There are three leading views about the "special relationship" between the United States and Britain. And they are all wrong.
The first view holds that maintaining the special relationship is Britain's best chance to exercise more influence than a country with 1 per cent of the world's population and about 3 per cent of its GDP might hope to. From this perspective, Britain should cling as tightly as possible to America's skirts.
A second view holds that the special relationship is a bewitching illusion, causing feckless British politicians to delude themselves into thinking that robotic conformity with American policy is in Britain's best interest. In reality, this view holds, the Americans will not pay a fair price for Britain's support; far from enhancing Britain's clout, the perception that London is Uncle Sam's lapdog actually reduces Britain's international prestige. Those who take this view usually propose a closer relationship with Europe as Britain's best alternative.
The third, more American, view reflects former US secretary of state Dean Acheson's celebrated comment in 1962 that Britain had lost an empire but not yet found a role. Like many American observers, Acheson saw Britain trapped between two unsatisfactory options. Staying close to the US brought Britain little respect or consideration from the Americans, but British efforts to place itself at the heart of EU affairs foundered on the close relationship between Germany and France.
All these views have something to recommend them. Britain probably does enjoy more attention globally because of its close relationship with the US. It was, however, not easy for Tony Blair to describe exactly what concessions he extracted from George W Bush in exchange for Britain's unflinching support for the invasion of Iraq.
The special relationship is less a result of policy choices made by Britain or the US than it is the cause of the similar choices the two countries so frequently make. America and Britain do not always see things the same way, and even when they agree on what needs to be done they often disagree bitterly over how to do it. Yet over time, taking the world as a whole, the chief "Anglo-Saxon powers," as their rivals often describe them, tend to reach similar if not identical, conclusions about what needs to be done.
Moreover, the special relationship is not a voluntary choice like a friendship between two people with similar tastes; it is more like the relationship between cousins in a family firm. We can be annoyed with each other, and even temporarily estranged, but the family tie remains. We may have different views about how the company should be managed, and we are each capable of trying to extract the maximum advantage in quiet but sometimes sharp competition with each other, but the prosperity and security of each of us remains tied to the health of the firm. We may both have interests and relationships outside the family and firm, and we may each belong to clubs from which the other is excluded, but the commonalities in our backgrounds, interests and priorities have a way of making themselves felt—and the family resemblance is so strong that even our casual acquaintances can see that we are related.
Over the 230 years since American independence, the special relationship has persisted through bilateral crises and mutual antagonism. Rhetoric about the relationship has often been most lyrical when the underlying competition has been sharpest. Franklin Roosevelt was the most Anglophobic US president of the 20th century, and, despite the resistance of British negotiators, he managed, as John Maynard Keynes put it, to "pick out the eyes of the British empire" during the second world war. Yet seldom has the rhetoric of Anglo-American solidarity been more loudly proclaimed than in the words of Churchill and Roosevelt during the war.
Tony Blair was not the first Anglo-American leader to discover that the special relationship can be a millstone around the neck rather than an anchor in stormy seas. American presidents like James Monroe and William McKinley were embarrassed by the way that US initiatives like the Monroe doctrine and the "open door in China" reflected British policy at the time. One American president, Grover Cleveland, lost his 1888 bid for re-election after the publication of a letter written by a British diplomat praising Cleveland's pro-British stance. The prime minister at the time was the marquess of Salisbury; his strong stance against Irish home rule made Irish-Americans even more Anglophobic than usual and Irish opposition may have cost Cleveland the election.
In those days, it was American presidents who worried about being poodles of Britain. In any case, the special relationship survived the marquess of Salisbury; it will also survive George W Bush.
*** The special relationship is based largely on the family firm, and as it happens the family business is spectacularly successful. For roughly three centuries now, the English-speaking peoples have been more or less continuously organising, managing, expanding and defending a global system of power, finance, culture and trade. Up until the second world war, the British branch of the family held the majority of shares and furnished the firm's leadership; since then, the American branch has taken the lead, but the firm, though periodically updating and revising its methods and objectives, still bears the imprint of the British founders. For better or worse, the family business is the dominant force in international life today, and is set to remain the foundation of world order for some time to come.
So it is not so much a matter of Britain having a special relationship with the US; rather, it has a special relationship with the international capitalist order. And the world system today preserves most of the features of the British system that existed before the second world war: a liberal, maritime international order that promotes the free flow of capital and goods and the development of liberal economic and political institutions and values. However much the British may object to particular US policies and priorities, the overall direction in which America seeks to lead the world is the direction in which most Britons more or less hope it will go. Both British and American leaders can and do make mistakes about how best to develop and defend this world system, but the health of that system has been the chief concern of British foreign policy since the 18th century.
The close similarity between the British and American world orders does not just influence the two countries towards international policies that are usually broadly compatible; it also gives Britain a unique role in the world order. This is most clearly seen in the close relations between London and New York, the twin financial centres of the world. The financial genius of Britain has been one of the driving forces that created the world we live in; Americans share that genius and, like the British, seek to make the world a safer and more profitable place in which increasingly sophisticated financial markets can operate on a progressively more global scale.
Acheson's crack about Britain's fallen empire and missing role was made at a time when Britain had, temporarily, lost sight of the sources of its own prosperity and power. The crash of the international system during the great depression and the second world war, combined with the forced liquidation of Britain's overseas investments during and after the war, left the world less hospitable to British enterprise. Combined with the unhappy results of Britain's flirtation with socialism and the profound disorientation which many Britons felt as the empire melted away, Britain seemed doomed to decline.
Today, led by a revived financial and service economy that is both connected to and dependent on the integrated global economy, Britain is back. Twenty-five years ago, smug French and German voices read Britain stern lectures; today they seek to match its success. Britain's voice counts for more today in Europe than at any time in the last half century; across Africa and the middle east, Britain, for better or worse, is seen once again as a significant and rising power. Even narcissistic America pays far more attention to British views than it once did.
This raises two possibilities. One is that the recent strengthening in Britain's performance is a relatively minor development that will have little long-term impact on world affairs. Britain has gone from being an ailing regional power in Europe to being a healthy one, but otherwise little has changed.
But there is another possibility, one that to my own surprise I find myself taking seriously after spending the last five years thinking about the family firm. It is so outrageous that I hesitate to mention it, and have omitted the subject from my most recent book, but suppose Britain is really back? Not just recovering from the doldrums of the Heath-Callaghan years, not simply weathering the post-imperial depression or shaking off the lingering after-effects of the experiment in postwar socialism—but really moving once again to become a global leader in finance, culture and technology? What would a change like that tell us about the state of Britain? How would that change the horizons of British foreign policy, and how would it change the world?
*** Americans are used to British writers commenting on American topics and describing our common history from a British point of view. In the 19th century, British writers like Fanny Trollope and Charles Dickens ignited critical firestorms with their unflattering portraits of American life. British historians like Thomas Carlyle and Thomas Macaulay were widely read and admired in the US, and their work shaped the views that educated Americans held about our common past.
Britons were not shy about advising Americans on what to do with their growing power. Rudyard Kipling's "The White Man's Burden" was addressed to Americans. Winston Churchill's History of the English-Speaking Peoples sold far more copies in the US than in Britain. More recently, writers like Paul Kennedy, Niall Ferguson, Timothy Garton Ash and Will Hutton have found significant American audiences for work that analyses US power and prospects from viewpoints based in British history.
This has, on the whole, been a good thing. To read a foreigner's reflections on one's own national history can be an unsettling experience. In such a work, many of the characters and situations are recognisable, but the perspectives seem a little distorted. In some places, the author explains too much, belabouring the obvious; in others he seems to assume vast amounts of knowledge that only specialists would have. At times the writer seems to exercise a delicate and unnecessary political caution; at others he or she disregards the most obvious and sensible conventions and taboos. Sometimes bafflingly opaque, sometimes irritatingly banal, foreigners seldom get things exactly right; but the unusual angle from which they view our familiar terrain often gives foreigners the ability to see things that natives miss.
As someone looking at Britain's decline in the 20th century and its prospects for the 21st, I too come to the subject from what to British readers will seem an eccentric and very American perspective. And like many things that are both eccentric and American, this perspective can annoy.
As most Americans learn their history, the 17th century and the glorious revolution are more important than any subsequent events in the British isles. In the 17th century, the peoples of England, Scotland, Ireland and Wales established and settled the American colonies, and the beliefs, controversies and habits of that age are more intimately present in American historical experience than are those of subsequent eras. Eighteenth-century Britain is more foreign to Americans; the two societies were drifting apart, and found themselves estranged by the century's end. From an American point of view, the issues that separated us in the 18th century are important ones, and the different paths we took then continue to affect our cultures and our fortunes today—as well as the ways we perceive one another.
In the 18th century, as Britain struggled to put the civil war behind it and forge a new identity as a united kingdom—all the while mounting a battle for world power against France—it developed a more centralised, powerful and intrusive state, and a more centralised and self-assured elite, than it had previously known. The vast resources made available by the Bank of England's system of national finance were harnessed to Robert Walpole's political machine to create a new kind of government.
Under the Hanoverians, Britain became in many ways a more polite, polished and elitist society than it had been. The establishment, whether one speaks of the Church of England or more broadly of recognised social and intellectual leaders, was more firmly implanted and more widely accepted and imitated at the end of the 18th century than at the beginning.
The American revolution began as a revolt against this development. It was fuelled by a number of ingredients: the wounded amour propre of colonial militia officers like George Washington, offended by the low regard in which they were held by an increasingly aristocratic British officer corps; the opposition of colonial dissenters to the growing power of the Church of England; and a fear that the British system of ever-rising taxes to fund endless wars was about to be transported across the Atlantic. Borrowing their analysis from the English "real Whigs," who opposed what they saw as the corrupt, power-grabbing tendencies of Walpole and his successors, the colonists rebelled against the Hanoverian state in the name of traditional English country values.
The revolution not only separated the US from the relatively centralised Hanoverian state, it also established a politics of populist revolt which has dominated American politics, religion and culture down to the present day. Such populist revolts have periodically erupted, from the time of Thomas Jefferson's revolt against the Federalists through Andrew Jackson's revolt against the National Republicans down to the "Reagan revolution" of the 1980s and beyond. Today American populism is considered a conservative movement; that is new. Through most of American history, populist protest has been considered part of our political left.
Macaulay attributed the greatness of Victorian Britain to the "union of order and liberty." This is, I think, true not just for Britain but for all the societies that sprang from it. However, while we have all found ways to express the union of order and liberty, we have done so in different ways. Since the 18th century, Britain has tended through all its vicissitudes towards a more orderly union than has the US. The British see America as permanently threatened by intellectual incoherence and religious kooks; Americans see the British as too docile and well mannered to succeed. Even stereotypes have their uses.
At the time of our revolution, many Americans believed that the powerful establishment and central government that George III and Lord North were building would sacrifice British liberty to order. That didn't happen. The shocks of the Napoleonic wars and industrialisation transformed Britain. Yet Americans continued to see British dynamism as threatened by a powerful establishment seeking to repress not only the raw violence but the ideological and social pluralism of British society. From this side of the Atlantic, it appeared that the forces of conformity had gained strength as the shocks of the industrial revolution began to fade into the past and British society during the long Victorian peace seemed to become more settled and smug.
From this traditional US point of view, the disastrous course of British 20th-century history between the fall of Lloyd George and the rise of Margaret Thatcher was less about the loss of empire or the rise of great-power rivals than about the gradual decay of the pluralism and dynamism that had once made Britain such a vigorous place. The great and the good have always had more power to impose received wisdom on British society than have the frustrated American intellectuals and moralists in the land of televangelism and the quick buck. But several factors came together in the 20th century to make the American stereotype about Britain more accurate than usual; Britain became less ideologically, culturally and religiously turbulent and diverse. The establishment was more than usually dominant; in fact it came close to wrecking Britain.
This is what Evelyn Waugh was getting at in Brideshead Revisited when he had Anthony Blanche tell Charles Ryder that his painting had succumbed to the fatal English blight of charm. To glide over unpleasant subjects, to smooth over difficulties, to block the unclubbable from influence, to exclude awkward and ungainly persons and ideas from public debate: the British establishment have always found this easier to do than have their envious American cousins. After the first world war, the evangelicals faded, the Anglicans cooled and the Catholic Irish were out of the way. As the outlines of a grand social compromise began to come clear, the Fabians domesticated British radicalism and sensible, moderate Tories banished the hangers and floggers to the backbenches. Dogmatic Manchester liberals disappeared. The crazy relatives—the Colonel Blimps, the dotty religious aunts, the vulgar entrepreneurs from the industrial north and the rawboned parsons of various sects—were locked up in the attic with the first Mrs Rochester. Regional centres lost power to London, and the contraction of manufacturing further concentrated economic power in an increasingly conservative and risk-averse City. The temperature of British public life cooled; the great questions of life seemed largely settled and a Britain that once breakfasted on beef and beer seemed resigned to a diet of toast and weak tea. The conflict and fire that had once made Britain terrible and great never died out, but the embers burned pretty low. Even Anthony Blunt, the last of the Burgess spy ring which rocked the world during the cold war, wanted nothing more from the last years of his life than to potter about peacefully among Queen Elizabeth's paintings. All Britain was blighted by charm.
Appeasement in the 1930s was only one among the many failures of imagination and energy exhibited in the era of Baldwin, MacDonald and Chamberlain. Desperation drove Britain to greatness between 1940 and 1945, but as soon as possible the respectable mediocrities of both parties reunited behind the dreary conventional wisdom that made Britain the sick man of Europe for an entire generation after the war. (Throughout much of the world, even in the US, the mid-20th century was a time of unusual social consensus around Keynesian economics and managed capitalism, but the British took it far further than the Americans. Postwar Britain was used by the American right to demonstrate the failures of socialism; the left often replied that Britain's shortcomings did not discredit the idea—the Swedes could make it work even if the British couldn't.)
That American view led to a great deal of headshaking over Britain during most of the last century and shaped Acheson's perception; today, that old analysis of the causes of British decline leads Americans—or at least this one—to a weird and unaccustomed feeling about Britain's future: optimism.
*** Partly through immigration, partly through economic and social change, Britain is becoming tumultuous once again. The City is too big, too successful and above all too revolutionary and even piratical to tolerate the fussy mediocrity that characterised British economic governance for so long. There are large numbers of immigrants who are not sure whether they really want to be British—and there are people in Britain once again who think that religion is important enough to die for or even to kill for. The Scots aren't sure they want to stay in; the English aren't entirely sure that they want them. Various loony-toon advocacy groups are running around taking all kinds of interesting causes to foolish extremes. Vulgar billionaires and shady foreign plutocrats with mysterious pasts swank through the streets of London. And none of these people actually care very much what the great and the good think of them. In other words, Britain today is looking more like it used to back when it was actually great. It is looking a little more like the kind of Britain that a Defoe or a Dickens would recognise: snarky, eccentric, iconoclastic. It is looking less like a slightly moth-eaten tourist attraction and a little more like the titanic force for change that not so long ago exported one revolution after another to the world.
I do not know how far the current revival will go, but it certainly wasn't jeopardised by the handover to New Labour in 1997. The British will probably always have a stronger tendency towards conformity than their obstreperous Yankee cousins. But if Britain continues to ward off the blight of convention and charm, and if it rekindles more of the dynamism and diversity that were once the normal conditions of British life, then it will count for much more in the wider world. The economy will grow, the City will play a greater role in the affairs of the world, and Britain will once again be a place where innovations in technology, finance, culture, politics, religion and ideology first make themselves felt. Britain will again be a leading exporter of ideas to the world.
From this side of the Atlantic, it appears that the endless debate in Britain over whether the country should choose Europe, choose America or continue to hesitate over the choice seems more than usually pointless. If Britain's recovery continues, Britain's foreign policy horizons will change. Both the Americans and the Europeans will care more about what Britain thinks, and rather than signing up to the initiatives of others, Britain will be conducting an active foreign policy of its own. If the recovery falters, Britain will face the same old unsatisfactory choices about America and Europe.
Economics, as so often the case in British history, points the way. Britain's ability—notwithstanding recent wobbles—to provide modern financial markets with a better regulatory framework and operating platform than either the Americans or the Europeans has given Britain new influence and prestige in both the EU and Washington. Maintaining an independent currency has not reduced British influence in Europe. Frankfurt, Paris and New York are more in awe of London than they were ten years ago, and Britain has far more weight in discussions on the future of the world economic system than it used to. If Britain continues this record of success, where will it stand ten years or a generation from now?
A British revival will test the special relationship even as it deepens it. A reviving Britain will be more deeply engaged than ever in the family business, and British success will invigorate the enterprise. British perspectives, British experience, British abilities can make the firm run better, and help it avoid some of the problems to which the current all-American management is all too prone. Even so, Americans will not always enjoy the consequences of a Britain that counts for more. Cousins quarrel and the special relationship has never been a particularly smooth one. But if Britain is really back, Americans—and Europeans—will just have to get used to it.
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