Vol. 24 - Spring 2019

SPRING2019

EDUCATION BUILDS PEACE, RIGHT? THE COMPLICATED 1 ANSWER FOR TODAY'S WORLD Professor Elisabeth King

WHY ELECTIONS FAIL: EXPLORING THE LIMITATIONS OF ELECTION MONITORING AND DEMOCRACY PROMOTION THE EFFECT OF CHINESE FOREIGN AID ON CIVIL CONFLICT IN SUB SAHARAN AFRICA: A STUDY AT THE SUBNATIONAL LEVEL Sabrina He

AFTERLIFE OF THE EMPIRE: "GLOBAL BRITAIN" AND THE CRISIS OF LIBERAL INTERNATIONALISM Andrew Spohn

journal of politics

Xan Northcott

& international affairs

Volume XXIV

Spring 2019

Journal of Politics & International Affairs Spring 2019 • Volume XXIV New York University

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Spring 2019 • Volume XXIV Journal of Politics & International Affairs New York University

spring 2019 • VOLUME XXIV

SPRING 2019 • VOLUME XXIV Notes On The Contributors

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Education Builds Peace, Right? The Complicated Answer for Today's World

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Why Elections Fail: Exploring the Limitations of Election Monitoring and Democracy Promotion

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The Effect of Chinese Foreign Aid on Civil Conflict in Sub Saharan Africa: A Study at the Subnational Level

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Afterlife of the Empire: "Global Britain" and the Crisis of Liberal Internationalism

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Professor Elisabeth King

Xan Northcott

Sabrina He

Andrew Spohn

This publication is published by New York University students. The university is not responsible for its contents.

SPRING 2019 • VOLUME XXIV

STATEMENT OF PURPOSE The Journal of Politics & International Affairs at New York University is a student-run publication that provides a forum for outstanding student work on relevant, thought-provoking topics in the domestic and international landscape, including research in political science, economics, history, and regional studies.

We believe that the student theses published biannually in the Journal—chosen and edited rigorously by our editorial staff—are legitimate and valuable examples of the intellectual growth of politically-minded students and writers at New York University.

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Articles published in the Journal of Politics & International Affairs do not represent an agreement of beliefs or methodology, and readers are not expected to concur with all the opinions and research expressed in these pages. Instead, we hope that these pieces are able to inform and inspire dialogue in the NYU community by addressing a wide variety of topics and opinions.

Archival volumes of the journal may be found online at

JPIANYU.ORG

EDITOR-IN-CHIEF Isa Ananya Spoerry MANAGING EDITORS Cynthia Tong Hakan Stanis CHIEF OPERATING OFFICER Janet Lee ASSOCIATE EDITOR Jessica Steele EDITORS Gian Marco Candolo Phoenix Chen Remie Arena Roshni Rangwani Rob Loeser Grace Buechler Alan Sun DESIGN EDITOR Phoenix Chen COVER PHOTO Cynthia Tong WEB DIRECTOR Hakan Stanis OUTREACH DIRECTOR Jacob Steel SPECIAL THANKS Center for Student Life Emily Anderson Nanci Healy Gail Ader-Fecci Audrey Underwood-Williams

A Note From The Editors Once a semester, our Journal publishes the most excellent submissions from student writers across New York University. The pieces consistently reflect the unique perspectives held by NYU students on the most salient events of our times, as well as previously examined issues that require a new critical focus.

This edition of the Journal features an original piece written by Dr. Elisabeth King, Associate Professor of International Education and Politics. Her meditations on the intersections between education, peace, and conflict reflect well our mission to disseminate knowledge generated by NYU students in the interest of contributing to a larger discourse. As such, this issue covers several timely topics ranging from the flaws of election monitoring systems, to the widespread influence of Chinese foreign aid, to the relationship between "Global Britain" and liberal internationalism. As Professor King explains, education plays a significant role in every global matter. We hope this edition of the Journal may serve as one particular form of education through the unique lenses of our writers. We are confident you will enjoy reading these brilliant student pieces as much as we enjoyed selecting, discussing, and editing them.

To keep up with the Journal or get involved, we hope you will follow us on our website (jpianyu.org), Facebook, and Instagram. As always, we encourage you to send us your incredible research, papers, and theses. We will be waiting to see what you write next.

Isa Ananya Spoerry, Editor-in-Chief Cynthia Tong, Print Managing Editor

Want to Write for the Journal?

Our editorial staff accepts submissions for consideration throughout the year. To submit your work, or to inquire about being published on our website, email jpia.club@nyu.edu.

Pitch the print Journal with your original essay or thesis: Works that are published by the print Journal tend to be longer than 5,000 words or 20 pages, double spaced.

Submissions are vetted based on their originality, academic strength, and syntax. Works that are chosen are then polished by several staff editors. The Journal is published every December and May. Submissions from NYU students of any school are welcome.

Pitch JPIA's online editorial forum: Our website publishes short blogs that are often around 500 words and feature unique, and creative insights into political issues, current events, and international affairs. We also welcome long-form, reported pieces.

These are typically 1,000-2,000 words, allowing writers to explore more complex topics with a heavier research component than the blogs. When pitching please keep your idea to a general abstract, and offer us an example of your written work.

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NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS PROFESSOR ELISABETH KING

Elisabeth King is Associate Professor of International Education and Politics at New York University and Founding Director of NYU’s interdisciplinary undergraduate minor in Peace and Conflict Studies (see: https://steinhardt.nyu.edu/ash/pacs). Her research interests include peacebuilding, development, and education in ethnically diverse and conflict-affected contexts.

She is the author of From Classrooms to Conflict in Rwanda, named an Outstanding Academic Title by the American Libraries Association. www.elisabethking.ca

XAN NORTHCOTT

Xan recently graduated from NYU CAS, Summa Cum Laude, in politics, economics and Chinese. He is currently Program Coordinator at Friendship Ambassadors Foundation, with a focus on the Foundation’s flagship conference, The Youth Assembly, which is one of the largest gatherings and networks of young leaders and social entrepreneurs in the world. Previously he has worked in strategic communications at the United Nations Development Programme, training students in practical engagement with politics at Generation Citizen, researching at advisory firm Invest Africa, and coordinating campaign activity for the Remain Campaign during the EU referendum in his home country, the U.K. Xan is passionate about politics and sustainable development, particularly regarding the activity and inclusion of youth, and hopes his research can spark new thinking on governance and elections in developing countries.

SABRINA HE

Sabrina He is a master's candidate at Columbia Journalism School. She profiles start-ups and entrepreneurs with a focus on how the Chinese tech industry is impacting emerging markets in Southeast Asia. She is fluent in French, English and Mandarin Chinese, having lived in Montreal, Beijing, Vancouver, Hong Kong and New York. As a senior at NYU, Sabrina launched a studentrun newsroom (www.irinsider.org) with 4000+ subscribers that publishes 5-7 articles seven days a week.

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ANDREW SPOHN

Andrew Spohn is a 2018 graduate of New York University’s Graduate School of Arts and Science, where he received a master’s in International Relations. Andrew also received his bachelor’s from NYU’s College of Arts and Science in 2017 with a major in European Studies and a minor Philosophy. His research interests focused on transatlantic relations, liberal political theory, the historical emergence of our contemporary world order and the United Nations, issues of national identity in international affairs, and Brexit. As such, he completed internships at the U.S. Embassy in London and U.S. Mission to the United Nations during his time at NYU to supplement his studies. Originally from Northeastern Ohio, Andrew continues to live in Manhattan and currently works as a paralegal at an investment management firm.

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Education Builds Peace, Right? The Complicated Answer for Today’s World Elisabeth King

Elisabeth King is Associate Professor of International Education and Poltics at New York University and Founding Director of NYU’s interdisciplinary undergraduate minor in Peace and Conflict Studies (see: https://steinhardt.nyu.edu/ash/pacs). Her research interests include peacebuilding, development, and education in ethnically diverse and conflict -affected contexts. She is the author of From Classrooms to Conflict in Rwanda, named an Outstanding Academic Title by the American Libraries Association. www.elisabethking.ca

In 2015, the United Nations ran an open survey called MyWorld. Nearly ten million people from around the world voted online to rank sixteen essential needs. From a list including jobs, health care, affordable food, an honest and responsive government, action on climate change, and so on, what ranked first in every age category from countries that rank lowest on the Human Development Index (HDI) to the very highest? “Getting a good education”. A broad spectrum of people across the globe put enormous faith and hope in education. These aspirations for education are also popular in the peace and conflict arena. Nobel Peace Prize winner Nelson Mandela, South Africa’s anti-apartheid leader and first black President, is often quoted for having called education “the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world” (1990). Likewise, the world’s youngest Nobel Laureate, Malala Yousafzai—who was shot by the Pakistani Taliban on her way to school in retaliation for her activism—advocates “Let us pick up our books and our pens, they are the most powerful weapons” (2013). The last panel on display at Rwanda’s main genocide memorial echoes this same belief. It says: “Education has become our way forward” (King 2014, p.1).

Despite its importance, education is inadequately studied by scholars and students of political science, peace and conflict studies, and international relations. Some years ago, I counted the number of articles that referred to education in some of the top journals in these fields1. I found that from 1994 to 2010, fewer than 1 percent of articles substantively referred to education or schooling in their title, 1 I focused on Journal of Peace Research and Journal of Conflict Resolution, arguably the two top peace and conflict focused journals, and the five journals published by the International Studies Association (International Studies Quarterly, International Studies Review, International Studies Perspectives, Foreign Policy Analysis, and International Political Sociology).

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keywords, or abstract (King 2014). I also found that when scholars in these fields do write about education, the focus is usually on education in the goal of peace. When education and conflict are written about in concert, the focus is usually on the disruption to education wrought by conflict. I argue, however, that additional relationships between education and violent conflict need also be considered to effectively deploy education as a tool of positive social change. In this short article, I present four key relationships between education, peace, and conflict (see also King 2011, King forthcoming), illustrate with contemporary examples, and conclude by suggesting some ways that readers may meaningfully move forward knowledge about education, peace and conflict.

Education Can Prevent Violent Conflict and Build Peace

Consistent with Mandela and Yousafzai’s quotes above, it is widely held in scholarship and practice that education can help prevent violent conflict and contribute to (re)building peace in its aftermath. There are two main ways in which education is theorized to play these roles. First, with educational access, schooling can provide a sense of normalcy to students amidst the unpredictability of conflict (Winthrop and Kirk 2008). It can signal to people that the government cares about them and their futures (Thyne 2006). Equitable access to education for different ethnic or religious groups, or people from different regions, can reduce the horizontal inequalities that often increase grievances between groups (Stewart 2005). Educational attainment can increase the opportunity costs of participating in violence, meaning youth would have too much to lose to involve themselves in violence (Collier and Hoeffler 2004; Humphreys and Weinstein 2008). Second, educational content can have positive effects on children and youth’s attitudes and behaviors. Such educational content can include peace education, human rights education, civics education and the like (McGlynn et al. 2009; Bajaj and Hantzopoulos 2016). Individuals, non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and governments are so committed to the importance of education that they often call for its inclusion in post-conflict peace agreements (Dunlop and King forthcoming). While much of the literature I cite is written in reference to intra- or inter-state war, the themes resonate with other types of violence as well, including terrorism, where education plays an important role in discussions of countering violent extremism.

Violent Conflict Can Disrupt Education

That wars disrupt access to education is also well-recognized. Access to education in conflictaffected contexts is much lower than global and national averages. Children and youth in conflict-affected countries are 30 percent less likely to complete primary school and 50 percent less likely to complete secondary school compared to their peers in countries that are not affected by conflict (Education Cannot Wait 2017). In a recent study with two New York University (NYU) PhD candidates, Emily Dunlop and Jo Kelcey, alongside University of Nairobi Professor Caroline Ndirangu, we studied access to secondary education in conflict-affected contexts across sub-Saharan Africa. We found that girls have lower access and completion rates compared to boys, and that ethnic marginalization, poverty, and living away from urban centers also compounds already-significant challenges of access and completion in conflict-affected

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countries. Conflict is also particularly disruptive to internally displaced persons and refugees whose access to schooling is typically much lower than non-refugee populations (King et al. 2019). According to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), for example, two-fifths of Syrian refugee children of school-age are not in schools (Karasapan and Shah 2018).

Schools Can Be Targets in Violent Conflict

Despite the United Nations Security Council (2011) recognition of “schools as safe havens for children”, attacks on education are common. The Global Coalition to Protect Education from Attack raises awareness about attacks on students and teachers at schools and universities, recruitment of schoolchildren into war, the use of educational facilities by armed groups, and more. It reports that between 2013 and 2017, upwards of 12,700 attacks on education occurred in more than seventy countries (GCPEA 2018).

The 2014 kidnapping of 276 female students from a secondary school in northern Nigeria by Boko Haram—an extremist group whose name translates as “western education” or “non-Islamic education” is “forbidden”—is a poignant example amidst, unfortunately, many others.

Education Can Contribute to Conflict

That education can contribute to conflict is the least well-recognized of the four relationships discussed here. Indeed, when I speak about my book From Classrooms to Conflict in Rwanda (King 2014), in which I study the ways education can, and has, contributed to underlying intergroup conflict in Rwanda from the colonial period to the present, audience members often endeavor to correct my title with comments like “You mean from ‘Classrooms to Peace,’ don’t you?” In fact, schooling can contribute to conflict in a number of ways. In parallel with the ways that I organized education’s potential contribution to peace in the first subsection above—via structure and content of schooling —I study who has access to schools, how schools are set up, and as what is taught in schools. In my book, I show that different ethnic groups —Hutus or Tutsis— had better educational access at different times in Rwanda’s history depending on which group was in power, prompting important grievances. I also show the historical narrative taught in class invoked stigmatization and stereotypes with exclusive identities that focused on differences between Hutu and Tutsi Rwandans (see also King 2017).

Education does not only contribute to conflict through national or locally-provided schooling.

In her book, Education for Conflict or Peace in Afghanistan (2014), my NYU colleague Professor Dana Burde recounts Cold War-era American support for pro-mujahideen textbooks aimed to mobilize Afghan children against the Soviet Union. In a chapter called “Jihad Literacy”, she explains how a United States Agency for International Development (USAID)-funded project implemented by the University of Nebraska created textbooks, teaching the alphabet with examples including “T is for topak [gun]” (p.77).

The ways in which education can contribute to conflict are often subtle. In my work in Rwanda, for example, I emphasize that education is not “a smoking gun” (King 2014, p. 164) in directly teaching hatred or mobilizing students to violent action. Indeed, I often learn about other not obvious, but

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potentially destructive, educational processes from people who read my book or hear me talk about my work. When I was recently teaching at NYU Abu Dhabi, for instance, I had the opportunity to meet with a group of schoolteachers from across the Emirates. One approached me after listening to me speak about the issues in this article and told me that at the elementary school where she teaches in Dubai, when it is time for Arabic language lessons, the teachers call the students “Arabs come here”, “non-Arabs, come here” to direct them to their next classes. She admitted she had not thought about this practice through peace and conflict lenses before—explaining they did not mean “Arabs” so much as Arabic speakers—and that she and her fellow teachers did not mean to divide the class in such exclusive or identity-based ways.

In thinking about the potential for education to contribute to conflict, though, she left tasking herself to urgently speak about the potentially deleterious nature of this practice with her colleagues.

Conclusion

Given education’s importance to people around the world and the varied ways in which education and conflict intersect, there exists a strong case for deeper learning and research centered around these concepts. There is far more we need to understand in each of these relationships. Readers here at NYU will find a number of opportunities to become directly involved in this pursuit. Undergraduate readers may be particularly interested in NYU’s cross-school interdisciplinary minor in Peace and Conflict Studies (PACS) that includes restricted electives focused on education, peace, and conflict. Graduate-level readers may take such classes offered through NYU Steinhardt’s International Education program. NYU is also home to the Journal on Education in Emergencies that publishes articles, podcasts, and book reviews on education in contexts of conflict, crisis, and other humanitarian emergencies. All readers may find these resources of interest and NYU students can also look out for opportunities to intern with the journal.

Finally, readers should stay attuned to the many events related to education, peace and conflict around New York City at the United Nations, United Nations International Children's Emergency Fund (UNICEF), and numerous NGOs. Education can and should “become our way forward”, as the Rwandan genocide memorial museum attests, but in a way that involves critical examination of the links to both peace and conflict.

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References

Bajaj, M. and M. Hantzopoulos (eds). (2016). Peace Education: International Perspectives. London: Bloomsbury.

Burde, D. (2014). Schools for Conflict or for Peace in Afghanistan. New York: Columbia University Press.

Collier, P. and A. Hoeffler. (2004). Greed and Grievance in Civil War. Oxford Economic Papers, 56(4), 563-595.

Dunlop, E. and E. King. (forthcoming). “The Structure and Content of Education in African Peace

Agreements from 1975-2011”.

Global Coalition to Protect Education from Attack. (2018). Education Under Attack 2018: A Global Study

of Attacks on Schools, Universities, Their Students and Staff, 2013-2017. New York: GCPEA. Humphreys, M. and J. Weinstein. (2008). Who Fights? The Determinants of Participation in Civil War.

American Journal of Political Science, 52(2), 436-455.

Journal on Education in Emergencies. Available at: http://www.ineesite.org/en/journal Karasapan, O. and S. Shah. (2018). Syrian Refugees and the schooling challenge. Washington DC:

Brookings. Available at: https://www.brookings.edu/blog/future-development/2018/10/23/

syrian-refugees-and-the-schooling-challenge/ King. E. (2011). “The Multiple Relationships between Education and Conflict: Reflections of Rwandan

Teachers and Students.” In Karen Mundy and Sara Dryden-Peterson (editors), Educating

Children in Conflict Zones: A Tribute to Jackie Kirk. New York: Teachers College Press, 137 151.

King, E. (2014). From Classrooms to Conflict in Rwanda. New York: Cambridge University Press.

King, E.( 2017). “What Framing Analysis can teach us about History Textbooks, Peace and Conflict: The

Case of Rwanda” In Michelle Bellino and James Williams (editors), (Re Constructing Memory:

Education, Identity and Conflict. Rotterdam, Boston & Taipei: Sense Publishers.

King, E., E. Dunlop, J. Kelcey, and C. Ndirangu .(2019). Secondary Education for Youth Affected by

Humanitarian Emergencies and Protracted Crises. Toronto: Mastercard Foundation.

King, E. (forthcoming). “Education, Conflict and Peace”. In Manish Thapa and Scott Nicholas Romaniuk

(editors), Palgrave Encyclopedia of Global Security Studies. London: Springer Nature.

Mandela, N. (1990). Speech at Madison Park High School in Boston. June 23.

McGlynn, C., M. Zembylas, Z. Berkerman and T. Gallagher (eds). (2009). " Peace Education in Conflict

and Post-Conflict Societies: Comparative Perspectives. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

Stewart, F. (2005). Policies towards Horizontal Inequalities in Post-Conflict Reconstruction. CRISE

Working Paper.

Thyne, C. (2006). ABC’s, 123’s and the Golden Rule: The Pacifying Effect of Education on Civil War,

1980-1999. International Studies Quarterly, 50(4), 733-754. United Nations Security Council.

(2011). Resolution 1998. Available at: http://www.securitycouncilreport.org/atf/cf/%7B65

BFCF9B-6D27-4E9C-8CD3-CF6E4FF96FF9%7D/CAC%20S%20RES%201998.pdf Winthrop, R. and J. Kirk. (2008). “Learning for a Bright Future: Schooling, Armed Conflict, and Children’s

Well-Being”. Comparative Education Review 52(4): 639-661.

Yousafzai, M. (2013). Speech to the United Nations. July 12.

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Why Elections Fail: Exploring the Limitations of Election Monitoring and Democracy Promotion Xan Northcott

Since the beginning of the 20th Century, there has been a movement by the foremost democratic countries to help spread and foster democracy around the world, particularly through the monitoring and observation of elections. This process, whereby a country, NGO or international body sends a delegation to observe and report on elections, was designed to track election fraud, and so to help the international community punish or reward countries based on the quality of their elections. However, election monitoring has seen much criticism, and many countries are plagued to this day by corrupt elections.

Hence, this paper examines the ability of election monitoring to improve election quality and explores factors that may hinder its success, such as adapted forms of electoral cheating and external political or foreign aid relationships.

It finds evidence that the effects of election monitoring are limited at best.

Furthermore, there is some indication that governments change their methods of cheating to avoid criticism by monitors, while in certain cases also receiving benefits in the form of aid or international praise in return for allowing monitoring.

Introduction

Since the beginning of the 20th century, and especially since the 1980s, the world’s foremost democratic countries have made a concerted effort to support the growth and consolidation of democracy around the world. Various techniques have been deployed such as: granting aid for development plans, providing assistance for peace and security interventions, and especially for monitoring elections. This is the process whereby a country, NGO, or international organization sends a delegation to observe an election in a country where potential misconduct is suspected.

This process was designed to detect election fraud, allowing the international community to punish or reward cases for the quality of their elections. By tracking their electoral progress tracked, countries could therefore be incentivized to democratize. Much store has been set in these election monitors. They are the foremost effort by the international community to improve democracies directly.

However, the success of election monitoring, along with other forms of democracy promotion,

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has long been and continues to be questioned. Though the 1990s saw many countries move towards an increasingly democratic system, this has not been true of the 21st century, with many countries still facing a flawed democratic system and severely corrupted elections.

This paper reassesses the effectiveness of election monitoring and finds evidence that might help explain why its success in democracy promotion efforts are limited. Using data on nearly all governmental elections from 1975 to 2012, this research provides evidence that, though election monitoring does seem to have an effect in certain circumstances, its overall impact appears limited and not always positive.

I then explore why this is the case by examining the fraud that takes place during monitored elections and the political relations and foreign aid receipts of countries where elections are monitored.

Here, evidence indicates that governments try to change their cheating tactics to avoid condemnation by monitors, and that judgments on elections are influenced by political relations and aid flows.

Overall, the research strongly questions the effectiveness of election monitoring, which has wide implications. If it is the case that election monitoring is not improving elections and does not serve as a neutral assessment to help build democratic credibility, this signals a significant failure of a cornerstone of modern democracy promotion efforts.

Background

Since the beginning of the 20th century, when US President Woodrow Wilson declared that we should “make the world safe for democracy”1, the world’s foremost democratic countries have claimed to promote democracy around the globe. Believing democracy to be the best and most morally upstanding form of governance, several countries—such as the United States and countries of Western Europe, as well as leading international organizations such as the United Nations and the European Union—have made agreements to support the growth and consolidation of democratic institutions. The UN’s 1948 Declaration of Human Rights specifically called for ‘periodic and genuine elections’2, and to this day, ‘more than 100 countries have received electoral assistance from the UN’3alone. Measures to improve democracy have been taken, such as election monitoring, military interventions, and the granting of aid money towards civil society groups and development plans. However, the effectiveness and authenticity of such programs have long been and remain in question.

During the Cold War, democracy promotion efforts were particularly seen as having “countervailing interests, both security-related and economic,” sometimes being “deliberately used to

1 Bjornlund, Eric. Beyond Free and Fair: Monitoring Elections and Building Democracy. Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004. Page 1.

2 Bjornlund, Eric. Beyond Free and Fair: Monitoring Elections and Building Democracy. Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004. Page 21.

3 Norris, Pippa. Why Electoral Integrity Matters. Cambridge University Press, 2014. Page 81

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obscure a contrary reality.”4 The U.S. “maintained friendly relationships with dictatorships”5 and worked more to support any government that would denounce communism and the USSR than to genuinely spread democracy. However, in the 1990s there was expectation that with no major power or ideology to rival the United States, democracy would begin to spread and flourish ubiquitously. Correspondingly, specific democracy promotion efforts massively increased. U.S. President Reagan had already “made democracy promotion an explicit goal of American foreign policy, and an increasingly important part of foreign aid”6 in the 1980s. However, with no major power to contend with in the 1990s, “there was a mood of heady optimism about the inevitable spread of democracy through elections, symbolizing the ‘end of history.’”7

During that decade, international institutions “renewed and expanded their commitments not only to democratic values but also to international engagement to support democracy.”8 In the United States, the budget for democracy programs increased 500% from 1990 to 2003.9 This increase led to the current situation where 11% of US aid goes towards democracy promotion, 38% towards development projects, 35% towards military aid, and 16% towards humanitarian aid.10 With the US foreign aid budget currently at around $50 billion per year, this means some $5 billion per year goes towards democracy promotion. Much of this funding is “channeled through USAID (the US Agency for International Development), which parcels out the money to NGOs, including the Carter Center, the National Democratic Institute, the International Republican Institute, and the National Endowment for Democracy”11, who are some of the leading organizers of election monitoring.

Accordingly, election monitoring rapidly increased in the 1990s, becoming an international norm for countries facing risk of election fraud, and was predicted to cause significant improvements in election quality and democracy. Typically, a monitoring delegation sends representatives a few weeks before an election, with a larger delegation arriving for the election day and some staying on after the election.

They write up a thorough report of the election that discloses any evidence of malpractice, intimidation, or manipulation witnessed. These reports are released to the public, so that the international community can draw up a response: either commending a country on a successful election or condemning it if there is evidence of malpractice. The implementation of increased or decreased political and economic ties 4 Carothers, Thomas. Aiding Democracy Abroad. Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 1999.

5 Carothers, Thomas. Aiding Democracy Abroad. Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 1999.

6 Bjornlund, Eric. Beyond Free and Fair: Monitoring Elections and Building Democracy. Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004. Page 1.

7 Norris, Pippa. Why Electoral Integrity Matters. Cambridge University Press, 2014. Page 81 8 Bjornlund, Eric. Beyond Free and Fair: Monitoring Elections and Building Democracy. Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004. Page 21.

9 Finkel, Steven et al. The Effects of U.S. Foreign Assistance on Democracy Building, 1990–2003. Cambridge University Press, 2007.

10 McBride, James. How does the U.S. Spend Its Foreign Aid? Council on Foreign Relations, 2017.

11 Bjornlund, Eric. Beyond Free and Fair: Monitoring Elections and Building Democracy. Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004. Page 1.

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could then be used to reward or punish individual countries, gradually building an incentive to improve democracy.

By 2004, 81.5% of elections in emerging democracies were monitored12. This expansion of election monitoring saw a corresponding increase in democracy, though the connection between the two is still unclear. Since the 1990s, the efforts of democracy promotion still seem to be limited in their success.

Though democracy has spread and is now at least the nominal form of governance in most countries, the early 2000s saw many setbacks. Freedom House pronounced 2017 a year of ‘democracy in crisis’13, and marked it as the 12th consecutive year of decline in their measure of global freedom, with almost exclusively negative trends since the turn of the century.

Evidently, a country being nominally democratic does not result in that country adhering to the norms of a healthy democracy—such as free and fair elections. Healthy democratic elections serve as a good indicator of the overall health of democratic institutions because, while they might not be sufficient for democracy, they are a prerequisite. They necessitate an open civil society exempt from corruption, where the freedom to run, campaign and protest prevails. Research also shows that improved elections are the leading driver of further democratization.14

Within democracy promotion, a large emphasis is placed on election monitoring. However, elections too have seen many cases of significant fraudulence in recent years, with notable examples in Kenya in 201715, Nigeria in 201516, Uganda in 201617, Rwanda in 201718, Madagascar in 201319, and Azerbaijan in 201320 . It seems that election monitoring does not always work, and that democracy promotion efforts could be more effective. Given that so much weight is put on the efficacy of election monitoring, and the amount of funding it requires, its failure presents a major policy failure, with wide implications for both the promoters of democracy and those still facing corrupt elections.

Literature Review

First, it should be noted that while democracy made great gains in the 1990s, it has since faltered

12 Kelley, Judith. Assessing the Complex Evolution of Norms: The Rise of International Election Monitoring.

Cambridge University Press, 2008.

13 Abramowitz, Michael. Democracy in Crisis. Freedom House: Freedom in the World 2018.

14 Lindberg, Staffan. Democratization By Elections. Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009.

15 Epstein, Helen. Kenya: The Election & the Cover-Up. New York Review of Books, 2017.

16 Kazeem, Yomi. Cambridge Analytica tried to sway Nigeria’s last elections with Buhari’s hacked emails. Quartz Africa, 2018.

17 Cheeseman, Lynch and Willis. How Election Monitors Are Failing. Foreign Policy, 2016.

18 Uwiringiyimana, Clement. Rwanda's Kagame wins third presidential term by a landslide. Reuters, 2017.

19 Klaas, Brian. The Curse of Low Expectations: Lessons for Democracy from Madagascar’s Election. Foreign Policy, 2013.

20 The Economist: New methods and technology can make elections fairer. 2017.

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or shown signs of receding in some areas. In Monitoring Democracy: When International Election Observation Works, and Why It Fails, Duke University scholar Judith Kelley claims that after 2005 “the democratic gains of the past two decades have stagnated, perhaps even begun to recede.”21

This is particularly evident in Africa, where despite some countries having officially been democratic for several decades, many still have very poor scores in democracy ratings. According to the Polity22 data series, all but 10 countries in Africa are classed as anocracies23. This are institutions somewhere between democracies and dictatorships. Similarly, the Economist Intelligence Unit scores seven African countries as ‘flawed democracies’, fourteen as ‘hybrid regimes’, and twenty-four as ‘authoritarian regimes’. A major factor behind these scorings is that “measures of democracy lean heavily on the quality of elections,"24 showing the importance paid to elections by the international community.

This alarming situation, whereby in modern times “the quality of elections may even be worsening,”25 is the case in spite of ever-increasing efforts by the international community to help improve elections. The budget for democracy promotion initiatives has rapidly gone up, with US aid going towards ‘strengthening democratic governance’ in the mid-2000s averaging at around $2.5 billion per year’26, and now reaching closer to $5 billion per year. This is not to mention the lack of democratization growth stemming from other aid projects, with Pippa Norris finding that “Cross-national evidence fails to demonstrate any positive linkages between development aid towards the electoral process and improvements in the quality of elections.”27

Although it officially forms a small percentage of aid budgets, election support is the most direct way the international community intervenes to support democracy, with election monitoring the most prominent tool. This leads Kelley to conclude that over the 20th century “international election monitoring has become the most prominent tool in the liberal effort to promote democracy.”28

Since first appearing in its modern form in the late 1970s, election monitoring became so prominent from the late 1980s that it is now used in almost every election in emerging democracies29.

Susan Hyde of U.C. Berkeley explores how election monitoring become solidified as a global norm in her book The Pseudo-Democrat’s Dilemma: Why Election Observation Became an International Norm. She shows that this trend emerged due to the extreme weight put on election monitoring by the international community. Indeed, among recorded cases of elections where monitors have been actively refused, all but 21 Kelley, Judith. Monitoring Democracy. Princeton University Press, 2012. Page 3 22 Marshall and Jaggers. Polity IV Project 23 Marshall and Jaggers. Polity IV Project 24 Kelley 4 25 Kelley 5 26 Norris, Pippa. Why Elections Fail. Cambridge University Press, 2015. Page 93.

27 Norris, Pippa. Why Elections Fail. Cambridge University Press, 2015. Page 106.

28 Kelley 155 29 Kelley, Judith. Assessing the Complex Evolution of Norms: The Rise of International Election Monitoring.

Cambridge University Press, 2008.

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one were condemned by the U.S. as fraudulent. Thus, it is now the case that monitoring is trusted to the extent that any election that does not allow it is immediately dismissed as rigged. Hyde cites the example of Iran, whose ‘refusal to invite international observers in 2009 was interpreted around the world as evidence that the Iranian elections had been stolen.’30

However, both Kelley and Hyde argue that this faith in monitoring has grown beyond what any evidence suggests it deserves. As Hyde shows, while unmonitored elections are utterly dismissed, some of the most blatantly corrupt elections in recent history have taken place while international election monitors were present31. Investigative journalism into recent elections further proves this point, with shocking levels of fraud discovered in some cases where monitors endorsed an election. Strong critiques of the methods of the monitors32 were issued. For example, after the 2016 Ugandan election, the European Union monitoring delegation, which had just 45 teams to cover 28,000 polling stations, advised readers to “draw their own conclusions” to their monitoring report instead of offering condemnation. This was in spite of findings of suspicious results in 20% of polling stations and the burglary and arrests of opposition leaders.33. Similarly, the E.U. praised Madagascar’s 2013 election as “free, transparent and credible” despite reports of mass disenfranchisement, uneven media coverage, illicit funding, and surprise court rulings banning opposition leaders from running.34

The most shocking recent case was the 2017 election in Kenya, on which the government spent $480 million35 in the presence of several distinguished election monitoring groups. This was partially in order to acquire new biometric voter identification technology, with much of this money coming from foreign aid. Monitoring delegations from the African Union, the European Union, the Commonwealth Nations, and the United States-based Carter Center quickly endorsed the results of the election. Former U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry, head of the Carter Center’s mission, applauded the process as ‘free, fair and credible’ despite “little aberrations here and there.”36 As it turned out, these aberrations included 5 million unverified ballots, the torture and murder of a key figure on the electoral commission, deportation of foreign advisers to the opposition, “statistically impossible voter turnouts,” and the frequent breakdown of the new technology, leading to a total lack of transparency in the transfer of voting results from polling stations to the Electoral Commission’s counting office.37 30 Hyde, Susan. The Pseudo-Democrat’s Dilemma: Why Election Observation Became an International Norm.

Cornell University Press, 2011. Page 1 31 Hyde 176 32 Klaas, Brian. The Curse of Low Expectations: Lessons for Democracy from Madagascar’s Election. Foreign Policy, 2013.

33 Cheeseman, Lynch and Willis. How Election Monitors Are Failing. Foreign Policy, 2016.

34 Klaas, Brian. The Curse of Low Expectations: Lessons for Democracy from Madagascar’s Election. Foreign Policy, 2013.

35 National Treasury of Kenya. Pre-Election Economic and Fiscal Report. 2017 36 Kuo, Lily and Dahir, Abdi Latif. Foreign election observers endorsed a deeply flawed election in Kenya. Now they face questions. Quartz Africa, 2017.

37 Epstein, Helen. Kenya: The Election & the Cover-Up. New York Review of Books, 2017.

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It should also be noted that, however limited the current success of monitors, their work is only likely to become more difficult. Recent years have seen great changes in democratic elections, with many emerging democracies adopting new technologies into their election process38. There have been some positive cases arising from this, with countries in Africa seeing people using their phones to record election polling stations. The internet is being used to track corrupt politicians. However, in other cases there have been government demands for data from tech companies,39 nationwide shutdowns of Internet40 or social media41 on election days and mass distribution of fake news.42 International strategic communications teams are capitalizing on this as well, with the notorious Cambridge Analytica found to have aggressively used social media on campaigns in Nigeria43 and Kenya.44 Nic Cheeseman of Birmingham University, an expert on elections in Africa, has warned that “in some cases the complexity of digital processes may actually render elections more opaque and vulnerable to manipulation.” This was perhaps the case in Kenya, where new election technology frequently broke down, but this was often overlooked by monitors who did not have expertise in the technology.45 Such technology has already been adopted by 50% of African countries46 and could lead to increased problems for monitors in the future.

Other analytical studies show that even when election monitoring does have a clear effect, it is not necessarily a good one. James Fearon argues that monitoring groups’ decisions can spark dramatic reactions. For example, the 2003 revolution in Georgia following an election being declared fraudulent by monitors. Ursula Daxecker also showed that if monitors report an election as fraudulent, there is an increased likelihood of post-election violence.47 There is also evidence that opposition boycotts are more common when monitors are present, because the opposition particularly fears losing an election that is endorsed by the international community, which would greatly discredit them.48

Other evidence suggests that, on the micro-level, monitors do have a positive impact in the

38 Chan, Stephen. Africa leads the way in election technology. The Conversation, 2017.

39 CIPESA. The Growing Trend of African Governments’ Requests for User Information on and Content Removal From Internet and Telecom Companies. CIPESA Policy Brief, 2017.

40 Dahir, Abdi Latif. More African governments blocked the internet to silence dissent in 2016. Quartz Africa, 2016.

41 Mohammed Omar. Twitter and Facebook are blocked in Uganda as the country goes to the polls. Quartz Africa, 2016.

42 Dahir, Abdi Latif. Fake news is already disrupting Kenya’s high-stakes election campaign. Quartz Africa, 2017.

43 Kazeem, Yomi. Cambridge Analytica tried to sway Nigeria’s last elections with Buhari’s hacked emails. Quartz Africa, 2018.

44 Epstein, Helen. Kenya: The Election & the Cover-Up. New York Review of Books, 2017.

45 Kuo, Lily. Electronic voting is failing the developing world while the US and Europe abandon it. Quartz, 2013.

46 Piccolino, Giulia. What other African elections tell us about Nigeria’s bet on biometrics. Washington Post, 2015.

47 Daxecker, Ursula. The cost of exposing cheating: International election monitoring, fraud, and post-election violence in Africa. Journal of Peace Research, 2012.

48 Hyde, Susan and Beaulieu, Emily. In the Shadow of Democracy Promotion: Strategic Manipulation, International Observers, and Election Boycotts. Sage Publications, 2009.

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specific local areas where they are present during elections. Hyde showed this in a natural experiment.49 However, a separate study in Ghana showed that “although fraud declined in polling stations where observers were present, malpractice was displaced to other districts around the country.”50 More broadly it is unclear whether election monitoring has any overall positive or negative impact. Daxecker even finds that multiple observer missions monitoring one election can still be ineffective,51 often providing completely contrasting opinions.

After a particularly thorough statistical analysis of monitoring, Judith Kelley concludes that monitors “can improve election quality” but “sometimes they are biased and contribute to the false legitimization of governments.”52 Nevertheless, Kelley does emerge as the leading supporter of monitoring, arguing that “the descriptive and statistical analyses show that…the presence of monitors is associated with improved election quality and more frequent turnover,”53 which is seen as a healthy sign of democracy. However, in this study I reassess the data used by Kelley and others, and find the evidence that monitors are effective unconvincing. The results of these analyses are below.

In this study, I also theorize why elections might be ineffective. On this issue, Kelley offers two main suggestions. The first is the problem of the rise of extremely weak monitoring organizations.

Whereas bodies such as the U.N. and the E.U., or American NGOs such as the Carter Center or National Democratic Institute, have a reputation of giving credible and detailed election reports, some organizations have emerged with monitoring delegations that seem to never offer real criticism, including the Shanghai Cooperation Organization and Commonwealth of Independent States. Therefore, some countries “strategically invite friendly monitors,”54 which they know will provide positive feedback on their election. Hyde supports this, suggesting that some governments have deliberately invited monitoring groups that are more likely to give a less harsh report55 in order to try to gain the credibility from having monitors present without facing any real risk. This has led to the expansion of monitoring and of countries claiming democratic intention, even with possible declines in real election quality.

Kelley also offers the possibility that monitoring causes governments to turn to “safer forms of cheating."56 She suggests that while monitoring might reduce explicit election-day cheating, this may simply be substituted for more sophisticated cheating during the electoral administrative process. Kelley 49 Hyde, S. (2007). The Observer Effect in International Politics: Evidence from a Natural Experiment. World Politics, 60(1), 37-63 50 Nahomi, Ichino and Schuenden, Matthias. Deterring or Displacing Electoral Irregularities? Spillover Effects of Observers in a Randomized Field Experiment in Ghana. Chicago University Press, 2012.

51 Daxecker, Ursula. Electoral Observers: The Implications of Multiple Monitors for Electoral Integrity. Oxford University Press, 2013.

52 Kelley 155 53 Kelley 115 54 Kelley 93 55 Hyde 56 Kelley 80

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finds little statistical evidence to support this, but Daxecker finds that in certain African countries after 1990, pre-election violence is more prevalent when monitors are present.57 In this paper, I further develop this theory, and run my own test to find evidence of this substitution of cheating techniques effect. Using an alternative dataset to Daxecker, I find a certain amount of further evidence that monitoring increases pre-election violence.

Hyde develops a more extensive theory of why monitoring fails, suggesting that corrupt governments, or ‘pseudo-democrats’, knowingly make a tradeoff between “risking the consequences of a negative report or refusing to invite observers and sending an unambiguous signal that their country’s elections will not be democratic.”58 The government’s risk of losing an election due to monitoring, she suggests, is trumped by the payoff from gaining “international prestige” or even “increased investment, trade and foreign aid.”59 However, Hyde offers little statistical evidence of a connection between monitors and aid. I reexamined this issue with the latest data available and found evidence showing that allowing monitors can be a gateway into receiving more aid.

My further theoretical arguments on why monitors fail explore how wider political issues might affect the monitoring process. There is little quantitative analysis on this specific topic, but there have long been theories that democracy promotion has been influenced by outside political factors. Researchers have given qualitative examples of post-Cold War era leaders “attempting to feign democratic credentials”60 in order to build relationships with wealthy democratic powers. In turn, Western powers have been accused of being lenient about the democratic failings of political allies. Kelley notes that the rates of endorsement by different monitoring groups can vary according to the country affiliation of that group61, suggesting that domestic governments might pressure monitoring groups into announcing or highlighting certain results.

Some have claimed this was the case with Western monitors’ approval of recent elections in Uganda and Kenya. Both countries are key Western allies and contribute troops to the U.S.-supported anti-terror African Union Mission in Somalia (AMISOM).62 Conversely, Susan Bush believes that NGO monitors are generous to corrupt governments because they fear total expulsion from the country,63 as was the case for the National Endowment for Democracy in Russia.64 57 Daxecker, Ursula. All quiet on election day? International election observation and incentives for pre-election violence in African elections. Elsevier: Electoral Studies Journal, 2013.

58 Hyde 186 59 Hyde 9 60 Donno, Daniela. Defending Democratic Norms: International Actors and the Politics of Electoral Misconduct.

Oxford University Press, 2013. Page 56.

61 Kelley, Judith. D-Minus Elections: The Politics and Norms of International Election Observation. Cambridge University Press, 2009.

62 Cheeseman, Lynch and Willis. How Election Monitors Are Failing. Foreign Policy, 2016.

63 Bush, Sarah Sunn. The Taming of Democracy Assistance: Why Democracy Promotion Does Not Confront Dictators. Cambridge University Press, 2015.

64 Luhn, Alec. National Endowment for Democracy is first ‘undesirable’ NGO banned in Russia. The Guardian, 2015.

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In this paper, I statistically examine the effect of political factors on the monitoring process and find significant evidence that some outside factors may indeed have a serious negative impact on the efficacy of election monitors in achieving their stated goal of promoting democracy.

Overall, there is relatively little literature on this topic, with many possibilities still to explore. In particular, more work could be done to statistically analyze some of the findings of qualitative research carried out on election monitoring in certain countries. Moreover, with technology causing rapid change in this field, there should be opportunities for more analysis on their effect when more data becomes available. This study calls into question some of the previous research in favor of monitoring, expands on previous theories of how governments cheat during monitored elections, and presents new findings that provide significant evidence that election monitoring has become politicized to the point that outside political influences might be causing its failure.

Theoretical Mechanism

As discussed above, previous research shows that election monitoring has limited success at best. Election debacles continue to occur, and it seems beyond doubt that there are faults within current election monitoring initiatives. I believe that a reassessment of the data available on election monitoring can further reveal its limitations. Furthermore, I seek to explain why it is that election monitoring has not been successful in improving elections by more deeply exploring the external political influences that affect the monitoring and assessment of elections to assess the relationship between monitoring and cheating.

First, my theory holds that the primary goal of an incumbent government is to retain power. All governments have policies and values that they wish to implement, which necessitates holding on to power for as long as possible. Second, a corrupt government wishes to gain as many resources for itself as possible.

A corrupt government can use its influence when in power to maximize its own payoff, whether through monetary or other resources. Both of the above assumptions provide a strong incentive for governments to win elections. Corrupt governments will especially fear losing an election, as there may be reprisals for any malpractice committed while in power. Therefore, a corrupt government will particularly want to win even nominally democratic elections, so as to retain power and influence and maximize whatever resources they are receiving —even at the cost of cheating.

Given this incentive to cheat, it may seem odd that election monitors have almost ubiquitously been invited by rather than foisted upon the governments of emerging democracies to observe their elections. Monitoring delegations typically have a team of up to a few hundred that inspect as many aspects of an election as possible during the electoral process. Their specific mandate is to record and report on all aspects of an election, and then write up an assessment as to whether or not the election appeared free and fair according to democratic norms. The most widely respected monitoring groups usually come from major international organizations, such as the United Nations, the European Union, the Commonwealth of Nations, or U.S. non-governmental organizations such as the Carter Center, the National Democratic Institute, and the International Republican Institute. After writing a report, the monitors will report back to their organization or to the government of their home country, which can then decide on the actions to take.

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If there is evidence of a corrupt election, an international group might encourage its members to issue warnings, sanction or take further action. An individual country, such as the U.S., could cut aid packages, reduce political support or actively condemn and ostracize a cheating government. Therefore, given that monitors only participate at the invitation of a host country, it seems counter-intuitive for a corrupt government to actively invite this increased risk to their cheating being exposed. Previous research, as noted, theorizes that this is partly explained by the fact that corrupt governments often find more lenient monitoring groups to observe their elections. However, I believe that the foremost reasons for this openness to monitoring are that corrupt governments can gain resources (such as increased foreign aid or political support) by inviting monitors and believe they can still cheat in these monitors’ presence.

I believe that while monitors could easily observe explicit cheating by government officials on election day, there are ample subtler forms that a government can engage in. These are more likely to be missed by monitors, especially given their usually small numbers and limited duration of stay in the host country. Explicit cheating would include forms such as stuffing of ballot boxes and clear intimidation or violence against voters during the day of the election while subtler iterations might include pre-election violence against opposition voters, manipulation of the media by the government, or tampering with the electoral administrative process. Examples of this administrative cheating might include hindering opposition contenders from running or voters from registering, gerrymandering, bribery, delaying publishing of results in order to manipulate vote counts, or simply having inadequate resources on election days. These provide ostensibly plausible excuses for miscommunication and misinformation. Many argue that these latter forms of cheating are also becoming increasingly available as the emerging democracies embrace new voter technology, which have proved easy for governments to manipulate. Below is an extended list of different forms of explicit and subtle cheating.

Signals of different forms of cheating:

Signs of Explicit Cheating

Signs of Subtle Cheating

Violence on day of election

Pre-election violence

Vote padding

Large crowds / long waits / signs of confusion

Ballot box stuffing

Restricted information on how to vote

Tampering with ballots or ballot box

Complicated ballot papers

Falsification of election protocols

Lack of needed bilingual ballots

Voter turnout 100%

Polling booths open excessively early or late

Problems with counting / tabulation

Fictitious reports of polling places

Double voting

Family / proxy voting (one family member allowed to vote on behalf of all)

Vote buying

Not signing or stamping ballots correctly

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Voters offered bribes

Ill-trained staff / general incompetence

Voters had fake IDs

Insufficient numbers of polling stations

Voters obstructed from reaching polling booth

Secrecy issues (thin ballot paper, see-through ballot boxes)

Voters denied access to polling station

Electronic voting causes lack of paper trail

Domestic observers forbidden from polling stations

Excessive security leads overcrowding

Aggressive behavior by party representatives

Poor quality of writing materials for voting

Political pressure within vicinity of polling booth

Names missing from voting register

Presence of unauthorized armed personnel at polling station

Dead people on voting register Voting cards not delivered in time for election Voting cards deemed out of date Many voters turned away due to admin issues

Thus, my theory holds that the risk of condemnation by monitors can potentially be mitigated by substituting the most blatant forms of election cheating with more subtle forms of cheating that might not be seen by monitors. In particular, I expect that there is a temporal shift in cheating, with corrupt governments more likely to increase cheating longer before or after the election day, when monitors are either not present, or at least less in number. This in turn would help avoid international condemnation from a negative monitoring report.

Regarding resources, I believe that corrupt governments might think they will gain increased foreign aid and political support as a result of inviting monitors. As noted above, previous literature shows that monitoring is seen as a key aspect of democracy promotion, and that refusing monitors is tantamount to admitting guilt of cheating. Therefore, refusal of monitors could lead to reduced foreign aid from the wealthy democratic countries, as well as less political support from these countries overall. On the other hand, accepting monitors displays a token of intent to promote free and fair democracy. Even if improved democracy is not a government’s true intention, the appearance of wanting to democratize might trigger more international sympathy, and so more aid and more political support.

Indeed, the incumbent government in a wealthy democracy might also be satisfied with token displays of democracy, since these can be touted as foreign policy successes even if the underlying political situation has not changed. Given that they too want to remain in power, I believe that, in general, governments of wealthy democracies will be more concerned about such domestic political issues, as

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opposed to genuine concern for election quality in other countries. Correspondingly, governments of wealthy democracies might be willing to overlook negative monitoring reports if the country in question serves as a good political partner. With the U.S., this might even denote that the U.S. government encourages American NGO monitor groups to be lenient to political allies, which would further explain why corrupt governments (if allied to the U.S.) believe they can invite monitors while still cheating and not building democracy. Thus, the U.S. and the West might support countries for allowing monitoring to take place, despite taking little regard of the actual level of problems during the election.

Taking the above ideas together, this suggests that corrupt governments might believe that they can invite monitors but continue to cheat in different ways, and that inviting monitors will bring benefits in the form of aid and political partnerships. This would explain why governments planning to cheat allow election monitoring in the first place, a seemingly self-detrimental decision. It might further explain why monitoring is ineffective, because it suggests that governments can cheat even when monitors are present, and that monitoring incentivizes only shallow displays of wanting to democratize, rather than any genuine desire to do so.

To explore this theory, I plan to use congregated data from research on this topic to explore the following predictions:

Hypothesis 1: Election monitoring will have little impact on overall election quality.

The combination of limited risk and potential benefits, discussed above, leads to the hypothesis that election monitoring, even if by a more credible monitoring group, will have little impact on the overall quality of elections. Though there has been research on this in the past, it has yielded mixed results, and so I use the latest data on election monitoring to make a reassessment of how successful or not election monitoring might be. I use regressions on variables such as the level of problems with elections and the rate of government turnover to assess the effect of monitoring, taking into account which specific monitoring group is present. Government turnover is analyzed because high rates of turnover is commonly seen as a sign of a strong democracy, and previous research has suggested that the presence of monitors may affect this.

Hypothesis 2: When monitors are present, explicit election cheating will decrease, whereas more subtle forms of cheating will increase.

While monitors might be effective in preventing the most blatant forms of explicit cheating in an election, which would be easily observed by monitors and render swift condemnation, my theory suggests that subtler forms of cheating might not decrease or even increase when monitors are present. Therefore, though no monitoring groups are likely to be totally effective in eliminating electoral cheating, they may influence the type of cheating that occurs.

Hypothesis 3: Foreign aid will increase with presence of election monitoring.

The theory also holds that the presence of monitors might increase international benefits, most notably foreign aid. Democracy promotion has typically taken a carrot and stick approach, with condemnation given to repressive governments and aid offered to those showing positive signs. Foreign aid is given at the discretion of donor countries, and so can easily be increased or decreased. A government

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allowing election monitors sends a clear signal of attempting to improve elections, and so would give donor countries cause to give more aid. I test whether or not a country allowing monitors appears to lead to increased aid, and also do some analysis at the individual country level to further explore if there might be a connection between monitoring and aid levels. This would help explain why election monitoring has become so widespread among emerging democracies, despite an apparent lack of real intent to improve democracy in many cases.

Hypothesis 4: The U.S. is more likely to judge a country’s election as fair if the country is politically aligned with the U.S.

Though monitors are theoretically neutral arbiters, there has long been criticism that the prioritization of political relationships taints democracy promotion efforts. I theorize that this will hold true for election monitoring as well. I examine this with regard to political support from the United States, using data on election fraud, the U.S. State Department’s assessments of elections, and political affinity with the U.S. as defined by aligning with the U.S. in votes at the United Nations General Assembly. I believe that political affiliation influences the U.S. State Department’s acceptance of elections, even though this assessment should be based on a neutral analysis of election monitoring reports. This would further show how the election monitoring process is heavily politicized in a way that does not produce strong incentives for genuine democratization.

Hypothesis 5: The U.S., or other Western countries, will reward a country for allowing monitoring, irrespective of actual levels of election fraud.

Similarly, though wealthy democracies should reward or condemn other countries based on their election quality, if monitoring is to be effective, I believe that they will place more value in simply whether or not a country allows monitors. Allowing monitors sends a signal that a country is attempting to democratize. This can be cited as a foreign policy success by Western powers, even if the monitors deliver certain amounts of criticism. Western powers can also use this process as an excuse to engage in deeper relations with a tactical ally, even if said ally is still carrying out flawed elections. With the average voter unlikely to read the details of monitoring reports, Western countries can more easily work with corrupt tactical allies, on the basis that they do at least allow monitors, and so have a supposedly decent democratic process. Altogether, I believe this means that Western countries will praise countries for allowing election monitors, but pay little regard to actual election quality when determining political relations, which will further undermine the mechanism by which election monitoring should work.

In summary, my theory is that election monitoring has spread, but also has failed, because governments see potential benefits in allowing monitors and also believe they can mitigate the risks posed by monitors by employing new cheating techniques.

Data Unit of Analysis:

The unit of analysis is a country-year. This study gathers the best data currently available on

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election monitoring and examines it in tandem with data on several other key indicators. For election monitoring, I use the National Elections Across Democracy and Autocracy (NELDA) dataset, compiled by Susan Hyde and Nikolay Marinov, which contains information on 3027 elections held between 1945 and 2012. I also use Judith Kelley’s Quality of Elections dataset, which uses information from the U.S. State Department to provide details on 1326 elections from 1975 to 2004. In addition, key country indicators and details on foreign aid are used from the World Bank’s World Development Indicators dataset, as well as data from Freedom House on press freedoms and Erik Voeten’s ‘Data and Analyses of Voting in the UN General Assembly’, which uses voting alignment in the United Nations General Assembly to produce a measure of political affinity between countries. All countries with a population above 500,000 are included, unless stated otherwise.

Independent Variables:

The key independent variables are the presence of various types of election monitoring groups.

The effects of different monitoring groups are compared, as well as the effects of specific different monitoring organizations. This information comes from the NELDA and Kelley datasets. For the fourth hypothesis, the independent variable used is a country’s political affinity to the United States. Control variables include a country’s population, gross domestic product (GDP) per capita, and level of democracy as recorded by the Polity IV index. Table 1 displays the summary statistics for a selection of the independent variables.

Table 1: Summary Statistics of Independent Variables

Variable

Observations

Mean

Std. Dev.

Min

Max

Presence of Monitors

1,241

0.3247381

0.4684657

0

1

International Monitors

1,123

0.2707035

0.4445212

0

1

Domestic Monitors

1,123

0.111309

0.3146545

0

1

Carter Center Monitors

1,242

0.0281804

0.1655545

0

1

EU Monitors

1,242

0.0297907

0.1700778

0

1

UN Monitors

1,242

0.0338164

0.1808292

0

1

African Union Monitors

1,242

0.0378422

0.1908913

0

1

GDP per capita

8,305

10007.41

15467.63

115.7941

144246.4

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Polity Score

8,000

1.041

7.409786

-10

10

Affinity to the US

9,435

-0.1167833

0.4085019

-1

1

Dependent Variables:

The key dependent variables are various measures of the problems associated with elections.

The NELDA and Kelley datasets contain measures that include overall election quality and then more specific measures such as explicit election day cheating, pre or post-election violence, media manipulation, and administrative tampering. Foreign aid is also looked at as an independent variable to explore the relationship between aid and election monitoring. For the fifth hypothesis, the dependent variable is change in relations with Western Countries, as recorded by the NELDA data.

Table 2: Summary Statistics of Dependent Variables

Variable

Observations

Mean

Std. Dev.

Min

Max

Overall Electoral Problems

1,127

1.289264

1.102113

0

3

Pre-election Cheating

941

0.9638682

1.14519

0

3

Pre-election Admin Cheating

925

0.132973

0.4566065

0

3

Pre-election Violence

878

0.856492

1.205233

0

3

Explicit Election-day Cheating

901

0.5982242

0.9835069

0

3

Election-day Violence

890

0.1797753

0.6285627

0

3

Turnover

1,203

0.2618454

0.4398218

0

1

US Aid Received

5,946

6.65E+07

2.54E+08

-3.76E+08

1.12E+10

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4.78E+08

8.83E+08

-9.47E+08

29

2.55E+10

Empirical Strategy Dependent Variables:

This study employs a cross-sectional time-series analysis featuring all countries with a population above half a million people. The NELDA dataset has data on 3027 elections from 1945 to 2012 and contains detailed information on elections, including the presence of election monitors and various forms of electoral misconduct. However, all variables are binary and are of less use when trying to gauge the extent of change when monitors are present. Hence, for most analyses, the Kelley dataset is used, which covers 1326 elections from 1975 to 2004. This data also contains details on various forms of electoral misconduct, but with a four-point scale on the level of problems.

Regressions are used with the data to estimate a measure of the extent to which different monitoring groups affect various forms of electoral cheating. For all regressions, country fixed effects are included, as well as control variables for GDP per capita, country population, and level of democracy within a country according to the Polity IV scale, since all of these factors likely have a significant effect on the quality of a country’s elections.

Thus, the initial regressions follow the model of the equation below:

Level of Electoral Problems = α + β1 (Presence of Election Monitors) + β2(Log of GDP per capita) + β3(Population) + β4(Level of Democracy) + ε

In the most thorough of previous assessments of election monitoring, Judith Kelley concludes that election monitoring does have a positive effect on the quality of elections. However, as her measure of quality, she uses the U.S. State Department’s proclamation of whether an election is acceptable, unacceptable or ambiguous. In this paper, I take the assumption that these proclamations might be politically motivated. Kelley herself admits that ‘it is possible for an election to have a lot of problems, yet for the State Department to conclude that it was nonetheless acceptable’. Therefore, I run a similar analysis, but instead, use the State Department’s recording of the actual level of problems witnessed during the election as my measure of Levels of Electoral Problems.

Variations on this regression model are then used by replacing Presence of Election Monitors with more specific forms of monitoring, including Presence of International Monitors (monitoring by an international body), Presence of Domestic Monitors (monitoring by a domestic delegation) or Presence of High / Low Quality Monitoring. For the latter variable, Judith Kelley’s measure of the credibility of monitoring organizations was used, with the most credible organizations being placed in the category of high quality monitoring and the most discredited organizations being placed in the category of low quality monitoring.

Variations of cheating are used as well, such as by replacing Level of Electoral Problems with other

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specific categories such as Pre-election Violence or Explicit Election Day Cheating. In this way, the varying effects of different monitoring groups can be compared as well as the resulting forms of cheating. Another regression uses Turnover as the dependent variable instead of Level of Problems, in order to assess the effect of monitors on turnover in a ruling party after an election, since frequent turnover is typically seen as a sign of a healthy democracy.

In examining turnover, one further regression is used with the interaction term of Presence of Monitors and Level of Democracy, as shown below: Likelihood of Turnover = α + β1 (Presence of Election Monitors) + β2(Monitors*Level of Democracy) + β3(Log of GDP per capita) + β4(Population) + β5(Level of Democracy) + ε

This is because I seek to explore whether the impact of monitoring on turnover might be limited to more democratic countries. Previous literature has cited the influence of monitoring on turnover as being the clearest evidence of monitors being effective. Judith Kelley claims that statistically, ‘presence of monitors is associated with more frequent turnover’. However, I question the strength of this positive impact and use this regression to determine if monitoring might simply be more associated with increased turnover in countries that are already more democratic, which would further indicate that monitoring is ineffective.

The paper then explores reasons why monitoring might be ineffective, specifically through investigating whether or not political or aid relationships might affect election monitoring. Foreign aid has long been seen as a tool to build political alliances in addition to its benevolent goals of helping development or promoting democracy. However, a country wanting to receive foreign aid must at least appear to be credible in its efforts to democratize, and allowing election monitors is a good way to do this.

Therefore, I explore whether or not a country is more likely to receive aid if it allows election monitoring.

Regression analysis on monitoring and foreign aid proved not to produce significant results, probably due to the complicated combination of factors that affect the quantity of aid given to a country. Therefore, this study instead looks at some individual countries, tracing the history of their U.S. foreign aid receipts to assess whether or not these seem to be affected by the presence of election monitors.

Also tested is whether or not a country’s affiliation to the United States has an influence on assessment of elections. The U.S. is by far the largest donor of foreign aid and holds democracy promotion as a clear foreign policy goal. However, the U.S. must also consider its political relationships when giving aid and typically gives more aid to its political allies. Yet, given that the U.S. government has an interest in being seen to donate to democratic countries and also wants to protect its political allies, it has incentive to proclaim the elections of political allies as more free and fair, regardless of the actual level of election fraud.

To explore this notion, I exploit the fact that the U.S. State Department records separate measures for 1) whether or not the U.S. government proclaims an election to be acceptable, and 2) the actual level of problems recorded during the election, as signified by monitoring reports and later assessment of the election. Thus, the correlation between these two measures is explored, and regression is used to observe whether or not affinity to the U.S. causes differentiation between a country’s election being proclaimed

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acceptable and its actual level of electoral problems.

The regression follows the formula below:

Election Acceptability (according to U.S. State Department) = α + β1(Level of Electoral Problems) + β2(Affinity to the U.S.) + β 1 (Actual level of electoral problems * Affinity to the U.S.) + β2(Log of GDP per capita) + β3(Population) + β4(Level of Democracy) + ε

The regression measures the interaction effect of the Level of Electoral Problems and Affinity to the U.S. because, while these two variables might separately affect Election Acceptability, I specifically seek to find out how U.S. affinity, in combination with electoral problems, affects the likelihood of the U.S. government to accept an election. If the U.S. is more lenient when criticizing its allies, we would expect the interaction term to reduce U.S. criticism of elections. In this way, it can be tested whether or not the U.S. deliberately proclaims the elections of its allies to be more acceptable, in contrast to evidence of election fraud on the ground. This would suggest a politicization of the monitoring process, which would render the work of monitors ineffective in terms of the goal of promoting democracy.

I then run the same regression model again, but this time only focusing on countries more politically aligned with the U.S. It is to be expected that if a country is a U.S. enemy, then the State Department will condemn its elections in line with monitoring reports. Focusing on countries closer to the U.S. should then produce a magnification of the effect described above, with even more leniency given to poor quality elections.

Finally, I look for further evidence of the politicization of election monitoring through observing country changes in political relations with the U.S. and the West following an election. The NELDA data records if countries had a positive or negative change in their relationship with the U.S. or another Western country or organization after an election. For monitors to be effective, it would require relations to worsen after a fraudulent election and improve after a high-quality election. However, I believe that the mere presence of monitors might be enough to improve political relations, regardless of election quality.

To test this, I use the following regression formula: Positive change in U.S. Relations = α + β1 (Presence of Election Monitors) + β2(Level of Electoral Problems) + β3(Log of GDP per capita) + β4(Population) + β5(Level of Democracy) + ε

In this way, the differing impact of the presence of monitors and levels of election fraud on U.S. relations can be compared. I also run the same regression, but using Positive Change with Other Western Country or Organization as the dependent variable. The NELDA dataset defines Western, in relation to Western Country, as being a member of the OECD. The other organizations counted are the World Bank and the IMF. Thus, it is explored as to whether or not other Western countries appropriately respond to different levels of election quality.

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Results Effect of monitors on election quality

Table 3 shows the results of regression analysis on the impact of various categories of monitoring groups on the level of electoral problems.

The regression shows that presence of monitors, international monitors and even high-quality monitors, produce a statistically significant increase in electoral problems, with the presence of monitors in any form predicted to increase electoral problems by 5%. The presence of domestic monitor groups (usually considered to be more lenient) and poor-quality monitors has no significant effect. This apparent increase in problems associated with presence of monitors is probably caused by the fact that election monitors usually go to the countries where the worst elections are expected to occur. This selection effect makes it difficult to assess the benefits, or otherwise, of monitors. Nevertheless, whereas previous literature has suggested there is a statistically significant improvement in elections associated with monitors, this regression offers counter-evidence that monitors, at best, have no impact on election quality.

Table 3: Effect of Monitoring on Level of Electoral Problems

Level of Electoral Problems (4 point scale) Model 1 Presence of Monitors

Model 2

Model 3

Model 4

Model 5

0.15** (0.08) 0.19*** (0.07)

Domestic Monitors

0.03 (0.06)

High Quality Monitors

0.19*** (0.06)

Poor Quality Monitors

0.08 (0.06)

Log of GDP per capita

0.02

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0.03

0.06

0.08

0.07

Log of population

Level of Democracy

Constant

N

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(0.12)

(0.11)

(0.09)

(0.09)

(0.09)

0.75***

0.76***

0.86***

0.76***

0.82***

(0.20)

(0.19)

(0.15)

(0.15)

(0.16)

-1.99***

-1.97***

-1.95***

-2.05***

-1.98***

(0.14)

(0.14)

(0.11)

(0.12)

(0.11)

-9.44***

-9.71***

-11.67***

-10.33***

-11.06***

(2.97)

(2.80)

(2.30)

(2.29)

(2.31)

629

628

930

931

931

33

* p < 0.10, ** p < 0.05, *** p < 0.01 Effect of monitors on turnover

The next regressions explore the effect of election monitors on turnover, since high turnover is often seen as an indicator of a healthy democracy. The results are displayed in Table 4.

Table 4: Effect of Election Monitors on Turnover

* p < 0.10, ** p < 0.05, *** p < 0.01

A simple model gives the significant result: Monitors cause a 12% increase in the likelihood of turnover after an election. However, in the separate regression model that includes the interaction effect between presence of monitors and level of democracy, the effect of monitors becomes statistically

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insignificant. Instead, the data shows that monitors only cause an increase in turnover when interacted with democracy, which suggests that monitors are only effective in increasing the likelihood of turnover in countries that are already relatively more democratic. Once again, this finding suggests that previous analysis of election monitoring may have been too generous. Rather than having a clear positive effect on turnover, monitoring appears to have a limited effect, and only if democracy levels are already strong.

Effect of monitoring on different forms of cheating Table 5: Effects of Election Monitoring on Different Forms of Cheating

* p < 0.10, ** p < 0.05, *** p < 0.01

Table 5 observes the impact of election monitoring on different types of electoral cheating. With these regression models, I explore my theory that governments may substitute obvious cheating with more subtle forms of cheating when monitors are present. However, possibly due to the selection effect discussed above, all of the significant results show a positive correlation between cheating and the presence of monitors, with even explicit election-day cheating predicted to increase by 7% when monitors are present.

Nevertheless, there is some support for the theory if the magnitude of the regression coefficients is taken into consideration. If we consider the coefficient of explicit election day cheating (0.28) as a baseline, we see that while the coefficients of other forms of on-election-day cheating are either lower or insignificant, pre-election cheating has a notably larger effect. Pre-election administrative cheating has a coefficient of 0.36, with pre-election violence at 0.55, corresponding to a 14% increased likelihood of preelection violence when monitors are present.

Therefore, the regressions provide evidence that, though monitors might not decrease explicit cheating as predicted, presence of monitors causes a comparatively larger presence of pre-election

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cheating and pre-election violence. This supports the theory that governments undergo a temporal shift in their cheating tactics when monitors are present, focusing efforts on before and after election days, so as to avoid detection while still gaining international commendation for having invited the monitors in the first place.

Effect of Monitoring on Foreign Aid

In order to examine why countries invite monitors, in spite of their limited success and the increased risk of international condemnation that they bring, I now examine whether or not allowing monitoring is likely to increase foreign aid receipts.

Table 6 shows how likely a country is to receive foreign aid when monitors are or are not present at elections. Each observation corresponds to a country-election-year, and the table excludes wealthy democracies (with a Polity score of 9 or above), since those countries typically never receive aid or have election monitoring. As can be seen, when monitors were not present, countries received aid 43% of the time during an election year. When monitors were present, countries received aid 81% of the time.

Since aid flows rarely fluctuate dramatically from year-to -year, we can expect that this pattern held for most years during the time period of the dataset. Hence, it seems that a countryâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s chances of receiving foreign aid almost doubles if its government allows election monitoring. This supports the hypothesis that countries might allow election monitoring, despite its shortcomings and its risks, in order to increase chances of receiving foreign aid.

Table 6: Effect of Monitors on Foreign Aid

Presence of Monitors

Foreign Aid Recipient

Total

No

Yes

No

57.04% (478)

18.86% (327)

Yes

42.96% (360)

81.14% (327)

100% (838)

100% (403)

Table 7 looks at the amount of aid given by the US to Kenya, Nigeria, Tanzania and Ivory Coast over time. Due to the multitude of factors that contribute to a countryâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s decision of how much aid to give, it is difficult to find statistical evidence to show that allowing monitoring increases the amount of aid a country receives. However, the countries shown, chosen because they are notable recipients of U.S. aid and election monitoring, all display a similar pattern. The red dots on the graphs represent elections, while the raised red dots with vertical lines represent an election where international election monitors were present.

It should also be noted that, though the elections dataset does not extend to the present day, all of these countries have continued to have monitored elections up to present-day. In all cases, a second monitored election within the country seems to have triggered a massive increase in foreign aid.

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Table 7: U.S. Aid to Countries with Monitored Elections

It cannot be surmised from this result that election monitoring has a precise effect on the amount of aid given to a country. However, these four case studies do support the notion that allowing election monitoring can serve as a prerequisite to receiving large amounts of foreign aid. This may be because, as my theory suggested, the U.S. wants to be seen supporting countries that are attempting to democratize, and so insists on a country to allow monitoring before giving large amounts of aid. However, once monitors are present, other political issues might take precedence, and determine precisely how much aid a country receives. Certainly, election quality does not seem to guide aid flows, since all of these countries continued to have flawed elections even when monitors were present.

Effect of US Affinity on US Assessment of Election Quality

Finally, these last results explore whether or not election monitors might be unsuccessful in causing democratization due to being undermined by other political factors. Election monitors have the mission of neutrally assessing the quality of elections, so that the international community can then punish or reward countries based on their election results. Thus, the efficacy of monitors relies upon the international community fulfilling on this mechanism, and condemning corrupt elections regardless of

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political affiliations to the country in question. However, Table 8 shows that the United States does not proclaim elections, acceptable or not, based on the level of electoral problems alone.

In fact, the data show that, while an increase in electoral problems is positively correlated with more condemnation by the U.S., this effect is lessened for countries where affiliation with the U.S. is strong.

The interaction term between level of electoral problems and U.S. affinity shows that U.S. criticism of an election is decreased as a country becomes more affiliated with the U.S., in a statistically significant result.

Table 8: Effect of Political Affinity on U.S. Assessment of Electoral Quality

U.S. Condemnation (3-point scale)

Extent of Problems

US Affinity

Problems*US Affinity

Log of GDP per capita

Log of population

Level of Democracy

Constant

N

Standard Model

Model Excluding Countries Least Affiliated with U.S.

0.15***

0.17***

(0.01)

(0.02)

0.06

0.04

(0.05)

(0.04)

-0.06**

-0.26***

(0.03)

(0.06)

0.04***

0.08***

(0.01)

(0.02)

-0.02*

-0.03*

(0.01)

(0.02)

-0.72***

-0.86***

(0.04)

(0.08)

0.48***

0.48*

(0.15)

(0.28)

905

248

* p < 0.10, ** p < 0.05, *** p < 0.01

The second model does the same regression, but excluding countries with the lowest scores of U.S. affiliation, in case strongly negative outliers are skewing the result. Though this involves a smaller sample size, this produces a large magnification of the same effect, suggesting that the U.S. is about 8%

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XAN NORTHCOTT

less likely to condemn an election in the face of problems if US affinity is strong. Crucially, at this point, the weakening effect from U.S. affiliation now outweighs the effect of electoral problems (whose coefficient is 0.17, as opposed to -0.26), suggesting that, for the countries in this sample, U.S. affiliation is considered more important than the quality of elections when the State Department decides if an election was acceptable or not. This, of course, would undermine the work of election monitors, rendering their work and their reports of little use in democratization.

Table 9 provides further evidence that the election monitoring process is politicized. Again, for monitoring to improve elections and democracy, a necessary condition is for countries to condemn or punish a country for a fraudulent election and praise a country for a free and fair election.

Table 9: Effect of Monitors on US Relations

Presence of International Monitors

Extent of Electoral Problems

Log of Population

Level of Democracy

Log of GDP per capita

Constant

N

Positive Change in Relations with US After Election

Positive Change in Relations with Western Country or Organization After Election

0.099***

0.104***

(0.032)

(0.029)

0.004

0.013

(0.020)

(0.018)

-0.268***

-0.152*

(0.093)

(0.081)

0.202***

0.165**

(0.078)

(0.069)

-0.028

-0.053

(0.048)

(0.044)

4.466***

2.786**

(1.381)

(1.212)

799

750

* p < 0.10, ** p < 0.05, *** p < 0.01

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However, the results show that simple presence of monitors has a greater impact on political relations than on the quality of elections. Presence of international monitors at a countryâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s election has a statistically significant positive effect on that countryâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s relationship with the U.S. or another Western country. On the other hand, the level of electoral problems has no significant effect on relations after the election. This gives evidence that countries are rewarded with political praise in return for allowing monitors, irrespective of the actual quality of elections, which is usually indicated by monitor reports. This is further evidence that election monitoring might show a countryâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s willingness to appear to want to democratize, but in reality, it is unlikely to bring significant democratization because the international community pays little regard to the actual quality of elections.

Conclusion

The results offer substantial evidence that election monitoring is, at best, a flawed process in need of review. The already limited analysis in praise of monitoring in previous studies seems to have been generous, with any positive effects either not statistically significant or reversible when interaction effects are considered. It is difficult to find any statistical evidence of positive effects from election monitoring, except for a marginal increase in likelihood of incumbent turnover in certain cases.

The theory that governments, in the face of monitoring, substitute explicit for subtler forms of cheating to avoid detection does not find strong supportive evidence. Rather, it seems that monitoring struggles to suppress any form of cheating. Nevertheless, there is evidence that pre-election cheating and pre-election violence are particularly prevalent when election monitoring occurs. This does, indeed, support the argument that some of the worst election cheating possibly is being missed by monitors, who need to do much more thorough investigations in the long term leading up to an election.

While there is not strong evidence found that quantities of foreign aid are directly tied to election monitoring, monitoring does often seem to be a necessary condition for a country to receive large quantities of aid. Certainly, the relationship between aid and election quality does not seem to be healthy, since aid levels appear to fluctuate irrespective of election fraud, even when monitors are present.

Finally, evidence shows the assessment of elections to be highly politicized. While assessment of elections should be a neutral process (which monitors were specifically formed to carry out), there is evidence that Western powers, particularly the United States, are likely to deem political affiliation more important in judging elections than the actual level of electoral problems. There is also evidence that countries gain positive political relationships when allowing monitoring, in spite of continued fraudulent elections, further suggesting the politicization of the election monitoring process.

The policy implications of the failure of election monitoring are highly significant. For countries that send monitors, this would represent an embarrassing and costly failure of a decades long central foreign policy goal. For countries being monitored, this means continued elections that are not only fraudulent, but also that the international community ignores their fraudulence. Yet, this study shows election monitoring to be largely ineffective, while also plagued by the intrusion of other political issues.

It seems that a reassessment is long overdue of this crucial element of democracy promotion, especially now when democracy seems to be at its most vulnerable since the end of the Cold War. Moreover, the work of monitors is becoming more difficult as new election technology brings unforeseen challenges.

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The Effect of Chinese Foreign Aid on Civil Conflict in Sub Saharan Africa: A Study at the Subnational Level Sabrina He

This paper seeks to explain the role of Chinese foreign aid on civil conflict in Sub Saharan Africa at the subnational level. Using birth region as a proxy for Chinese foreign aid, it finds that the addition of such aid does have a significant impact on the discourse surrounding conflict, which has traditionally been related to external demand shocks proxied by agricultural commodity shocks and exposure to banking crises. Specifically, it shows that conflict probability is higher in regions where conflict intensity is lower, and lower in regions where conflict intensity is higher.

Introduction

At the country level, results on civil conflict are mixed and support two theories acting in

opposite directions. On one hand, increased resources caused by positive income shocks decrease conflict by decreasing the opportunity cost of insurrection or increasing the state’s capacity to suppress conflict.

On the other hand, the state-as-a-prize theory claims that better resources increase stakes and incentivize people to revolt against their governments. Traditionally, income shocks on the country level, instrumented by various variables, are used as a measure for increased resources. On the county level, external demand shocks are proxied by agricultural commodity shocks and exposure to banking crises to measure fluctuation in resource availability of counties across countries. The goal of this paper is to introduce a new variable, Chinese foreign aid, as a new contributor to such fluctuation. Its results illuminate the external validity of previous research, which has tried to put a definitive direction on the effects of various shocks.

Since Chinese foreign aid, agricultural commodity shocks and exposure to foreign banking crises are all international trade patterns, this research meaningfully trends in international trade and beyond.

While my initial assumption was that Chinese foreign aid would increase conflict in Sub Saharan Africa on the subnational level, this paper’s findings become more convoluted. In terms of aid, conflict intensity has a serious impact on the direction of the Chinese foreign aid coefficient. Either way, introducing Chinese foreign aid to civil conflict checks previous assumptions on agricultural commodity shocks and banking crises. As further explained in the “results” section, Chinese foreign aid does not

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only influence civil conflict on its own, but also alters the impact of agricultural commodity shocks and exposure to banking crises on civil conflict.

Literature Review Explaining Civil Conflict with Income Shocks

Most research explaining civil conflict uses commodity price variations as a proxy for exogenous

income shocks, theorized to influence conflict at the country level. However, results are mixed at the very least. While Besley and Persson (2008) find a positive relationship between income shocks and civil war incidence, Brucker and Ciccone (2010) find the opposite. At the core of this contention are two a priori ambiguous models of conflict that contradict each other. On one hand, large incomes reduce conflict by reducing individuals’ opportunity cost of insurrection or increasing the state’s capacity to prevent rebellion, as described by Fearon and Laitin (2003). On another hand, large income resulting from positive income shocks increase conflict probability by enhancing the value of resources to fight over. This is more widely known as the “state-as-a-prize” mechanism. The inability to identify the precise direction that income shocks exert on conflict at the country level could partly be explained by the problematic channel of transmission at the crux of this research method.

Contextualizing the Micro level of Analysis

More recently, Bazzi and Blattman (2014) argue that a significant relationship between commodity prices and conflict incidence can only be ascertained with very specific examples at the microlevel, where disaggregated versus aggregated data is employed. However, there are few studies done at the micro level, with the exception of Dube and Vargas (2013), who collected geographically disaggregated data for a single country, Colombia. Interestingly, their findings include evidence in favor of both the opportunity cost (or state-capacity) and state-as-a-prize theories. More precisely, they discover that positive commodity price shocks decrease conflict probability in the case of a labor-intensive commodity such as coffee, but increase conflict probability in the case of a capital-intensive commodity such as oil. Due to the one country nature of Dube and Vergas’ research, their results cannot be applied to other countries on the subnational level. Their work, nevertheless, shows that negative shocks to agricultural production and crops prices are closely associated with conflict. Such a revelation makes agricultural commodity shocks a good proxy to evaluate the effect of external demand shocks on civil conflict at the subnational level. Another example would be Jia (2011), who finds that droughts in China increased the probability of peasants’ revolts over the 1470-1990 period. Following the same logic, Hidalgo et al. (2010) collected data on Brazilian municipalities to conclude that favorable economic shocks, instrumented by rainfall, which is closely associated with agricultural production, reduce the number of land invasions within municipalities.

The same phenomenon is found to be true for Bohlken and Sergenti (2010) on Hindu-Muslim riots in India.

Notwithstanding the special case of Dube and Vergas, country-specific research can identity causes of conflict using individualistic behaviors. However, from a statistical viewpoint country-specific research is subject to external validity concerns and thus cannot be broadly used to explain civil conflict overall. For this reason, stand-alone, country-specific studies on conflict should be complemented by data from a range of countries on the micro level. Doing so connects macro, cross-country results, with micro,

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country-specific ones, as both within and between country variations are considered. On this note, Berman and Couttenier (2013) use georeferenced data on the location of violent events on the county to country level in Sub Saharan Africa to evaluate effects of agricultural commodity shocks and exposure to banking crises, on the incidence, onset and ending of conflict. They find that the incidence, onset and ending of conflict are negatively correlated with external demand shocks at the county level, but the relationship weakens the more remote the location is. Their research, therefore, supports the opportunity cost (or state capacity) theory.

Such method differentiates Berman and Couttenier, as their level of analysis addresses across and within country variation, and their scope includes various types of previously unexplored shocks. The usual measure of commodity shocks is improved by a region-specific measure of agricultural specialization.

Using the world demand for particular agricultural commodities produced by regions within countries reduces generalization of homogenous specialization across cells. If agricultural commodity shocks serve as a proxy for short term external demand, Berman and Couttenier also account for long term demand via the number of banking crises in the country’s trading partners. Finally, they combine these shocks with cell-specific data on the natural level of trade openness, proxied by the distance to the nearest seaport, in order to account for the fact that more remote locations are naturally less affected by international trade patterns. A combination of long term and short term variables ensures that both the geography and intensity of conflict within countries are captured.

Using Foreign Aid to Understand Conflict

Since Berman and Couttenier mainly find that external demand shocks are negatively related to civil conflict, their research supports the opportunity cost theory of insurrection. However, that does not rule out the state capacity effect, since conflict might equally decrease in times of good financial shocks, should most of the revenue go into fueling the state, which would then gain means to strengthen control and subdue opposition. They prove against the state capacity effect in regressing an interaction term between distance to capital city and shock, which they find to be insignificant. The statistical insignificance convinces them that distance to the capital city does not particularly matter to effects on shocks. But the state-as-a-prize mechanism theory cannot be dismissed solely on the basis that Berman and Couttenier find a negative correlation between external demand shock and civil conflict. Conflict could very well increase under good economic conditions given more resources to fight over. Moreover, albeit excellent measures, agricultural commodity shocks and banking crises cannot account for all types of income shocks that influence conflict. Large changes in income driven by resource blooms, for example, may also directly affect state revenue.

With this in mind, relating Chinese foreign aid and civil conflict contextualizes the effect of external demand shocks on conflict. Bluhm and al. (2016) find that countries receiving bilateral aid are more likely to escalate from small to armed conflict. In other words, bilateral foreign aid not only affects conflict incidence, but also conflict intensity as more conflicts burst out in areas already plagued with conflict. Collier and Hoeffler (2004) find that aid may alter opportunity costs of fighting, while Fearon and Laitin (2003) find that aid increases state capacity and/or the likelihood of the state-as-a-prize mechanism.

If aid improves the provision of public goods, it directly decreases civilians’ incentive to engage in violent activities. However, if an increase in foreign aid is seen as a “resource bloom,” it may either increase state

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capacity, thereby decreasing conflict, or increase state-as-a-prize incentives, thereby increasing conflict.

This associates bilateral foreign aid with the same explanation that binds income shocks. Regressing civil conflict on Chinese foreign aid clarifies the relationship between both variables as well as their individual impact on conflict.

Theory

If foreign aid generally complicates the opportunity cost (or state capacity) versus state-as-aprize debate, then Chinese foreign aid serves all that while also accounting for potential endogeneity if birth region is used as an instrument for Chinese foreign aid. Birth region is an effective instrument because Chinese foreign aid disproportionately flows to places where political leaders are born.

Birth region also makes for a good instrument because it fits under the exclusion restriction required for an instrumental variable to be valid. By definition, the instrument Z cannot affect Y when the main independent variable X is held constant. In this logic, birth region of political leaders does not and cannot directly affect conflict in a particular subnational region because birth region would not be relevant if not for Chinese foreign aid. Just because a certain leader is born in a certain region does not automatically make that region more subject to civil conflicts. A leaderâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s birth region means very little if he/she does not act upon it by disproportionately sending aid into that region. Therefore, birth region is a good instrument for Chinese foreign aid because the former cannot directly affect conflict, reducing endogeneity effects in the latter.

Drehel and al. (2016) find that when leaders hold power, their birth regions receive substantially more funding from China than other subnational regions. A similar effect is found in regions populated by individuals who share the same ethnicity as the political leader in power. However, this paper will prioritize birth region given that it is much stronger than ethnicity of political leaders as a variable. Drehel and al. find the amount of Chinese aid sent to a political leaderâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s birth region triples after that leader assumes power. Such characteristic is unique to Chinese aid, as Drehel and al. find that World Bank aid does not flow disproportionally to birth regions of political leaders the way that Chinese aid does. In short, Chinese aid lets the recipient country decide what to do with the external funding, whereas World Bank aid is subject to stringent rules and are consequently, much more difficult to manipulate. Well known for a principle of non-interference in the domestic affairs of recipient countries, Chinese aid may be easily exploited by those who espouse patronage politics, as described by Tull (2006). Therefore, using birth region to instrument Chinese aid not only eliminates endogeneity, but also explains any effect on shocks caused by political favoritism. This paper reinforces Berman and Couttenier in disengaging the effect of income shocks on conflict from a regionâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s proximity to a political center.

Another advantage of using birth region is that this instrument is by default subnational. It would not be possible to pinpoint effects of birth region without disaggregated geocoded data for many recipient countries over a long period. Should data be aggregated on the country level, the birth region effect would get washed out. Therefore, birth region aligns with the eventual regression analysis. Since existing literature using subnationally geocoded aid data tends to focus on a single country, as in Franken et al. (2012) Dreher and al. (2016) stand out for incorporating a large number of recipient countries.

Berman and Couttenier also believe that singular findings cannot be used to make statistically significant generalizations.

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Through China’s activities in Africa, we can see that the choice to only improve subnational development around birth regions of political leaders inadvertently widens spatial inequalities in neighboring counties. Consequently, conflict increases with more resources to fight over. Positive results between Chinese foreign aid and civil conflict in Sub Saharan Africa therefore account for the state-asa-prize mechanism and reinforce Berman and Couttenier’s claim that the opportunity cost mechanism is responsible for the effect of income shocks on conflicts. That Chinese development projects target politically privileged regions necessarily incites marginalized regions to react with social unrests. Where results are negative for Chinese foreign aid, the state capacity mechanism is most likely at play, congruent with the birth region instrument since both empower the political leader in charge.

Hypothesis

The model takes into account the main independent variables of Berman and Couttenier’s research. These include external demand shock variables like world demand for agricultural commodities produced in the region and exposure to banking crises. Furthermore, remoteness is used as an inverse measure to the level natural trade openness. This variable is the log of distance between cell c and the nearest seaport. The remaining controls in Berman and Couttenier’s research are also replicated. These include time dummies t and cell specific characteristics c, which capture time-invariant traits that affect conflict probability in a given cell. This measure includes distance to the closest port or capital, natural resources and the region’s roughness. The dependent variable is conflict incidence for the most part, except for the last panel, conflict onset and ending are taken into account. The regressions examine agricultural commodity shocks and banking crises as separate proxies for external demand for goods produced by cell c. This paper adds Chinese foreign aid to the equation and interacts it with various controls: Conflictc,t = β1(Aid)c,z,t+ β2(shock)c,t + β2(aid)c,t × β3(remoteness)c +β4TimeDummyt +β5(TimeInva riantCharacteristics)c +εC,t

The dependent variable, Conflictc,t,,captures the incidence, onset, or ending of a conflict in any given cell during any given year. The independent variable β1(Aid)c,C,t is the natural logarithm of Chinese official finance allocated to region c in country C and year t in constant U.S. dollars. It is instrumented by the birth region of political leaders Birthregioni,C,t, a binary variable that takes 1 if the political leader of country C in year t was born in administrative cell c,and 0 if otherwise.

The original hypothesis states that as the amount of Chinese foreign aid increases, so will the number of conflict events. Such relationship supports the state-as-a-prize mechanism, which reinforces Berman and Couttenier finding on positive external demand shocks decreasing conflict in a region--since Chinese foreign aid accounts for the opposite effect. Using OLS panel regression with country-year units, I test the following hypotheses: H1: An increase in amount of Chinese foreign aid to a subnational region in Sub Saharan Africa will have a significantly positive effect on conflict incidence in that region. β1 > 0 H2: An increase in amount of Chinese foreign aid to a subnational region in Sub Saharan Africa will have a significantly positive effect on conflict onset in that region. β1 > 0 H3: An increase in amount of Chinese foreign aid to a subnational region in Sub Saharan Africa will have a significantly positive effect on conflict ending in that region. β1 > 0

My main independent variable, Chinese foreign aid, is instrumented by birth region of that

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regionâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s political leader. This dummy variable takes a value of 1 if the region receiving aid is also the birth region of that regionâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s leader, and 0 if otherwise. Accounting for endogeneity between the dependent and independent variables, it ensures that Chinese foreign aid is indeed a meaningful addition to existing regressions on conflicts.

Data

Three datasets containing the geolocation of conflict events in Sub Saharan Africa are used as conflict data. The first two are different versions of the Armed Conflict Location and Event dataset (ACLED) and the UCDP-Georeferenced event dataset (UCDP-GED). The purpose of using three sets of conflict data is to cover as many countries and time periods as possible. The first ACLED dataset (ACLED I) covers twelve countries that experienced civil war episodes over the period of study. The advantage of this dataset is that it covers a wide time period, from 1960-2005. The second ACLED dataset (ACLED II) covers all African countries and even a small number of non-African countries, but is limited in time range, only starting in 1997. The final UCDP-GED dataset covers more African nations than ACLED I but less than ACLED II, from 1989 to 2010. The three datasets differ most in how to determine whether an event should be included. While ACLED I and UCDP-GED only consider conflict events that reach at least 25 battle related deaths per year, ACLED II includes conflicts under 25 deaths in addition to the above.

ACLED II records all political violence, including riots and protests within and outside a civil conflict without specifying a battle-related deaths threshold, so that violent events without deaths may very well be included. The problem with the ACLED II dataset is that the broader definition of conflict makes it more difficult to sync with country level analysis. Given how they qualify conflict events, UCDP GED and ACLED I have a higher conflict intensity threshold than ACLED II. To be straightforward, the regressions assume that UCDP GED and ACLED I represent high conflict intensity, and ACLED II represent low conflict intensity.

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The observation for all datasets is events or conflict occurrence for the most part. The data is gathered anywhere from press accounts, humanitarian agencies, to research publications. The latitude and longitude of each event define a geographical location on the subnational level. All three datasets contain data on the precision of event georeference, and geoprecision is at least at the municipality level in 80% of cases— more than 95% in ACLED’s datasets. In 65% of the cases, observations are even finer, especially at the village level. Otherwise, the geoprecision is at the provincial level, and observations in UCDP-GED— where the event cannot be localized at a finer level than the country, accounting for less than 2%—are dropped. For each data point, data is aggregated by year in a 0.5 x 0.5 degree cell—55 x 55 kilometers at the equator. Month, week, and day are specified for most events; yet, some events in UCDP-GED only include year. As the goal is to aggregate data overtime at a yearly frequency, this limitation has no tangible impact on the results. The unit of observation stays the cell-year throughout the entire paper. Further, because the level of geographical aggregation is the same as that used in PRIO-GRID, PRIO-GRID data on distances to capital city, national borders, and socioeconomic factors are included as controls.

For each conflict event, my dependent variable equals 1 if at least one conflict happened in that cell during the year—such instance is cell-specific conflict. To account for country-year fixed effects, I included cell-specific conflict onset and ending. Finally, most events range from 1980-2006 due to the difficulty of calculating financial data after the 2008 financial crisis. The effects of the 2008 depression on international trade and commodity prices are yet to be fully understood. Since the goal is to investigate the effects of Chinese foreign aid in the context of external demand shocks, it is best to stay congruent with events descriptive of the financial scenario. For any given year, the average number of events by cell is between three and four, depending on the dataset. Because the majority of cells experience no conflict over the entire period, I run robustness checks with cells in which at least one conflict occurs. These “high conflict risk cells” show a bigger quantitative effect of Chinese aid on conflicts. The USD deflation variable is logged to approximate normal distribution.

The paper merges conflict data on the longitude and latitude of events with Chinese foreign aid data from the AidData 1.1 China in Africa dataset for subnational units of 47 African countries over the 2001-2011 period. Subnational units at the ADM1 and ADM2 administrative regions are matched with conflict data by the longitude and latitude such that the eventual product corresponds to the 0.5 x 0.5 cell measurement in the dependent variable. In total, there are 5,835 AMD2 regions in 47 African countries. Once Chinese aid and conflict data are matched, 5,749 of the 222,206 original data points in the Berman and Couttenier paper are retained. A little less than 100 observations from the Chinese aid data are dropped as a result of missing data on longitude and latitude. A series of regressions that include major agricultural/crisis shocks and distance data in the context of added Chinese aid follow.

The most important controls adopted from Berman and Couttenier are external demand shock proxies: the first being agricultural demand shocks (short-lasting) and the second being exposure to banking

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crises (long-lasting) in donor countries. Shock variables are based on variations in the foreign demand for goods produced by the region in which the cell belongs. By interacting the share of a certain agricultural commodity p in a cell c with the world import value of commodity p in year t minus the imports of country i, the values that agricultural shocks take are produced. The region-specific data on agricultural specialization is obtained from FAO Agromaps. Financial crises, on the other hand, make good longterm measures because they are exogenous to trading partners’ economic and political situations. In weighting the average share of the destination country’s total imports from the exporting African country, the crisis dummy equals 1 if the destination experiences a banking crisis in a given year. This trade data comes from the IMF Direction of Trade Statistics (DOTS) and the crisis data from Reinhard and Rogoff (2011). Finally, the remoteness variable correlates to non-shock related cell-specific characteristics such as economic activity or proximity to natural resources.

Results

The results complicate the previous theories. While the expected results are that Chinese foreign

aid increases civil conflict in Sub Saharan Africa, this is only the case for some of the actual results.

Each panel contains supposedly consistent estimations across regions—columns 1 and 2 use UCDP-GED conflict data, columns 3 and 4 use ACLED I, and columns 5 and 6 use ACLED II—but that is not the case. To increase robustness, odd-numbered columns contain fixed effects logit estimations while evennumbered linear probability model ones. All remaining tables follow this format except for Table 7.

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In Panel A of Table 3, the only variables included are the main independent variable (Chinese foreign aid) and one of the main controls (agricultural commodity shocks). Results for Chinese aid are statistically significant in columns 3-6, with 3 and 4 pointing in opposite directions to 5 and 6. The fact that the ACLED I only includes twelve African countries while ACLED II includes all Sub-Saharan African countries may describe such a contradiction. Furthermore, countries included in ACLED I have all experienced civil war in the time frame studied, while ACLED II accounts for a much larger selection of conflicts, including those without battle related deaths. In countries that already experience civil wars (those in ACLED I), Chinese foreign aid tends to increase state capacity and decrease conflict. Countries included in ACLED II are much more diverse and experience lower level conflicts. According to the results, these countries are subject to the state-as-a-prize theory, where Chinese foreign aid incentivizes people to protest and revolt against their political leadership. As previously stated, ACLED IIâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s more generous definition of conflict tailors to low-intensity conflicts. UCDP GED and ACLED I, on the other hand, tailor to high-intensity conflicts due to a stricter definition of conflict (at least 25 battle related deaths). Therefore, the results also demonstrate that Chinese aid leads to more low-intensity conflicts and less high-intensity conflicts. Another interesting observation is that the addition of Chinese foreign aid complicates the situation to such a degree that agricultural demand coefficients in Panel A are no longer significant in columns 3-6, regardless of whether the remoteness interaction term is added.

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In Table 4, Moree interaction terms are added as controls, including 1) aid x remoteness, 2) aid x ln distance to capital, 3) aid x ln distance to border, 4) aid x ln distance to natural resources, and 5) aid x ln GDP area. However, because the five interaction terms are so highly correlated with each other, the logistic regression model can not converge normally. As a result, the main effect of Chinese aid is initially not significant. To solve this problem, principal components analysis reduces the five highly correlated interaction variables to two, each related to a subset of the five. To derive meaning from the principal components, it is necessary to see what variables are most highly related to each other. Component one loads heavily on the interaction terms 2) aid x ln distance to capital, 3) aid x ln distance to border, and 4) aid x ln distance to natural resources. Component two loads heavily on the interaction between 3) aid x ln distance to border and 5) aid x ln GDP area.

These results complicate the previous expectation that Chinese foreign aid will reinforce external demand shock alignment with the opportunity cost theory, since most significant aid coefficients are negative. In this perspective, Chinese foreign aid is just as negatively correlated to conflict as are various forms of shocks, such that Chinese foreign aid partially explains the opportunity cost theory. Meanwhile, the same pattern in Table 3 holds for Chinese foreign aidâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;negative for ACLED I and positive for ACLED II. After the above interaction terms are controlled, results for the UCDP GED dataset become significant as well (both negative in columns 1 and 2). It makes sense that results from UCDP GED flow in the same direction as ACLED I versus ACLED II because both UCDP GED and ACLED I account for events of higher conflict intensity. Contrarily, ACLED II accounts for events of lower intensity since it has a more generous definition of conflict. As a result, the state-as-a-prize theory affects low rather than high intensity conflicts, ascertained by positive results in ACLED II. On the other hand, the state capacity and opportunity costs theories affect high rather than low intensity conflicts, given that results for UCDP GED and ACLED I are both negative.

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In Table 5, exposure to banking crises is the main control, rather than agricultural commodity shocks. In Panel A, the only three variables are the main independent variable, Chinese foreign aid and main control variable, and exposure to banking crises. Results are significant for columns 3-5 and follow the same pattern: negative for ACLED I and positive for ACLED II. In Panel B, the addition of the interaction term aid x remoteness improves results to make column 6 significant. In Panel C, the interaction term aid x remoteness makes column 4 insignificant; columns 3, 5 and 6 remain significant. Overall, the three panels follow the same pattern in which results are not significant for UCDP GED (probably because this dataset is less precise with georeference), significant and negative for ACLED I, as well as significant and positive for ACLED II.

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In Table 6, the results from UCDP-GED data on conflict onset and ending are used, instead of those from conflict incidence. In Panel A, all results are significant except for those from column 6. In Panel B, where the aid variable is interacted with remoteness, all results become significant and negative; on the other hand, some results are positive in Panel A. In the absence of the interactive variable, Chinese foreign aid has a positive effect on conflict onset and a negative effect on conflict ending—yet, this observation is no longer true once the interaction control term is added. This discovery shows that the level of openness of a specific region impacts how Chinese foreign aid affects conflicts. Since Chinese foreign aid does not flow to remote locations of no interest, the regions have less to fight over. However, people from more open areas are more tangibly affected by the disproportionate distribution of Chinese aid, incentivizing them to act against the government.

Conclusion

While this paper did not reinforce the findings of Berman and Couttenier—stating external demand shocks fit into the opportunity cost mechanism of civil conflicts—it did reinforce the contradictory findings in existing literature. The opportunity cost mechanism upholds that increased external demand shocks decrease the opportunity cost of insurrection and reduce conflict; however, the same phenomenon can also be explained by the increased state capacity, if resources flow strictly to the political leader.

However, the state-as-a-prize mechanism holds that increased income shocks increase resources and the probability of conflict. This paper finds that more Chinese aid increases the incidence of smaller conflicts, as with ACLED II, and decreases civil wars, as with ACLED I. These results show that Chinese foreign

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aid fits in the state-as-a-prize mechanism in cases of lower conflict intensity, and the opportunity cost/state capacity mechanism in cases of higher conflict intensity.

In demonstrating that the distance to the capital city has little impact on the relationship between shock and conflict, Berman and Couttenier provide evidence that correlates shock with the opportunity cost theory. The story is the opposite with Chinese aidâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;the birth region instrument is precisely valid thanks to political favoritism. That political leaders can dictate where aid flows shows that they control foreign assistance, making fueling such aid into increasing the stateâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s capacity easier, should an insurrection occur. Therefore, though the negative results confound Berman and Couttenier at face value, they are mostly intrinsically still in line with the latter.

In their ambiguity, the results reconcile micro and macro levels of analysis: the causes and direction of factors affecting civil conflicts are yet to be determined with precision. Because the nature of the sample (number of countries, type of countries, time frame, and rubric in identifying conflicts) does have an impact on results, the micro-level results complement macro-level contradictions in identifying another statistically significant variable that affects conflicts. While results are mixed, Chinese foreign aid is undoubtedly an excellent addition to the civil conflict study as it at once 1) accounts for endogeneity, 3) is instrumented by birth region of political leaders, and 3) is quantitatively adequate for working with large and telling samples. Further research can reevaluate the effect of Chinese aid on conflicts after the 2008 financial crisis, since the way by which income shocks impact conflict might differ greatly given the restructuring of the global financial markets.

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Works Cited

Data AidData. 2015. Geocoded Data from the World Bank IBRD-IDA, Version 1.0. Available at http://

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Gleditsch, Nils Petter, Peter Wallensteen, Margareta Sollenberg, and Håvard Strand, “Armed Conflict

1946–2001: A New Dataset,” Journal of Peace Research 39 (2002), 615–637.

Melander, Erik, and Ralph Sundberg, “Climate Change, Environmental Stress, and Violent Conflict:

Introducing the UCDP Georeferenced Event Dataset,” paper presented at the International

Studies Associations, March 16–19, Montreal, Canada (2011).

Monfreda, Chad, Navin Ramankutty, and Jonathan A. Foley, “Farming the Planet: Geographic

Distribution of Crop Areas, Yields, Physiological Types, and Net Primary Production in the

year 2000,” Global Biochemical Cycles 221 (2009), 1–19.

Raleigh, Clionadh, Linke Andrew, Håvard Hegre, and Joakim Karlsen, “Introducing ACLED-Armed

Conflict Location and Event Data,” Journal of Peace Research 47 (2010), 1–10.

Sundberg, Ralph, Mathilda Lindgren, and Ausra Padskocimaite, “UCDP GED Codebook version 1.0-

2011” (Uppsala: Department of Peace and Conflict Research, Uppsala University, 2010).

Literature Bazzi, Samuel, and Christopher Blattman, “Economic Shocks and Conflicts: Evidence from Commodity

Prices,” American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics 6 (2014), 1–38.

Berman, N. and M. Couttenier (2015). External shocks, internal shots: The geography of civil conflicts.

Review of Economics and Statistics 97(4), 758–776.

Besley, Timothy J., and Torsten Persson, “The Incidence of Civil War: Theory and Evidence,” NBER

working paper 14585 (2008).

Bluhm, Richard, Martin Gassebner, Sarah Langlotz, Paul Schaudt, “Fueling Conflict? (De) Escalation

and Bilateral Aid,” AidData Working Paper (2016).

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Empirical Investigation of Hindu-Muslim Riots in India,” Journal of Peace Research

47 (2010), 589–600.

Bruckner, Markus, and Antonio Ciccone, “International Commodity Prices, Growth and the Outbreak

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of Civil War in Sub-Saharan Africa,” Economic Journal 120 (2010), 519–534.

Collier, P. and A. Hoeffler (2004a). Aid, policy and growth in post-conflict societies. European Economic

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Dreher, A., A. Fuchs, R. Hodler, B. Parks, P. A. Raschky, and M. J. Tierney (2015). Aid on demand:

African leaders and the geography of China’s foreign assistance. CESifo Working Paper No. 5439.

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Modern African Studies 44, 3: 459-479.

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Afterlife of the Empire: “Global Britain” and the Crisis of Liberal Internationalism Andrew Michael Spohn

To many observers of international politics, the British electorate’s decision to leave the European Union and the advent of the Trump presidency signify an end to the liberal world order that has defined international relations for the past few decades.

This paper asserts that Britain’s historic sense of national identity has contributed to this current crisis of liberal internationalism generally and the Brexit referendum results more specifically. To demonstrate this point, one central research question is addressed: how have the internal contradictions of British international identity— which has historically been cast in both liberal and imperial terms by political and intellectual elites—helped produce the United Kingdom’s current political moment in regard to leaving the European Union? This thesis is primarily a work of global and international history focused on how the tenuous relationship between liberalism and imperialism has shaped British identity to the present day. Periods examined include the origins of liberal theory in seventeenth century Britain and that theory’s relationship with colonization; the height of British imperialism in the nineteenth century and the origins of the English-speaking world; the demise and decolonization of the British Empire after the two world wars; Britain’s fraught relationship with European integration and the wider liberal world order in the late twentieth century; and imperial nostalgia in the run-up to the Brexit referendum. To bring these ideas to the present, this paper also engages in an analysis of speeches from Prime Minister Theresa May, the British leader who has so-far been tasked with reformulating Britain’s future role in the world, to show how post-imperial aspirations plague the British political classes’ view of global affairs to the detriment of the real concerns of the electorate. Therefore, this paper broadly concludes that Britain’s problems are indicative of a post-imperial predicament, where Western nations like Britain, France, and the United States, pursue liberal policies internationally as a function of their perceived sense of domestic identity, while failing to recognize that the deeply-rooted contradictions within liberalism, that stem from the tradition’s imperial past, limit their countries’ abilities to build a truly liberal world order by exacerbating tensions within their domestic polities and engaging in destructive power politics abroad.

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Introduction: The Crisis of the Liberal World Order

The British electorate’s decision to the leave the European Union and the advent of the Trump presidency has prompted a common habit of observers to declare a crisis of the liberal world order that has dominated international politics since the end of the Cold War—especially in the United States and the United Kingdom. Considering Britain and America are two of the major vanguards of western liberalism, such a predicament is a significant development in international history. It is natural to wonder, therefore, what has compelled these two polities—particularly Britain, as a smaller European country that depends on multilateralism for its security and economic sustenance—to flirt with illiberalism.

To understand why such a question is arising now, it is important to remember the liberal political tradition emerged in the nineteenth century, at a time when Britain’s overseas empire expanded to its zenith. Liberalism and empire thus intimately intertwined, even though several strands of liberal thought critiqued, and ultimately undermined, London’s imperial modes of governance. This reality presents a complex and contradictory historical tension that has shaped Britain’s view of itself and of its role in the wider world. Examining and analyzing the historical nature of this dialectic—especially in light of Britain’s impending European Union exit—can help observers of today’s political climate to glean how the current crisis of liberal internationalism is partially a function of the inherent contradictions within liberalism— contradictions that stem from Britain’s imperial past.

The study of the historical development of contemporary British identity reveals the tension inherent to the liberal tradition. Literature on this subject suggests the overarching British sense of identity has two broad and interconnected strands: internationalism based on the promotion of a liberal world order that is underlined by a unique and indispensable role for the British state and people. In other words, the British identity is predicated on its global influence—a holdover from the imperial past that survived the decolonization period—and this has complicated the country’s role in the European integration project as well as influenced the United Kingdom’s relations with other English-speaking societies such as the United States. Therefore, when analyzing British identity in light of results of the 2016 referendum on European Union membership, the historical linkages between liberalism and British imperialism must be brought to attention.

I. Research Question:

This paper argues that Britain’s global sense of identity has contributed to the current crisis of liberal internationalism generally and the results of the Brexit referendum more specifically. In order to demonstrate this phenomenon, one central research question is addressed: how have the internal contradictions of British international identity—which has been historically cast in both liberal and imperial terms by political and intellectual elites—helped produce the United Kingdom’s current political moment in regard to leaving the European Union? To help guide and focus the research, several subsidiary questions must be assessed: 1. What were the key elements of the liberal-imperial dialectic that emerged in Britain during the longnineteenth century? How did this tradition’s thinkers imagine Britain’s role in the emerging world order?

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2. What elements of this liberal-imperial paradigm continued to shape elite British discourse on the country’s international identity, even after the decolonization period?

3. How have these historical ideas of British international identity complicated the country’s relationship with the European integration process?

4. How are notions of “The Anglosphere” – an alliance between Britain, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and the United States – and the Anglo-American “special relationship” animating the current British leadership’s political discourses as the country charts a new foreign policy path outside of the European Union?

On the surface, these queries may appear to only be narrowly applicable to one country off the northwestern coast of Europe. This is not the case, however; by linking Britain’s current political moment to the intermingled histories of liberalism and imperialism, light can be shed on a thematic problem that is increasingly manifesting itself in core liberal societies: can a democratic polity like the United Kingdom remain broadly liberal when certain elements of her society feel their sense of identity is threatened?

II. A Constructivist Approach to the Formation of British Identity:

The thesis will primarily be a work of global and international history focused on how liberalism and imperialism have shaped contemporary British identity and contributed to the crisis of the liberal world order, of which the British electorate’s decision to leave the European Union is an integral part.

Such considerations are important to note because no state’s foreign policy objectives occur in a historical vacuum, especially when that country’s government is seeking to redefine its role in relation to other global players, which is exactly what is happening right now in London. An analysis of historically-conditioned sense of British identity is therefore required to make sense of the current British government’s vision for a post-Brexit United Kingdom.

Constructivism, an analytic approach inherent to the academic discipline of International Relations, provides some helpful tools for this type of historical exercise. Constructivism broadly asserts that that the norms and rules of international politics are socially assembled; therefore, ideational factors are just as important as material structures and military power when assessing interstate behavior (Flockhart 84). When analyzing international politics, Constructivists focus on how each country formulates its identity within the broader world system and how such an identity informs its country’s role within that arrangement. In the case of Brexit, therefore, Constructivism can help determine how the British public views their country’s identity in relation to the European Union and the wider world and why that domestic identity has proven so problematic within a pan-European context. More importantly, though, Constructivism can help explain how Britain’s leadership and foreign policy elite will use that identity to formulate their country’s Brexit negotiating goals and future world role. Tim Oliver—an International Relations scholar from the London School of Economics—notes, “Constructivism can help explain why Prime Minister Theresa May’s negotiating priorities seem to privilege political concerns – largely based on a British sense of global identity – over economic ones,” (Oliver 1).

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This emphasis on Theresa May’s thinking points to a key limit of the Constructivist approach: that it relies primarily on a sense of collective identity, rather than on how that identity is used and manipulated by individual policy-makers and societal factions. This is particularly relevant in the case of Britain, which does not necessarily have a collective sense of national identity in the early twenty-first century, but rather, several competing regional and class identities (Sanders and Houghton 275). These divisions are evident in how the country voted during the June 2016 referendum on European Union membership: Scotland, Northern Ireland, and Greater London voted to remain in the European Union, while the rest of England and Wales largely opted to leave. It would be hard to construe one unified identity for the whole of the United Kingdom from these disparities, but that is exactly what Theresa May and previous prime ministers have had to do when representing the country in international forums. Fostering a distinctively British sense of identity (rather than English or Scottish) through foreign policy has been particularly relevant for the British state during times of historical disjuncture—like the two World Wars, decolonization, the Cold War, and, now, Brexit. Given this, it is therefore necessary to place primacy on how prime ministers and other elites have defined British identity on the global stage during moments of historical significance, which is exactly what supplementing Constructivism’s focus on identity with a historical analysis of the evolution of British views on world order can do.

This two-fold approach is the theoretical lens through which this paper assesses how British identity has contributed to Brexit and an unraveling of liberal internationalism. The argument is structured around eight chapters, each dealing with a different historical period and theme. The first chapter deals with select academic debates about the nature of the current crisis of liberal internationalism and argues that liberalism’s historical development has not sufficiently muted the more imperialistic aspects of the political tradition, one of the reasons why liberal internationalism now finds itself unraveling. The second chapter then explicates on this historical trajectory and shows how a colonial logic of appropriation, domination, and exclusion is constitutive of liberalism itself because the tradition developed within an imperial British context. The third chapter explains how the British state internalized liberal principles into its immediate post-Second World War foreign policy vision, largely shaped by wartime prime minister Winston Churchill’s famous “three circles” model that argued London could shape a liberal and democratic world order if it simultaneously fostered close diplomatic ties with the United States, the Commonwealth and former colonial empire, and continental Europe.

The fourth chapter examines how this vision was complicated by the decolonization of Britain’s overseas empire, which was largely sold to the British public as the final realization of the imperial mission to bring liberal principles to other parts of the world. A corollary to this story is that the loss of empire required Britain to reorient its economy and political system more toward the European integration project at the expense of its lingering ties to English-speaking Commonwealth countries, like Australia, Canada, and New Zealand. This was not the most popular option among both the populace and political elite, which ensured that Britain’s relationship with the European Community would always lack cultural depth.

The fifth chapter picks up on this theme to show how Conservative Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher distanced herself from Europe to embrace a more Atlanticist foreign policy with the United States, in order to promote neoliberalism—or liberal fundamentalism—more aggressively across the world. The

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chapter also examines how Thatcher’s legacy left an indelible legacy on Britain’s sense of identity—so much so that Labour Prime Minister Tony Blair adopted many of her outlooks, most notably the desire to maintain strong ties with the United States. The chapter then argues that the tensions between Britain’s commitment to Europe and the desire to pursue strong ties with the United States and Commonwealth ultimately undermined enthusiasm for European membership and encouraged right-wing Euroskeptics to increasingly endorse the idea of the “Anglosphere” as an alternative to the European Union. The “Anglosphere”—a proposed alliance of English-speaking states that are descendants of the British Empire —is frequently described as a liberal, democratic, and capitalist bloc of countries more in keeping with the values of Britain’s political and economic culture than other European countries. The origins of this “Anglosphere idea”— which can be traced back to the late nineteenth century—is one of the oft-forgotten backstories of Brexit, and one of the side-effects of the exclusionary and colonial logic that is endemic to British liberalism.

The sixth chapter addresses the fallout of the June 2016 referendum by analyzing how the government of current Prime Minister Theresa May has responded to the vote. In a series of speeches, Mrs. May stated that she wants a truly “Global Britain” to emerge after the country leaves the European Union. Her words and metaphors are laced with themes of British identity that can be traced back to the liberal-imperial dialectic of the long-nineteenth century, as outlined in earlier chapters, and new ideas about the Anglosphere. This will be demonstrated by an analysis of three key speeches: one about Britain’s relationship with the United States, another about the country’s commitment to liberal internationalism through membership of the United Nations, and a third that outlines a new relationship with Europe based on the country’s historical affinity for free trade. In doing so, the continuities between the “Global Britain” metaphor and earlier ideas of Britain’s role in the world are made clear.

Finally, the paper will conclude with a two-chapter assessment of how viable the “Global Britain” vision is given the major economic, political, and diplomatic constraints Britain faces as it leaves the European Union and navigates a world less defined by the liberal values it helped to engender. Ironically, the British political class seeks to perpetuate a vision of liberalism that Brexit and the Anglosphere idea actively undermines—a tension that is found within the very DNA of liberal internationalism as historically conceived.

Chapter 1: Defining The Crisis of Liberal Internationalism I. Perspectives on the Crisis of Liberal Internationalism:

Before British identity’s role in the current unraveling of liberal internationalism can be assessed, attention must be paid to the nature’s liberal order itself and its attendant crisis. There is a broad academic consensus on the features of this liberal order. Between the end of the Second World War and the fall of the Soviet Union, the United States successfully established a liberal order in the western part of the world with the assistance of other core liberal states like Britain, France, Canada, and West Germany (Jahn 45).

This order can be called a liberal international subsystem and was organized around the principles of economic openness and cooperation, democratic accountability, sovereign equality, human rights, and

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republican fidelity (45). Though the states included in this subsystem never fully adhered to these liberal ideals—either in their foreign engagements or domestic policies—they at least all generally agreed to aspire to the shared goal of peacefully solving transnational problems through the maintenance of international institutions, like United Nations and bourgeoning European integration project.

This consensus became more problematic with the Soviet Union’s collapse and the end of the Cold War. Having no real challenger to its global hegemony, the United States attempted to expand the western liberal international subsystem across the whole world throughout the 1990s and early 2000s, a project that President George H.W. Bush dubbed the “New World Order.” By the turn of the century, however, it became evident that this venture to craft a truly liberal international environment had failed due the rise of sectarian violence and Islamist terrorism, the spread of authoritarian democracy in Eastern European and post-Soviet states, and selective humanitarian interventions in the name of liberal causes that exacerbated the aforementioned problems and sidelined human rights concerns. There is considerable academic debate as to why the liberal international subsystem failed to be exported across the entire globe, but these disagreements can generally be divided into two camps: those who blame the idea of American exceptionalism for the failures of liberal internationalism, while still supporting liberal principles and, secondly, those who blame some of the constitutive elements of liberal theory itself.

Two major proponents of the view that American foreign policy is at fault are Daniel Deudney and John Ikenberry, who both broadly endorse liberal international principles in their writings, most notably in their co-authored book Democratic Internationalism. An American Grand Strategy for a Postexceptionalist Era. They essentially argue that the crisis of liberal internationalism is one of success, because once the United States and its ideas about economics and politics emerged dominant at the end of the Cold War, American leaders were then able promote their country’s interests in an unfettered way (Jahn 47). These efforts usually ended dreadfully, since Americans tended to ignore other country’s interests, cultures, and points of view due to the sheer power of their own country. This behavior was underlined by a belief in “American exceptionalism,” which asserts that the American model of capitalism, democracy, and development is vastly superior to any and all alternatives and thus should be followed by the rest of the world if a liberal modernity is to be achieved across the planet (48). Ikenberry, Deudney, and other liberal internationalists contend that this hubris is the central flaw of the current American-led international order, since it blinds policymakers in Washington to the possibility that not all countries in the world can follow America’s path of development, democratization, and liberalization because of different cultural, social, and economic conditions.

Given this, scholars like Deudney and Ikenberry contend that a reformed type of liberal internationalism that jettisons American exceptionalism is the antidote to the current crisis. They argue that liberal international theory has plenty of tools to accomplish this, especially if it places greater weight on social democracy to compensate for the inevitable economic inequality and dislocation that accompanies a transition to liberal capitalism (47). Their model has been dubbed “democratic internationalism,” and hinges on a recognition on the part of Americans that their model of state and society is not applicable to everyone, and that the world’s democracies must do more to learn from each other so that a more universal type of liberal democracy can be fostered. Under this conception, the core liberal democracies—

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like America, Britain, and other Western European states—should serve as examples to be emulated in culturally specific ways in other countries instead of actively intervening in other states’ affairs through militarized foreign policies and economic manipulation.

While these ideas are interesting in that they seek to provide a more expansive and culturallynuanced type of democracy that could underpin a broadly liberal world system, other academics argue it is too reductionist to blame American foreign policy for the failures of liberal internationalism, especially since the current crisis is a transnational problem that extends far beyond America’s shores. Beate Jahn, a leading scholar of the theory and history of liberal internationalism, argues the global distribution of these problems points to something much deeper about liberalism: internal contradictions within liberal theory that make liberal internationalism deeply unpopular both at home in core liberal states and abroad. This is evident, he argues, with European populism, the Brexit vote, and the election of President Donald Trump in the United States.

All of these movements generally do not seek to reform liberal internationalism, but rather, to dismantle the majority of the achievements and principles that have underlined the American-led world since the Second World War. Populists attack multilateralism and put ‘America, Britain, or France first’; they prioritize national over international law, citizenship over human rights, they cooperate with authoritarian regimes; they drop free-trade agreements, withdraw from free-trade blocs, and pursue protectionist policies; they attempt to block migration and travel, and thus build walls rather than bridges between states.

Today’s populist movements, in short, are rebelling against the globalized liberal world order – and thus liberal internationalism’s greatest achievement (Jahn 48).

This political rebellion from within liberal polities themselves constitutes an additional element of the crisis of liberal internationalism that the perspectives of Ikenberry and Deudney do not account. By placing their emphasis primarily on American foreign policy, they overlook the parts of liberal internationalism dependent upon a domestic political consensus within liberal states themselves. Jahn’s assessment – while not ignoring American foreign policy’s role in the current crisis – delves deeply into the philosophical underpinnings of liberalism from a historical perspective to show that there is an intimate relationship between the domestic politics of core liberal states and the limit to which liberalism can be propagated internationally. He argues that today’s American-led liberal world order has stretched this domestic consensus to its limits, which helps explain why populist movements have popped up in the United States, Britain, and Europe. Given all this, Jahn’s line of reasoning is more appropriate for an analysis of the crisis of liberal internationalism that focuses on the historical role of one liberal state’s sense of national identity—Britain—than the one offered by Ikenberry and Deudney. The United States’ foreign policy based on a sense of American exceptionalism matters, but it is not the only part of the equation, especially when one takes a more historical and ideational approach to the development of liberal internationalism.

II. The Origins of Domestic Liberal Theory:

When looking at the historical roots of the liberal tradition, it soon becomes evident that there is a strong theoretical connection between domestic liberalism and international politics. Before this can

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be addressed, though, it is necessary to provide some clarity on what liberalism means within a domestic context, as this is the sphere in which liberal values were first imagined and applied. Domestically, liberalism typically defines a type of government that honors individual rights, encourages the ownership of private property, adheres to the rule of law, and facilitates the democratic participation of the general population (Jahn 48). These features form the general values that liberal societies try to foster, but also provide an aspirational basis for reform both domestically and internationally.

There is a certain degree of vagary to liberalism and its application, however, since it is not a unified philosophy. Instead, liberalism is best described as a cultural phenomenon with no real founder.

Later generations of scholars have inherited the responsibility of synthesizing the tradition’s meaning by reading back noticeably liberal ideas into the philosophical works and concepts from earlier periods.

Nevertheless, scholars generally agree that seventeenth century English philosopher, John Locke, was one of the first major thinkers to bring recognizably liberal ideas together into a cohesive philosophy that directly inspired subsequent political movements (Jahn 48). Most importantly for the purposes of this paper, however, is the firm demarcation between the domestic and the international that Locke makes in his theories.

Locke’s thought reacted to a series of seventeenth century European crises that had undermined the religious, political, intellectual, and economic status quo. He responded to these changes by formulating a new conception of politics based on the so-called natural rights and freedom of man. In his influential Two Treatises of Government, he argued that these natural rights and freedoms could be secured if “every Man has a Property in his own Person and the Labour of his Body and the Work of his Hands” (Locke 28788). This desire to self-possess property and labor is what propels human beings out of their state of nature and into the social arena. But since property and labor are necessary for the individual person to sustain his or her livelihood, people are compelled to resist any social system that restricts their freedom to attain possessions and work. It is natural, therefore, for an individual to resist an absolutist government that does not guarantee these basic freedoms (Jahn 49). As Locke put it later in the Two Treatises, “Men are naturally free, and the Examples of History show that the Governments of the World… had their beginnings laid on that foundation and were made of the Consent of the People….the great and chief end therefore of government is the Preservation of their Property” (Locke 351). Even though these proposals were rooted in seventeenth century concerns, they nevertheless have shaped recognizably liberal thought up to the present day: According to Locke’s theory, then, the three core principles of liberal thought are private property, individual freedom and government by consent. These principles still lie at the core of most conceptions of liberalism. Today they are embodied in the market economy, human rights, and democracy. Crucially, however, in Locke’s theory these principles are mutually constitutive: private property constitutes individual freedom, and individual freedom requires government by consent; and the main task of government, in turn, is the protection of private property, which completes the circle by upholding individual freedom (Jahn 49).

As can be gleaned from this summary of the core of Locke’s thought, liberalism is primarily imagined within a domestic political context and provides a normative framework by which a society can be judged.

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Locke’s England, however, did not adhere to these principles, which ensured that his work had to develop a theoretical strategy for extending these values to the domestic British population.

III. The International in Early Liberal Thought

Locke’s analysis of sixteenth-century Britain is where the first noticeably international aspect of proto-liberal thought emerges. In line with Locke’s theories, this international dimension is intimately tied to the principle of private property ownership as a vehicle of personal emancipation. In Locke’s time, most people in Britain—and elsewhere, for that matter—did not own private property, which ensured the English monarch and Parliament in Westminster exercised too much control over ordinary people. Since his theories argue that property is the basis for individual freedom against an absolutist political system, Locke believed that people in England, Scotland, and Wales needed to work toward a government that protected private property. As a first step, he asserted that full political rights should be extended to all property-owners—even if they were not members of the nobility—so that a greater degree of political freedom was fostered in Britain (Jahn 49). This move would not be enough, however, since Locke thought that all people are born with a natural right to own property.

Locke therefore thought that full political rights would have to be extended to ordinary Britons if the masses were ever to own property and be fully free in the liberal sense. Given that the circular nature of his theories, the ownership of private property for the majority of the populations was the only way that a sufficient degree of pressure would be placed on the Westminster government to enact liberal political and economic reforms, thereby realizing his normative vision (Jahn 50). However, there was a problem with this regarding the origin of all this land and property. Space was a limited commodity in Britain, and property that was already privately owned could not be redistributed to the masses. Locke in turn suggested that commonly-owned (public) property should form the basis of redistribution, since it could then be used by the industrious labor of free individuals to be made more valuable both political and economically.

The problem of space in the British Isles still placed limits on the amount of public property that could be privatized in order to promote liberal values. Since there was not enough land in Britain to go around, Locke looked beyond the domestic sphere to England’s overseas colonies in North America, where he argued land was plentiful. As he wrote in the The Two Treatises, “there are still great Tracts of Ground to be found, which . . . lie waste and are more than the people who dwell on it, do, or can make use of, and so lie in common” (Locke 299). As such, Locke’s writings and theories consistently defended policies of English colonialism as a way of offloading the excess domestic British population to North America and other overseas destinations so they could attain the private property necessary for full political rights in the liberal sense—even if this came at the expense of the native populations of those territories (Tully). This colonial aspect of his thought also establishes the role of the international for a domestically-liberal society and its external policies: The solution to Locke’s conundrum – that the constitution of liberalism required the spread of private property, and yet private property could not be redistributed because it had to be protected as the basis of individual freedom – thus lay in the international sphere. It lay in the possibility of appropriating people’s property; and this in turn, required power politics. In other words, the constitution of domestic liberalism required a sharp distinction between two different political spheres: the domestic sphere, governed by the rule of law and liberal principles, and the international

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sphere, characterized by power politics (Jahn 51).

The tension between domestic liberalism and power politics abroad is therefore one of the constitutive contradictions in liberal theory as propagated internationally throughout history and helps explain why core liberal states—like France, Britain, and its former settler colonies, including the United States— have often engaged in expansionary and aggressive foreign policies in order to foster a domestic liberal consensus at home. These policies are often cast in both idealistically liberal terms—such as the desire to promote democracy throughout the world, for example—but often underlined a realist impulse to further the material interests and rights of the domestic society. Therefore, from a theoretical perspective, there exists an in-built colonial logic of inclusion and exclusion that underlines the liberal project to reshape the world—a “civilizing mission” within the very fabric of the dominant western political discourse.

IIII. Conclusion

Given that many of the fundamental challenges facing liberal internationalism in recent years stem from domestic protests against the status quo—Trump in America, Brexit in the United Kingdom, the National Front in France—it is too reductionist to assume that the crisis of liberal internationalism is one purely of American foreign policy or the success of liberalism against competing alternatives. There is a link between the domestic politics and international relations of core liberal states that must be established.

By looking deep into the theoretical writings of John Locke—the unofficial father of liberalism—it is clear that greater political freedom and economic opportunity at home was underpinned by power politics and colonial expansion abroad. This is because the privatization of public lands and property inevitably creates tensions and inequities within society—tensions that could limit the capacity of the liberals to achieve their reformative goals. Colonialism was the answer, since the appropriation of land and resources from abroad allowed burgeoning liberal polities, like Britain, to import economic benefits to enact reform while also exporting the tensions that resulted from those reforms abroad through colonization (Jahn 52).

The question then is how this dynamic played itself out historically to lead to the current moment – especially for Britain, as one of the world’s first liberal polities that is seeking to reorient its long-standing foreign policy traditions and identity as it leaves the European Union. To contextualize these sweeping debates about liberal internationalism within a British context, the next chapter will explore more deeply the relationship between liberalism and Britain’s colonial empire as a way to ascertain the extent to which each shaped the country’s sense of identity before the Second World War and explore how the tensions within the liberal tradition have shaped global history.

Chapter Two: Liberalism and the British Empire I. Introduction:

Today’s liberal international system of theoretically sovereign nation-states is a recent historical development that emerged out of a centuries-long period of European colonialism and imperialism.

Beginning in the sixteenth century, Western European polities like France, Britain, Spain, and the Netherlands were compelled into overseas expansion by the resource competition engendered by the burgeoning capitalist economy and the desire to connect with markets in East Asia, while sidestepping

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the Ottoman Empire’s dominance of the eastern Mediterranean and the Middle East. This expansion took the form of colonization and territorial market acquisition – particularly in the Americas, Africa, and Southeast Asia. By the nineteenth century, the most geographically expansive of these colonial empires was ruled and administered from London, which also claimed to be the capital of an increasingly liberal society.

II. Theorizing the British Empire:

The British Empire, which at its height ensconced a quarter of humanity across large swaths of Africa, Southeast Asia, Oceania, the Middle East, and North America, was an intricate historical entity that is difficult to concretely conceptualize. In his 2012 book Empire: The British Imperial Experience from 1965 to the Present, historian Denis Judd describes the totality of London’s imperial project as “riddled with paradox and contradiction.” Political theorist and International Relations scholar Duncan Bell expands on this theme when defining the empire: British imperial expansion was never motivated by a single coherent ideology or a consistent strategic vision. Characterized by instability, chronically uncoordinated, and plagued by tensions between and within its widely dispersed elements, it was unfinished, untidy, a mass of contradictions, aspirations, and anomalies (Bell 11).

Given its incoherence and complexity, the British Empire has left a multifaceted legacy in its wake that is difficult to assess. As such, there are several competing scholarly perspectives on the degree to which British society and politics were shaped by the empire.

This multiplicity of perspectives is evident in the debates that rage over the “imperial turn” that has occurred in the field of British Studies since the late 1990s. According to historian Richard N. Price, the foundational assumption of the “imperial turn” is that the British state and its overseas empire were “mutually-constituted” (Price 602). As a result of this, scholars in this tradition contend that one must place primacy on aspects of British identity that were forged during the imperial era to properly understand the evolution of British politics, society, and culture. In other words, empire is the prism to view the development of all aspects of British modernity through – whether they be philosophical, economic, financial, political, literary, or cultural.

This approach has its merits and has produced intriguing scholarship on how certain social developments – like the emergence of an evangelizing Christian ethos in the nineteenth century – drove the imperial enterprise. The “imperial turn” therefore has the power to paint empire as a crucial process of cultural formation. But the turn’s assumption that Britain and its empire are mutually constituted also obscures the other cultural and social forces that have shaped Britain. This is something that Price points out in his 2006 essay “One Big Thing: Britain, Its Empire, and Their Culture:” What other elements, aside from empire, constituted British modernities [after the eighteenth century]? What is the significance of empire compared to class, for example? Where do we fit in issues like ‘customs in common,’ the law, the tradition of civic republicanism, ideas of ‘liberty’ and the constitution, the political economy, or the hostility toward…[European]…‘others,’ like the French?... How would we demonstrate that empire overwhelmed these other identities, subjectivities,

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and historical formations in defining British culture? (Price 611).

These questions about the complexity of modern Britain demonstrate why it is reductionist to view the historical evolution of British society squarely through the eyes of empire. There was too much else going on that shaped the country. What is needed, then, is an approach that draws on the strengths found in the “imperial turn,” but also considers the indispensable role of other social forces. Such a perspective would be better able to address how the meaning of empire was contested, debated, and reformulated as British society evolved.

Price’s essay offers an alternative; he thinks that scholars should treat the cultural representations of empire as social constructs. He argues that this approach fills the void that stems from the idea of mutual constitutiveness of empire (Price 624) and allows scholars to more clearly identify the processes that contributed to British modernity over different periods of time. For Price, the chief benefit of this constructivist method is that it is more sympathetic to Britain’s fluid political and philosophical trends (625), which often operated above the public realm in the domain of the educated, policy-making elite (624), but nevertheless shaped many social aspects of life in the country. This is because political and intellectual elites are often the ones with the most influence on how a society interprets its own development. Through this act of framing, they are able to formulate an identity out of competing sociopolitical forces and possibilities. In the case of Britain, these forces very much included empire but also debates about how to best organize social and political rights in an increasingly complicated and interconnected world. The messy business of empire made these questions all the more difficult and, by the late eighteenth century, British intellectuals and policymakers began to concentrate their attention and efforts on bringing order to the untidy empire. British political theory – especially the emergent liberal tradition that started with Locke – was naturally affected by this imperial preoccupation. As will be shown, this contributed to a complicated dialectic in which Britain’s culture, politics, society, and engagement with the world was defined in both liberal and imperial terms.

III. Perspectives on Liberalism and Empire:

Much like the British Empire itself, political liberalism is difficult to define because of its scope and multifaceted nature. As noted in the preceding chapter, almost all of contemporary Western political theory—especially since the Cold War’s end—can be described as liberal. As a function of this, the mainstream parties in North American, European, and Australasian democracies all operate out of broadly liberal assumptions about the political world, even if those suppositions have produced a global system that is currently in crisis. What, then, given this ubiquity, is liberalism—especially in the British context?

In his 2009 book British Liberal Internationalism, 1880–1930: Making Progress?, historian Casper Sylvest argues that a uniquely British view of liberalism emerged in the mid-nineteenth century and coalesced around the emergent democratic ideals of “free trade, receptiveness to public opinion, and good, limited, and parsimonious government” (Sylvest 27). He also admits that the tradition quickly developed some glaring contradictions. It became possible for British politicians of different ideological persuasions to claim the liberal mantle precisely because the foundational tenets and text of liberalism are vague. This is a point that Duncan Bell, a British historian of international relations and political theory,

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elaborates on in his work about liberalism and empire.

Bell employs what he calls a “summative definition” of the liberal tradition. This conception takes into account “the sum of arguments that have been classified as liberal, and recognized as such by other self-proclaimed liberals, across time and space” (Bell 70). Upon first glance, this may seem like an imprecise definition, but according to Bell, the summative character is a strength that can “help make sense of discursive ‘overextension;’ and elastic usage of … [the term liberalism] …while avoiding unhelpful claims about pure essence and authentic form” (70). In that vein, this definition of liberalism allows Bell to acknowledge disagreements between individual liberal thinkers and figures, but also to define British liberalism as a political philosophy that emphasizes “individual liberty, constitutional government, the rule of law, the ethical significance of nationality, a capitalist political economy, and belief in moral and political progress” (6). While this summative definition may not be useful for a nuanced analysis of liberalism’s philosophical assumptions, Bell’s strategy is effective for an historical examination because it makes room for elements of liberalism that are commonplace today, such as respect for individual rights and the rule of law, as well as creeds from earlier times, like those of racial superiority, that are offensive to respectable liberal sensibilities in the early twenty-first century, but are still constitutive of the tradition’s philosophical underpinnings, as Beate Jahn observes.

To understand how liberalism and empire have shaped British identity, the historical path of British liberalism requires particular attention – even if liberalism from the past is tainted by racist justifications for colonial conquest. In many respects, historical treatments of the tradition contend that British liberalism emerged out of a tension between empire and the concepts of liberty and limited government. It seemed contradictory that a society which placed increasing emphasis on individual freedoms and rights could somehow sanction coercive rule and subjugation of peoples beyond its own shores. In his 1999 book Liberalism and Empire, political theorist Uday Singh Mehta elaborates on how this anxiety manifested itself in British and European intellectual circles:

By the mid-nineteenth century among radicals and liberals, the conditions for good government had been recognized as intimately linked with the conditions of self-government, and yet someone like John Stuart Mill, who forcefully articulated this argument, it applied only to the Anglo-Saxon parts of the empire. At a more general level, from the seventeenth century onward, the British, the Dutch, and the French rightly conceived of themselves as having elaborated and integrated into their societies an understanding of political freedom, and yet during this very period they pursued and held vast empires where such freedoms were either absent or severely attenuated for the majority of the native inhabitants” (Mehta 7).

As Mehta’s analysis hints, liberal ideas – like responsible and limited self-government – were racialized as an intellectual justification for the social inequities that defined European colonial empires. This trend was particularly evident in the British Empire, where the establishment of predominately White (or “AngloSaxon,” as it was called at the time) settler colonies in North America and later Australia, New Zealand, and Southern Africa provided a firm demarcation between imperial realms that were viewed as ready for self-governance and those which were not. To understand how this divide was grafted onto the empire,

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one must first understand the cultural and political environment in which British liberalism emerged from.

The temporal and locational origins of liberalism are subtle areas of disagreement between Bell and Mehta. Mehta argues that recognizably liberal ideas emerged in the eighteenth century in response to the writings of John Locke and British overseas expansion. He believes encounters with vastly different cultures that were eventually economically and politically subjugated to London – namely India – formed the impetus for racialized British liberalism. Mehta asserts that liberals came to believe that the British possessed a superior political and economic culture defined by Lockean principles of limited government, property rights, and free enterprise. They then used this belief as a justification for British imperial rule over foreign persons, like in India and North America, in an earlier variation of the “civilizing mission.” He also points out that during the eighteenth century, it was Edmund Burke, the oft-labeled father of conservativism, who forcefully declared that Britain’s constitutional tradition was incompatible with overseas oppression. In this sense, Mehta argues that liberalism and empire shaped each other in a simultaneous process of development and evolution. Given that Mehta’s analysis as a whole takes into account how realities in Britain and India shaped the development of eighteenth century liberalism, his theory is in keeping with the imperial turn’s emphasis on the mutual constitution of Britain and its empire. It therefore overlooks some other forces that led to the development of liberalism, especially in the following century.

This is one criticism that Bell’s work levels at Mehta. Bell temporally places liberalism in the nineteenth century and argues that it was a uniquely British philosophical response to the sociopolitical forces that challenged the British state and empire during that period. In doing so, he rejects the notion that the empire and liberalism were mutually-constituted from the outset and instead casts liberalism as a constructed response to changing imperial realities: The British Empire was forged long before the emergence of liberal political ideology: liberalism supervened on, while adapting to and supplementing, existing practices and procedures. A relentless focus on the assumptions, theoretical architecture, and political entailments of liberalism carries the risk of overlooking the deeper intellectual and political currents on which it drew and to which it was a response – perhaps above all the coevolving relationship between the modern state and global capitalism. In particular, I would contend that British liberalism was broadly coeval with the second settler empire. It was, in large part, a product of the violent dissolution of the thirteen colonies in North America, the revolutionary upheavals in France, and the tidal wave of economic, social, and political change that they unleashed. Perhaps, most importantly, the development of liberal political theory and the second settler empire was interconnected (371-372).

Bell’s thematic interconnection between liberalism and the second settler empire found in Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and South Africa is useful for conceptualizing how two disjointed phenomena contributed to each other’s development. This dialectic between liberalism and the settler empire had significant political consequences as the nineteenth century went on because it was used by elites to frame and construct the possible ways that British society could navigate a changing world order.

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For a full understanding of how the construction of British imperial identity through the creation of the second settler empire was still compatible with the theoretical underpinnings of liberalism, a middle-way between the perspectives of Mehta and Bell is necessary. This is where Jahn’s analysis from the preceding chapter comes in. The writings of John Locke do endorse colonialism in North America and elsewhere, as Metha observes, which means that colonialism is a constitutive part of the liberal tradition.

But the implications of this relationship were not fully realized until the long-nineteenth century when the loss of the North American colonies and terror of the French Revolution elicited a new round of domestic liberalization within Britain itself and renewed imperial expansion abroad through the creation of a second settler empire (Burbank and Cooper 220-221). The British liberalism and imperial expansion that defined the nineteenth century was therefore a compromise between the absolutism of the past and the French revolutionary fervor, which shaped the contradictory international politics of the period – which simultaneously emphasized the ideals of freedom for some people and its denial for others (Jahn 54). In summation, both Mehta’s and Bell’s insights are crucial to study of how liberalism and imperialism shaped Britain’s sense of identity vis-à-vis the rest of the world. Still, in order to see how the liberalimperial dialectic informs the types of states Britain has sought to foster close alliances with through its foreign policy entanglements, Bell’s focus on the role of the settler empire is particularly useful because it reveals the extent to which the racialized colonial logic of inclusion and exclusion came to define British views of world order.

IV. The Idea of Greater Britain and the Ideological Origins of the Anglosphere:

Bell addresses the implication his ideas for the field of international relations in his two main books – The Idea of Greater Britain: Empire and the Future of World Order, 1860 – 1900 and Reordering the World: Essays on Liberalism and Empire. In doing so, Bell links both liberalism and imperialism to the development of British identity and discourses about the British people’s proper place in global affairs during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. He broadly asserts that British liberals viewed these settler colonies, along with the independent United States of America, as places where liberal political ideals like personal freedom, the rule of law, self-determination, and republican governance could be fully played out. This contrasted sharply with the treatment of other imperial realms, namely India, where London employed more direct and autocratic governance measures. This disparity in practice, and focus on the part of liberals, allows Bell to conclude that settler colonialism and liberal political thought combined to create theories of Anglo-Saxon racial superiority and a transoceanic British public during the nineteenth century —a public that was believed to embody a set of liberal democratic values that could reshape global politics. This transoceanic public based upon settler colonialism was dubbed “Greater Britain” by Victorian and Edwardian politicians, journalists, and academics and Bell deftly examines how this idea of a global English-speaking community has evolved through time to influence events up until the present day. This is the real strength of Reordering the World and The Idea of Greater Britain, which allows these two books to draw insightful links between Britain’s imperial past and the country’s current standing in international affairs.

There are two chapters of Reordering the World in particular where Bell thoroughly explicates ideas relating to the concept of “Greater Britain” and their implications for today’s world. The first of

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these chapters is titled “The Dream Machine: On Liberalism and Empire,” in which Bell explains the relevance of settler colonialism to the imperial project. A great deal of Bell’s analysis in this chapter rests on how imperialistic notions of racial supremacy arose out of the liberal intellectual tradition, especially as it relates to settler colonialism. Bell explains how in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, policymakers in England tended to view settler colonies as an undesirable burden on the British state.

Starting in the 1830s, however, liberal reformers took it upon themselves to disprove this sentiment with evidence from the emerging academic discipline of political economy (Bell 36). One of these reformers, political economist E.G. Wakefield, argued that colonies should instead be seen as places of economic growth and social development. After all, the incorporation of new lands in North America and Australia injected new resources into Britain’s burgeoning industrial economy and also provided physical space where Britain could offload its excess population (36), both of which would have tangible benefits to a liberalizing state. In time, these new views were accepted in Britain, especially among liberals, who thought that settlers in the colonies were successfully reproducing the likeness of Britain in these new territories (37). By the latter half of the nineteenth century, this idea had created a firm distinction—based on race— in the liberal mind between the settler colonies and other imperial realms, such as India.

In his work, Peter J. Cain, another scholar of the British settler empire, explains how liberal ideas were married with the colonial experience to create an ideology of settlerism based on liberal-democratic principles: [The settler revolution] …created a new vision of the future in both… [Britain and her colonies].

Not only did the belief in progress become widespread, but also emigrants, once classified as failures, came to be represented as heroes or heroines battling triumphantly with elemental forces. Frontiers were that were once thought of as distant hellholes for thieves and murderers were imaginative transformed into gardens of Eden. Millions of people uprooted themselves and took to these new lands partly for the chance of a better economic future, but also because the frontier meant freedom from the cultural restrictions of the older societies. In the newlands, settlers could…[theoretically]… get away from the most hated of distinctions – privilege based on inherited wealth – and enjoy some degree of equal opportunity. With its acceptance of capitalism and hatred of inherited status, settler ideology was a freer and more confident form of the…[liberal] radicalism that animated nonconformity in Britain and became an…[integral]…factor of the popular liberalism supported

by Richard Cobden and John Bright… [Unfortunately, though] …settlers and their metropolitan relatives, usually had an abiding sense of the superiority of their own civilization and made, with depressing ease, the fatal transition from reveling in their material power to assuming that it betokened moral supremacy over the native races displaced on the frontier (Cain 104).

Under this racialized ideological view, the predominately white colonies of Canada, Australia, and New Zealand were seen to possess the “standard of civilization” necessary for self-government based on liberaldemocratic principles, whereas India would need to be governed more forcefully. As Bell does admit, there were plenty of liberals who hoped this discrepancy would eventually convince the British government to relinquish control over imperial possessions that could not be ruled through liberal means, like India, but

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this does not diminish the fact that many in Britain and her colonial empire started to view their role in the world in profoundly racial terms. As Bell points out, this development was a necessary prerequisite for imagining a “Greater Britain” that spanned the globe.

Before turning to how “Greater Britain” influenced Britain’s role in the world, it is important to address how the idea functioned in terms of the construction of British identity. Bell and Cain already demonstrated how liberalism and the colonial empire produced an ideology of settlerism, that was based both on white “Anglo-Saxon” superiority over native peoples, as well as principles of liberal democracy.

Simply put, in the mid-to-late ninetieth century, white settlers were seen as instruments that spread these liberal-democratic values across disparate global regions. In doing so, they were thought to have created a far-flung Anglo-World that represented the values and interests of British liberal democracy. Because of this, the British elite felt a certain ideational closeness to the settlers across the sea, who were still seen as British—not Canadians, Australians, or New Zealanders. This is despite the fact that London’s bond with the settler colonies was increasingly loose, with a large degree of self-government being granted by the mid-1800s. This perceived closeness with the self-governing colonies was used by the elites to reconstitute Britain’s identity in international relations during the late nineteenth century.

By the 1880s and 1890s, as Britain’s imperial and industrial dominance was challenged by new powers like the United States, Germany, and Russia, some British liberals began to advocate for an “imperial federation” to establish more permanent, institutional bonds between London and the settler colonies—a “Greater Britain” that could offset imperial decline (Bell 184). This was part of the process of “recolonization” of the empire, and it reflected a larger elite project to foster an imperial identity among the domestic and diasporic British population to counteract the sociopolitical forces that were seen to have caused British decline (Cain 105). According to Richard Price, this period of British history demonstrates how elites could deliberately construct a more imperial identity for British culture when it suited their interests (615). The historical record bears this out because, before the late nineteenth century, British policymakers often regarded the empire as a temporary product of trade connections that would eventually fade away. But when this actually began to happen, and British preeminence was challenged, there were anxious efforts to sustain the empire for the sake of British global influence. Reconfiguring the national culture to reflect imperial values was seen as the best way to go about this: Politically, the late nineteenth century sees the powerful conjuncture of a challenged imperial status in the world with the breakthrough to mass politics. The political culture had to respond to a mutating political economy that was placing Britain under military, fiscal, and cultural stress.

The growing democratic forms of national politics threatened to drive sectionalist and class wedges into the political culture. Thus, the political subjectivity of the ordinary Briton was transitioning at this time from the differential subject to the assertive citizen with the prospect of gaining actual power within the political system. Empire was potentially a way of bridging those divides in electoral politics…and… this was one reason why empire was injected into British culture in a more profound way than ever before during this period…The end result was that, from the late nineteenth century to middle of the twentieth century, to be a British citizen also meant to be an imperial citizen. Before the late nineteenth century, such categories had very different meanings and values in the culture”

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(Price 615-617).

The literature, therefore, suggests that the idea of “Greater Britain” was deliberately propagated by an increasingly liberal British elite both domestically and internationally to offset perceived imperial decline.

This resulted in British culture and identity becoming increasingly imperial at the turn of the twentieth century.

Naturally, this renewed imperial focus also affected Britain’s diplomatic relations. This is a point which Bell takes up in the second relevant chapter of Reordering the World, titled “The New Anglo Century: Race, Space, and Global Order.” He again explains how the “Greater Britain” concept advocated for an institutionally-deep political union between Britain and her settler colonies. Interestingly enough, the United States was often included in this imagined union, since liberal thinkers on both sides of the Atlantic thought Britain and America shared a broadly similar “Anglo-Saxon” culture and politically liberal outlook based on the rule of common law (Bell 191). Individuals like Andrew Carnegie, James Bryce, A.V. Dicey, H.G. Wells, and Cecil Rhodes were all supportive of some kind of Anglo-American reunification or alliance, which they hoped would secure the interests of the English-speaking peoples into the next century (192-94). In his 2011 book The Anglosphere: A Genealogy of a Racialized Identity in International Relations, Srdjan Vecetic explains that the Anglo-American rapprochement is not surprising when the racialized settler ideology is considered: From the perspective of state and national identity defined by Anglo-Saxonism, the most probable… [diplomatic partnership for Britain]… was the American alliance or, as Lord Balfour and Joseph Chamberlain sometimes called it, the ‘race alliance.’ The grip of Anglo-Saxonism was so powerful that British ‘race patriotism’ implied not only a ‘race alliance’ with America, but also a ‘federation of race.’ Thus, the boldest proposals for reversing Britain’s decline called for a political integration with the ‘cousins’ and ‘brothers’ in the United States – a project usually known under the rubric of ‘reunion,’ but also implied in the ideas ‘Greater Britain’ and the United States of Empire…

Equivalent proposals were not possible with respect to Germany or France, much less Japan” (Vecetic 27).

While some liberals were content with just a system of alliances, many other dreamed of a more formal system, where the seat of British power could be held in either London or Washington (188). This reveals that there was a large degree of fantasy involved in these visions (which was typical of the era), but they nevertheless informed Anglo-American thinking on a liberal world order into the next century.

According to Bell, visions of a federalized “Greater Britain” or an Anglo-American alliance animated five theories of world order during the first half of the twentieth century. These five forms are the regional federation, imperial-commonwealth, democratic unionist, world federalist, and AngloAmerican models. Some of these models, like the democratic unionist and regional federation, inspired the design of the future European Union, while others, like the imperial-commonwealth and Anglo-American, were more of a direct continuation of British imperial visions. What they all shared, according to Bell, however, was a commitment to broadly liberal-democratic political and economic principles and the desire

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to include both the United States and British Commonwealth (as the settler empire was increasingly called) within their frameworks. As such, the British and Americans were keen to take leading roles in providing theories for a democratically liberal world order, with Chatham House being founded in London and the Council of Foreign Relations being set up in New York in the early twentieth century to address this topic.

By the middle-to-end of the twentieth century, the overtly racist undertones of such discourses had greatly diminished and there were fewer calls to federalize nations across large geographic distances (Bell 206).

Nevertheless, Bell points out that earlier ideas of a “Greater Britain” still permeate British identity and politics today, particularly on the political right, where the notion of an “Anglosphere” alliance, involving New Zealand, Canada, Australia, and the United States, is often invoked as an alternative to the European Union. Therefore, in concluding the “New Anglo Century” chapter, Bell implores his readers to remember that much of today’s discussions about Britain’s future role in the twenty-first century world are the direct heirs of the imperial discourse on settler colonialism and Greater Britain.

V. Conclusions:

As far as the contemporary implications of Bell’s analysis of these ideas go, an understanding of how the liberal-imperial dialectic shaped British identity is important, especially since 52% of the British electorate voted to leave the European Union in June 2016. The referendum’s result can be seen as the culmination of a decades-long conversation in British political and intellectual culture about whether the United Kingdom’s geopolitical destiny lies with Europe or its English-speaking, Commonwealth connections. This conversation began in earnest after the Second World War, when it became clear that Britain’s time as an imperial power was coming to its end.

Chapter Three: The Construction of Britain’s Postwar Foreign Policy I. Introduction: The Imperial Hangover and Churchill’s Three Circles:

There is a consensus in the relevant academic literature that postwar Britain has an “imperial hangover” in regard to foreign policy and its international sense of identity. In his 2013 book, British Foreign Policy, political scientist Jamie Gaskarth analyzes how the imperial legacy informs the ideas that continue to animate London’s place in the world. Gaskarth argues that the British Empire imparted the notion that being British means being globally influential and that this forms the core of the country’s identity vis-à-vis other powers. This theme is taken up by political scientists David Sanders and David Patrick Houghton in their 2016 book Losing an Empire, Finding a Role: British Foreign Policy Since 1945, where they note that successive postwar British prime ministers and political elites have crafted metaphors to describe their country’s foreign policy in globally-influential terms. This is despite the realities of decolonization, persistent relative economic decline, and eventual membership in the European Union. With this framework in mind, Theresa May’s “Global Britain” is the latest in a series of attempts to propagate a great power status for Britain that is arguably not in keeping with the country’s current economic or material capabilities.

Oliver Daddow, a scholar of British politics and foreign policy, explains that Winston Churchill was the first British politician to formulate a post-imperial global metaphor to guide Westminster’s foreign policy (Daddow 27). Churchill’s theory identified three key spheres of influence for the United Kingdom:

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The Empire and Commonwealth, a strong, united continental Europe that Britain would not be part of, and the transatlantic “special relationship” with the United States. By fostering partnerships and collaboration with these three realms, Churchill argued that Britain would become “the only country which has a great part to play…in every one of the world’s free nations and democracies” (Churchill cited in Daddow 27). As Sander and Houghton contend, Churchill’s “three circles metaphor”--as this framework is often called in the literature--is underpinned by a notion of British exceptionalism and fostered by the imperial identity of the past that suggests Britain has special roles and obligations in international affairs that other countries do not (Sanders and Houghton 1). Since Churchill’s “three circles” idea has captivated successive British leaders from Anthony Eden to David Cameron, the hangover of Empire has remained a psychological and political constant during the postwar era. This is because it is “difficult for [Britain] to retreat inwards—adopting a policy of isolationism rather than internationalism—once it has [imagined itself] to play [an integral] global role for two-hundred years” (Houghton and Sanders 7). The persistence of Churchill’s “three circles” metaphor in the United Kingdom’s foreign policy construction is therefore a strong affirmation of post-imperial notions of identity and is useful to understanding the key global regions and political developments in which the British policymaking elite believe their country has vested interests.

II. Realism and Liberal Idealism in Churchill’s Three Circles Model:

Given this identity, the literature explicitly suggests that Britain’s postwar, Churchillian vision of world order is firmly rooted in the policy and political traditions that developed within the nineteenth century imperial system. Sanders and Houghton, as well as Jamie Gaskarth, argue that today the Empire’s legacy manifests itself in the tension between Realism and Idealism in British foreign policy (4). The British have always put primacy on what is deemed the “national interest,” including the security of the British Isles and solvency of overseas investment and trade. This informs the Realist outlook, with many policies and diplomatic engagements flowing out of a calculus based on what is labeled a national economic or security interest, primarily projected through both hard and soft power tactics. The way that this Realism operates has changed over time; Sanders and Houghton specifically note that: Britain once took a ‘wide-view’ of the world, in which the security of the Empire and its possessions across the globe were synonymous with the security of the homeland, a position that was no longer economically or politically viable after the 1960s – but the emphasis on power and interests [has remained] constant. To the extent that British foreign policy is still about the projection of power and influence… the three circles device maintains its core utility, since the latter is essentially a way of thinking about how Britain retains a major role in the world and remains a ‘player’ in the game” (4).

Since British national interests and power projection are often linked to Churchill’s three geographic regions, it is important to ask what makes Europe, the United States, and the Commonwealth important to Britain. This is where the Idealism dimension of British foreign policy is useful.

British Idealism is linked to the types of values that the Westminster government wants to propagate and represent on the world stage. Churchill’s “three circles” metaphor includes a reference to these values due to his characterization of these regions as democratic (Daddow 27). The maintenance of

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a democratic system of states is therefore ingrained in Britain’s foreign policy traditions and inextricably linked to three geographic areas. This democratic Idealism can also be linked to the Empire’s legacy since the philosophy of British Liberalism—typified by representative democracy and free trade--developed within the context of the imperial system. As mentioned in the previous chapter, Duncan Bell explores the complexity of liberalism’s relationship with the British Empire in his 2016 book, Reordering the World: Essays on Liberalism and Empire. In his analysis, he links both liberalism and imperialism to the long-term construction of British identity and discourses about the British people’s proper place in global affairs. Of particular importance is the racialized Victorian idea of “Greater Britain,” which argued that Britain and its English-speaking settler colonies in North America and Oceania—the so-called “Anglosphere”—were the democratic polities most likely to reshape the world according to liberal values.

The effects of the “Greater Britain” idea were not limited to the Victorian period; they informed immediate postwar visions of British identity and resonate even today due to the persistence of the “three circles” metaphor. Bell demonstrates this in his book through a focus on Britain’s extended imperial decline during the early twentieth century. As Britain’s industrial and global dominance was challenged during this period by new powers like the United States, Germany, and Russia, British liberals and imperialists started advocating for an “imperial federation” to establish more permanent bonds between London and the settler colonies—a “Greater Britain” that could offset the challenges of relative decline (Bell 184).

Interestingly, the United States was often included in this imagined union since liberal thinkers on both sides of the Atlantic thought Britain and America shared a broadly-similar Anglo-Saxon culture and politically liberal outlook based on representative democracy and the rule of common law (Bell 191). Bell argues that visions of a federalized “Greater Britain” and an Anglo-American alliance came to animate British theoretical models of world order during the twentieth century.

Two of these models, the democratic unionist and regional federation, inspired British dreams that continental Europe could unify into a strong, democratic bloc, much like today’s European Union. For Britain itself, however, an Anglo-American or Imperial-Commonwealth model, based on the unification of English-speaking global regions that feature strong cultural ties to the British Isles, held greater appeal.

This latter, British and American-centered models, are more of a direct continuation of British imperial thinking, but what all these ideas of world order share, according to Bell, are a broad commitment to liberal-democratic political and economic principles and the desire to include the United States, British Commonwealth, and continental Europe within their theoretical frameworks.

Churchill’s “three circles” model is therefore a natural extension of the debates about the place of Britain and its people in world affairs that emerged during the age of Empire. In the postwar era, however, the main problem London’s foreign policy leaders faced is how to effectively balance between the United States, Commonwealth, and Europe given Britain’s limited resources, while also remaining loyal to the liberal internationalist identity that the country has developed. This has required a constant reworking of the “three circles” metaphor in ways that have ended up privileging some of the circle’s three geographic areas over others.

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III. Britannia Eclipsed: The Origins of the Anglo-American ‘Special Relationship’

The literature focuses on how the notion of an Anglo-American “special relationship” has led to a complicated application of the Churchillian metaphor in ways that privilege transatlantic concerns over European and Commonwealth ones (Gaskarth 93). As Bell’s analysis observes, the “special relationship” idea has its roots in the imperial discourses of Anglo-American cultural affinity and superiority. This ideational element was also reinforced by the Realist concern about Britain’s gradual economic and industrial decline in the early twentieth century relative to both the United States and Germany, which made it increasingly difficult for London to finance imperial defenses against rival power centers (Houghton and Sanders 44). These cultural, identity, and security factors explain why the cultivation of close ties between Washington and London was a top Whitehall priority in the decades before the First World War and during the interwar period.

David Reynolds, a British historian of Anglo-American relations, explains that the United Kingdom’s decision to court the Americans was also underpinned by the belief that the United States would be a more natural international partner than European countries, like France and the newly unified Imperial Germany, because of the very shared language and cultural history that Bell describes. Reynolds notes that Lord Robert Cecil, a Conservative Party politician and diplomat from the pre-First World War period, wrote to his Foreign Office colleagues in an official memorandum that there was “undoubtedly a difference between the British and Continental [European] view in international matters —if America accepts our point of view…it will mean the dominance of that point of view in all of international affairs” (Cecil quoted in Reynolds 2). Two crucial points can be gleaned from this.

The first is that British diplomats intentionally pursued close ties with the United States to offset the security risks associated with a relative decline of British power. Secondly, and more importantly, the British identified the Americans and not the Germans (and by proxy, other continental European) to be their preferred international partners, even though the United States was just as much of a security threat to Britain’s long-term economic interests as Germany. As the Cecil quote alludes, this is because the United States, as a fellow English-speaking society, was thought to share the broadly liberal political and economic outlook necessary to perpetuate British views of world order. Implicit in this sentiment is the idea that both Britain and the United States represent truly global powers with the capacity to shape the norms and structures of international diplomacy to suit their shared, mutually compatible interests.

Continental European concerns, on the other hand, are deemed as more regionalized and less influential under this view. These points demonstrate that Britain’s closeness with the United States, and ambivalence toward Germany and “continental” views on international affairs, have their historical roots in a perceived cultural and political compatibility with America and the desire to secure Britain’s worldview and identity amidst the rise of potential alternatives.

Whitehall’s desire for firm Anglo-American relations came to fruition during London’s two twentieth century wars with Germany and her allies. During the Second World War, in particular, British and American security interests converged as a result of the military and ideological conflict with fascist totalitarianism. This allowed for exceptionally close diplomatic, military, economic, and technological

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cooperation between Washington and London. This was due to shared language, which made it easy to integrate diplomatic and military staffs at a level that was impossible for other allies (Sanders & Houghton 51). Even if the two countries’ top political leaders – like Roosevelt and Churchill – did not always agree as much as popularly imagined, these wartime working relationships proved invaluable during the years immediately following the conflict, since they facilitated smooth collaboration between the Truman and Attlee governments against the bourgeoning Soviet threat before the formal forums of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization were established in 1949 (52). This period of close technical and diplomatic cooperation is therefore seen as the height of the “special relationship” in the academic literature and explains why Churchill placed the connections between London and Washington as a key cornerstone of his “three circles” vision of a democratic and liberal postwar world order.

IV. Britain Aids America in Designing the Post-War International Order:

The convergence of American and British foreign policies during the Second World War also allowed the United States and Britain to construct the international institutions, such as the United Nations, that have defined the postwar world order based on their broadly similar liberal ideologies. The Americans and British had not always been in ideological alignment on matters of global governance, but the sheer cost and devastation caused by the Second World War changed this. According to Mary Nolan, the war convinced Washington and London policymakers that there would have to be a marriage of Anglo-American international outlooks if Europe and the wider world were to find peace. In her 2012 book The Transatlantic Century: Europe and America, 1890-2010, Nolan acknowledges that the wartime alliance did not just include Britain and the United States, but also asserts that the Soviets, French, and other partners did not push their views on international governance as aggressively since their focus was on rebuilding their seriously damaged countries and national morale. This dynamic ensured that it was Anglo-American liberal values that would animate postwar global governance: Visions for the postwar order were global in scope, but designing them was an Anglo-American project. Both states were determined to avoid a repetition of [the League of Nations mistakes], a renewal of depression, and a continuation of its legacies of diminished foreign trade, economic and social insecurity, and a world economy segmented into closed currency and trading blocs. America’s ongoing involvement in European economic and political affairs had to be assured and barriers to renewed aggression constructed. From 1941 on politicians, intellectuals, and the press in Britain and America called for strengthening international law, expanding rights and freedoms, building multilateral institutions, and modifying laissez-faire (Nolan 171).

From this list of shared policy objectives and values, it easy to think that the United States and Britain had found enough common ground to foster the enduring “special relationship “dimension of Churchill’s “three circles” that is so often discussed. Mary Nolan admits, however, and that there were many disagreements about post-war planning ranging from the Atlantic Charter—the document that first specified what America and Britain were fighting for in the war—to the development of the United Nations system (Nolan 171). This is the story that Mark Mazower elaborates in his 2012 book Governing the World: The History of an Idea, and it is one in which a relatively weaker Britain had to accommodate emergent

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American internationalism to perpetuate its own vision of liberal world order.

Mazower casts the development of postwar order, typified by the United Nations system, as a transfer of internationalist thinking and leadership from London to Washington through the vehicle of the wartime alliance. Since the era of Woodrow Wilson, Americans had acquired a preference for a system of global governance based on international law and sovereign nation-states (Mazower 192). This contrasted with Britain’s reliance on concert diplomacy, where imperial European powers balanced out each other’s spheres of influence to create stability and order. The general desire to ensure America’s involvement in international diplomacy after 1945, however, prompted a gradual change in Whitehall’s thinking on these matters. This was underpinned by the realization that Britain’s weakened military and economic resources would not allow London to wield the same weight in any kind of balance-of-power system as before (Mazower 199). This shift in sentiment was linked to a growing realization (if not necessarily, acceptance) that Europe’s empires would be decolonized after the war. Mazower asserts that British officials also developed the belief that Europe and the larger world would need a stronger, more militaristic international framework to police the world during the subsequent period of peace, decolonization, and transition to a nation-state (Mazower 194). In this light, American ideas of international law and bureaucracy looked appealing (Mazower 200) and some British foreign policy leaders, such as the wartime Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden, were happy to help in its development. Because of this alignment of general views of world order, Mazower’s analysis suggests that the closeness of Anglo-American relations during the postwar planning period was born out of a compromise of policy objectives and a willingness to adjust some aspects of British ideology.

Even once there was a commitment to the development of an international bureaucracy based on nation-states, the British and Americans still held divergent views on how this should be accomplished.

These stemmed largely from British desires to maintain a high level of global influence and American ambitions to use the future United Nations systems as an instrument of the State Department’s foreign policy that was palatable to domestic audiences (Mazower 196). The British still initially pushed for a more bilateral, alliance-based structure for the new international bodies, where the United States and Britain could serve as global policemen on relatively equal footing. President Franklin Roosevelt was privately sympathetic to the need for the so-called “Great Powers” to yield the most influence in international governance, but also knew that the American public would only support such measures if they were part of a more expansive, global coalition that would work to solve problems in both peace and war (Mazower 197). As such, the name “United Nations,” initially described the wartime alliance and British leaders – including Prime Minister Churchill – went along with this name and multilateral idea because it kept both the Americans and Soviets actively involved in post-war planning, even if their primary goal was further Anglo-American cooperation.

The British were in fact so keen to keep the Americans involved, that they even largely accepted the State Department’s internal plans for the structure of the post-war United Nations, which added bureaucratic and legal elements—inspired by the American New Deal—to the League of Nation’s framework of alliances and collective security (Mazower 199). The final post-war United Nations system blended the British approach to collective security and alliances, as typified by the Security Council, with

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the American desire for a development-oriented international bureaucracy framed around nation-states, as exemplified by the various United Nations organs and committees. This compromise was tenable, however, due to London and Washington’s overall desire to foster a liberal international framework that was amendable to Anglo-American objectives.

As these details of Mazower’s argument show, the United States was clearly the dominant partner in Anglo-American relations after the Second World War despite key British influences on international architecture. The fact that the British had to readjust their own visions of post-war order so many times to accommodate American interests attests to this. This pattern seems to give credence to the idea that there was no “special relationship,” but instead an unequal alliance where the British gave in to American demands to perpetuate a pretense of global influence that they no longer enjoyed. As Mazower mentions, though, Britain maintained a key international role through its seat on the United Nations Security Council and continued military prowess. David Reynolds expands on a similar sentiment to argue that a “special relationship” did develop in the 1940s that lasted through the early 1950s (Reynolds 4-5).

This was based mainly on a continued (general) alignment of ideological outlooks, shared interests in the Middle East and Western Asia, and personal relationships between Washington and London’s diplomats that developed during the war. These factors made cooperation between the two powers comparatively easy throughout the 1940s and 1950s.

V. Conclusion: Between America and Europe and the Suez Crisis:

Britain preferential closeness with the United States was also directly shaped by the country’s experience of the Second World War as a victorious and unconquered Allied power, which in turn influenced how it related to the other two dimensions of Churchill’s “three circles” in the conflict’s immediate aftermath: For the British, the ideological legacy [of the Second World War] was profound. After the AngloFrench entente of the Phony War, which many senior-policy makers saw as the basis of a permanent postwar alliance, the French were felt to have betrayed them in 1940 [with their surrender to Germany]. Britain therefore turned away from the perfidious continentals to its kin across the seas – the Commonwealth and the United States. Together, so it was felt, they won the war and it was only natural to look in the same direction for support and cooperation in peacetime. Such deeply held beliefs colored British attitudes toward the continent for a generation (Reynolds 5).

It is important to note that during the time when this generation of Britons felt estranged from Europe, the continent itself embarked on the first steps of economic and political integration with very little involvement from London. Not only does Reynold’s argument therefore elucidate why the British ended up privileging the transatlantic dimension of Churchill’s “three circles” model over the European one in application, but it also hints at a key area of contention that would emerge between Britain and the United States—the issue of decolonization of the status of the Commonwealth in international affairs.

The Americans had a long history of animosity toward European empires and colonialism.

As Reynold observes, this specific form of anti-Europeanism was inherent to the American ideology and

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functioned to differentiate the “the New World” from an “Old World” characterized anachronisms like monarchy and aristocracy (Reynolds 5). This anti-colonialism complicated Anglo-American relations in the immediate post-war decades since the British and other European powers initially desired to retain some degree of control over their colonies. As historian Odd Arne Westad notes in his 2005 book The Global Cold War: Third World Interventions and the Making of Our Times, United States policymakers came to view colonialism as a threat to America’s efforts to contain Soviet Communism’s spread (112).

Westad also asserts that Washington did not want the bankrupt post-war European governments (which were receiving American aid) to divert necessary funds for their own economic reconstruction to the maintenance of empire (112). These American viewpoints came in in direct conflict with British imperial policies during the 1956 Suez Crisis.

This diplomatic incident was precipitated when Egypt—a former British protectorate— nationalized the Suez Canal, which both the French and British used as a shipping route to their remaining colonies and other British Commonwealth members. To protect these interests, Britain, France, and Israel joined forces to militarily intervene. Both the United States and the United Nations condemned this move, causing much consternation between London and Washington. In his June 2006 article in Foreign Affairs titled “The Special Relationship: Then and Now,” British historian Lawrence D. Freedman asserts that American and international alarm at London’s actions was a watershed moment for the “special relationship,” the decolonization movement, and British foreign policy.

It was the United States – standing up for the principles of international law and using its economic muscle to restrain foolish adventurism – that prevented the United Kingdom and France from seeing through the reoccupation of the Suez Canal after Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser nationalized it. The United States' objection to the use of force in this case undermined not only the British position in the Middle East, but also British self-confidence; it was taken as a warning of the speed with which the United Kingdom could find itself isolated. After Suez, the British resolved never to get out of step with U.S. foreign policy again. This was the point at which British governments began to be obsessed with the idea of a special relationship. It was apparent that the United Kingdom could not expect to play a major role in the world either independently of or in opposition to the United States. Its future strategy would be to trade loyalty for privileged access to Washington's foreign-policy making (Freedman 2).

There are two analytically key implications of Freedman’s statement. The first is that the British idea of a seamless marriage of Anglo-American objectives was obliterated; due to America’s post-war status as a superpower, close relations with the United States could only be achieved if Britain intentionally aligned its own interests with Washington’s vision of the liberal world order. This should have been fairly evident given the nature of the wartime partnership, but this reality was made concrete with Suez.

Secondly, it demonstrates that the United States was not going to tolerate European interventions that were designed to uphold colonialism. With these two points, “the special relationship” took on a new guise, where Britain served as a junior partner to the United States in the defense of the liberal order whenever London deemed that their two countries’ interests significantly overlapped.

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Chapter Four: Decolonization I. Introduction: The Aftermath of Suez and Road to Decolonization:

Given Britain’s relegation to junior status in perpetuating the liberal world order following the Suez Crisis, London’s ability to project power on a global level began to wane in the late 1950s and 1960s. The driver of this change was decolonization and the attendant weakening of the Empire and Commonwealth ties. Sanders and Houghton attribute the weakening of bonds across the Empire to the political effects of the Suez Crisis. Before Suez, Britain seemed on track to slowly and progressively relinquish control over its imperial realms. India and the Mandate of Palestine, in particular, were granted independence in 1947 during the “first wave” of decolonization. Crucially, India had opted to remain a member of the Commonwealth, which bolstered hopes that liberal visions of empire and world order could be reinvented for the post-colonial era. Given the illiberal measures that Britain employed during the Suez fiasco, however, these hops were quickly dashed, as Houghton and Sanders observe: A [significant] long-term consequence of Suez concerned the Commonwealth. The most ardent imperialists at home had always hoped that the Commonwealth would help Britain to maintain its postwar world role by acting as a kind of surrogate Empire. In the mid-1950s there had been several good reasons for supposing that the strategy might be successful: the cultural ties which bound the Commonwealth were still strong; trade interdependence was still high, bolstered by the monetary underpinning of the sterling area; and the participation of the Commonwealth Brigade in the recent Korean War suggested that Commonwealth governments were agreed that cooperation among the liberal democracies was…important in resisting the global threat of Communist expansionism.

However, Suez meant that, although the Commonwealth survived as a formal institution, it lost what coherence it had possessed as an economic and diplomatic bloc (110).

India’s Prime Minister Jawaharal Nehru was particularly incensed by the Suez affair and started the diplomatic moves that eventually fostered the anti-imperialist Non-Aligned Movement by 1962 (Sanders and Houghton 110). Such developments intensified the pressure that indigenous nationalist movements in the remainder of the Empire placed on London. These movements critiqued Britain for the coercive and manipulative means that were used to maintain colonial control, which Suez seemed to embody.

By the 1960s, therefore, it became untenable for a supposedly liberal power like Britain to continue to rule over a colonial Empire or aggressively enforce Commonwealth solidarity (115). A “second wave” of decolonization was announced during Prime Minister Harold Macmillan’s “Wind of Change” speech delivered to South Africa’s parliament in February 1960. This started a process of imperial retreat that resulted in full independence for all but of a few of Britain’s smallest imperial realms by the early 1970s (133).

Second wave decolonization was also underpinned by structural changes within the British economy. By the 1960s, it was advanced and industrial European and American markets—not commoditydriven Commonwealth ones—that placed the most demand for British exports of goods and services (Buettner 73). This was a decisive break from past trends but served to reinforce the notion that the British

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domestic economy’s real interests rested in North America and Western Europe—not the former Empire.

In a similar vein, Commonwealth countries like Australia and New Zealand began to develop their own trade and institutional ties to East Asian and Southern Pacific countries at the expense of their British connections (134). Given these realities, British policymakers cut defense budgets that had been used to protect much of the former Empire, which culminated in a withdrawal of British forces from areas east of the Suez Canal by 1971 (124). The end result of these trends was the overall retreat from the EmpireCommonwealth dimension of British postwar foreign policy and a greater emphasis on the American and European nodes of Churchill’s theory.

II. Britain as a Member of the Western Liberal Subsystem—Not a Leader of It:

Even though the Americans ideologically supported Britain’s decolonization efforts due to their affinity for a global order based on international law and nation-states, the loss of empire made the United Kingdom a less influential, capable, and reliable partner for the United States. In the immediate postwar years, American foreign policymakers had indeed hoped that Britain’s Commonwealth connections would help London effectively burden-share on global security matters; once decolonization efforts reduced the capacity and reach of the British economy, however, Britain could no longer afford to do so (Sanders & Houghton 173). The Americans were also worried that the rapidity of Britain’s imperial retreat would produce a “power vacuum in the [decolonized] world that the Soviet Union would only be too happy to fill” (Sanders and Houghton 132). This sentiment, combined with Britain’s sustained overseas defense spending cuts, prompted former Secretary of State Dean Acheson to proclaim in December 1962 that Britain’s time of playing a special role in the maintenance of the liberal order beside America and separate from Europe was over. This indictment, of course, ran contrary to Britain’s longstanding goal of using the American alliance as a tool to perpetuate its other global interests. Nevertheless, by the mid-1960s, the Americans increasingly viewed Britain as just another European ally within the framework of the greater North Atlantic liberal subsystem and security alliance.

The weakened “special relationship” meant that the European dimension of Churchill’s theory was the most tenable option by the 1960s. After all, Britain’s economic capacity was increasingly localized and it became progressively difficult to play a robust role in international affairs as a result (Reynolds 13).

The American connection, however, continued to have an influence on how the British adjusted their global and regional priorities. President Kennedy personally intervened with British leaders to convince them to apply for membership in the expanding European Economic Community (Reynolds 14). Kennedy’s argument was that membership would halt Britain’s postwar economic decline and therefore strengthen the United Kingdom’s ability to be a reliable partner for the United States. Since it took nearly a decade for Britain to be allowed entry into the European Community—due primarily to personal rejections by French President Charles de Gaulle, who feared British membership would add unwanted American influence to the European project—the Anglo-American alliance continued to wane in importance for American policymakers during the 1960s and 1970s (Reynolds 14).

III. European Integration and the Persistence of the Liberal Commonwealth Ideal:

For many Britons, the recalcitrance of the French and other Europeans in extending European

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Community membership to the United Kingdom reinforced their previously held notions that Britain’s destiny was not with Europe. This continued distance from Europe ensured that Britain’s sense of international identity remained distantly connected to the liberal-imperial "three circles” leitmotif, even after decolonization in the 1960s and 1970s (Reynolds 14). Elizabeth Buettner, attributes the persistence of the “three circles” metaphor to the narratives surrounding British imperialism and decolonization that were sold to the British public during the decolonization era. She notes that journalistic and crossparty political accounts of the period portray colonial independence as a smooth transfer of power that the Empire’s liberal-democratic political traditions allowed for. Independence was not a radical break, according to this characterization, because liberal British ideals had made the “colonial subjects ‘ready’ for self-rule” …which was no less than the “fulfillment of British hopes dating back to the nineteenth century” (Buettner 38 – 39). Such narratives intentionally glossed over the sectarian violence and poverty that oftenaccompanied decolonization outside of the White Commonwealth and worked to “absolve Britain from [any] bloodshed that inevitably followed [from imperial retreat]” (39). This has had profound implications for British identity, since it allows the imperial-commonwealth connection to continue existing as a viable avenue for London's efforts at global engagement.

This is particularly apparent in the context of the British public’s relationship with the European integration project, which was still viewed as the least desirable of Churchill’s “three circles” during the era of decolonization, as Buettner demonstrates using polling information from the time.

In a 1961 Gallup poll asking [UK citizens] which…[entity]…was [most] important to Britain, 48 percent of the respondents chose ‘the Commonwealth,’ 19 percent ‘America,’ and 18 percent ‘Europe’ (with the remainder opting for ‘don’t know’). But Britain’s EEC membership application gave rise to intense discussions that framed Britain’s Commonwealth and European commitments as necessitating a choice between the two. If anything, Britain’s overture to the EEC was not simply a tacit acknowledgment of the declining economic and political utility of the Commonwealth as a vehicle for British interests…but became yet another factor among the many centrifugal forces already undermining Britain’s… [foreign policy] …cohesion (Buettner 74).

Given this disoriented construction of Britain’s international identity in relation to a post-colonial and postimperial world, it is not surprising that Britain’s relationship to the European project remained awkward once it was finally admitted to the bloc in 1973. In his 2013 book Britain and the European Union, political scientist Andrew Geddes argues that the British-European relationship took on a purely transactional outlook once London attained membership. The goal was always to increase Britain’s relative economic strength by integrating with other advanced markets, so that the United Kingdom could once again become a more valuable partner for the United States and better able to engage with the Commonwealth and outside world. The result of this strategy by 1980 was that Britain became differentially engaged with all three of Churchill’s circles, but the most economically valuable one—the European circle—was still not quite palatable to popular and elite notions of British identity due to the imperial legacy and historical disagreements with other European countries.

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Chapter Five: From Thatcher to Brexit I. Introduction: Atlanticism and Euroskepticism Under Thatcher:

Britain’s difficulty with Europe—and reciprocal affinity for the United States—would intensify starting in the late 1970s and early 1980s when Margaret Thatcher became British Prime Minister and Ronald Reagan the President of the United States. The two leaders shared a broadly similar right-wing political and economic vision—neoliberalism—that came to be implemented in both countries (Sanders and Houghton 175). Neoliberalism’s broad tenets emphasized the absolute primacy of market forces and the dismantling of the collectivist welfare state, and Washington and London’s ideological commitment to capitalism’s rejuvenation ensured a “remarkable degree of Anglo-American cooperation” during the decade (175). Even though Neoliberalism also influenced the social and economic policies of other European Member States, it did so not nearly to the same extent as in Britain. This divergence in policy outlook contributed to the sense of detachment that had characterized Britain’s involvement with the European circle, especially given that some members of Mrs. Thatcher’s ruling Conservative Party were more prone to Euroskepticism and imperialist nostalgia: Although the Conservative Party under Edward Heath had demonstrated strong pro-European [foreign policy] tendencies in the 1970s, Euroskepticism remained well-represented on [the party’s] back benches and ultimately become more pervasive after Margaret Thatcher assumed leadership.

Concerns about defending Britain’s sovereignty against European encroachment were commonly aired in the 1980s, with reservations about national subordination within Europe rising in tandem with the inauguration of a new chapter in the Anglo-American special relationship. Under Thatcher’s governments, Britain distanced itself from Europe and prioritized Atlanticism – not only through a pro-American foreign policy, but also in mounting ardent defense of one of… [the country’s] … remaining colonial…[holdings]: … The Falkland Islands (Buettner 75).

Mrs. Thatcher’s renewed Atlanticism and attendant hostility toward European integration is viewed in the literature as a resurgence of an interventionist Britain that has a “deep involvement in the world beyond Europe (Buettner 75). Therefore, despite decolonization, London’s relative decline in global reach, and the country’s eventual and reluctant turn towards Europe, some members of British society and policymaking elite never lost the appetite to perform a worldwide role that was imparted by the imperial past.

Due to her intentional revival of the Anglo-American “special relationship,” Mrs. Thatcher was able to cast herself as an effective heir of Churchill’s foreign policy leadership style. Events like the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War also worked in her favor, since they seemed to provide evidence for the superiority of the Anglo-American neoliberal model to all alternatives of social, political, and economic organization. Since Britain’s relative economic strength and ability to project global power alongside the United States had not improved dramatically since the era of decolonization, Houghton and Sanders ascribe Britain’s increased value to the United States to this ideological convergence and Mrs. Thatcher’s personal leadership qualities (198). Thatcher’s premiership therefore increased the importance of a leader’s personal interpretation of Churchill’s “three circles” metaphor, as well as British identity

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to both the formulation of British foreign policy priorities and the aforementioned intensification of Euroskepticism within the Conservative Party.

II. Blair’s Liberal Transatlantic Bridge:

The next British Prime Minister to define British foreign policy in terms of personal leadership style was the Labour Party’s Tony Blair, who came to power in 1997. Tony Blair’s international philosophy placed great emphasis on the maintenance of the liberal tradition, even going so far as to advocate for policies of multilateral military interventions in instances of gross human rights violations. As a committed Europhile, Blair believed both the United States and integrated Europe, as areas where liberal democracy flourished, should work to ensure that the liberal values were perpetuated across the globe. He therefore stressed the importance of American and European unity and thought that Britain had a special role to play in mediating between the two sides (Sanders and Houghton 3). This theoretical placement of Britain as a bridge between America and Europe essentially updated Churchill’s metaphor for the twenty-first century with the familiar goal of securing a globally relevant Britain for the future.

Blair’s leadership style and updated framework for global engagement imbued British foreign policy with a new confidence in the late 1990s, with the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s humanitarian interventions in places like Bosnia being viewed as extensions of uniquely British liberal values. This seems to give credence to the sentiment that the British could maintain global influence by shaping the values that crafted the norms of international politics in the early twenty-first century through its membership of the Euro-American transatlantic alliance (Gaskarth 118). Houghton and Sanders observe that this new role for Britain seemed to work for a while because America’s President Bill Clinton shared Blair’s conviction that both the United States and Britain had a moral duty to prevent human suffering through the perpetuation of the liberal world order (198). Given that London still faced stiff constraints on its military and economic capacities, Blair’s bridge metaphor primarily made Britain a valuable junior partner in the United States’ efforts to convince other countries—including European ones—to subscribe to the ideological preferences that justified America’s international actions. This arrangement served Blair well during the Clinton years according to Sanders and Houghton: Even though the British government was...[still]… unable to provide the type of military support that it had in the 1950s, it could still bestow the appearance of ‘multilateral legitimacy’ on Americansponsored out-of-area operations. This was clearly valuable to Washington in its attempts to justify its own behavior to world opinion…and also provided Blair with the opportunity to burnish…[his]… credentials as the true ‘heir’ to the mantle of Winston Churchill (198).

Complications arose once George W. Bush replaced Clinton as President in January 2001. Since Blair’s worldview and ideological preferences did not align as seamlessly with Bush’s as they did with Clinton’s, any type of balancing act between American and European opinions on foreign policy actions would become less favorable.

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III. Iraq – The Tragedy of Blair’s Liberal Internationalism:

This became evident once the Bush Administration pursued an aggressive and global “War on Terror” in response to the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on New York City and Washington, D.C. Pan-European opinion was initially sympathetic to the American cause, particularly in regard to Washington’s retaliatory actions against the Taliban and Al-Qaeda in Afghanistan. But when Bush’s government decided it would invade Iraq to remove the dictator Saddam Hussein from power, this support quickly crumbled across continental Europe. Blair, still ideologically committed to the “bridge metaphor,” decided it was in Britain’s best interest to support the United States and try to get the rest of the Europeans onboard with a United Nations Security Council resolution that sanctioned actions against Hussein’s regime. Blair’s attempt at Euro-American unity over Iraq came to naught, however, when the French President Jacque Chirac vetoed such efforts. Despite this setback, Blair made the choice to commit British troops to the United States’ Iraqi incursion, effectively privileging American interests over European ones and demonstrating how untenable the “bridge” metaphor could be in instances of diminished policy, ideology, and leadership alignment between the United States and Europe. Given the domestic unpopularity of the Iraq War, Blair’s flawed application of the bridge metaphor eventually forced him from office and largely discredited his brand of politics.

IV. The Rise of the Euroskeptic Anglosphere and the Road to Brexit:

The Conservative Party under the leadership of David Cameron returned to power in coalition with the Liberal-Democrats in Britain’s 2010 election. Aside from the foreign policy mess left in Iraq’s wake, the Conservative Party itself had to contend with its Euroskeptic enclaves that had only grown more vocal since Mrs. Thatcher’s tenure. Sanders and Houghton argue the desire of several Conservative members of Parliament to pull Britain out of the European Union, as well as the coalition government’s slim Parliamentary majority, made it difficult for Cameron to successfully put his own stamp on British foreign policy the ways Churchill, Thatcher, and Blair had before him (189). The 2010 Coalition nevertheless continued to invoke Churchillian motifs in its 2010 and 2015 National Security Strategy documents, which together, make the observation that “geographically Britain is an island, but economically and politically it is a vital link in the global network” (Sanders and Houghton 3). Despite the Iraq War fiasco and the history of Britain’s problematic construction of postwar foreign policy, this idea of Britain as the centerpiece for key global networks represented the latest reworking of Churchill’s “three circles” metaphor.

Whether intended or not, this reference to multiple networks—and not just European ones— makes an implicit appeal to British Euroskepticism. This is because the idea of a networked Britain actively involved in the manipulation of many spheres of influence represents the most Churchillian iteration of the "three circles” motif since it was originally conceived in the late 1940s. Conservative Euroskeptic politicians, like Boris Johnson, have seized on this new image to suggest that Britain could reorient its international position to privilege the Commonwealth and other emerging global markets if it left the European Union. The right-wing British press has adopted the Commonwealth element of this theory in recent years, in which an “Anglosphere” alliance of English-speaking democracies is painted as a viable global alternative to further European regional integration. Since the countries most often included in this

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proposed alliance are the former white settler colonies of New Zealand, Canada, Australia, and the United States, this particular vision of Britain’s potential role in the twenty-first century is the distant heir to the liberal-imperial discourse on settler colonialism and “Greater Britain” outlined by Duncan Bell. Elizabeth Buettner directly attributes the resurgence of this “Anglosphere” idea and attendant Euroskepticism to the persistence of Britain’s imperial identity beyond the era of decolonization, especially since the more violent realities of post-colonialism were not always accurately communicated to the British public: Long after the Commonwealth ceased…[to Realistically be competitive]...as an alternative source of British loyalties and attachments after the era of widespread decolonization, resistance to ‘Europe’ as an unhappy alternative to great powerdom, remained a powerful force in British politics…

[Therefore,] …while British Euroskepticism has many roots, its trajectory demands to be firmly embedded within the…[the country’s]…domestic responses to decolonization and perceptions of the nation’s [post-imperial] condition. (77).

As Buettner’s analysis alludes, even though European Union membership has economically benefited the United Kingdom by integrating the country with other highly developed neighboring economies, Britain’s identity vis-à-vis the rest of the world—an identity laced with a cultural sense of British exceptionalism— has consistently made London’s turn toward Europe difficult to maintain in light of the country’s perceived geopolitical alternatives.

Given increased Euroskeptic pressure from within his own party and society at large, Prime Minister Cameron called for a public referendum on Britain’s European Union membership to be held in June 2016. This followed a Conservative parliamentary majority gained in the 2015 elections without the liberal democrats. The referendum fulfilled a Conservative Party manifesto promise made during the campaign, which Cameron hoped would finally silence the Party’s anti-European backbenchers. Things did not go according to plan as many prominent Conservatives, including Boris Johnson, campaigned to leave Europe despite the Prime Minister’s preference to remain. Throughout the referendum campaign, Johnson and other proponents of a British exit consistently argued “a global Britain” that embraces the liberal international order and reaffirms London’s historic “network” beyond Europe would be the end result of a Brexit. When the British public narrowly voted leave in June 2016, these opinions seemed to be given greater popular credibility.

V. Conclusion: Enter Theresa May:

Cameron was forced to resign as Prime Minister after his defeat in the referendum and was replaced by Theresa May after a brief Conservative Party leadership battle. Even though Mrs. May had campaigned to remain, she quickly shifted views upon becoming Prime Minister and vowed to deliver a successful Brexit. In doing so, she and her government have had to formulate new priorities for Britain’s future relationship with Europe and the rest of the world. Since the European Union remains the United Kingdom’s largest trading partner, the Realist impulse in British foreign policy suggests that Britain maintain strong trade links with the remaining twenty-seven Member States, including finding a way to retain favorable access to the Common Market and Customs Union. It has proven extremely

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complicated to pursue this Realist priority, however, since Mrs. May also faces considerable domestic pressure from many regions in England and Wales to curb the levels of immigration and economic migration from continental Europe. Given these political constraints, May has instead opted to again rework the Churchillian three bridges metaphor into a new motif—“Global Britain”—that theoretically allows the country to politically and economically distance itself from the European Union to pursue closer connections with other powers, like the Commonwealth and United States. In doing so, she is not only privileging ideational elements rooted in Britain’s imperial hangover but also appropriating rightwing ideas, like the desire to create an “Anglosphere,” that dominated the referendum campaign. Sanders and Houghton’s analysis suggests this is a natural response for a Prime Minister who must appease Brexit supporters in her own party and also leave her own individual mark on Britain’s postwar foreign policy traditions—especially since the last Conservative Prime Minister, David Cameron, largely failed to do so. The history of Britain’s postwar construction of a foreign policy identity, as sketched in the last few chapters, and Theresa May’s personal political considerations are necessary to understanding how the Prime Minister’s latest iteration of the Churchillian "three circles” metaphor informs her government’s Brexit priorities.

Chapter 6: Global Britain

As the historical overview conveys, Britain’s past notions of global identity, particularly the “imperial hangover,” have complicated Britain’s European Union membership, especially since this identity has been married to both the maintenance of close bilateral ties with the United States and a cultural affinity for the Commonwealth. Also behind this focus on partnerships is a broad commitment to the multilateral maintenance of the liberal-democratic postwar order that the Anglo-American alliance helped create. The current British leadership draws on these values and historic symbols to create an ideology of “Global Britain” to chart a path forward after Europe.

In her October 2016 speech at the Conservative Party Conference in Birmingham, Theresa May boldly proclaimed that a truly “Global Britain is possible¬—and it should not be surprising that it is.” She cited Britain’s strong geographic location and subsequent involvement in global trade and finance, the comparatively far reach of the country’s intelligence and military services, London’s large web of diplomatic alliances, Britain’s leading role in higher education, and the fact that the United Kingdom is the largest foreign investor in the American economy to support her point. The explicit message of Mrs. May’s speech is that Britain is economically, politically, and culturally relevant and strong enough to be an independent actor on the global stage outside of the European Union. Her words employ the tropes of British exceptionalism that are inherent to the Churchillian “three circles” foreign policy tradition, as well as reference the need for close ties with the United States and other allies, including the Commonwealth.

The European dimension receives less attention in her remarks, reflecting the reality that an exit from the European Union will greatly alter and limit Britain’s capacity to act in that historic sphere of influence.

Therefore, a practical need exists for Britain to intensify its political and economic connections with its other partners, which is reflected in how the current government imagines their country’s post-Brexit foreign policy.

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I. The Maintenance of Britain’s Liberal Multilateralism:

Prime Minister May has made it clear that, despite Brexit, she intends to maintain Britain’s multilateral support of the liberal world order. This is the essential first step in containing the diplomatic fallout from Britain’s impending withdrawal from the European Union because it signals that Whitehall policymakers do not want their country to become isolated in world affairs. It also perpetuates the underlying liberal philosophy in Britain’s postwar foreign policy, which has consistently viewed the United Nations system—which Britain helped create in cooperation with the United States—as a cornerstone of the liberal order. It is not surprising then that Mrs. May reaffirmed Britain’s role at the United Nations when she addressed the General Assembly in New York on September 20, 2016: My pledge to this United Nations is simple: the UK will be a confident, strong, and dependable partner internationally – true to universal values that we share together…From the St. James’ Palace declaration and the Atlantic Charter forged by Winston Churchill and President Roosevelt, to first meeting of this General Assembly in London in 1946, the United Kingdom has been an outward facing, global partner at the heart of international efforts to secure peace prosperity…[across the globe]…And that is how it will remain. For when the British people voted to leave the EU, they did not vote to turn inwards or walk away from any of our partners in the world.

This quote demonstrates that Mrs. May and her government view the United Nations as a vehicle through which Britain’s diplomatic engagement with the rest of the world—particularly with its key North American ally—can continue.

Aside from this continuity, however, May also interjects an element of her own personal political philosophy—one that places primacy on what she believes to be in the British peoples’ interests—into another part of the speech: The challenge for those of us in this room is to ensure that our government and our global institutions, such as this United Nations, remain responsible to the people that we serve. That we are capable of adapting our institutions to the demands of the twenty-first century and ensuring that they do not become irrelevant... so when it comes to the big security and human rights challenges in our time, we need…our United Nations…to forge a bold new multilateralism.

Highlighting a government’s need to serve its own people first subtly hints to one potential lesson to be learned from the Brexit referendum’s result: namely, that some Britons in the United Kingdom’s downtrodden, postindustrial regions used their vote as a protest against the socioeconomic status quo in both Westminster and Brussels, even if the causes of their frustration will worsen when the country leaves the European Union. Mrs. May, who wants to ensure that Britain remains actively engaged in the world affairs, understands that the British public’s continued frustration with the domestic state of the United Kingdom could place limitations on her government's global ambitions. As a result, she believes it imperative that international institutions like the United Nations and the European Union reform to better

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serve national needs so they are in turn more supportive of multilateral diplomacy and internationalism.

In Britain’s case, such support is a prerequisite to any attempts by Westminster’s foreign policy elite to implement a “global Britain” in keeping with Churchill’s metaphor. This supports the idea that liberal internationalism first and foremost requires that a domestic consensus for liberal values remains intact in core liberal states, which is precisely what the current form of liberal internationalism has failed to engender.

II. Trump’s Challenge to the “Special Relationship”:

Britain is far from the only country afflicted by a populist revolt against liberal internationalism.

Aside from the right-wing movements in other European Union Member States like France and Poland, the United States—Britain’s closest ally and the crucial pillar of Churchill’s model—has inaugurated a president who came to office on an anti-establishment platform that eschews much of America’s international economic and political involvements. President Donald Trump’s political philosophy, though largely incoherent in application, marks a rather uncertain departure from the United States’ postwar foreign policy traditions. For instance, the United States has largely supported European integration over the past sixty years, and, as the literature reveals, had primarily valued the “special relationship” with London so long as Britain is in a position to further American goals within the broader liberal world order.

This longstanding policy explains why former President Barack Obama controversially intervened in the Brexit referendum campaign to advocate for Britain’s continued European Union membership, arguing that the United Kingdom is a stronger and more reliable partner for Washington within the pan-European framework.

President Trump, who sees the Brexit referendum’s result as an extension of his personal brand of politics, does not appear to be as concerned about the solvency of the European integration project as his predecessors. Whereas Obama said that a Britain outside of the European Union would be “in the back of the queue” in regard to a new bilateral trade deal with the United States, Trump has suggested that this will not be the case with his administration. Of course, it is still too early to ascribe real weight to the new president’s statements, since his opinions tend to change quite frequently; nevertheless, the mere suggestion that the United States could actively help Britain remove itself from the European Union has caused panic in other European capitals, according to New York University professor and esteemed political risk analyst Ian Bremmer. This is because such assistance would raise real concerns about America’s continued commitment to institutions that compose the broader Euro-American trade, defense, and intelligence alliance—if the United States supports one country leaving the European Union, what is to stop Washington from acquiescing to another Member State’s exit? (4). These suspicions have weakened the transatlantic alliance’s overall solidarity during Trump’s two years in office; but for Mrs. May’s team, which is more narrowly concerned with maintaining close ties with Washington once Brexit occurs, the change in attitude has been seen as a potential advantage.

Mrs. May’s government has made it clear that the United Kingdom desires a new and deeper trade deal with the United States after Britain leaves the European Union, reasoning that such an arrangement would soften the economic blow that Britain’s exit will entail, so that the country can continue to afford a robust and multilateral global role. To assist in the preliminary stages of any trade talks, the

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British actively lobbied to ensure Prime Minister May was the first foreign leader to visit President Trump at the White House after his January 2017 inauguration. When these efforts were successful, supporters hoped that she could employ the traditions inherent to the postwar “special relationship” to convince the President to reaffirm America’s commitment to the transatlantic alliance as well as multilateral diplomacy, both of which are important and longstanding elements of the previously outlined foreign policy strategies of the United Kingdom.

As part of this strategy to put pressure on the President to normalize his international views, Mrs. May gave a speech to the Congressional members of Trump’s own Republican Party in Philadelphia on January 26, 2017 before meeting with the President in Washington. In this speech, which featured the usual emotive appeals to the “special relationship,” the Prime Minister took great pains to the remind the Republicans of Britain’s shared history of developing the liberal world order—with explicit references to United Nations and North Atlantic Treaty Organization—that she is keen on perpetuating for Britain’s benefit. In doing so, her words portray Britain’s European Union exit as an opportunity for Britain to reformulate a global role in keeping with its postwar foreign policy traditions with the support of the United States: As Americans know, the United Kingdom is by instinct and history, a great, global nation that recognizes its responsibilities to the world. And as we end our membership in the European Union – as the British people voted to do with determination and quiet resolve last year – we have the opportunity to reassert our belief in a confident, sovereign, and “Global Britain,” ready to build relationships with old friends and new allies alike…it remains overwhelming in our interests – and in those of the wider world – that the EU should succeed… But we have chosen a different future for our country… A future that sees us step up with confidence to a new, even more internationalist role, where we meet our responsibility to our friends and allies, champion the international cooperation and partnerships that project our values around the world, and continue to act as one of the strongest and most forceful advocates for business, free markets, and free trade anywhere around the world… this is a vision of a future that my country can unite around – and that I hope your country, as our closest friend and ally, can welcome and support…we have the opportunity – indeed the responsibility – to renew the Special Relationship for this new age. We have the opportunity to lead, together, again.

These references to webs of alliances, a broad commitment to capitalism and free trade, and the projection of values are all key ingredients of liberal internationalism that has underlined Britain’s partnership with America. And since Britain has traditionally played a junior role alongside Washington—in keeping with London’s “three circles” approach to international relations—Mrs. May needed to ensure that Americans remain committed to these values if the United Kingdom is to effectively use that liberal order to maintain global influence after it leaves the European Union. This, again, is because the European dimension of Churchill’s model will not be as tenable for the United Kingdom after the Brexit process plays out, so Mrs. May needed to rely more on the Anglo-American “special relationship” and broader liberal-democratic order, typified by the United Nations, to bring her “Global Britain” leitmotif to fruition.

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III. “Global Britain’s” Relationship to the European Union:

Aside from the Anglo-America connection and the liberal tradition, Prime Minister May and her government have also needed to address how a new “Global Britain” will relate to the European Union. Not only is a focus on Europe of economic necessity to maintain Britain’s overall solvency, but it also keeps with Churchill's desire to include an integrated Europe as a key part of the United Kingdom’s relationship with the world—even if Britain was not itself part of that integrated community. This specifically Churchillian vision of Britain's relationship with Europe—where the United Kingdom is a valued partner of the European community, but not itself a member—is the tradition that Theresa May has adopted. It is her hope that this more distant arrangement with the European Union, coupled with some kind of free trade deal, will allow Britain to foster deeper relations with other parts of the world, including, of course, the United States and Commonwealth.

Mrs. May first revealed some of the details of her vision for Britain’s new relationship with the European Union in a speech at London’s Lancaster House on January 17, 2017. In doing so, she casted the referendum’s result as a product of Britain’s distinct political traditions and culture; a distinctiveness that, according to the Prime Minister, has produced a sense of British identity that is markedly different from continental Europe.

Our political traditions are different…unlike other European countries, we have no written constitution, but the Principle of Parliamentary Sovereignty… we have only a recent history of devolved governance…and we have little history of coalition government. The public expect to be able to hold their governments to account very directly, and, as a result, supranational institutions as those created by the European Union sit very uneasily in relation to our political history and way of life.

The Prime Minister then linked this distinctively British political identity to the United Kingdom’s place in the world affairs in a truly Churchillian fashion, emphasizing the need for Britain to remain distant—but still cooperatively involved with Europe, even though the two entities share broadly similar democratic values. This type of arrangement, according to Mrs. May, is the necessary prerequisite for Britain to embrace the spirit in internationalism that has historically defined her country.

Our vote to leave the European Union was no rejection of the values that we share… It was no attempt to do harm to the EU itself or to any of its remaining Member States. We do not want to turn the clock back to the days when Europe was less peaceful, less secure, and less able to trade freely. It was a vote to restore, as we see it, our parliamentary democracy, national-self-determination, and to become even more global and internationalist in action and spirit.

With the focus on Europe’s internal cohesion and security, this statement also blends the Realist tradition in British foreign policy with the more ideational focus on internationalism. Churchill stressed the importance of ensuring the continent’s security, as European stability would allow London policymakers to turn their attention elsewhere to the maintenance of transatlantic and Commonwealth ties. A more secure Europe

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is also a better trading and economic partner for Britain, which reinforces the United Kingdom’s ability to pursue liberal free trade policies. Therefore, Mrs. May is bringing these past themes into play for the present moment as part of her “Global Britain” motif. And given that this international identity for Britain is constructed out of themes and tropes that developed during the imperial past, the Prime Minister’s vision for future Anglo-European Union relations is emblematic of the “imperial hangover” that is so often referred to in the academic literature on Britain’s postwar foreign policy.

V. The Role of Trade with the Commonwealth and Anglosphere:

Mrs. May’s Lancaster House speech gives further evidence to the “imperial hangover” in British foreign policy when she explicates further on how a more distant relationship with Europe can reinvigorate Britain’s more traditional ties beyond the continent. She again explained this in terms of Britain’s international identity, which necessitates global trade engagement that keeps liberal principles that are of course developed out of an imperialist context: It’s not simply because our history and culture is profoundly internationalist, important though that is. Many in Britain have always felt that the United Kingdom’s place in the European Union came at the expense of our global ties, and of a bolder embrace of free trade with the wider world…we want to get out into…[that]…wider world, to trade and do business all around the globe.

With this quote, Mrs. May explicitly acknowledged that one of British Euroskepticism’s main pillars is that Britain betrayed its rightfully global role by agreeing to become a more regionalized actor within the European Union. This supports Elizabeth Buettner’s earlier analysis that Euroskeptic British politicians were never forced to acknowledge that their sense of global identity is derived from an imperial past of their country’s specific experience of decolonization, allowing for it to be unduly romanticized. As Buettner observes, this romantic attachment to the liberal-imperial past—and the countries that were a part of that past—makes it easier for Euroskeptics to continue to frame Britain’s European Union membership as an obstacle to the liberal trade and business practices that they believe London has a duty to promote across the world. It does not matter to these Euroskeptics if today’s European Union largely operates according to liberal, democratic, and capitalist principles; the very fact that the Union is geographically confined to a European sphere of influence renders the project insufficiently global for those with a nostalgic attachment to British imperial traditions. By appropriating this line of Euroskeptic thought, Prime Minister May is further fuels the “imperial hangover” that has infected Britain’s foreign policy and identity formulation since the Second World War.

Given this appropriation of Euroskeptic motifs and her general reworking of the Churchillian “three circles” metaphor, it is not surprising that Mrs. May pitted Europe against the Commonwealth, United States, and emerging market economies when discussing the regions where Britain could increase its trading ties: We want to get out into the wider world to trade and do business. Countries including China, Brazil, and the Gulf States have already expressed their interest in striking…[free]…trade deals with us. We

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have started discussion on future trade ties with countries like Australia, New Zealand, and India.

And…[President] Trump has said Britain is not at the ‘back of the queue’ for a trade deal with the United States, the world’s biggest economy, but front of the line.

Australia, New Zealand, and India are, of course, tied to Britain through the Commonwealth, so their inclusion in Britain’s post-Brexit trade and foreign policy framework is a natural extension of Theresa May’s “Global Britain” metaphor. As a fellow liberal and English-speaking power that has historical links to Britain, the United States are also included, despite not being a formal Commonwealth member.

Through the vehicle of free trade, closer Commonwealth and English-speaking connectivity also keep with “the Anglosphere” notion that has emerged in right wing, Conservative Party discourses over the past few years. Not only does a subtle reference to “the Anglosphere” further the viability of Mrs. May’s metaphor with the more Euroskeptic wing of her party, but also it thematically links her entire message to free trade liberalism. This theme is key to understanding why she references the non-Commonwealth countries since free trade is the imagined tool that could integrate and further socialize these emerging markets into a system that benefits Britain and the broader liberal world order that is supported by the web of alliances that Churchill first envisioned.

As mentioned before, though, Europe itself is still an integral part of Churchill’s vision. This is not just limited to the hard security sense, but also includes an economic dimension that is reinforced— naturally—through ties of free trade. This is where Theresa May’s vision becomes complicated since she wants Britain to maintain the closest possible free trade ties with the European Union and with any future economic partner. To strike new free trade deals in the unhindered fashion that the Prime Minister hopes for, however, Britain will have to rid itself of the European Union’s trade regulations and bureaucracy.

This is why Mrs. May has made it clear that she is open to removing Britain from both the European Single Market and Customs Union. This action has been labeled a “hard Brexit” by analysts of Britain’s upcoming departure because such an arrangement would leave Britain with little to no privileged trading access to the European Union’s internal market of goods, services, and capital. This would result in a significant shock to the domestic British economy, while also hurting the remaining twenty-seven Member States.

Given that this type of “hard Brexit” is rather undesirable, Mrs. May has suggested she that wants to negotiate a new tariff and trading partnership with the European Union based on an amended relationship with the Customs Union. This would be the wisest course of action for all parties according to the Prime Minister, and she addresses her views on this matter in one of the final turns of her Lancaster House address: I want Britain to be able to negotiate its own trade agreements. But I also want tariff-free trade with Europe and cross-border trade there to be as frictionless as possible. That means I do not want us to be bound by the Common Commercial Policy…[or]…the Common External Tariff.

These are the elements of the Customs Union that prevent us from striking our own comprehensive trade agreements with other countries. But I do want us to have a customs agreement with the EU. Whether that means we must reach a completely new customs agreement, become an associate

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member of the Customs Union in some way, or remain a signatory to some elements of it, I hold no preconceived position. I have an open mind on how we do it. It is not the means that matter, but the ends. And those ends are clear: I want to remove as many barriers to trade as possible. And I want Britain to be free to establish our own tariff schedules at the World Trade Organization, meaning we can reach our new trade agreements not just with the European Union, but with old friends and new allies from outside Europe too.

Given these statements, it is clear that Theresa May ardently believes that her government can deliver a Brexit that makes Britain more internationalist and not less. From a political perspective, this “Global Britain” model suggests that she is doing this to put her own unique stamp on Britain’s postwar foreign policy traditions. She could also be trying to emphasize the liberal-cosmopolitan strands of British politics so that the country’s culture remains centered on global engagement, despite domestic protests to the contrary. When viewed through a Constructivist lens, Mrs. May’s personal emphasis would be in keeping with the internationalist identity that the imperial legacy, liberal political tradition, and Churchillian “three circles” model have produced since the Second World War.

Chapter Seven: Global Britain’s Strategic Incoherence in the Face of a Collapsing Liberal World Order I. Introduction:

The broad contours of Theresa May’s “Global Britain” are revealed through these speeches, and this metaphor creates a foreign policy strategy based on how its constituent regions and philosophies thematically reinforce each other. A commitment to the liberal international order is the strategy’s bedrock. This explains why Prime Minster May has worked hard to assure the United Nations and other international bodies of Britain’s intention to remain fully engaged in the world. After all, as Mazower demonstrates, Britain is one of the states most responsible for the United Nation’s creation and therefore has a vested interest in maintaining the solvency of multilateral diplomacy. And as Britain removes itself from one multilateral body—the European Union—it will need to further engage with the other options it has left to ensure British interests are effectively projected onto the world stage.

II. An Illiberal America Undermines Britain:

A strategic and thematic commitment to liberal internationalism is all well and good, but the problem is that liberal-democratic multilateralism is currently under siege, in part due to the British voter’s decision to leave the European Union. Of even more significance, however, is the current political climate in the United States, where an illiberal President now has the power to influence Washington’s place in the world. The Trump Administration has expressed a general skepticism toward multilateral diplomacy and a preference for a more militaristic foreign policy based on hard power tactics and economic protectionism.

Prime Minister May has still chosen to include the United States in her “Global Britain” framework but has chosen to put pressure on the American governments’ other organs so that they can socialize the new President’s team into a more multilateral mindset. This is why Mrs. May was so keen to speak to the

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Congressional Republican Party about the shared values that have constituted Anglo-American relations since the Second World War, which, of course, includes a commitment to liberal internationalism. The Prime Minister seems to think that the current American government can still be a reliable partner for Britain, the United Nations, and other international bodies like the European Union if given enough prompting from its closest ally.

On some level, this is an understandable strategic policy, since a close relationship with the United States could ensure that some British interests are adopted by the world’s strongest political and economic power. The idea of a renewed “special relationship,” however, is unrealistic given the current circumstances. The British may be able to socialize the Trump Administration to a certain extent, but the President’s pseudo-nationalism is likely to remain his guiding principle. This means that Trump’s protectionist instincts could overrule any good will he has toward Britain’s predicament. For example, even if the President does instruct his team to work with Britain on the development of a new Anglo-American bilateral trade deal, the arrangement’s terms are most likely to be heavily skewed in America’s favor. This would be a necessary feature if the President is to sell a trade deal to his domestic constituencies, who largely want the United States to reform free trade agreements to privilege domestic American workers.

Britain could also have no real ability to alter America’s terms since the country might be in dire need for new deals if its exit negotiations with the European Union go badly. This reflects the reality that, after it leaves Europe, Britain will be more dependent on the United States than ever before, even if Washington is not as committed to the maintenance of the liberal system that has historically benefited the two countries.

Even if Trump was not the current leader, it is important to remember that America has always valued Britain the most when it was an active member of the European Union. So even if Trump’s views are brought into alignment with more traditional modes of thought, he and his team may not end up seeing as much value in Britain as Mrs. May hopes. Therefore, the Prime Minister needs some sort of backup plan, as productive and amicable relations with Trump’s America may not be as easy as she hopes.

III. The Anglosphere’s Limits:

The Commonwealth could provide the needed alternative to the United States and Europe.

This is why the Prime Minister’s “Global Britain” strategy includes the goal of increasing free trade ties with these predominately English-speaking countries. The Prime Minister’s plan hopes that the common language and cultural ties to Britain will make New Zealand, Canada, Australia, and India more likely to engage in British efforts to foster free trade liberalism and a looser type of multilateralism. In addressing this issue, a February 2017 article published by the New York Council on Foreign Relations titled “A Future of the English-Speaking Peoples,” asserts that the Anglosphere alliance—something long dreamed about by some British and Commonwealth leaders—could come to fruition in some form in the future. The article, written by economists Eduardo Campanella and Marta Dassú, admits that due to Britain’s antisupranational tendencies, such an arrangement could never be as federal in nature as previous generations had hoped. Instead, it would be a type of trading preference area between countries with broadly similar cultures and economic system. This would be in keeping with Mrs. May’s desire for Britain to engage with the world in a more loosely multilateral fashion than it currently can within the European Union. This explains why she has adopted “the Anglosphere” idea as an integral component of her “Global Britain”

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leitmotif.

Even this strategy is problematic, however, because of the uncertainty caused by Britain’s European Union exit and rising illiberalism. The structural economic trends that first drove Britain to pursue European integration have not changed. As Sanders and Houghton’s argument elucidates, Britain’s economic interests still chiefly rest in its trade with continental Europe and, secondly, the United States.

As an extension of this structural reality, Britain’s economic capacity has been strengthened by European integration, making it a more enticing partner for the United States and other market economies as a part of that greater bloc. On its own, Britain will be far less desirable trading partner, regardless of whether it shares a language and cultural affinity with many other countries. This is especially true given the rising protectionist impulse that is currently infecting international relations. The uncertainty of a Trump Presidency and Brexit may compel countries to put their own narrow interests first to ensure a degree of political and economic stability at home. This could complicate Britain’s attempts to find new equitable free trade arrangements, and, more importantly, make it more difficult for the country to find replacements for the economic gains that is has derived from its membership in the European Single Market and Customs Union. Despite Mrs. May’s government’s best efforts, therefore, even a loosely multilateral “Anglosphere” alliance seems unlikely given today’s unpredictable international environment—which is moving away from an American-led liberal order to something far messier.

IV. Conclusion: A Weaker, Less Influential Britain:

These points demonstrate that there is a large degree of incoherence in the strategic application of Theresa May’s “Global Britain” metaphor. The problems largely stem from Britain’s imminent departure from the European Union, which, from a Realist perspective, will make it more difficult for the country to remain of high value for its other international partners. This will, in turn, reduce Britain’s ability to perpetuate the internationalist identity that the country has developed over the past centuries and also dilute the capacity for British liberal ideals to inform global politics. This is because Britain’s partnerships are the vehicle through which it can construct a globally influential identity and ensure its own security. Jamie Gaskarth takes up this point to explain that without close collaboration with its European neighbors, any notion of Britain as an international norm producer or geopolitical centerpiece will be obliterated: If we want to provide a more specific description of [Britain] as an international actor, then it may be…[most]…appropriate to see it as a leading networker and norm entrepreneur via the AngloEuropean access of power. For all the global character of the Commonwealth and the UK’s postimperial ties, it is Europe and the United States that are the primary conduits for British influence...

When Britain seeks to exercise a global role in isolation…it has tended to be rebuffed (Gaskarth 94 – 95).

Without offering tangible benefits for its key Euro-American partners, therefore, there will be little impetus for Britain to be a privileged actor or voice within a broader multilateral web of alliance and the country will cease to be a networker and provider of norms—a result that is the antithesis to Theresa May’s vision

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of a “Global Britain.”

Prime Minister May does, on some level, seem to understand that there is no real alternative for Britain other than Europe and America. This is why she is so keen to ensure that strong economic ties with the European Union persist despite Britain’s exit. She must now convince the other twenty-seven European Union Member States to allow Britain some sort of privileged access to the Single Market and Customs Union that falls just short of full membership. This will be difficult, however, since Mrs. May wants Britain to be distant enough from these European institutions to strike wide-ranging and deep trade deals with other countries, while also close enough to continue to reap the economic benefits that those institutions engender. This is a position that the other twenty-seven states are hesitant to support since it is rather unreasonable for a country that is under European Union rules and regulations to demand access to the markets that those rules create. This, again, demonstrates how untenable the “Global Britain” metaphor could become once the United Kingdom’s negotiated exit from Europe formally begins. By privileging metaphorical, ideational impulses over Realist calculations, Mrs. May’s government is, therefore, perpetuating notions of British identity that are constructed from the country’s imperial past instead of developing realistic policies to effectively deal with the diminished world role Britain will have outside of the European Union.

These limitations of this constructed, ideational view, particularly in regard to securing a new free trade deal that benefits Britain, all pose acute problems for the tenability of Prime Minister May’s “Global Britain.” European Union leaders like Jean-Claude Junker realize this but contend that it is unreasonable to expect that Britain can somehow have a more beneficial relationship with the European Union outside of the bloc than it currently has as a full member. Once it leaves, Britain will be treated as any third-party country would and it will be up to Britain’s leadership to deal with the consequences. London’s time of bending Europe to its own interests and designs will be over, and, as Tim Oliver and Michael John Williams observe, a remarkably different European Union based primarily on the interests of the core Eurozone members will emerge (Oliver and Williams 556). As a result of this, Britain’s other key partners, like the United States and Commonwealth countries, will no longer have a need to look to London to help them engage with Europe. The United States, in particular, could increasingly rely on Germany for transatlantic dialogue since the Berlin government would be in an even more powerful position to influence pan-European security and economic policy than it already is (Oliver and Williams 564). All of this will sideline Britain from the center of transatlantic and global affairs regardless of whether the current Prime Minister wants to draw on Britain’s internationalist identity to foster an even more global role, which is ultimately detrimental to the liberal world order.

Conclusion: Evaluating the Historical Role of British Identity in the Crisis of Liberal Internationalism

This paper has broadly argued that the crisis of liberal internationalism that the world is currently experiencing has its roots in the contradictions that rest in the liberal tradition. These contradictions stem from the fact that liberalism developed within an imperial British context and has shaped the policies

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and identities of two of the world’s historically great liberal powers—Great Britain and its former settler colony, the United States of America. Both countries have historically sought to use their global influence to create a liberal world system that reflected their domestic political values. Britain tried this first in the long nineteenth century when its empire was the largest in the world. The United States assumed this mantle after the Second World War, when it successfully created a liberal subsystem around the western security alliance. Washington then attempted to expand this system globally after the end of the Cold War—an effort that has largely failed and undermined trust in liberal values internationally and within core liberal states. The historical progression of the liberal international tradition broadly reveals this crisis as one of success since the internal tensions within liberalism are now free to fully reveal themselves in the absence of a real ideological alternative. Taking all this as a backdrop, this paper explored how Britain’s sense of identity has shifted throughout modern history and produced some of the tensions that led to Brexit and the general crisis of liberal internationalism.

Britain’s role in international history has a great deal to teach about liberalism, the development of multilateral world order, and the legacies of imperialism on domestic identity. The first recognizably liberal thinker—John Locke—focused his writings on domestic British politics and his home country’s burgeoning overseas empire. He argued that a free society based on the principles of limited government could only be realized if private property rights were extended to the majority of the population. Since private property was a limited commodity in the British Isles, Locke’s writings endorsed colonial expansion as a means to import economic goods to pay for political reforms and export political tensions—through an offloading of the excess British population—to the colonies.

Liberal reforms began to be enacted in Britain during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries when the number of property holders given political representation in the House of Commons dramatically increased. This process of liberalization, however, increased the inequalities within British society, since the newly enfranchised classes—who largely made their fortunes in overseas trade—appropriated more domestic wealth for themselves, which reduced the resources available to the rest of the population (Tilly).

These inequalities were ameliorated, in part, through colonization in North America and Oceania, where colonists used the language of Locke’s proto-liberalism to justify their claims to native lands (Jahn 40). Once America secured its independence from Britain, it continued to employ variations of these arguments until a cohesive ideology of settlerism that was supported by liberal politicians, philosophers, and economists across the nascent Anglo World emerged (Bayly 86). This means that this development was not present just in North America or the imperial metropole in London: The same argument was also influential is Australia, Canada, and New Zealand well into the nineteenth century. Colonialism allowed the European elites to appropriate ‘foreign’ land, thus easing the economic burden on the domestic poor back in Britain. It also provided an opportunity for the poor to emigrate; and it allowed the government to export its poor, its criminals, its orphans, as well as to offer employment for the middle and higher classes in the administration of the colonies thus easing political pressure on domestic government. Most importantly for the subsequent development of settler nations like the United States, however, colonialism provided common political ground: namely, an interest in expropriating foreign land, and hence a commitment to the principle of private

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property which justified this expropriation – for rich and poor alike – and thus bridged the gap between their otherwise mutually exhaustive interests (Jahn 40 -41).

The bottom line, then, was that liberal states—like Britain and its settler colonies— justified their colonial expansion and appropriation of native land as an excuse to secure greater economic and political freedoms for their domestic populations, an idea supported by one of the foundational texts of the liberal tradition, John Locke’s Two Treatises of Government.

Scholars like Duncan Bell, Elizabeth Buettner, and Uday Singh Mehta pointed out that this in-built dichotomy between liberal values at home and power politics of appropriation abroad fostered an ideology of racial superiority in Britain and its settler states. Duncan Bell, in particular, has charted the roots in the contemporary “Anglosphere” idea in the racialized nineteenth-century idea of “Greater Britain”—a transoceanic component of the British empire filled with white settlers that were thought to have the capacity to reshape global politics in a liberal direction. It is no surprise that this vision was full of contradictions since most debates about world order in the long nineteenth century were underlined by a logic of inclusion and exclusion that tried to make theoretical room for both sovereignty and imperialism (Jahn 54). Despite these contradictions, however, Britain, its settler colonies, and other liberal powers managed to create a liberal order characterized by a highly integrated global economy during the fin de siècle period, which ultimately imploded during the two world wars when there was no more room for territorial expansion across the globe and the political tensions engendered by a liberalized world could no longer be managed.

The two world wars that followed the Age of Imperialism undermined Britain’s power and capacity to take a leading role in global affairs. It would henceforth serve as a junior partner alongside the United States in upholding the western liberal subsystem once its empire was fully decolonized in the 1960s and 1970s. However, centuries of imperial preeminence ensured that the decolonization of the British public’s mind—especially in regard to the policy-making elite—never fully happened.

Winston Churchill, Britain’s wartime prime minister, declared in the mid-1940s that Britain should still seek to play a preeminent role in world politics by fostering a strong transatlantic alliance with the United States, a deep partnership with an integrated European continent, and strong commercial and political ties with the Commonwealth. As Elizabeth Buettner observers, this vision was underlined by the domestic British belief that decolonization had been a success and that the former parts of the world that had been ruled by the British were now operating out of broadly liberal-democratic principles. All this worked to ensure that the British population continued to identify strongly with the liberal aspects of empire—an identity predicated on being globally influential and privileged, which was supported by the material benefits of being a part of the wealthy transatlantic security alliance.

The end of the Cold War ensured that the western liberal subsystem could now be extended globally. Ironically, however, this extension served to undermine the domestic-international divide that allows liberalism to function successfully in core liberal states, like Britain and America, ensuring that the embedded contradictions from past centuries have begun to play out in contemporary forms (Jahn 57):

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The demise of the Soviet Union and with it the absence of a serious external threat eroded the bipartisan consensus in liberal polities and led to the fragmentation of the political landscape, with extreme parties on right and the left gaining power. With liberal capitalism, the only game in town, the need for political and economic compromise in the domestic sphere was gone. The much despised ‘cosmopolitan establishment’ could now pursue its economic interest unimpeded across the globe. Further dismantling of welfare states was followed by austerity policies after the financial crisis of 2008, and economic inequality took on obscene dimensions. Instead of protecting domestic populations in core liberal states from inevitable downsides of capitalism by importing and redistributing economic benefits from the international sphere, these populations now experienced the exact opposite: the export of investment and jobs into the international sphere…and the import of political tensions in the form of refugees and migrants… (57).

In the case of Britain, the erosion of a domestic liberal consensus helped spur protests against the European Union and nostalgia for former imperial glory through the emergent Anglosphere discourse, which ultimately was a key factor that drove the country toward the Brexit vote. Having to negotiate a divorce from the European Union has only exacerbated Britain’s already tenuous search for a foreign policy role after the end of empire—the so-called imperial hangover.

As a response to domestic unrest and the referendum’s result, Theresa May’s government has attempted to forge a compromise between competing notions of British identity. The current leadership must find a way to balance the populist demand for more protection from the downsides of the liberal world order with the British tradition of global engagement. The result has been the “Global Britain” leitmotif, which refashions Churchill’s postwar framework in a way that incorporates some of the Anglosphere’s ideational language more explicitly. This is unlikely to solve Britain’s problems, though, especially as the world continues to move away from liberalism and American leadership. Given all this, “Global Britain,” as currently conceived, is simply the product of a Churchillian foreign policy vision that was probably untenable from the start.

Global pretensions should have declined with the Empire, but Britain’s specific experience of decolonization and the continued salience of the “Anglosphere” idea have allowed them to persist despite the reality of events. The historical evidence reveals that during the postwar period, Britain was either forced to play a junior role alongside the United States after the Suez Crisis, culminating with the tragedy in Iraq, or a more regional European part within the European Union to maintain its global ambitions.

Neither of these options completely satisfied Euroskeptic yearnings for more internationalism, however, due to the construction of British identity as fundamentally global and tied to the English-speaking Commonwealth. For their part, British leaders, from Thatcher to Blair, and finally to May are guilty of perpetuating this mythical identity to serve their own political ambitions, even as the domestic liberal consensus began to crumble around them. The metaphors have been altered, but the same theme has persisted—even after the British voted to leave the European Union. The “imperial hangover’s” legacy is, therefore, likely to inform Britain’s continued uncertain search for an international role and coherent foreign policy framework after it leaves Europe and for many more years to come.

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Any study of this scale is inherently incomplete and worthy of scrutiny. The legacies of empire and tensions within the liberal theory itself are far from the only explanations for Britain’s uneasy postwar search for a world role, the Brexit vote, and the current crisis of liberal internationalism more generally.

The influence on non-liberal actors both at home and abroad, as well as changes wrought by technologies on individuals, states, and societies, all have a part in this story. This study, too, has privileged the English-speaking world far too much in its analysis. A more complete research agenda would include the perspectives of other post-imperial European societies like France, Spain, Portugal, and the Netherlands, and the way that their pasts have complicated their relationship with the European Union and western liberalism. Greater attention should also be paid to how Australians, New Zealanders, and Canadians view the legacy of settlerism and idea of “Greater Britain,” so that Washington and London do not always occupy the heart of this story. Duncan Bell’s work provides an impetus for this type of additional research into the former members of the Anglo-World and the attendant implications for contemporary international relations.

Regardless of these drawbacks, the central contention of this paper holds: liberal internationalism is in crisis in part because core liberal states can no longer export the downsides of privatization to the outside world, which obliterates liberalism’s capacity to promote growth and equality within a domestic context. This development—particularly in Britain and America–challenges the fundamental notion of identity that many citizens hold about their state’s role in global affairs, which means some of darker aspects of the tradition is compatible with racism, neo-imperialism, and a logic of inclusion and exclusion are more likely to assert themselves and enter into dominant foreign policy discourse. Thus, it seems that in order for liberalism to be applicable to a post-imperial and post-American world, many of its fundamental tenets need to be decolonized.

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