British Decline Research Articles

Imperial Gothic 2.0: Brexit, Brex-Lit, and everyday Euroscepticism in British popular culture

ABSTRACT In recent years, scholarship on postfunctionalism in European integration has drawn attention to how processes of Europeanisation are not restricted to policymakers, but exist equally (if not more significantly) in the quotidian. The 2016–2020 Brexit process and debates on the relationship between national identity and ‘Europeanness’ urge a new consideration of how Europeanisation is narrated in everyday discourses. This paper analyses British fictional portrayals of the EEC and EU and posits a new theoretical framework of ‘Imperial Gothic 2.0’. Pre-2016 representations of the EU were entirely dystopian. But post-2016, Brex-Lit fiction has reversed this trend and the EU now appears as a flawless utopia. Early twentieth-century ‘Imperial Gothic’ saw popular fiction defined by themes of British decline and oppression by foreign powers; a century later, Brex-Lit has resurrected these themes by narrating Britain in terminal decline, reflecting cultural anxieties, a reversal of Self and Other, and a loss of identities. This ‘Imperial Gothic 2.0’ reveals anxieties which reflect and influence political action, and reveals the extent to which imaginations and narratives of the EU have transformed from depictions of a distant, technocratic entity used for comedy or conspiracy, into a site of intense emotional affiliation, nostalgia, anticipation, and regret.

Make Us Great Again: The Causes of Declinism in Major Powers

Narratives of national decline occur frequently, often independent of “objective” measures of decline. What causes declinism? First, I argue that declinism most often comes from opposition brokers. Brokers bring otherwise unconnected groups and individuals together in a coalition. This coalition is well positioned to blame the nation’s decline on the establishment. Second, I argue that negative events or conditions help narratives of decline resonate with audiences. Using text analyses of UK parliamentary speech, I show that declinism was rampant in late-1970s Britain. I show how two brokers—Margaret Thatcher and Keith Joseph—brought together previously unconnected groups to create a coalition that centered on British decline. Negative events, particularly the “Winter of Discontent,” helped declinism resonate, something the coalition recognized and exploited. Finally, I trace the foreign policy consequences of Thatcher’s declinism, particularly with respect to the Falklands War.

The Examination of the Decline of Philosophy of Education with Institutional Theory: A Focus on the Last Three Decades

Many symposia and special journal issues over the last several decades have been devoted to concerns over the decline of philosophy in teacher education programs. I pursued an answer for my doctoral project and found institutional explanations are rarely invoked in the “decline literature.” I have sketched here the theory, and have shown it to be equally applicable to the last several decades of this literature. I argue that institutional organizational theory (IOT) shows how teacher education institutions have changed over time in a way that ultimately rendered the environment less and less hospitable to philosophy of education curriculum and faculty. Particular attention is paid to the educational context of Ontario, Canada, but I also include the wider American and British decline literature. In the final pages I offer de-institutionalizing solutions that, if realized, could provide a new soil in which philosophy and other humanities fields could take root again in teacher preparation programs.

Anglo-American Relations and a Dilemma of Diplomatic Recognition: Royalists, Republicans and Crisis in the Yemen, 1962–1963

This article investigates Anglo-American handling of their bilateral relations regarding whether to extend diplomatic recognition to the Yemen Arab Republic following a coup in 1962. Hitherto this issue has been cast largely within a narrative of relative British decline and/or deepening malaise in the special relationship. This article develops two principal counterarguments. First, the British viewed the crisis as a challenge to their intent to stay in, not retreat from, the Persian Gulf – which the Americans welcomed. Second, the special relationship worked relatively effectively. London and Washington made policy concessions in the interests of their cooperation in Yemen and the wider southern Arabian Peninsula. Bilateral policy friction was largely contained and negotiated within lower echelons of the British and American governments; Kennedy and Macmillan managed their exchanges amicably throughout.

Is It Time for the Beaver to Hop off the Eagle? A Case for Canada to Reconsider Its Geopolitical Alignment with the United States

Canada is known for its close relations with the United States in the domains of economic affairs, defence and international diplomacy. This arrangement, however, was a product of the great changes brought about by the Second World War. The combination of British decline, Ottawa’s desire to achieve full independence from London, and the looming Soviet threat during the Cold War created a political environment in which Canada had to become closely integrated with the United States both militarily and economically. Canada did so to ensure its survival in the international system. With the exception of a few controversial issues like US involvement in Vietnam (1955) and Iraq (2003) as well as Ballistic Missile Defence (BMD), Ottawa has been Washington’s closest ally since 1945. On numerous occasions like the Korean War, the Cuban Missile Crisis, and as recently as the War in Afghanistan and the War Against IS (Islamic State), Canada had provided staunch military and diplomatic support to Washington in its engagements around the globe.
 In an era of relative peace, stability, and certainty, particularly during the Post-Cold War period and the height of American power from 1991 to 2008, this geopolitical arrangement of continental integration had greatly benefited Canada. This era of benefits, however, is arguably drawing to a close. The Great Recession of 2007-09, the situations in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the insistence on pursuing a foreign policy of global primacy despite its significant economic cost, are sending the US down an uncertain path. Due to its close relations and geographical proximity with the US, Canada now faces a hostile international environment that is filled with uncertainty as a result of superpower decline, great power rivalries, environmental degradation, and failed US interventions.

‘Like Romans Becoming Italians’: Italy as the Negative Paradigm for British Decline in the Language of the Press and Denis Healey

The article explores the views of Denis Healey about Italy, and demonstrates that his rhetoric on the Italian national character is connected to British socialism and the British relationship with Europe. Healey’s opinions about Italy have been informed by the idea – very common among British and European socialists – that European people do not share a common nature. In 2013, he spoke of an ‘olive line’ separating the North – defined by pragmatism and responsibility – and the South – defined by abstraction and fiscal laxity. Healey adopted a discourse grounded in essentialism. Social and economic factors, contingency and agency are not important in shaping the behavior of a group of people. Political action is a derivative of the ‘national character’, a mixture of cultural and geographical determinism, which is hard to define and impossible to modify. This was used by Healey to explain the failure of democratic socialism in southern Europe. During the 1970s and 1980s, Italy played a part in Healey’s reflections, and past experiences were reworked to validate his political positions. His argument about the national character formed the basis for his skeptical position regarding European unification, which in the 1970s had divided the Labour party, and worked against international socialist cooperation as well. Speaking about the ‘national character’ of the Italians was a rhetorical choice by Healey, which gained strength from pre-existing political positions from the early twentieth century, but could also be revitalised to deal with contemporary issues like the European Union and Britain’s role in the world as late as 2013.

An Empire Gone Bad: Agatha Christie, Anglocentrism and Decolonization

Recent scholarly accounts of early post-war society have emphasised the importance of positive and self-congratulatory narratives of decolonisation – whereby the end of empire was the inevitable result of a pro-active British beneficence – or have suggested that society was shielded from a sense of imperial decline. Such accounts are complicated by Agatha Christie’s immensely popular crime novels, which constructed a narrative of British decline rooted in a sense of departure from pre-war ideals of imperial masculinity, but whose Anglocentrism nevertheless offered up the potential for imperial renewal pending a ‘rediscovery’ of such characteristics.

Developmental States: The British Crisis and the Imperial Mind-Set

British economic decline was a staple of much post-1945 public discourse, until its supposed reversal by the “miracle” of the Thatcher years. In the aftermath of the great financial crisis of 2007, it has been revived with a vengeance as the weaknesses of its rentier economy have been mercilessly exposed. Meanwhile, the relative strengths of more coordinated “competitor” states are once again more apparent. Of the books under review here, two offer theoretically grounded and comprehensive empirical studies, while the other two bring together contributions from those seeking to restore a greater and more strategic economic activism to the British state. If anything, the former serves to underline the rather desperate predicament depicted by the latter, whose very publication is indicative of the cul-de-sac in which Britain now finds itself economically and politically.

Of Once and Future Kings: Rethinking the Anglo-American Analogy in the Rising Powers Debate

ABSTRACTThis paper seeks to advance the so-called rising powers debate of the past 15 years by interrogating its selective use of the past. Key to the debate are the impact of rising powers like China on the international order, and how to accommodate them. Historiography plays a crucial but unappreciated role in the debate, as scholars look to the past to make sense of the future. Especially in the United States, many compare the US now to Great Britain before 1940, the idea being that both faced the same difficulties of decline relative to rising challengers. This is the core case of power transition theory in the field of International Relations. It is also, fundamentally, weak. As I show, it relies on a ‘long chronology’ of British decline that the past quarter-century of historical scholarship on twentieth-century Britain has undermined. I instead propose a ‘short chronology’ of the transition away from Britain that emphasizes agency and contingency over structure and the longue durée. Bringing the work of historians to the rising powers debate thus indicates that the key factors to study are not grand systemic forces, but short-term politics and diplomacy.

Trading with the “Enemy”? Hong Kong Bourgeoisie and Chinese Nationalism during the Two Wars, 1919–1941

This paper examines the interplay between trade and nationalism in the development of Chinese bourgeois nationalism in British Hong Kong in the interwar years (1919–1941). It points out the contingent responses among the Chinese bourgeoisie to the calls of Chinese nationalism. The bourgeoisie were lukewarm to the mobilization of the Chinese anti-British strikes and boycotts in the 1920s. They however organized fundraising movements and charities to support the Chinese defence against the Japanese inroads in the 1930s. The implication of the findings is twofold: first, the operation of Chinese antiforeigner movements in Hong Kong was not “taught nationalism” dictated by nationalists in mainland China. Second, while Chinese bourgeoisie identified the Japanese expansion as a reason for the British decline, they did not attempt to interrupt the Japanese trade. The latter was crucial for the Chinese manufacturers in Hong Kong to sustain their business. The agency of Chinese in Hong Kong in the decades of high Chinese nationalism points to the importance of examining Chinese bourgeois nationalism in Hong Kong against the backdrop of the colony’s place in the inter-imperialist rivalry between the demise of the British free-trade imperialism and the rise of the Japanese East Asian New Order. (This article is in Chinese.)

‘On or about December 1910’: F. T. Marinetti's Onslaught on London and Recursive Structures in Modernism

Many accounts of the formative years of English modernism rely on Futurism's own questionable record of F. T. Marinetti's visit to London in the spring of 1910 as the catalyst for an avant-garde revolution in Anglo-American literature that led through Roger Fry's revolutionary Post-Impressionist exhibition to Imagism, and onto Vorticism. New evidence presented here, however, supports the position advanced by a number of scholars that Marinetti did not visit until after Fry's exhibition. We can now quite precisely date Marinetti's important ‘Futurist Speech to the English’ to Tuesday 13 December 1910, rather than to the spring of that year as previously thought. Close examination of the content and context of this lecture, to an audience of Suffragettes at the Lyceum Club for Women, highlights the sheer extent of Marinetti's propaganda drive between 1908 and 1910, as he attempted to garner support for his movement and neutralise the satirical attitude of the mainstream English press. Moreover, Futurism, it appears, actively altered the historical record in order to genealogically prioritise itself. Such a process finds itself recursively working back into modernist studies, through a process in which theories of British historical and cultural decline or inferiority, alongside a presupposition of the continental avant-garde's guiding influence, tend to unconsciously take root in studies of literature of this period. In contrast and as illustration, we can find in one of Wyndham Lewis's early essays – previously considered imitative of, but now clearly an influence upon, Marinetti – the extent to which ‘on or about December 1910’ British society and culture was already in the process of radicalizing itself.

Scholarship and the ship of state: rethinking the Anglo-American strategic decline analogy

This article uses the centenary of the First World War as an opportunity to re-examine a major element of the existing literature on the war—the strategic implications of supposed British decline—as well as analogies to the contemporary United States based upon that interpretation of history. It argues that the standard declinist interpretation of British strategy rests to a surprising degree upon the work of the naval historian Arthur Marder, and that Marder's archival research and conceptual framework were weaker than is generally realized. It suggests that more recent work appearing since Marder is stronger and renders the declinist strategic interpretation difficult to maintain. It concludes by considering the implications of this new work for analogies between the United States today and First World War-era Britain, and for the use of history in contemporary policy debates.

Reversing the Influence: Anglo-German Relations and British Fitness Policies in the 1930s

In ‘inventing’ and exporting modern sports to the world, the British influenced innumerable people. However, by the inter-war period, there was a general anxiety regarding British decline. The reasons were threefold. First, British health and fitness experts underlined the low physical standards of their people. Second, it became evident that Britain's leading position in international sport was under threat. Third, the fascist states seemed to be doing particularly well in this area. How could the British Empire last without strong men to defend it? Perhaps part of the solution might be found overseas in just the place where the present ‘danger’ came from. This paper studies this reversed influence and shows how German influence affected British fitness policies in the 1930s. In a period marked by appeasement, sports meetings, official visits and a large amount of cultural propaganda resulted in the sharing of British and German experiences. However, the attitude of the British was complex and their determination to go their own way limited the effectiveness of German influence. By the time the war broke out, the British had distanced themselves from German organization and values once again. The brief flirtation with fascist forms of physical culture was over.

The Persistence of the English School

Dilemmas of Decline: British Intellectuals and World Politics, 1945-1975. By Ian Hall. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012. 254 pp., $31.46 paperback (ISBN-13: 978-0-984-59099-5). This book offers an intellectual history of the development of International Relations (IR) as a discipline in the United Kingdom. The context is the sharp decline in the postwar power and standing of the United Kingdom. Hall is not primarily concerned with whether decline occurred, but whether the scholars of IR he is concerned with perceived it to be occurring, how they addressed it or, in many cases, failed to address it. He rejects the strong hypothesis that British decline brought about a decline in British thinking about world politics after 1945, believing it to be too deterministic. He prefers instead to focus on the traditions of thought that dominated British thinking about IR in the postwar period and to trace how these evolved. To accomplish this, he draws on the framework established by Mark Bevir for understanding traditions as webs of belief, which are composed of many inherited ideas and assumptions. Such traditions have a momentum and internal life of their own, which may or may not have much contact with international politics. The book uses British decline as a context, but much of its content is about the internal development of particular traditions of thought in British international relations. The principal focus of the book is on the liberal internationalist tradition and the Whig diplomatic tradition. The radical dissenting tradition and the strategic studies tradition are also considered, …

Globalisation, Hegemony and Perspective

Globalisation has been treated as a homogenising, even Americanising, process. Its complex nature means that its effects can be observed at various levels of analysis: economic, political, social, cultural and legal. The books under review here tackle different aspects of globalisation, with the overarching theme of US hegemony and how that has been employed in the reconfiguration of the global order. Two titles deal specifically with British decline, albeit without a perspective informed by political economy, the absence of which is argued to weaken their respective analyses. The analytical purchase provided by Marxist political economy is also highlighted.

British Intelligence in the Middle East, 1898–1906

This article examines British intelligence efforts in Turkish Arabia at the turn of the twentieth century. It argues that intelligence collection was really three separate efforts, carried out by the War Office, the Foreign Office, and the Government of India, and it reflected concerns about British decline, the problems experienced during the Boer War, as well as an effort to penetrate the ‘information order’ of India's sub-empire. Although intelligence efforts suffered from bureaucratic disharmony in Whitehall, and between London and the Government of India, valuable contributions were nevertheless made to Britain's knowledge of Turkish Arabia.

British Literary Responses to the Suez Crisis

By the 1950s, the Suez Canal was crucial for Britain's trade in the Middle East, for its communication with overseas dependencies and for its containment of Soviet influence in Africa. The sudden nationalisation of the canal in July 1956 by Gamal Abdul Nasser, and the obstruction of British military intercession by the United States, struck a blow to the prestige of the nation that resonated in the work of British novelists for decades to come. This essay examines the discursive responses to the Suez Crisis in such texts as John Fowles' Daniel Martin (1977), Lawrence Durrell's The Alexandria Quartet (1957–60) and Olivia Manning's The Levant Trilogy (1977–80), analysing its links to orientalism, anti-Americanism, Cold War hostilities and fears about British national decline.

A comment on British imperial decline and the conditions of emergence for Scottish nationalism

This is a reply to: McCormick, Callum. 2013. “From post-imperial Britain to post-British imperialism.” Global Discourse. 3 (1): 100–114. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/23269995.2013.804762.

From post-imperial Britain to post-British imperialism

The article explores the potential implications for the United Kingdom of Scottish independence. I attempt to situate the possibility of the break-up of the British state in 2014 within a broader understanding of the decline and erosion of the main institutions of British society. In particular, I focus on the malaise created by the end of the British Empire and on the political and institutional effects of the neoliberal restructuring of the British economy. I relate these processes to the current austerity agenda of the Coalition government and the attempt to outline the likely effects of the current government’s policy on the debate over Scottish independence. I then focus more particularly on the question of Britain’s nuclear weapons, analysing the ways in which discussion of the replacement or renewal of the Trident weapon system has interacted with debates over the future of the British state. I suggest some possible outcomes of Scottish independence on the United Kingdom, including the likelihood that it will increase the speed of British decline and further increase dependency on the United States. I also offer some criticisms of those on the left of Scottish politics who have seen independence as a means of pursuing a post-neoliberal and anti-militaristic alternative to the regime of war and austerity on offer from Westminster.

Mapping Pawel Pawlikowski and Last Resort

ABSTRACTThis article looks at the British-Polish film-maker Pawel Pawlikowski and his film Last Resort (2000). It argues that the film-maker and the film's main protagonist are prime examples of a postcommunist condition, which has manifested itself since the fall of the Berlin Wall. Drawing on the Bourdieuian concept of ‘cultural capital’, the author claims that Pawlikowski, although a hybrid film-maker, should be considered as a British director, with his cinematic capital bound up in the liturgy of Eastern Europe, particularly Russia. By choosing Margate for his film, Pawlikowski aligns himself alongside iconic film-makers like Lindsay Anderson. Moreover, through this seaside town, he is able to evoke a sense of British decline, which in Pawlikowski's film melts into an ‘Eastern Europe’ on the coastal fringe of Britain. In Pawlikowski's film, Margate becomes an example of the postcommunist condition through its abundance of migration, grey housing blocks, surveillance and social misery. If the film-maker is successful in gaining recognition for his cinematic capital as an insider of postcommunism, then his leading heroine fails in her quest for happiness and love in Britain partly because her cultural capital is not recognized. The postcommunist condition is most tangible in Tanya's migration; however, Alfie, Tanya's British suitor and saviour, is also part of this global condition, which has engulfed the old Cold War divide. In Last Resort, both East and West function to exhibit a shared postcommunist condition.