Britain’s Search For A Role

Press, Volume CIX, Issue 32032, 5 July 1969, Page 4

Britain’s Search For A Role

Britain’s Future. By D. Cal-1 leo. Hodder and Stoughton,- 190 pp. Bibliography and Index. the Making of British Foreign Policy. By D. Vital. Allen and Unwin. 11l pp. Bibliography and Index.

It is now six years since Dean Acheson made his famous jibe about Britain having lost an empire and hot yet found a role. Many people may feel that in the intervening period Britain has made little progress with the search. She seems to be resigned to knocking ineffectually at a door marked E.E.C. which has hitherto remained as firmly closed as it was six years ago, While her relative economic, military and political strength has gradually ebbed away. Calleo’s "Britain’s Future” is an examination by a young American political scientist who is now a consultant with the State Department of the possible roles which Britain might adopt and of the reasons why none of them has so far appeared to provide a satisfactory alternative. He takes as his starting point Churchill’s celebrated doctrine of the three circles of British foreign policy, viz., that Britain should remain simultaneously a great European power, the centre of a world Commonwealth and the special ally of the United States. • He shows how through the fifties and early sixties each of these roles became harder for Britain to Play. As regards Europe in the late fifties, the commitment of the continental European powers to political unity and to an independent stance within the Atlantic Alliance developed so rapidly that the price of remaining a “good European power” swiftly escalated. Britain’s leaders were quite unprepared for this development Calleo quotes for example the comments of a distinguished Canadian economist on the insularity of other British counterparts, manifested in their unshakeable assumption that the desire to create a unified economy in Europe was “not a reasonable policy objective, but a delusion whose possessor should be treated with due gentleness.” By the time that Britain was prepared to recognise the increased price of commitment to Europe in the sixties the chance was gone. As regards the special relationship with the United States, developments from Suez onwards showed the declining importance which the Americans were prepared to give to an exclusive relationship with Britain. As regards the Commonwealth, the centrifugal tendencies which were becoming so apparent at this time precluded the possibility that the Commonwealth would provide a suitable alternative base of British power and influence. Calleo discusses the chance of reviving any of these three roles as a basis for future British policy and his conclusions are uniformly pessimistic. So far, he suggests, the problems in each of Britain’s possible roles seem so formidable that it is difficult not to entertain the thought that none of them will in the end be chosen. It might easily be said, for example, that joining the Common Market’s European bloc will require not only economic costs too great to bear, but a reorientation of Britain’s world strategy and allegiances too fundamental to be -probable. Joining any genuinely significant Atlantic grouping, on the other band, Would seem to involve the Unpleasing prospect of , increasing submission to American policy without any satisfac-

■tory means to influence it. As ■ for the Commonwealth, while ■ at presents opportunities, its extreme heterogeneity and , fragility has meant that it solution to Britain’s “search solution to Britain’s search for a new role.”

Yet the only alternative would appear to be the continuation of the balancing act of the 1950 s between the three circles but in growing isolation from each one of them. The result, Calleo fears, could only be “a slow if comfortable decline accomplished by a general withdrawal into insular re-occupation,” unless of course the “elusive alternative” of joining the E.E.C. becomes a realistic possibility. Mr Calleo presents no easy solutions to the problem though his sympathies are clearly most closely engaged by the European alternative. The book ends with a sad little epilogue on the failure of leadership and political imagination in modern Britain. Some of the difficulties of foreign policy formation are emphasised by Dr Vital in “The Making of British Foreign Policy.” This is a much more academic kind of book. Dr Vital is concerned to evolve a theoretical or analytical framework within which the study of foreign policy formation may be undertaken. It is, he suggests, “quite fruitless to attempt to analyse a complex subject of this kind with all its intricate political, institutional and sociological ramifications except on the basis of some view of what is or is not significant, what does or does not constitute a valid explanation ... and what specific phenomena may properly be selected out of the mass of observable data by way of illustration and example." Vital distinguishes four main problems in the conduct of foreign policy—the problem of comprehending the external environment of the State, defining its goals, formulating the strategy of achieving these goals and finally implementing the strategy. All these stages involve administrative and intellectual challenges of the greatest difficulty. “The task of formulating a valid and relevant picture of the

foreign scene is often likened to that of fitting together the pieces of the jig-saw puzzle. But it is not nearly as simple as that. If the simile is to serve at all, it must be remembered that only a fraction of the pieces are available at any given time, that none fit smoothly into others, that the player must match the pieces according to a conception of the whole that is of his own invention and that no two players will ever arrive at precisely the same result.”

He then examines Britain’s foreign policy formation in the light of this model. He examines the range of alternatives open to Britain and concludes that it is precisely the variety of choices and the marginal differences between the advantages that may be expected to accrue from taking up one option rather than another that make the intellectual and imaginative demands oh British policy-makers so great. He looks at the British policymaking machinery and shows how the inevitable process of consultation and coordination between the different Government departments leads to an essentially pragmatic approach, geared to the handling of problems as they arise rather than to the longterm definition of goals and objectives. This in his view explains some of both the strengths and weaknesses of British foreign policy. “After all, the pragmatic approach implies caution, protection, keeping the opponent at bay and the holes in the dyke plugged. . . . Such a posture naturally militates against clarity of position and commitments and encourages attempts to conciliate, to play for safety, and to prefer the familiar and the controllable.”

Dr Vital's book may help to throw some light on the problems raised by Mr Calleo but some people may feel that bis model-building approach is unnecessarily complicated and obscures more than it clarifies.