Anti-Americanism is on the order of the day since the invasion of Grenada. Even Denis Healey has joined in. Andrew Gamble assesses 200 years of the 'special relationship' between Britain and the USA since the Treaty of Paris was signed in 1783.
The Peace of Paris
Two hundred years ago on 3 September 1783 the Peace of Paris was signed, bringing to an end the war between the American colonies and Britain. Aided by the intervention of France and Spain the rebel colonists had won a complete victory. An independent United States free from the despotism of Crown and Parliament was born and British imperial expansion appeared to have received a decisive check.
But although this defeat in the New World was a severe reverse and a great humiliation for the landed oligarchy which controlled the British state, British fortunes were soon repaired by the victories against Napoleonic France, and still more by the dramatic growth of its industrial power. British expansion was resumed on a grander and broader scale. By 1883 the loss of Britain's 'first empire' had been overshadowed by the acquisition of a second, the empire on which the sun never sets, and by the quite novel position which the British state had come to occupy within the capitalist world economy as a result of the development of large-scale industry.
1783 comes towards the close of the mercantalist era of British policy at the beginning of rapid industrialisation. One hundred years later, in 1883, the year Marx died, Britain had reached the peak of its power; American power was still in its infancy. The previous hundred years had seen an unprecedented leap forward in world productive forces, a widening and deepening of the world division of labour and the beginnings of a profound social and economic revolution whose consequences are still reverberating around the globe. The capitalist world economy which had been developing ever since the sixteenth century was now established as the dominant material force throughout the world. It had begun to incorporate every nation, every territory, every community, and every resource into the ceaseless drive to accumulate capital.
By 1983 the relative positions of Britain and America had been transformed. Britain's second empire was already a memory apart from a clutch of islands and dependencies spread across the globe. Britain no longer ranked as a major world power and the relative decline of its economy had further undermined its remaining pretensions to great power status. Britain had become heavily dependent on the United States and subordinate to its former colony on all important questions. The United States had replaced Britain as the leading military force, the economic powerhouse, and the financial centre of the world economy.
Throughout these last two hundred years, the era of world capitalism, the relationship between Britain and America has been central to an understanding of the dynamics of the world economy and the system of imperialism. One of the key conditions for accumulation of capital on an expanding scale is the existence of one state powerful enough and willing enough to assume responsibility for maintaining the system in existence. In a world where no global sovereign power exists some alternative arrangements must be found for policing the world economy, for ensuring a stable medium of exchange, as well as maintaining orderly flows of capital, goods, and labour.
These 'state' functions for the capitalist world economy were performed mostly by Britain up to 1914, and have been performed mostly by the United States since 1945. What is so striking about the relations between the two countries during the last two hundred years is that apart from brief and inconclusive hostilities at the end of the Napoleonic wars and occasional moments of tension such as the Venezuela crisis of 1895/6, they have never clashed militarily or seemed likely to do so. The eclipse of British power by its former colony has been accomplished without an armed struggle.
The readiness of Britain's rulers to relinquish their position of dominance in favour of the United States is a fundamental and little explored aspect of twentieth century politics. Some have detected an 'Anglo-Saxon' conspiracy and stress the bonds of culture, kinship and language. But bonds of sentiment have been cheerfully cast aside when the central interests of either nation have been at stake. What has to be explained is why the dominant groups within both ruling classes came to recognise a common interest in maintaining a close political relationship. It is a complex story and only an outline of some of the key factors can be provided here.
The American Revolution
The revolt of the American colonists against British rule was at one level a simple dispute over the authority of the British Crown to levy taxes on its colonists. According to eighteenth century mercantilist notions the colonies were so many overseas landed estates and were expected to augment the national wealth of the metropolitan country. Trade and shipping with them were rigidly controlled and the colonists were expected to contribute in taxes to the costs of maintaining the policies of overseas expansion. The national debt had increased enormously as a result of the major wars with France between 1740 and 1763, and British citizens in England were taxed much more heavily than those in the colonies.
Like so many revolutions therefore the immediate cause of the American revolution was fiscal. The ultimate power of any state depends on its ability to raise taxes. In a bourgeois society if the citizens challenge the authority of the state to collect taxes they strike at its very existence. In rejecting this authority of the British Parliament to tax them, however, the American colonists went much further, asserting universal doctrines of the rights of man, in order to justify their rejection of British sovereignty. What began as a petty dispute over taxes broadened into a general attack on the legitimacy of a government that was not directly answerable to its citizens. The revolt of the American colonists became one of the major bourgeois revolutions of the modern era, producing some of the classic statements of liberal ideology.
The radicalism of the American Revolution is not at all welcome to many modern American historians. Many of them find it irksome that the American Revolution should so often be linked to the French revolution, because the latter is so strongly associated with the Terror and with radical social and political upheaval. But the upheaval in the American colonies was also intense — there were more emigres in proportion to the population than in France, more property was confiscated, and the emigre elements did not return. American society, with the major exception of the slave-owning landed property of the Southern states, was purged of those elements that might have put a break on the development of the economic and social relationships necessary for capital accumulation.
Even before the Revolution the United States had a purer kind of individualist bourgeois civil society than any of the European countries where pre-capitalist ideological social and economic influences and institutions were still so strong.
This is what those politicians in England like Edmund Burke who oppose British policy towards the American colonies could never understand. Burke argued that the way to preserve the link between Britain and the colonies in America was the way for the British parliament to abandon its rights to tax, while maintaining the all important right to shipping, trade, and external policy. This solution was similar to the one that had been pursued in Britain's other major problem colony — Ireland. But the essential difference, as some of the American revolutionaries were quick to point out, was that Ireland was a conquered country, British rule was maintained there by force, and the relative autonomy given to Ireland to manage its own affairs was not given to the Irish but to the tiny class of Anglo-Irish landowners.
What Burke and the English Whigs could not recognise was the unrepresentativeness of the English Parliament. British political institutions have often received lavish praise but this was particularly strong in the eighteenth century. One writer even described the British constitution at that time as 'without doubt the most perfect form of human government that ever was devised by human wisdom.' The tiny size of the electorate (only 250,000), and the corruption and anomalies of the system (5723 persons chose half the members of the House of Commons) were brushed aside. The degree of real liberty to all classes and the degree of protection to the interests of the landowners were recommendation enough. One of the chief reasons the British sought to coerce the American colonists was precisely because they perceived it as a democratic movement. As General Gage noted during the agitation over the Stamp Act: 'It is to be feared that the spirit of democracy is strong among them.'
The independence which the colonists already enjoyed and the remoteness from London was what made coercion on an Irish scale impractical. By the 1770s the argument had already moved on. There was no means short of coercion by which the British Parliament could have retained control over its American colonies. This was seen perfectly clearly by all the English radicals, who were fighting the despotism of Parliament in England itself. They immediately championed the American cause. Tom Paine, arriving in America just before the declaration of Independence, wrote his famous pamphlet Common Sense, which quickly became the most popular and influential indictment of the despotic rule of the British Crown and the British Parliament. For radicals like Paine there appeared at this time no fundamental conflict between their support for mass political participation and the expansion of market relationships. Paine's radicalism was the radicalism of the independent artisans and was directed at the power of the great landed proprietors. For Paine the greatest evils to be swept away were the hereditary privileges of the monarchy and the aristocracy. These were the major obstacles to a society of independent, self-reliant individuals free both to exchange and to choose who should govern them. The reforms which the English radicals wished to enact in Britain were the ones they saw being triumphantly carried through in America. This was why America acquired such a hold over the radical imagination which it has never entirely lost.
Free Trade
The American Revolution was like a beacon to the growing revolutionary movement in Europe, and helped disseminate the [illegible] absolutist Europe and the Old Corruption of England. It was an important example and spur to the French Revolution. But it remained largely a political revolution. It secured the exceptionally free and egalitarian civil society that had developed in America, but it did not make America the pioneer of industrial capitalism. Despite the unrepresentativeness of British political institutions the crucial acceleration in the accumulation of capital took place in Britain. During a period of intense social repression of the radical movement the foundations of the first major industrial capitalism were created. The loot Britain had gained from overseas wars, colonies, and trade — vast as it was — came to seem paltry in comparison to the quite unprecedented stream of wealth that flowed from the foul drain of Manchester.
The dominance of Britain in the world was established on a quite different foundation from its earlier power which had been based on British industries over all others throughout the world permitted the development of a new international division of labour and a network of economic relations which subordinated foreign nations to Britain often without direct resort to physical coercion. Free trade not protected trade became the new rallying call of the British Parliament. As one MP put it so simply in the 1846 debate on the repeal of the [illegible] foreign nations would become valuable colonies to us without reposing on us the responsibility of governing them'.
America was crucial to this policy of free trade imperialism. Economic relations between Britain and America did not cease after the colonies broke away. They grew enormously. America became a major wheel of the new world economy which industrialisation in Britain brought into existence. The flows of goods, of capital, and of labour occurred on a colossal scale. America was developed by huge infusions of British capital, initially to provide many of the raw materials for British factories as well as the food necessary to reproduce the urban working class at the lowest possible cost. America at the same time provided major markets for British manufactures and was the chief destination for British emigrants. Between 1820 and 1910 a staggering 13 million people emigrated from Britain to the United States.
American political institutions continued to attract support from liberal opinion in the UK and continued to be distrusted by conservatives. Americanising was already equated with democratising and vulgarising, so it is no surprise to find many of the Victorian critics of industrialism such as Ruskin, Carlyle, and Arnold, highly critical of the United States. They believed American democracy was undermining the principle of aristocracy and producing mediocrity and uniformity. But the freedom and openness of American politics and the extent of participation in American democracy still commanded wide respect among European liberals.
In the American civil war Britain remained neutral, opinion divided between the two sides. Radical opinion initially inclined towards the South, partly because of the strong tie of economic interest with the cotton planters, but more importantly because the issue was seen as the right of the southern states to national self-determination. When the issue became more clearly defined as anti-slavery, liberal opinion veered towards support for the North. If America had been perceived at that time as a greater threat to British interests Britain might have sought to intervene to promote an outcome that did lead to the break-up of the United States into two or more separate states — the policy it had traditionally followed in Europe.
The American Challenge
The period of free trade imperialism was ended by the rise of new imperialisms that could seriously rival Britain. Both Germany and the United States were rapidly industrialising by the 1880s and both imposed very high tariffs to protect their industries from British competition. Now the value to the United States of the political independence from Britain, which it had won a century earlier, was fully demonstrated. Britain's dominant position astride the world economy remained, buttressed by its enormous empire and by its undisputed dominance of shipping, finance, insurance and all the other services needed by the world economy. By 1914 Britain was easily the largest creditor nation in the world, and its overseas investments totalled £4000 million.
But the basis of this colossal edifice of power was rapidly undermined by the speed with which Germany and America first caught Britain up and then overtook her completely in many crucial industries like steel, as well as pioneering major new industries such as chemicals and automobiles. Britain's position began to look extremely precarious both militarily and economically and the first of the great outpourings of national introspection on decline began. German and American methods of production and selling began to be studied but were only gradually adopted. A typical British response was to label German and American goods as shoddy and second-rate, their sales methods as unseemly, and their work as ungentlemanly. British goods by contrast were quality goods made by craftsmen. Scientific management and the new methods for organising the labour process were derided. When Taylor sent a copy of his book on the principles of scientific management to a British engineering firm he received in return a copy of the owner's edition of Horace's Odes. Lack of investment by British capitalists in new manufacturing processes and methods was rarely cited as a factor in the success of Britain's new competitors. The greater power of trade unions in Britain compared to the United States however was soon being blamed for the failure of British firms to develop new products and new methods, and to keep costs down as successfully as the Americans.
Alongside the sudden eruption of the United States as a rising industrial power with a seemingly boundless potential due to its size and resources, came a major change in attitudes to the United States on both Right and Left. On the Left the focus on American democracy gave way to a focus on American capitalism. America as an example of advanced democratic institutions and republican virtues was replaced by America as the country of unbridled capitalism, where the logic of capital accumulation was most unfettered, where the tendency to concentration and centralisation of capital in giant trusts was strongest, where the gulf between rich and poor was most stark, where techniques of mass industrial production and the application of science to production were most highly developed. On the Right by contrast, which was coming to see the battle against democracy as lost, there was an increasing appreciation for the strengths of American institutions in effectively restraining the 'worst features' of democracy, the unfettered exercise of popular sovereignty. The conservative intentions of the authors of the Constitution were now much better appreciated.
Imperialist war
The First World War marked a decisive turning point in Anglo-American relations. Faced by the industrial and military challenge from both Germany and the United States, Britain was forced to choose whose claims should be contested. What had become very clear by 1900 was that Britain was quite incapable of taking on both its new rivals simultaneously and defeating them. The British government was informed by the Admiralty in 1900 that if it wanted to control the seas around the coasts of America it was essential that the neutrality of the European powers should be secured. Since the latter was so unlikely this advice implied that Britain must reach an accommodation with the United States, even if on a longer perspective the United States was a greater threat to Britain's power and position than Germany.
The logic of Britain's strategic position was laid out with considerable insight by Halford Mackinder, sometime geographer, prominent Unionist, Director of the LSE, and British Commissioner to the White forces in Odessa 1919-20. He argued that a secure island position, a sizeable population, and a fertile lowland plain, had allowed Britain to become the dominant naval power and to establish a world empire. But this power would be threatened if at any time a land-based military power arose centred on the 'Heartland' of Eurasia. Such a state would be invulnerable to sea power yet could press outwards to seize the 'islands and peninsulars' of Eurasia ('the World Island'). Mackinder considered that Britain's permanent strategic interest was to ensure that Europe and Asia remained divided between a number of regimes and that Britain retained its monopoly of sea power.
Britain went to war with Germany in 1914 because Germany was intent not merely on expansion within Europe and the creation of a land-based empire, but also because Germany was building a battle fleet to directly contest British control of the seas. Both sides expected the war to be brief; no-one was prepared for the total mobilisation and military stalemate that ensued. The direct beneficiary was the United States, because Britain was forced into ever closer dependence on the United States to maintain its war effort. The Americans also took full advantage of the struggle to mop up British markets in Latin America, while the forced sale of British assets and overseas investments contributed to the emergence of New York as the leading financial centre in the world economy.
America was now a major creditor nation for the first time. The late entry of America into the war clinched victory for the British and French, and confirmed the United States as the new economically dominant power in the world economy. But America was clearly unprepared politically to play a world role and displace Britain. It preferred to remain isolationist. A confused interregnum ensued during which Britain attempted and failed to reconstruct the world monetary system around sterling and gold.
After Germany's defeat and Russia's departure from the capitalist world economy there seemed every prospect of a further contest between Britain and the United States to complete America's rise to world power. Trotsky confidently predicted this in the 1920s. It never materialised. America still had to fight to obtain supreme world power, but the wars were to be against a revived Germany and an expansionist Japan. Although the potential for a major war against Britain existed it was averted by the readiness of the British to concede American claims and accept the dependence of Britain upon the United States. This was already apparent straight after the First World War. Not only had the United States emerged from the war as a major creditor nation and the world's leading industrial economy, it also refused to limit the size of its fleet. Britain was forced to surrender its traditional principle that the British fleet should always be as large as the fleets of its two most important rivals combined.
Why should the British have conceded their world power so tamely? The answer is that the only alternative to some accommodation with the Americans was to organise a unified and protected Empire in the German manner, as Joseph Chamberlain and the Social Imperialists urged. Such an alternative would have necessitated reaching an understanding with Germany in order to counterbalance American power. It would [illegible] armed conflict between Britain and the United States more [illegible]. But this alternative was only tried for a time and then half-heartedly during the 1930s after the gold standard had collapsed. Against this idea of independent economic blocs there were powerful currents of opinion in Britain and the United States which [illegible] permanent strategic interest would continue to be served if the role was transferred to the United States. The United States would inherit the mantle of sea power and the responsibility for maintaining the political order of the capitalist world economy. Britain would have a privileged but subordinate role which would allow considerable elements of British power to be preserved.
The American Ascendancy
The gradual conversion of opinion at all levels of the military and political apparatuses of both states can be traced through the first five decades of this century. But World War Two like the earlier conflict with Germany was the catalyst for the major shift. Neville Chamberlain who during the 1930s had helped orient British policy along the lines of Social Imperialism, also worked hard to achieve an understanding with Germany, precisely to avoid the kind of major war which he knew would destroy the basis of British power. Even after war was declared Chamberlain's instinct was to limit the conflict, to husband national resources, to ride out the storm. For a time there seems to have been a real chance of a negotiated peace with Germany in 1940.
The chances of such a peace were ended by Churchill's appointment to the Premiership and the formation of a Coalition Government to conduct the war, bringing Labour into Government. Churchill's oft-quoted remark that he had not become his Majesty's first minister to preside over the liquidation of the British Empire was the reverse of the truth, since his policy of all-out war necessarily involved all-out dependence on the Americans. The Americans gave the British as much credit as they wanted through Lend-Lease and the British war effort was soon inconceivable without American support. With the full entry of the Americans into the war the relative power of the United States and the British Empire was vividly displayed, and by the end of the war the American ascendancy was complete. Only the Soviet Union could approach American power. The British people celebrated victory but for the British Empire the outcome of the war was a major defeat. Britain could no longer retain empire except on [illegible] agreed with the Americans. Churchill's grandiose picture of a partnership between equals was belied immediately the war finished by the American insistence on harsh terms for continuation of the loans Britain needed to pay for essential imports of food and raw materials. In particular the Americans wanted early convertibility of sterling and an end to the system of imperial preference. They wanted complete liberalisation of the world capitalist economy — free movement of goods and capital, no protected spheres where American capital could not penetrate. In the state of the world in 1945 only Russia and later China were in a position to refuse American terms. Britain along with the defeated European capitalist powers abandoned independence in its economic and foreign policies in return for inclusion in the new American-dominated world economy and military alliances: NATO, SEATO, IMF, and GATT — these were the new agencies which expressed and institutionalised American power. Within this context the British Empire withered away and Social Imperialism disappeared as a viable option on the Right of British politics. Even Halford Mackinder gave his blessing to the new dispensation. Britain's future role, he wrote in 1945, was to be a 'moated aerodrome' for the United States in its struggle against the new heartland power — the Soviet Union.
The American connection in the post-war period has thus been of critical importance in shaping post-war policy and post-war politics in Britain. No account of British politics is complete which does not consider it, for this is where the real and most effective consensus between the parties has lain.
The Anglo-American relationship has continued to be special, particularly in defence and sterling. Britain has borne a disproportionately high defence burden within the Atlantic Alliance, and there has been an unusually close relationship between personnel at all levels. British overseas military spending and concentration of its research effort on military projects were significant factors in the relative decline of its economy. Similarly sterling was permitted by the Americans to remain as an international currency which helped accelerate the internationalisation of the leading sectors of British capital. These were burdens which the more successful states within the American world economy did not carry. Whenever Britain stepped out of line as at Suez in 1956, the true nature of the relationship between the two powers was starkly revealed, and as time went on so the special relationship was valued much more in London than in Washington.
The Weakening of US Hegemony
The acceptance of dependence on America has been enormously assisted in the last forty years by the attitudes of the Labour Party. This might seem surprising since the earlier enthusiasm of the British Left for American democracy had given way to criticism of American capitalism. In the 1930s there was concern that America might succumb to Fascism. Yet the Labour Party in the 1940s emerged as a staunch upholder of the Atlantic Alliance. Whereas the Conservatives with their imperialist traditions continued to have grave reservations about conceding too much to the United States and were anxious to continue to assert British interests, the Labour leadership from Attlee and Bevan through Gaitskell, Wilson, Brown, Jenkins, Callaghan and Healey has been solidly committed to the Atlantic Alliance and to the American connection with all that has meant in terms of domestic priorities and alternatives.
[illegible] the New Deal [illegible] revived faith in American political institutions. Many Labour intellectuals like Laski saw it as a bold attempt to create a middle way between capitalism and socialism. It provided a bridge between liberal American intellectuals and Labour's emerging new leadership whose thought was so heavily influenced by Keynes and Beveridge. The New Deal tradition in American politics has exerted a powerful fascination for the British Labour leadership.
The second factor has been the Cold War and the successful mobilisation of all Western democratic forces against Soviet communism. This has had lasting consequences of a foreign policy consensus stretching from the American Right to the European Social Democrats. This combination of social reform and anti-communism have long been prominent features of Atlanticist ideology and have maintained American hegemony over its allies despite the shocks administered by the Vietnam War and the Nixon presidency.
Since the end of the 1960s however American power has weakened, its capacity to supply the kind of leadership it provided between 1945 and 1965 has declined, and this has been a factor in the major economic and political crisis that engulfed Western capitalism in the 1970s. What the two major world recessions since 1974 have demonstrated so clearly, however, is that there can no longer be any simple return of the 1930s for Western capitalism or any revival of military conflict between the major capitalist nations. The last forty years has significantly increased the interdependence of the world economy and reduced the sovereignty of any single nation state and national economy and the freedom of manoeuvre of any national bourgeoisie. That is why the only serious alternative strategies for British capitalism which have been canvassed on the Right have been the Europeanist strategy of Heath and the Atlanticist strategy of Callaghan and Thatcher. The latter has been in the ascendancy since 1976. It has meant the recreation of the military aspects of the special relationship — as shown by British readiness to install Cruise. At the same time it has meant ensuring British economic policy conforms to the preferred monetarist strategy of the international financial markets and the central control organs of the world economy like the IMF. There have been some recent strains in the relationship particularly over American protectionist moves over steel and the gas pipeline in the Soviet Union. There was also initially some conflict over the Falklands war since siding with Britain clearly endangered the whole Central American strategy and has brought closer direct American military involvement. Nevertheless American policy over the Falklands illustrates an important point. Even a Britain much shrunken in world power and relative economic importance is still of much greater significance for American global strategy than preserving a pro-American military regime in Latin America.
By 1983 the re-election of the Thatcher government had become an important objective of the Reagan administration, especially since the Labour Party for the first time since the war was showing signs of abandoning its Atlantic commitment. With Thatcher returned to power Britain's dependent client status has been confirmed, and the ties subordinating British policy to American interests have become stronger than ever.
The invasion of Grenada in October 1983 tested the loyalty of the Thatcher government to the utmost because British views were directly overridden. Yet despite being humiliated by its ally the Thatcher government refused publicly to condemn the American invasion or to vote against it in the UN Security Council. Government ministers kept reaffirming that maintaining the Atlantic Alliance was far too important to Britain to risk weakening it by condemning what the Americans had done. Grenada punctured the Falklands myth of Britain's revived power and showed that the Iron Lady was just another tin soldier. It exposed how weak Britain had become, how uninfluential, how subservient to American policy even when it disagreed with it.
It also showed the hollowness of Thatcher's Cold War rhetoric. She more than any other European leader has stoked up the anti-Soviet ideological crusade over Afghanistan, Poland, and the Korean airliner, and has given warm support to American desires to halt the spread of 'communism' in Central America and the Middle East. But when Reagan began acting to liberate the Caribbean and to threaten Nicaragua, Syria and Iran, Thatcher suddenly discovered virtue in the cautious, pragmatic low-key policies of the British Foreign Office, that nest of appeasers and traitors, which she had always so firmly despised.
But she is tied so firmly to the American juggernaut that she can do little but be pulled along in its dust. She has no means of escape except to press for a much stronger alignment with the European Community, a course which anti-Thatcher politicians from Heath to Owen advocate so strongly. That would be a shift of major dimensions in British policy and there are no signs that Thatcher has begun even to contemplate it. The special relationship is not over yet.
ANDREW GAMBLE is a lecturer at Sheffield University and author of Britain in Decline.