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This book addresses the special relationship from the perspective of post-Second World War British governments. It argues that Britain's foreign policy challenges the dominant idea that its power has been waning and that it sees itself as the junior partner to the hegemonic US. The book also shows how at moments of international crisis successive British governments have attempted to re-play the same foreign policy role within the special relationship. It discusses the power of a profoundly antagonistic relationship between Mark Twain and Walter Scott. The book demonstrates Stowe's mis-reading and mis-representation of the Highland Clearances. It explains how Our Nig, the work of a Northern free black, also provides a working-class portrait of New England farm life, removed from the frontier that dominates accounts of American agrarian life. Telegraphy - which transformed transatlantic relations in the middle of the century- was used by spiritualists as a metaphor for the ways in which communications from the other world could be understood. The story of the Bolton Whitman Fellowship is discussed. Beside Sarah Orne Jewett's desk was a small copy of the well-known Raeburn portrait of Sir Walter Scott. Henry James and George Eliot shared a transatlantic literary network which embodied an easy flow of mutual interest and appreciation between their two milieux. In her autobiography, Gertrude Stein assigns to her lifelong companion the repeated comment that she has met three geniuses in her life: Stein, Picasso, and Alfred North Whitehead.
political capital out of it [and] some are calling for a witch hunt. 2 Kenneth Younger, 1951 The Anglo-American ‘special relationship’ was an important dimension of Attlee’s foreign and defence policy. Stemming from wartime collaboration, relations with Washington were fraught and served to provide the Labour government with
This book is based mainly on government sources, namely material from the White House, State Department, Foreign Office (FO), Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO), Prime Minister's Office (PREM) and Cabinet (CAB). Private papers consulted include those of Harold Wilson, Foreign Secretary George Brown and Undersecretary of State George Ball. The book explores a period of the Wilson-Johnson relationship. It considers the seven weeks from Wilson's election until he went to see Lyndon B. Johnson on 7-9 December, a formative period in which Britain cultivated American financial support and which saw pre-summit diplomacy over the NATO Multilateral Force (MLF). The book covers the summit in detail, examining the diplomatic exchanges over the Vietnam War, the British commitment East of Suez and the MLF, as well as the interplay of personality between Wilson and Johnson. By exploring the relationship of the two leaders in the years 1964-1968, it seeks to examine their respective attitudes to the Anglo-American relationship. The book then assesses the significance of an alleged Anglo-American strategic-economic 'deal', Wilson's 'Commonwealth Peace Mission' to Vietnam, and another Wilson visit to Washington. It also considers why the personal relationship between Johnson and Wilson suffered such strain when the Labour government 'dissociated' the UK from the latest American measures in Vietnam. Next, the book addresses the period from August 1966-September 1967, during which Wilson launched an intense but abortive effort to initiate peace negotiations over Vietnam, and London announced plans to withdraw from military bases East of Suez.
This book examines how intangible aspects of international relations – including identity, memory, representation, and symbolic perception – have helped to stimulate and sustain the Anglo-American special relationship. Drawing together world-leading and emergent scholars, this volume breaks new ground by applying the theories and methodologies of the ‘cultural turn’ in diplomatic history to the study of Anglo-American relations. It contends that matters of culture have been far more important to the special relationship than previously allowed in a field hitherto dominated by interest-based interpretations of American and British foreign policies. Fresh analyses of cultural symbols, discourses, and ideologies fill important gaps in our collective understanding of the special relationship’s operation and expose new analytical spaces in which we can re-evaluate its strengths and weaknesses. Designed to breathe new life into old debates about the relationship’s purported specialness, this book offers a multidisciplinary exploration of literary representations, screen representations, political representations, representations in memory, and the roles of cultural connections and constructs that have historically influenced elite decision-making and sculpted popular attitudes toward and expectations of the special relationship. This book will be of particular interest to students and informed readers of Anglo-American relations, foreign policy, and diplomatic history, as well as all those who are interested in the power of culture to impact international relations.
This is the first monograph length study that charts the coercive diplomacy of the administrations of Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford as practiced against their British ally in order to persuade Edward Heath’s government to follow a more amenable course throughout the ‘Year of Europe’ and to convince Harold Wilson’s governments to lessen the severity of proposed defence cuts. Such diplomacy proved effective against Heath but rather less so against Wilson. It is argued that relations between the two sides were often strained, indeed, to the extent that the most ‘special’ elements of the relationship, that of intelligence and nuclear co-operation, were suspended. Yet, the relationship also witnessed considerable co-operation. This book offers new perspectives on US and UK policy towards British membership of the European Economic Community; demonstrates how US détente policies created strain in the ‘special relationship’; reveals the temporary shutdown of US-UK intelligence and nuclear co-operation; provides new insights in US-UK defence co-operation, and revaluates the US-UK relationship throughout the IMF Crisis.
hard to deny the ‘special relationship between photography and humanitarianism’ ( Fehrenbach and Rodogno, 2015 : 4). Advances in technology, such as the portable Kodak introduced by George Eastman in 1888, secured this connection just before and after the turn of the nineteenth century, as images from multiple waves of Indian famine were disseminated (1876–78, 1896–97, 1899–1900) and ‘atrocity photographs’ distributed by The Congo Reform Association (1903–13) generated moral
Culture, both as a focus of analysis and as an applied methodology, has long been marginalized in the study of the Anglo-American special relationship in favor of (neo)realist and functionalist analyses centered upon power, interest, and mutual utility calculations. The product is a substantial (and increasingly conspicuous) historiographical gap in the field, and within the extant literature frequent but unsatisfying allusions to the influence of ‘sentiment’ and anecdotal emotional ties within relations between the United States and the United Kingdom. By
INTRODUCTION Anglo-American relations assumed their modern form as a result of pre-existing sentiment, interests, and shared experiences being given shape through discourse and, especially, their encapsulation in a simple, easily identifiable, and preferential nomenclature: the special relationship. Yet there is an anomaly in play. On the one hand, the term is nowadays instantly recognizable shorthand for Anglo-American relations. On the other, it gained political and popular traction only from the 1950s onwards, after the objective peak of what it is
politically useful national identities and war stories. Their constructions of those identities and narratives helped to shape the collective emotional, patriotic, and gendered experiences of the Second World War among their nations’ people, as well as their nations’ foreign policies. Succeeding generations of national leaders drew upon the stories and gendered national identities that these wartime leaders defined and symbolized as they reconfigured and reaffirmed state-to-state “special relationships” – Anglo-Irish relationships
INTRODUCTION Culture matters – it united Clinton and Blair, then Blair and Bush. They inherited and shared a political discourse, shared memories constructed on the ‘special relationship,’ a shared propensity to lead, a cultural affinity, and personal friendships. When British prime minister Tony Blair entered 10 Downing Street in 1997, his close relations with US presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush began another chapter in the affinity between US and UK leaders built on the famous relationship that Churchill coined as ‘special’ in Fulton, Missouri in