New Orientations

Essays in International Relations

Edith Tilton Penrose

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135156480
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politica e relazioni internazionali
• Subtopic: Politica

First Published in 1970.This is a collection of critical essays on international relations and is the first in a volume of series of publications. As the general title indicates, the essays will express forward looking, often 'revisionist' points of view. Their main themes will be those of contemporary international relations, broadly interpreted. But contemporary events are obviously affected by events in the past, especially the recent past, and we shall seek essays devoted to new or revised interpretations in international history. The contributors also aim at including essays on the economic as well as the political aspects of international relations.

BRITAIN’S PLACE IN THE CHANGING STRUCTURE OF INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS

E. F. PENROSE

Nearly a quarter of a century has passed since the Second World War. The material progress in Britain has been impressive. In contrast to the inter-war years, continuously high employment has been maintained. The extreme poverty of a considerable proportion of the population in the earlier decades of the century has almost passed away. In a remarkable extension of social legislation the chief risks of everyday life have been covered. A great National Health Service has brought medical care within the reach of all, regardless of income. Secondary and higher education have been widely extended. Mortality rates have fallen steeply among the younger age-groups. The social evils which remain, measured in sickness and premature death, are associated with over-eating rather than undernourishment, with tobacco and sedentary habits rather than excessive hours of heavy labour and unhealthy working conditions, with indulgence in faulty individual habits of everyday life rather than with severe epidemic diseases. In short they are the evils of misused affluence rather than those of involuntary poverty. On the economic side Britain has faced periodical difficulties in maintaining balance of trade and payments, but she has not been alone in this, and, when account is taken of her foreign trade, viewed over the whole post-war period, results have been impressive.

But these great achievements at home have scarcely been matched by corresponding achievements abroad. Britain’s policies towards other great powers have hardly been less irresolute and faltering in the 1950s and 60s than they were in the 1930s. A pattern set in the concluding stages of the war and in the first seven years after the war has tended to become stereotyped. Opportunities to take the initiative in European and world politics have been passed over. The wartime habit of estimating power in terms of the number of army divisions and the number of aeroplanes has been carried over into peacetime, modified by the addition of atomic bombs. Judged by this crude and primitive conception of the nature of power in international relations, Britain’s position has declined in a comparative sense among the great powers. The newer generation – now middle-aged in the 1960s – which reached adult age in the later war and early post-war years, grew into a world accustomed to violence and the exercise of physical force among the nations. The post-war quarrels among the former allies, followed by the Korean War and the ‘Cold War’, intensified the cult of physical force, the free use of threats and counter threats, the improvisation of military alliances and counter-alliances. Even in the formal study of international relations these preoccupations had their counterpart in the growth of institutional support for ‘strategic studies’ which, interpreted more liberally in Britain and France than across the Atlantic, are nevertheless concerned first and foremost with questions relating to the physical means of exercising coercion in international affairs.

Such over-simplified approaches to international relations have naturally led to pessimistic and unconstructive conclusions regarding Britain’s future role in the world. Considerable sections of the public, reflected in part of the press and in organisations concerned with the study of international affairs, deprecate any attempt on the part of Britain to take an initiative or seek to play a role among the great powers, and regard it as illusory to suppose that Britain can hope any longer to influence the course of international events in any important sense. Left without an empire, lagging behind the superpowers in the armaments race, she must, they say, accept her limitations and no longer attempt to play a role which is manifestly beyond her physical powers to support. As to what limited and modest or minor parts she might usefully play, there were and still are sharp differences of opinion, which will be discussed later.

These controversies over Britain’s changed position among the great powers are concerned only with a limited part of the whole field of international relations. In another direction, Britain’s role in the post-war period, up to a point, has been outstanding. The Second World War created widespread upheavals in Asia and North Africa as well as in Europe. It disturbed the economic order in Africa south of the Sahara and in Latin America. Political consciousness, which had already been growing throughout Asia, Africa and Latin America, was greatly intensified. The Attlee and Macmillan Governments quickly realised, the first with respect to Asia and the second with respect to Africa, that the hour of decolonisation had struck. Wisely recognising that the clock could not – and even if it could, it was undesirable that it should – be turned back, the governments suppressed their ‘diehards’ and granted outright independence freely to hundreds of millions of previously dependent peoples in Asia and Africa. No other country was as early in the field or as ungrudging in its terms of independence. To say, as some intransigent doctrinaire nationalists and communists have said, that Britain was compelled by force to do all this at the time it did, is a falsification of history.

Here, then, in contrast to Britain’s defeatist attitude in ‘great power politics’, were solid post-war achievements affecting large populations spread widely over the world and destined to exert an increasing influence in the future. Such a display of initiative, boldness, and faith created assets which, if conserved, were capable of being turned to great mutual advantage in the world of the future.

The greater success in dealing with distant overseas relationships than in dealing with great power relationships mainly confined to Europe and North America reflects what at first sight appears to be a curiously paradoxical feature of Britain’s external relations. In fact, it may largely be explained in terms of political and economic geography. The geological event that narrowly separated our island from the mainland of Europe had far-reaching psychological effects which were strengthened by the development of fairly strong central government, especially from Tudor times. The navy was the first line of defence, and very early the tramp of invading foreign armies, so familiar on the mainland, ceased to be heard in Britain. Even linguistic links with the rest of Europe declined.

On the other hand, endowed with a favourable position for maritime enterprise and seaborne trade, British merchant venturers were not long in following pioneer explorers from other parts of Europe. The course of commercial and ‘strategic’ imperialism was beset by rivalries with other European powers, which extended far beyond Europe. Hence the nature of Britain’s overseas relationships with the distant continents was closely affected by the fluctuating balances and imbalances of power within Europe itself, in which Britain played a role, at first as a satellite of more powerful European states. Later, from the accession of William III and Anne, in 1688, she was drawn into the mainstream of European great power rivalries, frequently as one of the smaller principals. In that role her influence was occasionally of decisive importance in resisting attempts of a single power under authoritarian rule to dominate Europe. In playing this role she made a valuable contribution at times to the preservation and development of representative government. But her strength being on the ocean rather than on the land, she used it in distant seas during war time against her rivals. Hence even intra-European rivalries at times had the indirect effect of exposing the peoples of Asia, Africa and Latin America to the consequences of quarrels which served no interest of their own, and in which they were used as instruments in the hands of distant outsiders.

Thus, even when Britain was drawn deeply into European politics, her geographical situation, her comparative size among the nations, and the specialised nature of the sources of her strength, all contributed to a tendency to give precedence to overseas rather than to European interests. The outlook of British people as a whole was deeply influenced by this fact. Though Britain is indisputably a European island, many of her people until recently have not felt themselves to be European at all. As we shall see, the results have been unhappy.

Britain’s overseas expansion had led to two markedly different types of economic and strategic interests; the first in the tropical, and the second in the temperate zones. The tropics supplied complementary products much in demand, but they were inhabited by peoples of different races, colours and civilisations. It was these areas which were decolonised after the Second World War. In the temperate overseas lands of North America and Australasia the indigenous peoples were more thinly spread and less advanced in civilisation. They were speedily disposed of by treachery and by the introduction of new diseases, opening the way for large-scale settlement from Britain and other parts of Europe. The British political and administrative traditions were largely carried into these areas. By the Second World War these regions of overseas settlement in the temperate zones had nearly all become independent, but, aided by similarity of languages, they still attracted immigrants of high quality from Britain, and to many British people they are still objects of greater interest and attention than other parts of Europe.

Decolonisation of areas inhabited by settlers of European origin in temperate regions was a simpler matter than decolonisation of tropical areas some of which were densely populated by people of other races and old civilisations. The modern industrial revolution was confined to the temperate zones: it benefited some tropical regions by increasing the demand for tropical raw materials and improving the means of transporting them to distant markets. But this form of international trade was subject to fluctuations which made it a precarious basis for an international livelihood, while, on the other hand, the environment of the tropics has so far proved to be much less favourable than that of the temperate zones for modern industrial development. It was obvious from the beginning that the newly independent areas would be faced with serious economic difficulties in view of the rapid increase in population, the impossibility in many areas of employing it profitably in agriculture and fishing, and the greater difficulties of industrialisation in a tropical environment. Moreover, the prospects of the new indigenous governments, and the choice between authoritarian and representative forms of government, would be affected by economic conditions.

Nevertheless, Britain’s long experience of the peoples of Asia and Africa, and the considerable number of well qualified overseas administrators, traders and professional experts, contributed towards the practical and realistic attitude with which the question of decolonisation was faced after the war. There was a far-sighted recognition of the folly of attempting to coerce any peoples to remain under a foreign overseas rule after a nationalistic consciousness had arisen among them, and an understanding of the future benefits that might be gained by parting company without ill-feeling. The constructive approach to this aspect of Britain’s external relations after the war stood in sharp contrast to her negative attitude in the early post-war years to the rest of Europe and her defeatist attitude towards her future relations with other great powers and especially the super-powers.

Unfortunately British successes in this field were incomplete. Much of Southern Africa, a region part of which is on the margin between temperate and tropical conditions, and to which therefore considerable European settlement had been attracted, was omitted. A serious error was made in 1953 in virtually granting independence in internal affairs to a ‘white’ minority in the Union of South Africa, which created a state composed of a privileged ruling minority of one race and a subjugated majority of another. But this error was not beyond repair. We must turn to an analysis of Britain’s post-war relations among the great powers for the source of other difficulties in her relations with the Third World.

I

Three great powers, by their armaments, their economic resources and their control of trade, had exercised a leading influence in the world in the later stages of the war. The two largest had been forced into the war despite their inadequate preparation, the one by Germany and the other by Japan. Once in it, they were obliged to expand their military strength to the full and by the end of the war they had gone far, in terms of armed strength, towards realising predictions made in the early nineteenth century, that they would be by far the leading world powers by the middle of the twentieth century. The predictions had been a fairly simple deduction from the facts of economic and political geography in a world of growing population. But the war hastened the process by revealing to the governments and peoples themselves their latent power in the world. The inhabitants of two such immense continental areas were – and are – naturally inward looking. Thus, much was heard before the war of the ‘isolationist’¹ attitude of the people of the United States, and the suspicious attitude of Russians towards foreigners.

Regardless of developments in the technology of weapons, these two countries would in any case have taken and maintained a long lead over the rest of the world in armaments. The physical capacity to destroy is related to the magnitude of the total national income together with the possession of the pre-requisites of large-scale industry. Other countries could rival the super-powers in quality but not in quantity.

Allied in war, the super-powers fell apart in peacetime: In accounting for this, much has been made of the differences between them in political doctrines and social systems. The contrasts were great, the differences sharp, but in themselves they are not enough to account for the depth of the rift that followed. They were aggravated by mutual fears arising out of a competitive race to arm with the new deadly weapons which the combined efforts of mainly European-educated scientists and American technicians have produced.

Thus, the first problem in great power politics which British Governments faced, was that of the relations between the superpowers. The prospects had been adversely affected from the beginning by the events which had brought the war to an end in Asia, and which were the climax to what M. Bertrand Goldsmidt, in his lucid and timely work, Les Rivalités Atomiques, 1939–1966 (Paris, Fayard 1967) describes as:

‘… l’étonnante histoire de la creation en trois ans, moyennant une dépense de deux milliard de dollars, du complexe atomique américain de laboratoires et d’usines, employant près de cent cinquante mille travailleurs et ayant la même importance industrielle que toute l’industrie nationale automobile à cette date.’ (p. 103)

The decision to devote such large resources, in scientific and other man-power and in materials, to the production of atomic bombs was based on the belief that Germany was already engaged in the same quest and the fear that she might succeed first. That belief was mistaken and the fear groundless. Here, British ‘intelligence’ on the enemy countries, excellent on many matters, failed. If the truth had been known early enough, such a large diversion of resources into a single project would hardly have been made².

Notwithstanding the essential British role in the project, little systematic thought appears to have been given in British political circles to the fundamental questions of policy which a technically successful outcome of the effort would raise, both in the short and in the long run.

The student in search of the ‘ironies of history’ will find a fertile field here. The project was started with an eye on Germany; it ended with an eye on Japan and Russia. It was started with the aim of creating a means of retaliation against Germany if she succeeded in producing a similar weapon against Britain; it ended by perpretrating a massacre of Japanese civilians, although Japan was known to have no such weapon and was already on the verge of collapse.

Britain faced three issues. First, there was the question whether the atomic bomb should be used against Germany or Japan; second, what policy Britain should adopt towards the international future of atomic energy and its applications; third, to what extent, if at all, Britain should engage in the production of atomic weapons? Obviously the answers to the third question would be influenced by the decisions regarding the second.

On such far-reaching issues it would be reasonable to expect that British Governments would have given careful consideration to each of these questions. For the first time in history an invention, for which they shared responsibility, had appeared which, if developed, would be capable of destroying the population of the world and converting the solid surface of our planet into a poisoned desert, but which, if properly applied, would bring great benefits to mankind. A high order of statesmanship was required before the momentous choices which had to be made.

It was not then, and has not since, been forthcoming.

On the first issue it is sometimes argued that the economic and technological contribution of the United States to the manufacture of the bombs, and the mainly American composition of the fighting forces arrayed against Japan, entitled Washington to decide whether the bombs should be used against Japan. The argument was influential in practice, but spurious in principle, so far as Britain’s role was concerned. Whether Japan gave up the fight in August or, say, in November, was unimportant in comparison with the effects on the whole world in the longer run of using the devastating new weapon against Asian civilians. Yet the British political leaders ‘in the know’ seem neither to have attempted to weigh the consequences of alter native courses that might have been followed, nor to have questioned the ultimate decision of the U.S. political leaders to use the bomb against the Japanese civilian centres. Three courses were open: the first to rely on other weapons, particularly naval blockade, to end the war in the Far East; the second to make a demonstration of the destructive effects of the bombs in an uninhabited zone but in sight of Japanese and other observers; the third to drop the bombs on inhabited centres in Japan. To any adviser with a knowledge of economics and of Japan itself, the first course would have commended itself as obviously the best. But United States political leaders merely asked a small sub-committee to advise on a simple choice between the dropping of the bomb and large-scale military invasion. Nor was there anyone on the sub-committee with an elementary knowledge of economics³.

But this seems to be of only limited relevance. It now appears that from an early stage it was expected in United States circles that the bomb would be used against Japan. On September 18, 1944, reference to this intention appeared in the Hyde Park memorandum; President Roosevelt raised it a few days later in conversations with a U.S. and a British scientific expert⁴. Churchill and Eden, and later, Attlee, accepted it. Thus six months before the end of the war with Germany it was presumed by both American and British political leaders, that the bomb was to be used against an Asian, not a European civilian population.

After the Yalta Conference, and particularly after the fall of Germany, another American incentive, ultimately the decisive one, to the use of the bomb was added. The Russians had taken a stiff position with respect to the eastern European countries which stood between them and Germany. They followed the long established Russian aim of either absorbing their immediate neighbours or maintaining them in a satellite role as buffer states between them ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• INTRODUCTION
• NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS
• THE GREAT GLOBE ITSELF: CONTINUITY AND CHANGE
• BRITAIN’S PLACE IN THE CHANGING STRUCTURE OF INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS
• VIETNAM: THE REAL ISSUES
• INTERNATIONAL ECONOMIC RELATIONS AND THE LARGE INTERNATIONAL FIRM