Many policymakers, let alone historians, would dispel any attempts to compare and contrast such disparate events, given their complexity.
And yet we should learn from the past. This leaves us to consider not whether to draw connections or conclusions from these events, but how to, in a way that is humble and cognisant of our limitations.
One way of doing this is to place a foreign policy, grand strategic decision, or event within a ‘tradition’ of statecraft, broadly defined, that offers conceptual and contextual boundaries when thinking about the present. Here, ‘tradition’ is not a normative concept - a tradition can be considered positively or negatively; something to be emulated, or avoided.
On the 14th June, the Centre for Grand Strategy hosted a conference on ‘Traditions of British Statecraft.’ The aim was to convene a meeting of individuals from academia, think tanks, and government to assess (1) whether there is a distinct tradition or traditions of British statecraft and, if so, (2) whether these traditions continue to matter for the development of British external policy today. While the conclusions of panellists and participants invited to present papers and attend the conference will be the subject of a dedicated report released at a later date, it is possible to discern some intrinsic questions that attendees grappled with.
There were four panels dedicated to discrete themes within the aforementioned questions: a panel of the general principles of British statecraft; a panel on grand strategy within British statecraft; a panel on regional traditions; and, finally, a panel on ‘big ideas’ within British statecraft.
On the first panel, panellists investigated tensions between rhetoric and actions. Inherent within the idea of a tradition is the idea that one must collect disparate events and decisions within a collective whole; but does it make sense to collect and compare disparate events for historians and policymakers alike? Has Britain benefitted from a bipartisan tradition of foreign policy? Are traditions just unhelpful myths lurking in disguise? How important are individual personalities, and what is their relationship to British statecraft?
The second panel investigated how these traditions do or do not prefigure in the conceptualisation and enaction of UK grand strategy. Does Britain retain the capacity for organisational innovation to facilitate good external policy in the 21st century? What ideas inform British conceptions of grand strategy, and, indeed, is there something distinct about British grand strategic thought? Have British external policy departments historically been better at short-term crisis response or long-term planning? Do policymakers have the tools they need to effectively manage external policy?
The third panel focused on certain regional traditions of British external policy in Europe, the Middle East and the United States. The panel questioned whether diplomatic failures might engender their own positive or negative traditions that a have lasting impact on strategy and diplomacy. Has strategy always been conceived as a means of leading Britain to a new role or status quo, or has it been conceived as a way of keeping Britain in the same place? Is Britain really as good at managing regional dynamics as it thinks it is, and to what extent to continuities exist in the way that Britain manages relations with its allies and partners. Do we, for example, have an unhealthy obsession with the ‘Special Relationship’, or is this the inevitable consequence of having a close relationship with a superpower?
The fourth panel identified ‘big ideas’ across three hundred years of British statecraft. The panel considered the extent to which ideas were enduring, rediscovered, or recycled; and the virtues of reducing complex ideas into ‘-ians’ – Palmerstonian, Gladstonian, Lloyd-Georgian, for example. Placing the origins of some ideas within the eighteenth century forced the panel to consider the historical literacy of those seeking to apply these ideas – is it necessary to know how and where these ideas came from? To what extent does international law’s grounding in the maritime and seapower realms affect our understanding of it? Twentieth century policymakers used ‘big’ ideas to frame their thinking of grand strategy – is this necessary today? Do they influence our thinking whether we like it or not? And when considering how to learn from the past, not just what, do ideas and concepts offer better ways of framing questions, than the specifics of any given policy decision or outcome? Is it better to consider how a leader learned their way from one position to another, rather than the details of the policies themselves; and does British statecraft contain good examples of this?
As we have seen, the panels were consciously and unconsciously undergirded by a number of themes – time; post-imperialism/empire; imagination and historical insight; consensus versus bipartisanship. The conference, nor the papers, were seeking to produce definitive answers to these complex questions. However, when published, we hope the report acts as a useful probe into how Britain conceives of its own statecraft, and sparks further reflections for academics and policymakers alike as we continue to recalibrate our position in the world order.