ABSTRACT
Even before 1865, it was an axiom that British foreign policy was designed and pursued to ensure international stability. Stability not only gave security to the British Isles and to its global empire; it minimized disruptions to trade and commerce-the life-blood of ‘Great’ Britain.2 In the century after 1865, the pursuit of international stability remained at the heart of diplomatic initiatives supported by capable armed forces and a strong economy. The grand strategy by which successive British governments endeavoured to achieve these national and imperial ends involved the maintenance of a balance of power-both in Europe and in the wider world, where the protection of British interests in the form of prestige, markets, strategic outposts, and lines of communication preoccupied cabinets, the Foreign Office, the service ministries, other departments of state, and, sometimes, public opinion. In one sense, there were a number of individual balances of power-in Western Europe, in the western and eastern Mediterranean, in the Western Hemisphere, in South Asia, and in the Far East and Pacific Ocean. In the British diplomatic parlance of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, these balances were represented as ‘questions’, like the ‘Eastern Question’;3 and the answers to these questions combined in the minds of those responsible for British foreign policy as representing a global balance of power.4 In this context, the European balance of power had decided importance because any continental disequilibrium could
imperil the security of the home islands, the centre of the Empire, and the well-being of Britain’s people and economy. Of course, on occasion, war could occur either because British policy failed or ambitious Powers decided that they could imperil Britain’s vital interests. Indeed, as Disraeli did in January 1877 when Russian armies neared the Straits in the Russo-Turkish war, the British might themselves threaten war if doing so was the only way to protect their interests. However, once war began, the British fought to win-a not unnatural course of events; but their war aims always looked to establish a post-conflict stability that augmented their narrow national and imperial interests. Michael Dockrill’s succinct observation about the nature of British foreign policy as the First World War ended is germane not only to the difficult period of 1918-20. It brings to the fore a series of truisms that underscored British foreign policy between 1865 and 1965 and which the contributors to this volume explore: that international politics, and Britain’s diplomatic and military response to them, was an evolutionary process conditioned by changing circumstances; that British policy was flexible; and that from the British perspective and in line with British interests, stability was the sine qua non of diplomacy. Thus, as late as 1896, Lord Salisbury, the Conservative prime minister and foreign secretary, could eschew alliances because ‘in 1892, as now, we kept free from any engagement to go to war in any contingency whatever. That is the attitude prescribed to us on the one hand by our popular constitution which will not acknowledge the obligations of an engagement made in former years-on the other by our insular position’.5 In Salisbury’s estimation, stretching back to the 1870s-and even in that of his contemporary political adversaries like the Liberal, William Ewart Gladstone, who wanted morality to underpin the country’s externalpolicies 6-Britain lay safe behind the Channel and the strength of the Royal Navy; and no Great Power or coalition of Powers threatened the Empire. Thus, concluding alliances meant making promises it might be impossible to keep in an unknown future. It profited Britain, instead, to concentrate on trade and commercial expansion.7 Yet between 1902 and 1904 a different generation of British leaders with Salisbury’s successor, Lord Lansdowne, as foreign secretary concluded the Anglo-Japanese alliance and an entente with France.8 They did so because the Boer War showed Britain to be dangerously isolated at a moment when other Great Powers had coalesced into opposing alliances and looked to exploit British
concentration on the crisis in southern Africa; this was a situation that could rebound unfavourably on its global interests.
