Perception and Posture in Anglo-American Relations: The War Debt Controversy in the ’Official Mind‘, 1919–1940

Abstract

Churchill's captivating vision of a 'special relationship' between the British Commonwealth and the United States, based on the supposedly 'fraternal association of the Englishspeaking peoples', has fascinated scholars of Anglo-American interaction.1 It survives in spite of evidence that suggests that, even at its wartime zenith, this was an 'ambiguous partnership' between 'allies of a kind' and even more evidence that in the period since 1945 it became 'special no more'.2 Yet, in spite of the frequency with which the 'special relationship' has been consigned to the dustbin of history, the idea continues to display what Steve Marsh and John Baylis describe as 'something of a Lazarus-like quality'.3 In the period before the Second World War, however, the evidence suggests the existence of a more ambivalent relationship. Some historians dismiss the entire 'British fantasy' of its supposedly 'special' nature, claiming that, beneath the patina of a sentimentalized 'myth of cousinhood and common interest', there was nothing but a Realpolitik pursuit of national self-interest.4 Others, more common, echo Coral Bell's view that there was already something 'special' about the Anglo-American relationship before the close of the nineteenth century; a new amity progressively reinforced by 'the Great Rapprochement' during the early years of the twentieth century, as policy-makers on both sides of the Atlantic came to recognize the mutual advantages of co-operation in pursuit of a shared