ABSTRACT
The Suez Crisis precipitated an identity crisis for the Anglo-American we. It dissolved the instantiating narrative of that identity so that the previously shared representation of British and American self and other, intertwined in a trusting security relationship, was no longer shared. As we-ness broke down, neither the British nor the Americans knew what to expect from each other, and the stable expectations that had characterized the security community international order gave way to international disorder. But disorder did not prevail. Over the course of the crisis period, the very same authors who had dissolved the Special Relationship then turned around and re-produced that we-ness identity through the linguistic practice of fastening. More exactly, those who had been accused of being either bellicose Brits or disloyal Americans retaliated against that defamation by waging campaigns of representational force. Their campaigns were designed to reverse, or at least neutralize, each of the dissenting phrases that constituted those two slanderous “realities” (bellicosity and betrayal). Each campaign was successful. Thus, phrase by phrase, and one by one, those who had dissolved Special Relationship with dissident narratives were forced to back-track on their own dissent until, ultimately, the logic of the six phrases that gave “reality” to bellicosity and betrayal had dissolved instead. The cumulative result was not just to re-produce the narrative “reality” of the Special Relationship, but also to re-produce the Anglo-American security community order of stable expectations for nonviolent behavior that had flowed from we-ness.
