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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
5 Anglo-American relations in the counter-terrorism propaganda war Introduction This chapter will begin by tracing developing patterns of divergence and convergence in the perceived interests dominant in each country’s leadership. The international system which permitted the emergence of a predominantly Anglo-American ‘war on terror’ was a security environment in transition. Former adversaries now competed in the marketplace of capitalism, with China a rising economic competitor to the US. The period was also characterised by the emerging international position
This book can be described as an 'oblique memoir'. The central underlying and repeated themes of the book are exile and displacement; lives (and deaths) during the Third Reich; mother-daughter and sibling relationships; the generational transmission of trauma and experience; transatlantic reflections; and the struggle for creative expression. Stories mobilised, and people encountered, in the course of the narrative include: the internment of aliens in Britain during the Second World War; cultural life in Rochester, New York, in the 1920s; the social and personal meanings of colour(s). It also includes the industrialist and philanthropist, Henry Simon of Manchester, including his relationship with the Norwegian explorer, Fridtjof Nansen; the liberal British campaigner and MP of the 1940s, Eleanor Rathbone; reflections on the lives and images of spinsters. The text is supplemented and interrupted throughout by images (photographs, paintings, facsimile documents), some of which serve to illustrate the story, others engaging indirectly with the written word. The book also explains how forced exile persists through generations through a family history. It showcases the differences between English and American cultures. The book focuses on the incidence of cancers caused by exposure to radioactivity in England, and the impact it had on Anglo-American relations.
A history of the US nuclear presence in Britain from its origins in 1946 through to the run-down of strategic forces following the Cuba crisis and the coming of the missile age. The book deals with the initial negotiations over base rights, giving a detailed treatment of the informal and secret arrangements to establish an atomic strike capability on British soil. The subsequent build-up is described, with the development of an extensive base network and the introduction of new and more advanced types of bomber aircraft. Relations with the British during these developments are a central focus but tensions within the USAF are also dealt with. The book recounts the emergence of the UK as a nuclear power through prolonged negotiations with the US authorities. It deals in detail with the arrangements for RAF aircraft to carry US nuclear weapons, and the development of joint strike planning. A concluding chapter provides a critical assessment of the UK role in the Anglo-American nuclear alliance.
This book analyses the evolving Anglo-American counter-terror propaganda strategies that spanned the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, as well as reconstruction, between 2001 and 2008. It offers insights into the transformation beyond this period, tracking many key developments as much as possible up to the time of writing (2013) and providing a retrospective on the 'war on terror'. Using empirical data located within multiple spheres, the book draws on sociology, political science and international relations, developing an interdisciplinary analysis of political communication in the international system. It shows how media technologies presented legal, structural and cultural problems for what were seen as rigid propaganda systems defined by their emergence in an old media system of sovereign states with stable target audiences. Propaganda successes and advances were an inconsistent by-product both of malfunction and of relationships, cultures and rivalries, both domestically and between the partners. The differing social relations of planners and propagandists to wider society create tensions within the 'machine', however leaders may want it to function. The book demonstrates that the 'messy' nature of bureaucracy and international systems as well as the increasingly fluid media environment are all important in shaping what actually happens. In a context of initial failures in formal coordination, the book stresses the importance of informal relationships to planners in the propaganda war. This situated Britain in an important yet precarious position within the Anglo-American propaganda effort, particularly in Iraq.
Advertising agencies were important conduits through which the norms of American consumption travelled eastwards across the Atlantic. This book explores the institutional developments in British advertising and the wider shape of the market for advertising services in the 1950s and 1960s. It details the growing internationalism of the advertising industry in Britain, including the increased presence of US-owned agencies in London and deals with the concern with the apparent 'Americanization'of British commerce. Considering its relationship with its parent company, the book explores the dynamics of Anglo-American advertising relations within the J Walter Thompson (JWT) company. It looks at the uses and development of market research within JWT London and allied companies, and examines the techniques that were used to generate ways of understanding the 'mass housewife'. It was the legacy of British documentary film making which helped to give a distinctive British character and feel to many of the early TV commercials produced in the 1950s and 1960s. The book explores the ways in which TV advertising focused on commercials which promoted washing powders, washing machines and convenience foods. It considers the reception of advertising by cultural critics and by those concerned with the broader governance of commercial life and consumption. The advertising people offered a positive and spirited defence of the role they performed and the pleasures of mass consumption in the age of affluence. For critics, advertising was seen as a harbinger of American 'hard sell' techniques of salesmanship within British business.
Soviet policies towards the Congo.18 The next six chapters, arranged chronologically, follow the way the Congo crisis unfolded at the UN in New York, and in the field missions in Léopoldville and Elisabethville (now Lubumbashi), the provincial capital of Katanga. The first chapter establishes why, in 1960, the outbreak of the Congo crisis and its successive internationalisation through UN intervention was an important question for Anglo-American relations. It provides an outline of what the crisis itself was and the format of the UN response. The chapter sketches the
, management and communications. The whole project was overloaded with too many urgent and competing demands – to expand and extend military production, develop new reactor types, and support an arguably over-ambitious civil power programme. Reluctance to publish the full findings of the initial inquiry into the accident also had to do with Anglo-American relations: Harold Macmillan, then Prime Minister, did not want to give the Americans any reason to continue to block collaboration on military applications of atomic energy. His diary note for 30 October 1957 records this
The United States and Anglo-American relations first became central themes in P. G. Wodehouse’s fiction in his 1909 novel Psmith Journalist , in which a visiting Englishman becomes a muckraking journalist in New York City and brings down a slum landlord. That treatment then evolved through Wodehouse’s next four novels, A Gentleman of Leisure (1910), The Prince and Betty (1912), The Little Nugget (1913), and Something Fresh (1915). Gradually, during those novels Wodehouse retreated from the (for him) tough engagement with social problems that featured
with Britain actually served to undermine the American position as it publicly linked the US with the policies of a former colonial power. It also revealed to American officials that the utility of the alliance with Britain was severely limited as its connections and influence over African and Asian officials was increasingly tenuous. This realisation changed the dynamic of Anglo- American relations at the UN as the US gradually sought to assert a more anti-colonial stance and disassociate itself from the European colonial powers in public. This was most clear in