Bagehot
Britain’s “special relationship” with America makes it modest, not arrogant
IT WOULD be surprising if David Cameron’s rather bumpy visit to America this week did not elicit some quiet gloating in Paris, Berlin or Madrid. For it is an article of faith in the chancelleries of western Europe that Britain suffers from two related delusions of grandeur—and that this arrogance explains its resistance to deeper European integration on defence and foreign policy.
The first grand delusion involves the “special relationship” with America. Britain’s desire to keep in with the global superpower, it is argued, makes the British into something like Trojan poodles: slavish in Washington (eg, over Iraq) yet cocky in Brussels, and willing to help America divide the EU and rule. The second accusation is that imperial nostalgia blinds Britain to the limits of its sovereign power today. To quote a senior European politician: “your country has never got over the British empire.”
So Mr Cameron’s visit to Washington contained much that was delicious for European observers. True, President Obama granted the prime minister 75 minutes alone in the Oval Office (as counted by a waiting British press corps, on high alert for snubs), and called him by his first name. It is also true that, before he left for America, Mr Cameron mocked the “seemingly endless British preoccupation” with the health of the special relationship. The alliance should be a hard-headed “partnership of choice” serving national interests on both sides, he said.
But Mr Cameron’s pre-emptive coolness could not save him from several torrid moments. For much of his visit, he was treated less like a British prime minister than like a super-spokesman for BP. American senators and reporters peppered him with questions about whether the oil giant—already on the rack for the Gulf of Mexico oil spill—had played any role in the 2009 release from a British prison of Abdelbaset al-Megrahi, the only person convicted of the bombing of Pan Am flight 103 above the Scottish town of Lockerbie in 1988. Mr Cameron was forced on to the defensive. He said Scotland’s devolved executive, not the British government, took the “completely wrong” decision to release Mr Megrahi on the grounds that he was close to death from cancer (Mr Megrahi remains alive in his native Libya, almost a year later). He noted that lots of Americans owned BP shares and were employed by the firm, and pleaded “let us not confuse the oil spill with the Libyan bomber.”
The suspicions of British perfidy were bad enough. Mr Cameron also found Americans waking up to the idea that Britain—with 25% cuts threatened for most Whitehall departments—might be broke. “I gather you flew here on a commercial airliner, business class?” asked a radio interviewer, failing to stifle her giggles.
At last, European allies could be forgiven for thinking, Britain’s Atlanticist obsession is unravelling. Freed from delusions of grandeur, perhaps it will finally stop blocking attempts to pursue a much more ambitious European foreign and security policy.
It is a seductive theory. Alas, it is based on a misunderstanding of the special relationship, which British officials know is not that special at all. For the ministers, military types, envoys and spooks who make the relationship work, proximity to the world superpower has made them painfully realistic more than it has made them arrogant. They know all too well they serve a mid-sized, declining power that only intermittently sways American policy.
What is more, Britain’s upper echelons are not theologically opposed to working with Europe, nor hostile to European values. In the words of one senior figure, a posting in America is the best way to teach the British how “fundamentally European” they are. If the British machine is sceptical about Euro-dreams of bestriding a multipolar world, that is because it has a jump-seat view of American might—and of the money and unity of purpose required to make it work.
Insecurity haunts British practitioners of the Anglo-American relationship. They talk of “niche” capabilities, and being useful: membership of the EU is far from irrelevant here. Britain earns credit with America by working to keep hopes of Turkish accession to the EU alive, or trying (with France) to secure tougher-than-expected European sanctions on Iran.
There have been moments of British hubris, notably around the time of the Iraq invasion. Some British soldiers assumed that service in Northern Ireland made them smarter at fighting insurgencies than the galumphing Americans, who were also thought to be casualty-averse. Seven years on, there is much greater respect for the American military, its staying power, its ability to commit massive resources and readiness to rethink tactics.
There is also realism among most ordinary British voters, who are not filled with imperial nostalgia, whatever Euro-grandees suspect. A recent YouGov poll for Chatham House, a think-tank, did find that Britons prefer New Zealand, Canada and Australia to other foreign countries, by a hefty margin. But some ex-colonies, such as India and Pakistan, were unpopular. To be blunt, most Britons under 40 have only the haziest knowledge of the empire: history is not their strongest suit. The YouGov poll seemed mostly to reflect dislike of the exotic: the next highest-scoring foreign countries were tidy, calm Switzerland, Sweden and the Netherlands.
Thanks to a shared language, it is easy for Britons to take credit for America’s successes (for instance, Hollywood films that feature one or two British stars), while decrying American excesses. But that amounts to the sin of smugness, not dreams of playing Athens to America’s Rome. Standing beside Mr Cameron this week, Mr Obama said his country has “no stronger partner” than Britain. It is a sign that the relationship is finally growing up, perhaps, that few believed he meant very much by this at all.
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