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| Srl | Item |
| 1 |
ID:
123882
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| Publication |
2013.
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| Summary/Abstract |
How do we approach the subject of British grand strategy today? This article seeks a new approach to this question. It argues that there is a gap of grand strategic significance between actually-existing Britain and the Britain its political elites tend to imagine.
The colonial and imperial histories that helped constitute and still shape the contemporary United Kingdom have fallen through this gap. One consequence is a grand strategic vision limited to a choice of partner in decline - Europe or the US. Overlooked are the power political potentialities of post-colonial generations situated in multiple sites at home and abroad.
In search of this potential, we lay the conceptual basis for a strategic project in which the British 'island subject' is replaced by a globally networked community of fate: 'Brown Britain'. This entails reimagining the referent object of British strategy through diaspora economies, diverse histories and pluralized systems of agency.
What might such a post-colonial strategy entail for British policy? We offer initial thoughts and reflect on the often occluded social and political theoretic content of strategic thought.
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| 2 |
ID:
130668
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| 3 |
ID:
138852
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| Summary/Abstract |
Few grand strategies have been more scrutinized than Britain’s decision to appease Nazi Germany. From 1933 to 1938, Britain eschewed confrontation and attempted to settle German demands. However in the five months following the negotiations at Munich, the British abandoned appeasement and embraced a policy of confronting the German state. The roots of both appeasement and confrontation can be found in Germany’s legitimation strategies. Until the Munich crisis, Adolf Hitler justified Germany’s aims with appeals to collective security, equality, and self-determination—norms central to the European system established by the Treaty of Versailles. After Munich, in contrast, German politicians abandoned these legitimation strategies, arguing instead that expansion was justified as a matter of German might, and not international rights. As Britain came to see German demands as illegitimate, so too did they decide this revisionist state was insatiable, impervious to negotiation, and responsive only to the language of force.
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| 4 |
ID:
151837
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| Summary/Abstract |
The Labour Government's decision to withdraw from Britain's overseas bases east of Suez in the 1960s had profound repercussions for British grand strategy. One of the last colonies to be evacuated was the port town of Aden, located on the south-western tip of the Arabian Peninsula. First seized by the East India Company on behalf of the British Empire in 1839, it became a Crown Colony almost a century later in 1937. By 1963, the British government had presided over Aden's entry into the fledgling Federation of South Arabia, a transitional body that was envisaged as a vehicle for independence. Drawing on the Labour's Party's archives, amongst a range of other sources, this article examines the shift in policy within the Labour government on the issue of Aden. It makes the case that, in contrast to the Conservative government's wholehearted support for Britain's tribal allies in South Arabia, Labour hedged its bets by balancing its policy off between the tribal rulers and the new radical nationalist opposition. By refusing to back the fledgling Federation government, Labour, instead, adopted a non-committal stance that would lead to greater strategic inertia in its policy towards the Middle East during the Cold War.
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