Thread by @EddieDu5

Germany occupies a unique place in the British national psyche.

In 1961, the US envoy concluded if the division of Germany were to be made permanent, this would be overwhelmingly popular in a country where the word ‘Hun’ was still in common usage.
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Relations between West Germany and Britain are traditionally characterized as alternating periods of hostility and harmony.

This is reflected in the literature on Anglo-German relations during the Cold War.

This ambiguity is a product of the process whereby Britain and Germany evolved from deadly enemies to alliance partners.

In the ultimate place, West Germany was able to create a hard-line policy on the German question by virtue of the indulgence of the United States.

Once the West German state was being consolidated, Britain desired an arrangement with the Soviet bloc that implied the ‘closing’ of the German question.

The West German state insisted that the German question was open.

The West German position was based upon a rigid legalism which insisted that all questions were provisional pending "a peace treaty which can rightfully be concluded only by an all-German Government, democratically elected by the entire German people."

British policy towards Germany was primarily shaped by three factors:

Britain’s special relationship with the United States;

its possession of nuclear weapons after 1952;

and, Britain’s role as one of the four powers with special responsibility for Germany and Berlin.

In assessing British policy on Germany we might view matters through the perspective of what Arnold Wolfers termed ‘possession’ and ‘milieu’ goals.

Possession goals are direct and concrete; milieu goals are indirect and more abstract.

In Wolfers’ model, Soviet hegemony in Eastern Europe did not represent a mortal threat to British interests.

For West Germany, conversely, Soviet domination of Eastern Europe posed both a mortal security threat and perpetuated German division.

Post-1945, there was an intrinsic link between domestic and foreign policy in Germany, and the casting of the international system.

West German Aussenpolitik (foreign policy) after 1949 was often virtually indistinguishable from its Deutschlandpolitik.

Britain played a significant role in achieving West German membership of NATO by 1955.

However, Britain failed to anticipate the totality of the Franco-German rapprochement that would provide the impetus for West European integration.

The subsequent British pursuit of détente with Moscow only heightened existing German suspicions by means of efforts to manipulate European integration and Harold Macmillan’s much-criticized diplomatic efforts during the Second Berlin Crisis of 1958–62.

Although the intimacy of Bonn and Paris contributed to de Gaulle’s 'Non!' to British EEC membership in January 1963, Adenauer’s successors refused to embrace de Gaulle’s anti-American vision of a ‘Europe from the Atlantic to the Urals’.

In 1962, the British government made a secret assurance to Poland regarding the inviolable nature of its western frontier.

This frontier had severed a quarter of Germany’s territory from the Reich, and its recognition was opposed across the political spectrum in West Germany.

After 1964, the new Labour gov't of Harold Wilson pursued a cautious but supportive policy towards Bonn in its modification of its Eastern policies.

London now sought to provide reassurance by means of its remaining influence in Eastern Europe and via its links with Washington.

By 1967, with the devaluation of Sterling and the decision to withdraw from ‘East of Suez’, British policy choices increasingly reflected an acceptance of a role as a medium-sized European power.

As recently as 1938–9, the British had balked at the idea of deterring Nazi adventurism by virtue of a military arrangement with Moscow – for fear that the Soviets might use it as an opportunity to expand into Eastern Europe.

Whilst the war continued, the West could, on occasion, match the East in its desire for the absolute destruction of the German nation.

Henry Morgenthau once proposed a plan that would have effectively ended the life of Germany as a modern, industrialized nation.

For his part, FDR believed that the every German would have to recognize their guilt as their whole nation had "been engaged in a lawless conspiracy against the decencies of modern civilization".

The UK, USSR and US agreed to establish a European Advisory Commission (EAC) in October 1943.

The EAC duly began work in London in January of 1944, and agreed Germany should be dealt with on the basis of its borders of 1938 (i.e. without the Sudetenland and Memel).

Despite this acquiescence regarding Soviet dominance in Eastern Europe, the British were alarmed at what they saw as the US willingness to grant every Soviet demand at the wartime conferences of the ‘Big Three’.

Fear and hostility to the USSR had, of course, been the norm in British policy since 1917: the years 1941–45 were the exception.

When Hitler’s Germany had been in the ascendant, Britain had fully co-operated with Moscow so as to defeat Nazism.

Traditional British policy, though, meant that the advance of the Soviet armies into the heart of Europe was creating hostages to Europe’s future.

At the Tehran Conference in 1943, Churchill had agreed to Stalin’s demand for the adoption of the Curzon line as the Soviet–Polish frontier.

Britain duly put pressure on the Polish government-in-exile to accept the Curzon line... compensate ... German territories in the west.

In 1944–5 Germany unambiguously remained the defeated enemy, and there was extensive debate within British circles regarding the practicalities of splitting up the Third Reich by encouraging ‘separatist’ movements.

Frank Roberts, the British Minister in Moscow, argued that while Germany must be prevented from waging another war of aggression, it also had to be given a stake in the future of Europe.

Oliver Harvey, Anthony Eden’s Principal Private Secretary, asserted that "It is utopian to think of a West Germany which is not in the long term united again with East Germany".

The British government had poured £80 million into its occupation zone in 1945–6, and bread rationing was introduced into Britain so as to divert wheat to Germany.

Consequently, in spite of rhetoric affirming a commitment to German unity, the British were a driving force in the creation of the Bonn republic.

The mutual and escalating hostility of the early post-war period was reflected in increasingly divergent attitudes towards the Potsdam Agreement.

At the epicenter of the problem lay the matter of German reunification and the status of the Oder–Neiße line.

The United States would on no account settle for a neutral Germany, and deliberately sought to resurrect the German economy as the engine-room of post-war European capitalism.

Anglo-Saxon thinking converged on such matters at the London Conference in December 1947.

Britain strongly backed George C. Marshall in his demands for a reassessment of Germany’s frontier with Poland.

From the late 1940s, Britain’s Deutschlandpolitik concentrated on consolidating the links for the Federal Republic of Germany with the West.

A divided Germany offered Britain far more security than a neutral, reunified one.

This was to accept the West German claim of Alleinvertretungsrecht (right of sole representation) as laid out in the Grundgesetz (Basic Law) of the Federal Republic.

While British High Commissioner Sir Ivone Kirkpatrick believed that Adenauer had developed a ‘Versailles complex’, it was undeniable that the Chancellor had managed to wedge his republic between the Potsdam signatories.

Adenauer had solid backing for his anti-Potsdam stance.

The three main parties in West Germany (the CDU/CSU, FDP and SPD) were all engaged in an ongoing tussle over the mantle of the truest and earliest champion of the Oder–Neisse cause.

After Hitler occupied Prague in March 1939, British policy makers assiduously sought to avoid the label of appeaser.

The necessity of doing so was underlined by the appearance of the first volume of Churchill’s history of the Second World War (which appeared in 1948).

Churchill portrayed Chamberlain as naïve, inexperienced, over-confident and out of his depth in his European policy.

The passage of time and hindsight did little to rehabilitate the dead man’s reputation.

As Robert Self notes: "Poor Neville did come badly out of history ... precisely because Churchill wrote that history in order to ensure that his carefully crafted version of the 1930s would be the one which became indelibly etched upon the national consciousness."

Churchill’s six-volume history of the Second World War was the crowning glory of all his historical writing, which was recognized by the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1953.

The intimate relationship of power and history, personified by Churchill as author and statesman, meant that the latter felt morally justified in pursuing détente with the Soviet Union in order to ameliorate the Cold War in Europe.

Thus, thanks in large part to Churchill’s influence, the notion of the ‘Guilty Men’, and their weakness in allowing the breakout of the ‘unnecessary war’, was both powerful and enduring.

The enduring shame attached to Munich meant that historians in the Eastern Bloc, and other figures with an axe to grind, continued to make capital from Chamberlainite appeasement at Britain’s expense for many years.

Even Thatcher, an ardent opponent of appeasement and whose formative years took in the 1930s and the Second World War, conceded that "British foreign policy is at its worst when it is engaged in giving away other people’s territory".

If one phrase eternally damned Chamberlain and Munich it was Churchill’s taunting prophesy: "You were given the choice between war and dishonor. You chose dishonor, and you will have war."

The intensity of the feelings generated by the memory of the 1930s is heightened by the inevitability of increasingly frequent invocations of the past during national crises, such as those over Suez or the Falklands.

On a visit to the Soviet Union in 1989, Enoch Powell opined: "What an important thing memory is, collective has endured."

"What is history except a nation’s collective memory?"

The German historian Jan-Werner Müller points out that collective memory is often "ahistorical, even anti-historical, oversimplifying the ‘ambiguities of the past’ and possessing ‘moral messages... which most historians cannot accept".

As Maurice Cowling noted in 1971, ‘high politics’ is ‘a matter of rhetoric and manoeuvre’ by statesmen.

Cowling was in uniform from 1944 to 1948, was commissioned in the Queen's Royal Regiment, and served in both British and Indian armies in India and Egypt, where his taste for frequenting brothels led to a spiritual crisis and the abandonment of any idea of taking holy orders.

Cowling despised ideology and believed that political philosophy was irrelevant to everyday political action, which was, in his view, about practical objectives and responding to changing circumstances.

Cowling disliked what he called the gang of ex-communists who surrounded Thatcher (an accurate description only of Sir Alfred Sherman), and yet his own cynical emphasis on material interests as the real motor of politics was well-nigh Marxist.

When Sherman died in 2006, The Daily Telegraph obituary described him as “the most eccentric, and certainly the most contradictory figure ever to have been a leading adviser to a senior politician”.

Without Cummings there would probably would have been no Brexit, no Tory victory at the polls in 2019, no Boris premiership and no serious attempt to reform the civil service.

Without Sherman, there would have been no Centre for Policy Studies.

Without the British think-tank, which played a key role in the Thatcher revolution, there would probably be no Thatcher, at least not the Thatcher who had the confidence to reverse British decline, rather than seeking to manage it like her predecessors.

His role, though indirect, had played a crucial role in the outcome of the contest for the Tory leadership in 1975.

For Thatcher had no need to spell out her political creed; she simply let it be known that on such matters she entirely agreed with Sir Keith Joseph.

Sir Keith Joseph's cogent and powerfully argued speeches delivered during the previous 18 months were almost entirely written by Sherman (some of them going through more than a dozen drafts before Joseph had the confidence and courage to deliver them).

Contrary to the impression they like to create, think-tankers, like those who were to run CPS, do not sit around waiting for great thoughts to occur.

They already know what they think about the issues that concern them and seek to encourage others to think the same way.

Ted Heath gave his approval, believing that the Centre would turn out to be a harmless intellectual toy and even nominated his own man, Adam (later Sir Adam) Ridley as his representative on the CPS board.

As Heath was to learn, instead of turning out to be a harmless distraction that would keep Joseph out of the headlines, CPS turned out to be the intellectual base camp for a determined assault on the policies followed by his government.

Sherman’s most frequent targets were Heath, Jim Prior and Chris (later Lord) Patten, then director of the Conservative Research Department, but he was very willing to extend his contempt to anyone he deemed mediocre or second rate.

Sherman was widely believed to have prompted Thatcher in a television interview in January 1978 to say that she would never allow Britain to be “swamped by immigrants.”

Unlike Cummings, Sherman was not a campaigner and had not much aptitude for political intrigue; his interest was in ideas and policy and the relationship between the two.

Thatcher, being somewhat more astute than Boris, declined to give Sherman a position in government.

She took what she wanted from Sherman without incurring the risks that would have undoubtedly resulted from giving him a job.

Sherman was among the first to realize that sterling’s high exchange rate in 1980 was the result of unnecessarily tight monetary policy.

This had succeeded in bringing down inflation but at a high cost.

Despite his continuing influence Sherman (later to be rewarded with a knighthood) strongly resented the fact that he had been denied a senior government post and the perks that went with it.

When Sherman lost a power battle with Hugh (later Lord) Thomas, who at his own urging had become chairman of CPS in succession to Joseph, Thomas pushed him out.

Thatcher declined to intervene.

At the Centre for Policy Studies, Thomas tried to help Joseph, now education secretary, to re-establish a sense of the glories of English history that they both believed had been obscured by the works of Eric Hobsbawm, E. P. Thompson and others.

Thomas, as a bestselling historian, had written an account of Spain’s civil war that was described as “the bible of the Spanish left”.

Thomas' first book was published in 1957 by the Fabian Society.

Though the son of a colonial commissioner and himself a former student of Cambridge, where he presided over the Union, he called in early writings for the destruction of Britain’s “fusty Establishment”.

Thomas’s politics later shifted to the free-market right. In 1979 he became chair of the Central Policy Unit advising Thatcher and two years later was made Lord Thomas of Swynnerton.

The degree of financial security that followed from the book’s success enabled Hugh Thomas in 1962 to marry Vanessa Jebb, the daughter of the diplomat Sir Gladwyn Jebb, later Lord Gladwyn, for whom he had worked in the British embassy in Paris.

After Thatcher’s resignation in 1990, Hugh Thomas was increasingly disillusioned by what he saw as a festering Euroskepticism.

Finally, in November 1997, he crossed the floor of the Lords to the Liberal Democrat benches.

One of the crucial factors in the rise of Revisionism regarding the character and career of Neville Chamberlain was the introduction of the ‘Thirty-year rule’ for the release of public records in 1967.

This shaped the historiography of appeasement in the 1970s and 1980s in particular.

Historians now became more sympathetic towards Chamberlain as, for the first time, they fully appreciated the constraints placed upon him.

In popular terms, the seeds for the revision of the postwar orthodox interpretation of appeasement were laid when A. J. P. Taylor’s The Origins of the Second World War was published in 1961.
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The infamous line "In principle and doctrine, Hitler was no more wicked than many other contemporary statesmen" was much quoted while the sentence that followed it was not ("In wicked acts he outdid them all").

The fact that many of the reading public were not of an age to remember first-hand the deeds of Hitler (and the guilt of the appeasers) undoubtedly allowed those challenging the orthodoxy the chance to receive a fairer hearing than they had received hitherto.

The challenge to the orthodox view in the appeasement debates was assessed, and boosted, by D. C. Watt in 1965.

This effort was designed to address the fact that appeasement "has taken to itself the status of a myth – loaded with implication, undertones, and overtones".

In 1975, Maurice Cowling’s seminal The Impact of Hitler added a muscular intellectual edge to the Revisionist case.
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Cowling’s work was characteristic of an era where historians now began to seriously discuss and evaluate the limitations imposed by internal national politics on the formulation of international policy.

From the perspective of those historians who were broadly sympathetic to Chamberlain, the economic constraints of the 1930s meant that the policy of appeasement was virtually inevitable.

These factors, above all, ensured that those same forces driving appeasement before 1939 played an even greater role in foreign policy formulation since 1945.

A number of historians have argued that further constraints on British foreign policy were imposed by public opinion.

For these writers, the appeasement of the 1930s was undeniably ‘rooted in the British conscience’.

Crucially, successive extensions of the political franchise, and the growth in the popular press, meant that politicians increasingly had to justify their policies a great deal more than in previous eras.

The excessive focus on Chamberlain as the villain of the piece has masked the fact that the vast majority of the policy-making elite supported appeasement (as did the overwhelming majority of the general public).

All of this meant that A. J. P. Taylor could write, with typically mischievous intent, that Munich was "a triumph for all that was best and most enlightened in British life; a triumph for those who had preached equal justice between peoples."

This state of affairs effectively introduced a moral element specifically attached to appeasement into international relations even if, in reality, this was maintained for purely self-serving political purposes.

Churchill, however, was convinced that he could have his cake and eat it.

For, despite his anti-appeasement rhetoric, on which his reputation rests, Churchill had been no stranger to appeasement himself, when he deemed it necessary.

On the eve of the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941, Churchill memorably told his private secretary Jock Colville: "If Hitler invaded hell he would at least make a favorable reference to the devil!"

Lothar Kettenacker observed that the approach of anti-appeasers like Churchill and Eden to Stalin resembled nothing so much as Chamberlain’s earlier diplomacy towards Hitler.

In April 1943, the discovery at Katyń of the mass graves of 22,000 Poles, murdered by the Soviet NKVD in 1940, threatened the fragile unity of the anti-Hitler coalition.

Goebbels embarked upon a publicity campaign to spread before the world the perils of Bolshevik success: "One hardly dares to imagine what would happen to Germany and Europe if this Asiatic-Jewish flood were to inundate our country and our continent."

Moscow's propaganda machine was swift to reply. "The whole world must know about the monstrous crimes of the fascist German butchers," cried a Soviet war time movie, a slogan that was repeated time and again in the following decades.

Boris Yeltsin opened the archives in 1992 and released documents carrying the signature of Stalin. It was the first piece of irrefutable proof that Soviet death squads, not German soldiers, were the perpetrators.

The traumatic experience of Chamberlainite appeasement made the decision to stand firm against the Soviets a very natural one for most policy makers.

Ernest Bevin, the new Labour foreign secretary, had talked of "left speaking to left in comradeship and confidence", but now embraced anti-Sovietism with all the zeal of the convert.

The idea that the USSR had to be opposed resolutely was accompanied by a belief that Britain remained a global power to be reckoned with.

After all, Stalin was but the latest tyrant seeking hegemony (following Charles V, Philip II, Louis XIV, Napoleon, Wilhelm II and Hitler).

As a corollary of this belief in the continuing relevance of British power, and following an awkward and humbling meeting with US Secretary of State James Byrnes, Bevin famously declared that he wanted to see the atomic bomb "with a bloody Union Jack on it".

Negotiation itself was now seen as dangerous and General Sir Brian Robertson, military governor in Germany, warned: "if we keep on talking indefinitely, we might wake up some fine morning to find the Hammer and Sickle already on the Rhine."

The resolution demonstrated by the West, and by the US and the UK in particular, in its confrontation over Berlin in 1948–9 led directly to the establishment of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO).

Henry Luce's Life magazine criticized the fact that the Attlee government, which had recognized Red China, "was publicly on its knees to the Communist aggressors of Peking".

Although the British had essentially pursued Washington’s line while the Chinese Civil War raged, the aftermath saw a divergence of policy between London and Washington.

Once Chiang had been defeated, the British priority was the security of Hong Kong.

Such self-interested logic would have been familiar to those who had supported British recognition of the Franco government in 1939.

For the British government, Hong Kong was the equivalent of Berlin in Asia.

Attlee had told the Cabinet in May 1949 that a failure to ensure Hong Kong’s security would seriously damage British prestige in Asia.

The British felt even more justified in pursuing this because of their belief that the United States was erroneous in simply regarding Red China as a puppet of Moscow.

But the realities of power nevertheless meant that the United Kingdom would have to appease Mao without alienating the United States to an unacceptable degree.

In London the secretary of state for war, John Strachey, warned Bevin that any escalation in Korea would be nearly as ruinous to Britain as a lost war.

Attlee famously flew to Washington to seek an undertaking from Truman that the United States would not use nuclear weapons in Korea.

Attlee nevertheless had no problem simultaneously defending his government’s recognition of the PRC on the grounds that the Reds already ruled the mainland!

One of the bitter ironies of the Korean War was that the MiG-15, which was used against the UN forces in Korea, powered the VK-1 engine, a composite copy of the Rolls Royce Nene and Derwent engines – which the Labour government had authorized for export to the USSR in 1946.

This attempt to boost exports and improve relations with Moscow by this aeronautical diplomacy by trusting Moscow’s assurance that they would not copy the British engine was, to say the least, rather naïve.

The fact that thermonuclear war can end life on earth plays a very small role in the history of US thinking about international politics.

The vision of a nuclear war causing catastrophic damage at a global level was the atomic age equivalent of the interwar maxim: "the bomber will always get through" (derived from a 1932 speech by British Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin).

Once Ernest Rutherford had split the atom in 1917, the potential of the ‘mighty atom’ developed none of the positive connotations associated with nuclear energy and the like.

Only days after the atomic bomb attacks on Japan in 1945, Robert Don Oliver noted "the price worth paying for peace is now very much higher... the main function of our armed forces should be the prevention of war, rather than the ability to fight it on purely military grounds".

In the summer and autumn of 1956, Eden and his colleagues convinced themselves that they had to take a stand against Egypt’s Nasser over the Suez Canal.

The CIA-MI6 arranged coup d’état in Iran in 1953, which overthrew the nationalist Prime Minister Mosaddeq, was very much to the taste of those who favored no appeasement in the Middle East.

In Iran, Mosaddeq's populist demands seemed outrageous.

Yet, and not for the first time, the British had initially viewed the Americans as naïve on the question.

The US Assistant Secretary of State George McGhee was accused of appeasement by elements in the Foreign Office (FO) who fretted that Washington had no conception of exactly what Mosaddeq’s aggressive nationalism was all about.

The morale of the British had been raised by Truman’s replacement as president by Eisenhower in 1953. The British believed that they now had a staunch and loyal friend in the White House.

This misconception, along with the notion that Nasser would keep his word, would cost Eden dear.

The Attlee governments’ approach of maintaining high levels of employment with major industries under public ownership became the orthodoxy in postwar British politics until Margaret Thatcher’s 1979–90 Conservative government.

Attlee became prime minister in July 1945 as the leader of a Labour Party that had won a landslide victory with a majority of 144 seats.

Only Tony Blair in 1997 (179) and 2001 (167) had more impressive Labour victories.

The Attlee government presents one of the great paradoxes of 20th-century British history: why it achieved so much, but lost power so quickly; why it framed the terms of political debate for so long, yet led to the Labour Party being in opposition for so long.

Labour’s catastrophic defeat in the 1931 general election – reduced to a mere 52 parliamentary seats – left it a generation away from power, barring a seismic political event, which duly happened in the form of the war.

For Attlee, the prime minister was not generally meant to be an active contributor of policy, only an arbitrator between competing policies if absolutely necessary.

Attlee represented a deliberate departure from the deeply personal leadership style of Ramsay MacDonald.

This is not to say that Attlee did not depart from his central idea of chairmanship.

He was happy to take on a greater responsibility in certain policy areas: independence for India and the development of Britain’s nuclear weapons were two examples.

Attlee’s approach to leadership was an authentic reflection of his personality, experiences and background.

He was a moderate, sensible, well-grounded man with few insecurities; he did not adopt a persona to project an image.

The 1881 census had confirmed the total population for Great Britain and Ireland at just over 35 million.

Of these, it has been estimated that around five million had no means whatsoever beyond their weekly wage.

In the years before the First World War, Clement Attlee underwent his life’s major conversion. Having had little interest in social issues, he became a socialist.

Attlee was an official ‘explainer’ for Lloyd George’s ground-breaking National Insurance Act of 1911 and, in 1912, became a lecturer at the LSE, teaching students who were themselves about to enter social work.

“A modest man with much to be modest about,” Winston Churchill said of him once.

Attlee had a modest mustache and came from a modest family, and had a modest demeanor — so much so that his modesty made him almost a joke figure.
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Even when he was Prime Minister, one wit noted that “an empty taxi drew up to 10 Downing Street and Attlee got out.”

He was always regarded impatiently, even patronizingly, by his more charismatic colleagues on the left.

Rejecting Bolshevism, Attlee schooled himself on the works of William Morris and Edward Bellamy.

Working his way through Labour’s already madly factional squabbles and splits, Attlee became leader by virtue of his obvious integrity and his ability to talk to all sides.

There were many, perhaps even a majority, on the Tory right more interested in preserving the peace and the British Empire than in opposing Hitler.

When Churchill and FDR were considering their declaration of the Atlantic Charter, it was Attlee who insisted on including “freedom from want” as one of its aims.

The most significant period of development in Attlee’s political life was after the First World War.

During this time, he gained experience of political realities – of political competition, political advancement, political achievement and, above all, political power.

The 1924 general election produced the first ‘modern’ result, with a clear dividing line between the Conservatives and Labour as the viable parties of government, with the Liberals a distant third in terms of seats.

The Attlee govt's main disadvantage was that Britain had been on the winning side in the war.

British industries had been bashed around by German air raids, but had not suffered the wholesale destruction which allowed the renascent German economy to start from a clean sheet.

More importantly, British economic class structures - and bitter enmities - survived the war unscathed, in contrast to those countries which had been traumatized by invasion and occupation (none more so than Germany) into rethinking their economic cultures.

But there were other obstacles in the path of Labour's would-be revolutionaries.

The country, to put it brutally, was broke. It had poured its wealth into the war effort and in 1945 was groaning under a mountain of debt.

Even when the war was finally over, the victorious, impoverished British maintained vast numbers of men and resources tied up in an empire on which the sun was about to set.

In Europe, Britain paid for a huge army of occupation in Germany. The dawn of the nuclear age, and British pride, demanded handsome investment in the new weapons which would keep the country allegedly a first class power.

Even the weather seemed at times to conspire against Labour. The winter of 1946-47 was one of the most severe ever recorded, causing widespread misery and disruption.

The introduction of the welfare state rested very largely on the work of two Liberal economists: John Maynard Keynes, who argued the virtues of full employment and state stimulation of the economy, and William Beveridge.

The birth of the National Health Service in July 1948 remains Labour's greatest monument. It was achieved only after two years of bitter resistance by the medical establishment.

Britain's ignominious surrender of Singapore in 1941 had sent a clear signal to Asia that the daysof European imperialism were numbered.

With hindsight it was a blessing for Britain, and for its vast numbers of subjects around the world, that Churchill lost the 1945 election.

Churchill was, at heart, a Victorian romantic, hopelessly in thrall to the so called romance of empire.

His antipathy to India's independence struggle, in particular, was well established.

Attlee, on the other hand, recognized that the Raj was doomed.

Meanwhile at the heart of the Middle East, Washington was adamant that nothing should stand in the way of the establishment of Israel and when the mandate finally dribbled into the sands of history in May 1948, the new state was born, fighting for its life.

The Union flag still flew over huge tracts of Africa, whole archipelagos in the Caribbean and Pacific, jewels of Asia like Singapore and Hong Kong.

But there was another much greater reality: British adherence to, and even dependence on, the patronage of the United States.

After all the fervent promises of a new dawn, British life remained to a large extent grey and grim.

At times, food restrictions were even tighter than during the war - bread was rationed for the first time.

The NHS is said to be “the closest thing the English have to a religion” (Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland run their own services).
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Tight budgets and increasing demand from Britain’s greying population have put the NHS under huge strain.

But unlike other departments, forced to cut and reform, it lacks a clear consensus and firm direction on how it should adjust to straitened times.

The NHS owes its existence to the climate of wartime British politics, not least the vastly expanded access to basic healthcare which came with conscription, and the subsequent rise in expectations.

The Labour party, despite its self-written mythology, was not even a dogged believer in socialism up until this point.

Until the 1920s, most of its own MPs saw themselves primarily as workers’ and trade unions’ representatives.

In February 1947, a penniless Britain told the State Department that it could no longer defend the Greek government in its civil war with Yugoslav-backed Communist rebels, prompting Truman to pledge U.S. economic and military aid for Athens and Ankara. 
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Stalin, whose country was struggling to recover from Nazi devastation, fell back on defense.

His aim now would be to hold the new security zone in Eastern Europe and to prevent the United States from controlling Russia’s mortal enemy: Germany.

In March 1947, the new U.S. secretary of state, George C. Marshall, embarked on six grueling weeks of negotiations in Moscow with his Soviet counterpart, Vyacheslav Molotov, over the future of occupied Germany.

Stalin denounced the Marshall Plan as a vicious American plot to buy political and military domination of Europe.

He feared losing control not just of Germany but of Eastern Europe, too.

Prior to the launch of the Marshall Plan, Stalin had never been dogmatic about the forms of socialism pursued by countries within Moscow's sphere.

By the end of 1948, Stalin had fully co-opted or crushed the remaining non-Communist elements in the governments of Eastern Europe.

On April 4, 1949, a year and a day after signing the Marshall aid legislation, Truman signed the founding agreement of NATO.

The following month, the United States, Britain, and France accepted the constitution for a new West German state.

By early 1990, the East German communists were a spent political force, and Gorbachev had begun to reconcile himself to German unification.

What he still demanded was that a reunified Germany not be part of the Atlantic alliance.

Gorbachev and his Russian successors have maintained that they were misled over whether the alliance would be permitted to expand eastward.

NATO, the Soviet leader said, was “an organization designed from the start to be hostile to the Soviet Union.”

Defense Minister Pavel Grachev warned Polish leaders that his countrymen saw the alliance as a “monster directed against Russia.”

Yevgeny Primakov argued that NATO expansion would necessitate a more robust Russian defense posture.

Days after the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland joined NATO in March 1999, the alliance began a three-month bombing campaign against Serbia — which, like Russia, is a Slavic Orthodox state.

These attacks on a brother country appalled ordinary Russians, especially since they were not carried out in defense of a NATO member, but to protect the Muslim population of Kosovo, then a Serbian province.

NATO’s actions in the former Yugoslavia — in Bosnia in 1995 and in Serbia in 1999 — were undertaken with noble aims: to stop the slaughter of innocents.

NATO expansion into the former Warsaw Pact countries, however, all but guaranteed that Russians wouldn’t see them that way.

In 2015, Turkey shot down a Russian fighter jet that had crossed into its airspace from Syria, where it was bombing opponents of the Assad regime.

“Turkish airspace … is NATO airspace,” the Turkish foreign ministry pointedly told Russia after the attack. Russia took notice.

In trying to assure the Russians that NATO was not a threat, the Clinton administration had taken it for granted that legitimate Russian interests, in an era following glasnost and perestroika, would not clash with NATO interests.

Halford Mackinder, who died in 1947, the year the Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan were launched, drew policymakers’ attention to the strategic centrality of the vast Eurasian “Heartland,” which was dominated by Russia.

In 1919, Mackinder wrote that had Germany conquered Russia and France “she would have established her sea-power on a wider base than any in history, and in fact on the widest possible base.”

The Boer War in South Africa and the Russo-Japanese War had reminded him “a parallel contrast between Vasco de Gama rounding the Cape of Good Hope on his voyage to the Indies, and the ride of Yermak the Cossack over the Ural range into Siberia early in the 16th century.”

Unsurprisingly, this theory of geopolitics has not gone unnoticed in the heartland itself.

Today, in the shadow of the Kremlin's spires, geopolitical theory has a fast-growing set of devotees.

In its milder form, Eurasianism simply stresses Russia's uniqueness and argues that Russia need not Westernize in order to modernize.

But in its hard-line version, the movement envisions the Eurasian heartland as the geographic launch pad for a global anti-Western movement.

In the skilled hands of its careful ideologues, Eurasianism has succeeded in reconciling the often contradictory philosophies of communism, religious orthodoxy, and nationalist fundamentalism.

Looking outward, Russia was a “land which had never known a friendly neighbor.” Its defining characteristic was its indefensibility. No mountain ranges or bodies of water protected its western borders.

In the latter half of the 19th century, Russia had been contained by France and Britain — in the Balkans, the Middle East, India, and China — well before Kennan made “containment” a household word.

It has sought to dominate its neighbors as a means of preventing the borderlands from being used against it by other powers.

Whereas the West sees Russia’s fear of invasion as groundless, history has shown Russian leaders that foreign intentions are typically hidden or fluid.

The offensive realist point of view contends that the ultimate goal of states is to achieve a hegemonic position in the international order.

States always look for opportunities to gain more power in order to gain more security for an uncertain future.

Pragmatically, it is nearly impossible for a great power to achieve global hegemony because there will always be competing great powers that have the potential to be the regional hegemon in a distinct geographical region.

The United States has been the regional hegemon in the Western hemisphere for about a century, but it has never become a true global hegemon because there have always been great powers in the Eastern hemisphere, such as Russia and China.

The principal interest of the US is the establishment of a secure global order in a context that enables the US-controlled capitalist modes of production to flourish throughout the globe without any obstacles or interruptions.

Nicholas Spykman's Rimlands thesis was developed on the basis of Mackinder's Heartland concept.

In contrast to Mackinder's emphasis on the Eurasian Heartland, Spykman offered the Rimlands of Eurasia – that is, Western Europe, the Pacific Rim and the Middle East.

Spykman argued that the power of the Heartland could be kept in check by the peripheral Rimland given the latter’s advantage in the population, resources, and access to sea.

The original “Great Game” which started around 1830, marked an era of tension and confrontation between the British Empire and the Russian Empire in today’s Central Asia and South Asia.

Despite the long distance of over 3000 kms separating the two empires’ established territories, they feared each other’s incursion into the other’s comfort zones.

Having become the major partner, or at least one of the key trading partners of each of the Central Asian state, China is the largest trading partner with the whole region and has replaced Russia’s earlier dominance in trade with Central Asia.

Central Asia, as a solid segment of the former Soviet Union, shares the political, ideological, and economic legacies of the state-socialist system and post-socialist transition societies with China.

China considers Kazakhstan a key source and link in its energy security nexus, and sees the cooperation as helping strengthen and secure its northwestern borders of a restive Xinjiang.

Brzezinski insisted that the US' primary objective should be the protection of its hegemonic superpower position.

In order to achieve this goal, Washington must maintain its hegemonic position in the balance of power prevailing in the Eurasia region.

The Iranian Revolution of 1979 and the strategic loss of a stalwart pillar of U.S. influence in the region had a significant bearing on attitudes towards Afghanistan.

While exploring the options in the spring of 1979, the CIA began to make contact with the Pakistanis and Saudis, both of whom feared for regional stability following the recent events.

Relations with Saudi Arabia similarly developed through a Cold War lens.

Although oil was a major impetus, the relationship was largely built on a shared interest in countering the spread of Soviet influence.

A Soviet military presence within 300 miles of the Persian Gulf could threaten the oil supplies that the United States, Japan, and Western Europe were increasingly dependent on, and expose the region to further Soviet penetration.

Beginning in May 1979, Brzezinski reminded Carter of “Russia’s traditional push to the south, and briefed him specifically on Molotov’s proposal to Hitler in late 1940 that the Nazis recognize the Soviet claims to pre-eminence in the region south of Batum and Baku.”

He noted that Baluchi tribes had long agitated for a separate state, and warned that the cause of a separate Baluchistan could be used to justify an advance into Pakistan and Iran and fulfill the “age-long dream of Moscow to have direct access to the Indian Ocean.”

Brzezinski cautioned that a Soviet-controlled Afghanistan could allow Moscow to gradually exert its influence over much of the region by implementing a process of “Finlandization” by which regional states could adopt a more compliant relationship with the USSR.

With Iran destabilized there would be no “firm bulwark in Southwest Asia against Soviet drive to the Indian Ocean,” and Islamabad could acquiesce to “some form of external Soviet domination.”

Brzezinski persistently urged Carter to be more forceful in dealing with Moscow and draw the line to avoid past mistakes where inaction and silence implied acquiescence (as in 1956 and 1968).

Although working well together in other areas, Carter's two primary foreign policy advisers, National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski (left) and Secretary of State Cyrus Vance (right), clashed over the administration's Soviet policy.

At the time, Brzezinski was under no illusion of a potential “Soviet Vietnam,” instead fearing the Soviets would quickly subdue the insurgency, consolidate their hold on Afghanistan, and position themselves for further expansion in the region.

Carter’s significant contribution in creating the constructive links between the CIA, ISI, and the mujahideen, and in coordination with the Saudis, Chinese, and others, was an important first step that allowed Washington to counter the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan from 1980.

The demise of the USSR marked the emergence of the Caspian region as a new energy producer. Until that time, the importance of the region as an energy source had not been appreciated with the exception of Baku.

Kazakhstan views the development of its hydrocarbon resources as a cornerstone to its economic prosperity. However, Kazakhstan is land-locked. In other words, Kazakhstan cannot ship its oil resources.

China’s Belt and Road suffers from a number of problems and ambiguities. However, it is a much more coherent, potent, and resilient endeavor than many experts believe.

The BRI leverages China’s unique geoeconomic assets, such as state control over national actors, a vast national market, and growth rates superior to those of most countries, to circumvent Washington’s military primacy.

Despite notable hiccups, Beijing’s financial reach, non-discriminative approach, cheap technical assets, fast delivery, and anti-imperialist rhetoric often suffice to preserve BRI’s appeal.

The vastness of China’s western and southwestern peripheries, the local demographic superiority of non-Han ethnic groups, and the historical weakness of local state authority have always exposed Chinese leaders to domestic unrest and foreign interference.

The US’ pursuit of global primacy rather than alternative, and more modest, grand strategies helps account for why NATO endured after the Cold War.

Countries that sought membership in post-Cold War NATO believed that joining the alliance was crucial to realizing their goals of integrating with the West and protecting themselves from Russia, with which many of them had a troubled history.

NATO has always been a unipolar pact. 

In particular, defending the Baltic states — small, weak countries that adjoin Russian territory — would have been impossible absent US military might.

Brzezinski insisted that expansion was an urgent necessity that had to proceed ‘with Russian cooperation or without it.’

He warned that the Bill Clinton administration’s failure to act decisively on expansion ‘could compound the danger that the alliance might disintegrate.’

William Perry, secretary of defense under President Clinton from February 1994 to January 1997, had a different concern.

He did not oppose expansion in principle but believed that it should be delayed and pursued slowly thereafter.

The Baltic states, Georgia, and Ukraine are simply more consequential to Russia’s security than they are to the security of the US.

This is the lesson offered by the 2008 Russia–Georgia war, Russia’s 2014 annexation of Crimea from Ukraine, and its support for insurgents in parts of Ukraine’s Luhansk and Donetsk provinces.

Declassified US documents demonstrate that Russian leaders desired a post-Cold War European order that would include them, and not as a mere adornment.

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In Mackinder there is one pattern of conflict in history — that between seapower and heartland.

In Spykman, there are two — that between seapower and heartland, and that between an independent center of power in the rimland with both seapower and heartland allied against it.

Conventional views of Spykman see only the first pattern in his framework, which supports his link to Mackinder.

Yet it was the second pattern that he saw as coinciding with major wars in modern times.

While containment policy supported European federation, Spykman warned against it whether it was by federation or conquest.

While Mackinder said nothing on unity, his framework is not necessarily inconsistent with it.

From Spykman's view, the decline in one pattern will simply be replaced by another in accordance with new centers of power.

Thus European unity is not the fruition of containment's success, but a development that will transform the basic pattern within which the first existed.

The stunning growth in the capabilities of China has created a severe geopolitical challenge for the United States and its allies.

The U.S. faces a near-peer competitor with the potential ability to dominate the Eurasian Rimland through previously unexpected means.

Mackinder suggested the era of European maritime predominance established 400 years earlier was coming to an end as the consolidation of great continental-sized land powers meant that insular maritime democracies would have a more difficult time maintaining their global position.

Mackinder asked his readers to envision continental Europe, continental Asia, and continental Africa as a single “World Island,” possessing most of the world’s population and industrial potential.

If the world island were ever united under a single political entity, with a base in the Heartland, then it would possess overwhelming economic and military advantages over the outer crescent of geographically insular maritime powers, such as the US, Japan, and the US.

The League of Nations’ failure to prevent a second world war encouraged a new appreciation for geopolitics. 

Writing in the early 1940s, Nicolas Spykman modified Mackinder’s formulations by pointing to the existence of what he called an amphibious Rimland.

Spykman understood that Americans are always tempted by an offshore strategic approach, but he did not view such an approach as viable.

If the U.S. failed to maintain control over vital sea and airspace in the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, then some other power eventually would.

We appear in some ways to be returning to the premodern world of Marco Polo, in which Western Europe was only one portion of a vast Eurasian commercial network encompassing roughly equal civilizations, centered on China as much as on any other power.

Strictly speaking, China is not a pure land power, but an amphibious one. That is, China faces both land and sea. This means it faces threats in both directions.

Similarly, France under Louis XIV and then Napoleon had great relative capabilities. Yet, the French also carried the burden of facing threats and opportunities on land as well as at sea.

When measured by purchasing power parity, China’s GDP surpassed that of the United States in 2014. This material growth has gone hand-in-hand with a vast expansion of Chinese trade and investment on every inhabited continent.

The conventional wisdom regarding Sino-Russian cooperation used to be that their relationship was nothing more than an axis of convenience. Unfortunately, this is no longer true.

Spykman noted that all of the world’s recent aspirants for global hegemony (Napoleonic France, Wilhelmine and Nazi Germany, plus Imperial Japan) were rimland powers.

Personality certainly mattered, but the Manichean framework that made the Cold War possible was not an historical accident.
books.google.com/books?id=Sl5or…

"Germany needs to be balanced by France and Eastern Europe,"
books.google.com/books?id=rsIwx…

Karl Ernst Haushofer (1869 – 1946) counseled against Germany’s invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941, and ended up in Dachau in 1944.

Haushofer had come under suspicion because of his contacts with left-wing socialist figures within the Nazi movement (led by Gregor Strasser) and his advocacy of essentially a German–Russian alliance.

Haushofer remained fiercely loyal to his beloved wife, Martha, despite her Jewish heritage.

Similarly, as a staunch admirer of the Japanese, Haushofer did not view the world through the same racist lenses as the Nazis.

Haushofer co-founded the German Academy (predecessor of the Goethe-Institut), modeled on the Alliance Française; it was to popularize all things German beyond Germany’s borders.

Hitler’s coming to power should have enhanced Haushofer’s influence. But just the opposite was true.

After 1933, Haushofer was bedeviled by his wife’s Jewish origins. He constantly worried about Martha and their two children, Albrecht and Heinz.

Haushofer repeatedly turned to his protégé Rudolf Hess to secure exceptions to the regime’s anti-Semitic legislation for his family. He was gradually pushed out or withdrew from the organizations that he had built up.

In May 1941, Hess took his ill-fated flight to broker a German-British peace. Haushofer, who met with Hess several times in spring 1941, likely encouraged this mission.

As early as 1908, when he first went to Japan, Haushofer had grasped what the rise of new forces in the East meant to the destinies of Europe.

Haushofer had been deeply impressed by Friedrich Ratzel's concept of the "law of the growing spaces." It had led him naturally to the shores of the Pacific, which he describes as the largest "physiographic region on earth."

Lord Kitchener had told Haushofer in 1909 that he was opposed to the coming war between England and Germany because it would ruin Europe's future in the Pacific forever.

America and Japan would be the only ones to profit from such a war, Lord Kitchener added.

Deeply offended pride and hatred against the Powers which had humiliated his beloved Fatherland caused Haushofer to welcome the rise of the 'colored world'.

He foresaw the coming doom of the white race with fatalism and even with malicious joy.

Haushofer constantly points to the fatal mistake which the white winners of the war made when they permitted the Japanese to take over Germany's Pacific islands.

The loss of Germany's foothold in the Pacific gave Haushofer a basis for the claim that German and Japanese vital aims no longer overlapped anywhere.

Germany, he said, could therefore subscribe to the cry of "Asia for the Asiatics" and prepare to coöperate with Japan.

Wilhelm II deliberately and sometimes even cynically denounces such feelings: "It is not up to the Germans to create a white bloc. This bloc was smashed by those who used colored troops in the Rhineland to keep down a white race."

"We must counteract the oppression which we suffer from the uncultured colored peoples of a half-African power (France) by helping to liberate the cultured colored races which will rise against our oppressors."

German geopolitics would not have turned to the Far East and centered so definitely in the Pacific if Haushofer had not decided to make this part of the world the center of all his planning.

Haushofer's "Geopolitics of the Pacific Ocean" is not only a political book but an attempt to educate the German people for a global view of world politics.

Japan was the nucleus of the revolution in the East. The two years which Haushofer spent there biased him in favor of Japan and against China.

Haushofer liked to point out that Japan, so often accused of militarism, kept peace for two and a half centuries, until it was taught by America and the West how "to secure its living-space by defensive strokes."

Fully aware of the tragic possibilities of Japan's adventure, Haushofer worked for years trying to persuade Japan to come to terms with China and Russia and, on the other side of the world, convince Hitler that he should live in peace with Russia.

The editors of the Zeitschrift für Geopolitik had stubbornly advocated reconciliation and friendship with Russia from the beginning, and Hitler's noisy crusade against the arch-enemy, Bolshevism, made no impression on them.

Since 1924, the editors of the Zeitschrift für Geopolitik had written in favor of an Asiatic alliance including Russia, Japan, India and China, with Germany as partner.

"Germany will have to decide where she stands; does she want to be a satellite of the Anglo-Saxon powers and their super-capitalism, which are united with the other European nations against Russia, or will she be an ally of the Pan-Asiatic union against Europe and America?"

The answer is that "no nation is closer to Russia than is Germany; only Germany can understand the Russian soul; Germany and Russia have been friends for centuries; their economic structures are complementary; they must hang together."

The German-Russian non-aggression pact of August 23, 1939 (Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact) was Haushofer's greatest triumph; it brought him close to the fulfillment of his most audacious dreams.

"Never again," Haushofer prayed, "shall Germany and Russia endanger, by ideological conflicts, the geopolitical foundations of their adjustable spaces."

In May 1940, Haushofer wrote: "If it were possible for the nations of the Rising Sun (Japan) and of the Hammer and Sickle (Soviet Union) to end their mutual distrust . . . they would be invincible in their domestic seas."

For Haushofer, the less friction there is in the relations between Japan and Russia, the less chance there will be for the Anglo-Saxons and the Chinese to impose a policy of divide and rule.

But Japan did not listen to Haushofer's admonitions to strike first against the British Empire (and France and The Netherlands.) Instead of turning to the south, Japan also started her drive on the continent.

Source,
foreignaffairs.com/articles/unite…

During the Second World War, Hans Weigert wrote a book on German geopolitics, Generals and Geographers: The Twilight of Geopolitics (1942),
thediplomat.com/2015/06/hans-w…

Weigert’s geographical pattern of the East Asian coast in Principles of Political Geography focused on the location of marginal seas and narrow waterways that, he wrote, “rank high among the geographical foundations of political and military power.”

Control of some or all of these strategic “chokepoints” by naval and air power is crucial to any U.S. effort to contain China or act as the offshore balancer of the East Asian mainland.

China today gives every indication that it plans to challenge the U.S. peripheral positions along the East Asian coast and become the predominant land, naval, and air power in the Asia-Pacific region.

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Spykman, Lattimore and Leo Pasvolsky,
books.google.com.hk/books?id=Y3SYD…

According to Owen Lattimore, China for millennia articulated its foreign policy in territorial terms while the United States still based its foreign relations in sea power and maritime trade.

For Spykman, the extension of the Monroe Doctrine to Europe and Asia created a new foreign policy based on active intervention, serving his political goal ending American isolation.

Once upon a time, the 'Franks' admired Ottoman meritocracy and efficiency.

It was in the context of the Ottoman threat that propagandists, politicians and thinkers began talking about Europe as a normative as well as geographical concept.

Venice, Marseilles, and Ragusa (in today's Croatia) depended on the Ottoman Empire for both luxury and bulk goods, while in the course of the 16th century less established states such as France, England and the Low Countries became increasingly reliant on Ottoman raw materials.

Trade and communication between the Ottomans and Europe also assisted the transmission of social and technological knowledge, leading to a spurt of developments in European manufacturing, particularly those sectors imitating ‘Eastern’ products.

Having conquered Egypt and Syria in 1517, and thus obtaining access to this crucial hinge in the Eurasian trade routes, the Ottoman Empire became, perhaps briefly, the most impressive seaborne power in the Mediterranean.

Such was the concern over ‘the Infidel’ that the papacy put more of its resources into fighting the Ottomans than it did into combatting Protestantism.

After Francis I was captured by the Hapsburgs in the Italian Wars (1521–26), his release was negotiated on the condition that wars with the Ottomans would become his ‘principal intention’.

By 1519, concern for the ‘Terrible Turk’ loomed so large that the election of Charles V as the Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire was in part based on his ability to unite Christendom in wars against the Ottomans.

The Ottoman-French alliance grabbed the headlines, but the Ottomans also established more clandestine links with dissident groups in Christendom.

Sultan Süleyman I (aka Suleiman the Magnificent) contacted the Schmalkaldic League of German Protestant princes, urging them to cooperate with France against the Hapsburgs, and offering them amnesty should Ottoman armies conquer Europe.

The military pressure of the Ottoman Empire proved a crucial contributing factor in the origins and expansion of the Reformation.

Lutheran revolts swept through Germany during a period in which the Hapsburgs were especially dependent on German military support.

In this context, Lutherans sought to carve out greater religious freedoms whenever conflict between the Ottomans and Habsburgs surfaced, using the Ottoman threat as a bargaining chip in negotiations with Charles V.

With slightly greater success the Ottomans also established links with Protestants in the Low Countries.

In the 1570s, Dutch rebels were known to use the slogan ‘Liever Turks dan Paaps’ (‘Rather Turkish than Papist’).

In numerous ways, it was the Ottoman threat that so persistently redirected both Hapsburg and Papal resources away from the internal divisions that were stretching the Empire in the northwest.

Both Charles V’s and Philip II’s prioritization of the Ottoman front came at an extremely high cost.

The former could not maintain either religious or Austro-Castilian unity, and the latter oversaw the eventual breakaway of the Dutch Provinces.

At the same time, the Ottoman–Habsburg military conflict exacerbated Mediterranean volatility, cutting the arteries of Venetian seaborne trade.

The Spaniards and Portuguese fared little better.

Having lost its Black Sea monopoly, Genoa sought to circumvent the Ottoman passage to Indian and Far Eastern markets, while turning to private business and financial operations in Western Europe and the Atlantic.

Throughout the 16th and 17th centuries, Spain and Portugal acted as conduits for the transfer of much of the American bullion into the coffers of financiers in Antwerp, Amsterdam, London, Paris and Genoa.

Why the Dutch, rather than English, became the first leading force in the subsequent development of the world market during the Long 16th Century is also explained by the country’s close ties to the Spanish-American trading system.

Adam Smith (1723 –1790) recognized the significance of American silver in ‘West–East’ trade relations, noting how East Asia was a major market for the silver being pumped out of the American mines.

Smith also noted how the European commodity trade to the East Indies, along with the gold and silver purchased for those commodities, necessarily created increases in European productivity.

For Smith, it was the widening of markets brought about by the acquisition of American wealth that would bring about divisions of labor and technological developments.

The problem of the idle, vagrant, rebellious worker reasserted itself in the colonies, where the persistent resistance and flight of workers made the new American communities periodically unsustainable.

The peculiarity of this colonial arrangement in the New World meant that the possibility of capitalist development based on a ‘free’ and waged workforce was effectively closed off.

Attempts to establish plantations in West Africa failed because the Europeans were unable to subjugate and transform the communal subsistence bases of agrarian production into a privatized market-based system.

To be clear, slavery was widespread not because Atlantic Africa was more ‘backward’ than feudal Europe, but rather because the character of ruling class reproduction differed.

While in Europe land ownership constituted the basis of private property and ruling class wealth and power as such, in Atlantic Africa quasi-communal ownership of land predominated.

Slaves constituted the primary form of private property in West African law. Hence, European contemporaries observed that local rulers and notables were predominantly wealthy in slaves rather than land, cash or goods.

In the case of Songhai (Sahel region), Kongo and Ndongo (Angola), slaves were crucial to the centralization of the ruler’s authority, acting as "administrators, soldiers, and even royal advisors, enjoying a great freedom of movement and elite lifestyles".

West African geopolitics was governed by what might be termed biopolitical accumulation: wars aimed at acquiring slaves were "the exact equivalent of Eurasian wars aimed at acquiring land".

In certain areas, such as the Gold Coast, the processes of state formation that took place in the 16th and 17th centuries were made possible by the encounter of Atlantic African societies with each other, and with Europeans.

Europeans, who were producing firearms on an unprecedented scale, were exceptionally well placed and only too willing to take advantage.

From the mid-17th century, with African states now plugged into dense networks of commercial-cum-military relations with Europeans, this dynamic fundamentally changed.

Wars became more extensive, giving rise to a series of expansionist state formations along the Atlantic African littoral, with states such as the Denkyira, Akwamu and Asante (in today's Ghana) springing up, expanding, and widening the geographical scope of slave acquisition.

At the same time, states outside the slave trade were deprived of access to weaponry and increasingly found themselves on the losing side of an arms race.

To get muskets, there must be something to export. The only item in great demand was slaves.

Overall, the slave trade came to serve a dual purpose.

It was the medium through which the firearms crucial to war-making could be imported, and it was also the medium through which states could shed the surplus slaves accrued from their now enhanced war-making capabilities.

The Europeans’ insatiable thirst for slave labor in the Americas, on the one side, and the subsequent re-ordering of African geopolitics, on the other, help explain why, from the mid-17th century onwards, there was a radical increase in the trans-Atlantic slave trade.

Slaving in and around Allada in what is now southern Benin – which would eventually take the title of the ‘Slave Coast’ – grew from no exports in 1500 to over 19,000 slaves per year by 1700.

By the mid-18th century this had resulted in the increasing militarization of West African states.

The expansion of slaving for export, combined with the ravages of conflict, produced a concomitant demographic exhaustion of West Africa and its tributaries.

In a region where people were considered the primary source of wealth, population decline had a negative impact on agrarian productivity, which in turn increased exposure to famine and disease.

In the New World, the maintenance of the plantation was subject to costs and ‘market stimuli’ that constantly demanded renewed and expanding commodity production, where profit maximization was the cardinal aim.

Consequently, at least "9/10 of American slaves were put to commodity production", in which modern techniques of discipline and violence were deployed to concentrate and mechanize work, as well as accelerate its intensity.

In the Jamaican sugar plantations, for example, the rate of return was 10% or more higher than the prevailing rate of interest in England.

Access to cheap sources of cotton lowered the cost of production in the all-important textile industry, raising the competitiveness of British exports.

British exports accounted for approximately 56% of all industrial production in 1700-1760, and over 46% in 1760- 1800.

Certainly in the 17th century, cotton textiles were central to the widening of Britain’s export markets, saving British industry as a whole from a crisis of stagnation.

The American colonies and slave plantations generated both the markets and needed surpluses that assisted, through reinvestment, in jumpstarting the engine of industrial accumulation.

Whether a revolution was the necessary condition to bring about capitalism or whether it worked to facilitate an already existing capitalism varied with each case, France being an example of the former and the United Provinces and England more or less a case of the latter.

The 16th century of absolutist state building was a period riven by inter-dynastic conflict and war.

During the century, there were only 25 years without large-scale military operations in Europe.

As the Catholic Church provided the key ideological underpinning of the feudal system, any attack on the system was necessarily directed against the Church.

The divergent paths of socio-economic development between feudal Spain and an incipiently capitalist Netherlands were therefore a structural precondition for the outbreak of the Dutch Revolt.

The immediate context for the Dutch Revolt against the Hapsburg Empire beginning in 1566 was occasioned by the fiscal-military pressures arising from the Habsburgs’ protracted struggle against the Franco-Ottoman alliance.

The VOC’s amalgamation of disparate regions of Asian trade into a self-sustaining and expanding intra-regional network helps us understand the success of Dutch colonialism.

The VOC established a colonial presence in Hirado (平户) in Japan for silver and in Taiwan for silks and gold.

With access to these commodities, the Dutch were able to obtain Indian textiles on the Coromandel coast.

While the Portuguese were more committed to feudal-territorialist forms of surplus extraction based on mare clausum, the Dutch explored the potential of sustaining and exploiting the already existing South Asian system of mare liberum.

The Dutch realized that in order to supplant the Portuguese, they needed to control all the main sources of supply.

The resultant intra-Asian network provided a way to squeeze Spanish Hapsburg revenues, facilitating the Dutch rebellion back in Europe.

Source,

How the West Came to Rule: The Geopolitical Origins of Capitalism (2015)

by Alexander Anievas (University of Connecticut) & Kerem Nişancıoğlu (SOAS)
books.google.com/books/about/Ho…