger of the Communists seizing the banner of nationalism if there was any delay. But in practice the Americans did very little about it. The British and the other European powers were simply allowed to get on with it, with virtually no interference.
This was for a good reason. As Lord Beloff notes in his contribution to The Special Relationship: “There was a feeling in some British as well as American quarters that if the British imperial system were to be written off there would be strategic consequences, since the United States would have to develop its own power to fill the vacuum created.” And he quotes from a dispatch of the British ambassador to Washington in 1944: “[American] attacks on the empire reveal conflicting tendencies. On the one hand there has been an increased realization of America’s own interest in the perpetuation of the empire for strategic reasons. . . . On the other hand from the economic standpoint the belief has gained strength that British and American interests conflict all along the line.”
It cannot be pointed out too frequently that since 1945 successive United States administrations have believed that there are more urgent priorities than the pursuit of economic advantage. This record is all the more remarkable when one recalls the suspicion and alarm with which British Tories—the first, but by no means the last, proponents of the notion of the tacit and informal American empire—viewed the postwar economic policies of the United States, which they took to be no more than ploys to acquire the British empire at a bargain-basement price.
For example, when the British government revealed in 1945 that it had, while negotiating the repayment of lend-lease in 1941-42, committed itself to the elimination of economic discrimination against non-empire goods, British politicians were in an uproar: Lord Croft declared that this was an “interference with the freedom of our own country to manage its affairs that I regard as unparalleled in the history of the world.” And one MP, Beverly Baxter, threatened: “If the government tries to eliminate Empire Preference a number of us will light the very beacons on the hills. We will attack them in the marketplace, in the towns and the cities, we will rouse this whole country against them in such a crusade as will overcome this government. . . .”
These outbursts were by no means confined to backwoods Tory politicians. Sir Roger Makins, the British ambassador to Washington, was being less than diplomatic when he wrote (in 1954): “There is on our side a very understandable suspicion that the Americans are out to take our place in the Middle East.” Selwyn Lloyd, Britain’s hapless Foreign Secretary during the Suez crisis of 1956, bitterly described American policy in the Middle East as a combination of “anti-colonialism and hard-headed oil-tycoonery.” Leopold Amery, Secretary of State for India during World War II, once declared that he would prefer Hitler’s “New Order” to Cordell Hull’s “Free Trade.” And even today, a sympathetic observer like David Reynolds, writing of the American commitment to free trade in his contribution to the present collection, remarks rather sourly that “it is undoubtedly true . . . that the American conversion to Cobdenite values conveniently fitted the interests of a country able to dominate an open, global market economy.”
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But all these fears were entirely beside the point. The United States has been committed far more deeply to maintaining the unity of the West than to ensuring that the principles of free trade are being observed. The French, the Belgians, and the Dutch, by associating their former colonies with the European Economic Community, created “trade preferences” clearly in violation of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), yet the Americans chose to say nothing for the sake of allied cohesion. Likewise they turned a blind eye to the British practice of state trading—bulk purchases of agricultural goods—which was also a transgression of the provisions of GATT. As Richard N. Gardner argues here, the Americans have eagerly endorsed the European Economic Community all along, though it became obvious quite early that it would emerge as a closed trading group extremely detrimental to American interests.
The instances can be multiplied. When American oil companies began to expand their activities in the Middle East, the State Department issued instructions that under no circumstances were they to challenge British interests there. Though there was widespread alarm that the United States was out to destroy the “sterling area,” no sooner was Libya granted independence in 1951 than the Americans encouraged it to enter this economic unit since they were planning to build a military base there and needed British cooperation in order to do so. Indeed, the “sterling area,” which continued to operate for many years after World War II, collapsed finally as a result of British economic weakness rather than American pressure. Nor, despite all the anguish, did the system of Imperial and, subsequently, Commonwealth Preference end until Britain joined the European Economic Community. And as for decolonization, Wm. Roger Louis concludes that, far from fearing American cajolery, “the British had their own reasons for precipitous decolonization, hoping to retain economic and political influence in return for a quick transfer of power.”
The importance of strategic and political considerations as against economic ones was shown in 1962, with Polaris, and again in 1980, with Trident, when the United States agreed to sell Britain its most advanced nuclear systems on extraordinarily generous terms. (All Britain had to pay for Polaris was the cost of the missiles and a 5-percent surcharge as a contribution to American research and development costs.) These were hardly the actions of a power eager to maintain the appropriate imperial relationships of subordination and hierarchy.
And yet the legend persists to this day—especially in Britain—that somehow or other the Americans helped themselves to the European empires. Or even if they did not actually help themselves they set out to destroy the empires. Or even if they did not actually destroy them they did nothing to save them. And today, we are asked to believe, we are living with the consequences of this wanton naiveté and obstinacy. Famine, pestilence, civil wars, genocide—all this because the Americans refused to heed the advice of the Europeans (who could run the affairs of Asians and Africans to their own and to the West’s advantage) and insisted that independent government was synonymous with good government, and that since the American people were the revolutionary people par excellence the newly-emancipated colonial subjects were bound to turn to them for inspiration. The most important virtue of The Special Relationship is that it exposes this interpretation of postwar European-American relations as a grotesque caricature of reality.
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