God Save the Queen - And Her Inflated Overseas Defence Budget Too

“For God’s sake, act like Britain!” exploded an irate American Secretary of State Dean Rusk to his British counterpart in 1968, upon being informed of Britain’s intent to pull out of its colonies “east of Suez.” Mr. Rusk appears finally to be getting his wish – if a bit posthumously.

As European governments slash military spending with a ferocious zeal typically reserved for obnoxious cheering at top-flight football matches, Britain appears once again to be cherishing its perennial position as the English exception to the European rule. As The Economist reported last week, the odd LibDem-Conservative bedfellows currently charged with running the country appear to have traded Britain’s time-honored practice of offering its students free education for a pair of brand-new aircraft carriers and the continuation of the Trident nuclear submarine program. While some cuts are inevitable in the wake of the global financial crisis – the British defense budget will be cut by approximately eight percent this year – Tory Prime Minister David Cameron has nevertheless promised that the United Kingdom shall “remain one of a ‘very few’ powers able to deploy a brigade-sized force anywhere on earth, indefinitely.”

James Bond might approve - but will the British public? Surprisingly, the answer appears to be a resounding yes (or perhaps even “jolly good.”) A poll commissioned by British-based think-tank Chatham House revealed recently that the British public considers the armed forces, along with the BBC, to be the asset that “best serves Britain globally.” As The Economist’s Bagehot editorialized last week: “Whereas defence is an elite preoccupation in many European countries, in Britain it is the general public that is keen on hard power” – an attitude borne out by Britain’s seemingly odd commitment to overseas territories far from the imperial center. The South Atlantic News Agency reported yesterday, for example, that British forces in the faraway Falkland Islands, the site of a brief 1982 war between Great Britain and Argentina, remain “ready for any crisis… including external aggression.” (Given recent speculations in the London-based Telegraph about a possible invasion of the islands by a covert Argentine commando force, it isn’t hard to see where such “external aggression” might come from.)

Controversial British military bases on the onetime colonial isle of Cyprus, meanwhile, have escaped the budget cuts entirely, as reported in the Cyprus Mail – leaving the British Overseas Territories of Akrotiri and Dhekelia, sovereign British military bases on the island’s southeastern coast, more or less intact. (Britain has held the island, or parts of it, almost uninterruptedly since 1877, though most of Cyprus was granted independence in 1960). Despite sweeping fiscal austerity measures across the board, Britain’s longtime colonial and military outposts look like they’re here to stay – at least for the moment.

But why, with the rest of Europe apparently content to let the United States play Atlas with regards to global security, is Great Britain, a relatively small island nation seemingly more likely to launch internationally bestselling wizardry franchises than ballistic missiles, refusing to do the same? A brief foray into the history and geography of British foreign involvement, however, suggests that Britain may still be clinging to the legacy of Churchill, the legend of T.E. Lawrence, and the tatters of its once-glorious imperial mantle – and it might even help explain the sentiments behind Hugh Grant’s famous oratorical rebuke to Billy Bob Thornton in Love Actually.

Use of the British Army to preserve order in the former imperial colonies, and of the Royal Navy (the world’s largest during the 18^th and 19^th centuries) to patrol the world’s seas, was common. As early as 1754, the British waged a titanic worldwide struggle against archrival France in the Seven Years’ War, during which they seized the crucial French sugar-producing isles of Guadeloupe and Martinique (only to return them in exchange for significant portions of French North America). In 1757, British forces under Sir Robert Clive maneuvered themselves to victory over the Nawab of Bengal at the landmark Battle of Plassey, heralding the inception of a century of gradual conquest in what would eventually become British India under the Raj. In 1806, the British seized Cape Town from the Dutch as a base from which to thwart Napoleonic influence in the Indian Ocean; beginning in the 1840s, Britain deployed regulars against the Maori in the New Zealand Land Wars (the genesis of modern trench warfare); British gunboat diplomacy brought Qing China to its knees in a series of enforced unequal treaties (see the Treaty of Nanjing, 1842); and British espionage specialists vied for control of Central Asia in the “Great Game” against Russia throughout the 19^th century.

British imperialism may perhaps have reached its apogee during the infamous “Scramble for Africa,” given shape at the Berlin Conference of 1884, in which European nations raced to carve up the furthest reaches of the “Dark Continent” in a battle for national pride and economic autarky. In southern Africa, British empire-builder, diamond magnate, and “Cape-to-Cairo” visionary Cecil Rhodes expanded British influence into the Boer Republics and the eponymous colonies of Northern and Southern Rhodesia. Following the “Great Boer War” of 1898-1902, during which the British pioneered the use of concentration camps against Afrikaner men, women, and children, the U.K. assumed control of what would eventually become the resource-rich nation of South Africa, complementing its existing outposts in Egypt, Nigeria, Kenya, and Bechuanaland (Botswana). British acquisition of Germany’s former colonies in Africa, and of its so-called “League of Nations mandates” in the Middle East, following the First World War enhanced what had by then become, on many counts, the most influential empire the world had ever seen. Connected after October 1902 by the so-called All-Red Line (a telegraph network that effectively extended around the globe, augmented by British insular possessions at Ascension Island, Mauritius, St. Helena, and Fiji), the Empire was both a formidable economic resource abroad and a source of pride to the British public at home, steeped in the legendary stories of heroic explorers like Charles “China” Gordon, Sir Henry Morton Stanley, and T.E. Lawrence. Only with the economic devastation wreaked by the First and Second World Wars did Britain’s long-held overseas empire begin to slip away, wrested from its grasp by a long, slow decline in geopolitical and military influence that continues in some respects to this day.

In light of Britain’s long history of global prominence, however, it should perhaps be no surprise that Britain, in the words of The Economist, still wants both “guns and butter” – and that Britons remain doubtful about massive reductions in the national defense budget, preferring, as the Chatham poll revealed, to preserve a fading image of their nation as the “great power” it once was.