British Foreign Policy, National Identity, and Neoclassical Realism by Hadfield-Amkhan Amelia;

Author:Hadfield-Amkhan, Amelia; [Hadfield-Amkhan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Incorporated
Published: 2010-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

Case Study Premise: Political and

Cultural Discourse and Policy Making

The linkages between the public, popular culture, the press, Parliament, and policy now appear concrete. Morgenthau’s maxim that “the kinds of interests determining political action in a particular period of history depend upon the political and cultural context within which foreign policy is formulated” is both vindicated and visible in 1909.160 From 15 October 1908 to the passage of the 1910 “four-plus-four” Naval Estimate, the narrative of identity worked to drive home the need for a policy of eight additional dreadnoughts. The alarm in Parliament, combined with the hysteria in the press, and the centrality of cultural forms that reflected growing national unease over naval weakness constituted the national narrative. Coalesced within the unitary discourse of anxiety, these elements are also causally linked to the reactive policy response of Asquith, Grey, and McKenna.

By 1908, “only one ingredient was needed . . . to convert public uneasiness as well as uneasiness at Whitehall into a first-class scare” with tangible policy results.161 Marder identifies that ingredient as “intelligence of German acceleration.”162 This, however, was a secondary process entirely contingent on a prior and permanent blow to English nation-navy identity: the dismemberment of the Two-Power Standard due to the introduction of the Dreadnought. English identity lies at the heart of all such alarms; what had been disturbed was the surety of its principal association between naval supremacy and national greatness. The loss of naval preeminence “inflamed the long-growing public uneasiness” and gave political voice to the public narrative, “strengthen[ing] their real opposition” into demanding “eight and we won’t wait.”163

To clarify, the surface hysteria of the navy scare is representative of the lack of national self-assuredness and its associated links with the German Other. The roots of the scare itself are however entirely focused upon the prior diminishment of the foundational naval identity at work within the English Self and the security concerns of the British state. A careful reading of the newspapers of the day makes this abundantly clear. In 1904, the Times had recorded that “[n]o phantom as to German aggression haunts us; but the consciousness we feel that it is our duty to watch the progress of German naval power, and to consider the possible purposes for which it might be used.”164 English identity, as examined in chapter 1, was at this point based upon perceptions of tacit, assumed superiority and an ability to exercise national duty by casting a watchful if isolationist eye from the sidelines. However, as illustrated, a change within the domestic identity rather than within systemic forces is equally capable of turning observations of equanimity regarding a rival into sentiments of alarm.

As examined in chapter 3, the greatest threat to identity formation is “a comprehensive alternative identity, an ‘other’ that can plausibly be understood as a replacement.”165 A threat such as that experienced by Edwardian England in the dramatic increase of the German navy represents a clear oppositional threat, an obvious juxtaposition of “self” and “other.” However, one must question the validity of this easy opposition.

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