Written by Henry Hill | 30 June 2011
Posted in Comment - Britain

Photography: The Prime Minister's Office

If there's one question that has vexed British policymakers – especially Conservatives – over the decades since the end of the Second World War, it has been how to maintain British influence in a world where we are simply not big enough to compete as a unilateral power in our own right. Various strands of mainstream political thinking in the UK have produced three competing schools of thought: the imperial nostalgics; the atlanticists; and the europhiles. This article will focus on the latter two. The course of time has shown that, while the Commonwealth of Nations is a fine community and trading unit, it is unsuitable for the basis of a 21^st century power bloc. With the imperial sentimentalists undone by Suez and blown away by the winds of change, that left only two courses of action left to Britain: America, or Europe.

It will probably surprise many (and doubtless kill any hope I had of a political career) for me to state that I am a Europhile Conservative. There are several reasons for this, but key is my belief that British influence is better served as a powerful participant in a multi-lateral power than as the enfeebled satellite of a unilateral one. For me, while the Atlanticist outlook is attractive in theory, the reality of it is very different and very off-putting.

Simply put, we are always going to be an 'ally' of the United States, never a partner. The United Kingdom will, as far as the United States is concerned, always fall within the bracket of 'foreign policy', and never that of self-interest. British and American interests might coincide, perhaps on multiple issues or for a long time, but British/European interests will never be American interests. Therein lies the flaw at the heart of the Atlanticist concept.

This should have become apparent in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, with the US' open hostility to the perpetuation of the British Empire. It could not have been made more crystal clear after America pulled the rug out from beneath the Franco-British-Israeli operation in Suez in 1956. It has been further rammed home by the US' reluctance to support Britain's rights over the Falkland's in 1982, or the recent cancellation of missile umbrellas in Poland and Czechia by the Obama administration. All of these examples demonstrate that American and European interests do not coincide, and that Britain suffers alongside her European neighbours when they do not.

What these examples all have in common is that they all touch on the key mistake atlanticists continue to make: the idea that Cold War geopolitics would remain constant in a post-Soviet, increasingly multilateral world. The primacy of Cold War thinking in the examples that fuel the atlanticist ideal is clear: the US did not rebuild Western Europe with the Marshall Plan after WWII out of a sense of brotherhood or charity, but to buttress it against the Soviet Union, and it was the existence of the Soviet Union that led to the creation of that great Atlanticist edifice, NATO. On the other side of the coin, it was Cold War logic that led to America's hesitance during the Falklands War. America in the post-1945 world was fuelled not by an idealistic belief in the brotherhood of free nations, but by an at once ideological and deeply pragmatic determination to deter and destroy global communism. European atlanticists, caught up in the rhetoric of time, failed to realise this.

If one sought the dénouement of this argument, one more recent example fits the bill perfectly: Hillary Clinton's recent call for Britain to negotiate over the future of what she termed the 'Malvinas Islands'. Think about this, particularly in light of President Obama's recent speech reiterating his commitment to the 'special relationship'. The Falkland Islands are a British colony that briefly became an Argentine colony before becoming a British colony again. They have been in British hands for close to two centuries. They were never an integral part of the Argentine nation and - most importantly of all - the Falkland Islanders themselves wish to be British. If the 'special relationship' doesn't involve the defence of British sovereign territory and the right of the Falkland Islanders to self-determination, but instead the support of groundless nationalist irredentism by Argentina, then what on earth does it stand for?

The US cannot be depended upon to back Britain - or Europe - up. That isn't particularly poor behaviour on America's part, they're simply doing what all nations do and looking out for themselves. But atlanticists are delusional to pretend that America has some sort of ideological commitment to an Anglo-Saxon brotherhood or to a broader Occident where such a commitment is not in her selfish interests.

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