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Tag Archives: Suez Crisis

A World Shaped by the Anglo Race

20 Sat May 2017

Posted by Jaideep A. Prabhu in Book Review

≈ Comments Off on A World Shaped by the Anglo Race

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Anglosphere, ANZUS, Australia, Britain, Canada, identity, Iraq, New Zealand, race, Srdjan Vucetic, Suez Crisis, United States, Venezuela

AnglosphereVucetic, Srdjan. The Anglosphere: A Genealogy of Racialized Identity in International Relations. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011. 272 pp.

It has become increasingly difficult since World War II to study race in international relations. After the excesses by Nazi Germany, most Western officials were shamed into at least keeping their thoughts on racial characteristics private. This is not to say that the problem of race in international relations was solved, but, like sex in Victorian England, became something that was not mentioned in polite company. However, there has been a fair amount of scholarship recently that has reintroduced race as a method of analysis in diplomacy with interesting results. In The Anglosphere: A Genealogy of Racialized Identity in International Relations, Srdjan Vucetic takes a look at the most enduring and perhaps only genuinely special relationship in international relations, primarily that between the United States and Britain but also with Australia, Canada, and New Zealand thrown into the mix as junior partners. Vucetic’s contention is that the bond between the Anglo nations of the world was forged not out of realpolitik but along racial lines in the late 19th century. Over the next century, these bonds would be tested by evolving values of state, nation, empire, and liberalism.

It was an English historian and diplomat Edward Carr who wrote in 1939 that the Anglos were consummate international hypocrites, bent on spreading their forms of politics under the guise of morality and neutrality. Vucetic explores this thought through several crises – Venezuela in 1895 and 1902, the Pacific Pact in 1951 binding the United States to the security of the far-flung former British possessions of Australia and New Zealand, the Suez Crisis in 1956, the Vietnam War, and the build up to the Second Gulf War in 2003. In each case, the author finds compelling reasons for the Anglo powers not to have sided with each other as they did and suggests that their behaviour was brought about by a feeling of kinship.

By any yardstick of historical precedence, the United States was almost destined to become Britain’s rival if not enemy in the late 19th century. Yet, a rapprochement took place. The United States sought to secure the Western hemisphere for itself by repelling and expelling all foreign presence in the region. It moved against French, Russian, Danish, and Spanish possessions by coin or by Colt – except for the British. Washington never threatened the territories of its Anglo cousin in Canada, Newfoundland, or the West Indies. In the Venezuelan Crisis of 1895, for example, Venezuela claimed Essequibo and Guayana Esequiba from British Guyana. The United States forced Britain to abjure from the use of force and accept an arbitration (which awarded London 90 percent of the territory anyway). In 1902, the United States did not move against a blockade of Venezuela by Britain and other European powers for the failure to compensate for damages caused during the Venezuelan Civil War (1859-1863).

The general explanation preferred by many Liberals for US behaviour is democratic peace theory which posits that the behaviour of two democracies is always tempered by their institutions such that they never go to war. Realists, however, argue that London’s imperial commitments elsewhere around the globe and distance from the New World meant that it did not pursue a more muscular policy in 1895. Both overlook, however, the human element of diplomacy – the racial statements made by prominent figures on both sides of the Anglo Atlantic. Joseph Chamberlain and Arthur Balfour, for example, who had long called for a “race alliance” between the two carriers of liberal modernity, declared war between America and Britain to be “unnatural,” “fratricidal,” a “horror,” and a “crime against the laws of God and man.” Archibald Primrose and Lewis Harcourt, members of the Opposition, agreed that war must be avoided at all costs. This sentiment was reciprocated on the other side of the Atlantic – Secretary of State Thomas Bayard, for example, asked why “two trustees of civilisation should fight over the mongrel state of Venezuela.”

During the Second Boer War in 1899, the United States stayed neutral and its secretary of state John Hays argued that the “fight of England is the fight of civilisation and progress and all our interests are bound up in her success.” Washington’s neutrality was seen as repayment or gratitude for British neutrality during the Spanish-American War in 1898. Even one of America’s most preeminent strategic thinkers, Alfred Mahan, targeted Germany and Japan but not Britain when he made a case for a strong navy to counterbalance the influence of the United States’ rivals in Europe and the Asia-Pacific. In discussions of foreign policy, it is often forgotten that the 19th century was an era in which race mattered immensely. The American Civil War had ended barely a generation ago and immigration was strictly controlled in favour of Anglo Saxons. It is not clear why international relations scholars would assume, then, that their domain remained unaffected by this prejudice.

There were, at the same time, perhaps linguistic and religious cleavages with other world powers. The French were an Other because of their Catholicism and the Germans were the impulsive and brutal Teutonic Other. The Anglosphere was thus imagined as a largely white, English-speaking Protestant federation. Such distinction is clear from how the American media, for example, differentiated the German bombardment of San Carlos and the British role in the flattening of Puerto Cabello during the Second Venezuelan Crisis. The former was uncivilised and disproportionate while the other was judicious and restrained. Similarly, the expansion of German imperial domains was seen as threatening to US security interests while Britain continued to add to her colonies without much comment from the United States. Thus, as political scientist Daniel Deudney provocatively states, “the most important and successful interstate alliance of the twentieth century is actually a type of non-state national unification,” one that did not officially achieve even a customs union let alone a dissolution of borders or single polity.

The New Zealand historian James Belich has an interesting observation about the histories of Australia, Canada, and New Zealand independent states: no one knows when they truly began. In 1950, the Australasian territories were more British than independent and the people saw themselves as “neo-Britains” or “better-Britains.” They made sure to always distinguish themselves as part of the Old Commonwealth, the real or original community that included Canada and South Africa while the New Commonwealth comprised of India, Ceylon, and Pakistan. In fact, the Anglosphere was not even stated in the English penal colonies but remained an implicit presence and was most visible during the early years of the Cold War.

In 1950, for example, the Sydney Morning Herald opined on the security arrangements against the Communist bloc by reminding Canberra that “our religious faith, our national philosophy, and our whole way of life are alien to Asia.” Rather than buttressing Asian democracies against communism, what the audience wanted was Canberra to join the Anglo-led West in containing all of Asia. Interestingly, the United States was not interested.

With the Soviet Union playing up the status of blacks and other non-white people in the United States, Washington could not afford to be publicly seen entering into white alliances around the globe. The racist undertones of Australian and New Zealand diplomats was sidestepped by John Foster Dulles by proposing a Pacific Ocean Pact in which ANZAC (Australian and New Zealand Army Corps) would prop up the isalnd states of Japan, the Philippines, and Indonesia; the United States also refused British membership in this pact because it did not want to create a “closed club for Anglo Saxons,” Dulles explained to the British ambassador in March 1951. Australian and New Zealand officials were irate, pointing out that an alliance with the Philippines or Indonesia but not Britain was unthinkable and any move to turn Japan from an enemy to a firm ally overnight would have serious political ramifications domestically. As Vucetic shows, Manila’s request to be included was rebuffed by Canberra and Wellington on grounds of shortage of time and money. The final result was ANZUS – “about Asia, but not of Asia,” as historian David Lowe once described.

Vucetic argues that this showed that it was balance of race that was important to the Anglosphere, not balance of power. He writes, the fact that “Washington deliberated with its junior allies during the negotiations and lost, instead of simply overruling them, reveals the operation of collective identity in practice…it is a sense of shared identity that compels friends to accommodate each other, regardless of extant hierarchies and asymmetries.”

The influence of race on the foreign and security policies of the Anglosphere diminished over time but still remains dormant. Furthermore, the shared sense of brotherhood that was forged in the early 20th century is still with us to this day. The first sign of a shift came in Canada’s discomfiture at the British invasion of Egypt in 1956 to seize the Suez Canal. A liberal internationalism and the urge to distinguish itself from its southern cousin motivated Ottawa as was seen in its response to Vietnam as well. Australia, however, contributed boots on the ground in every major engagement the United States found itself in. Even in the Second Gulf War, while Britain and Australia saddled up to go to war in Iraq, New Zealand and Canada stayed on the sidelines though gave ambiguous blessings to their racial cousins by pontificating on the ethics of liberal interventions. Americans did not rename, however, as Vucetic points out, Canadian bacon as they did French fries.

The end of white-only immigration policies – in 1967 in Canada and in 1973 in Australia – catalysed the emergence of multiculturalism in the Anglosphere, especially as the number of non-white immigrants surpassed white immigration after the mid-1990s. Yet the reinvention of the Anglosphere as a community of (still English-speaking) liberal, democratic, capitalist states still carried undercurrents of a racial bond. The conflict in Afghanistan, wherein the Anglo powers bore the brunt of the warfare, fed the conservative and Hochromantik imagery of a small band of Anglo states preserving civilisation and standing against the tides of barbarians. Picking up from where Chamberlain and Churchill had left off, the British historian Robert Conquest proposed a political association of English-speaking states and American businessman James Bennett argued modern technology had finally allowed Anglophone societies to create a globe-spanning network commonwealth of liberal democracy, free trade, and labour movement. As Duncan Bell wrote in his 2007 The Idea of Greater Britain,

“Grandiose fantasies of Anglo-Saxon unity and superiority continue to exert their mesmeric power, shaping visions of a future world order, and drawing people back into the dangerous orbit of empire.”

There are several narratives of the rise of the English-speaking powers – rags-to-riches, revolution-to-rapprochement, autocracy-to-democracy, racism-to-multiculturalism, colony-to-nation, or imperial-war-to-international-law. The Anglosphere contains many of these frameworks, though undergirded by bonds between settler colonies – even penal ones – that have so far been overlooked. Vucetic notes that today, “all core Anglosphere states and societies define their liberal identities, not simply against present authoritarian Others but also against their own racial past. The mainstreaming of antiracism…has had a paradoxical effect of reifying racialized structures of meaning. Instead of reducing race talk, national census-style racial categories have contributed to it.”

Is it possible that Vucetic has been oversensitive to the race angle? After all, critics may point to the idea of a bill of rights, trial by jury, habeas corpus, the centrality of private property, a man’s word of honour and several other aspects of Anglo culture other than race and sect that bind together the people of the English-speaking first world countries. This, however, is a Churchillian view, premised on the belief that other cultures did not understand property rights or other social and political liberties. Furthermore, the notion that race and religion, two of the most powerful categories in the Age of Imperialism, did not play a role in foreign relations is rather farcical.

Talk of race these days is meant to get our hackles up. However, it is difficult to deny that there exists a sense of kinship that can be forged from racial, linguistic, ethnic, or religious identities. What makes the racial identity of the Anglosphere any more pernicious than the religious bonds of the ummah? Such natural commonality does not banish acrimony in relations but it does create a greater willingness to compromise and maintain ties. Wise or not, the inherent appeal of such bonds should be clear to most of us who meet a fellow countryman when travelling abroad.

Regardless of one’s views on the role of race and religion in foreign affairs, The Anglosphere is an intriguing book whose central thesis asks us to open our minds enough to consider yet another framework to international relations and alliance politics. Vucetic’s argument is not necessarily novel but charts new territory in the direction earlier scholars such as Michael Hunt and WIlliam Inboden had already suggested. In that, it stands firmly on the shoulders of excellent historical research and explores further the implications of what has only recently fallen out of fashion.

The Anglosphere is a valuable addition to foreign relations scholarship that is a must-read for anyone looking to equip their intellectual toolkit to the fullest.

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Ariel Sharon – A Portrait in Blood and Sand

11 Sat Jan 2014

Posted by Jaideep A. Prabhu in Israel, Middle East

≈ Comments Off on Ariel Sharon – A Portrait in Blood and Sand

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Ariel Scheinermann, Ariel Sharon, Battle of Abu-Ageila, Biscari, David Ben-Gurion, Disengagement Plan, Entebbe, fedayeen, Gadna, Gdudei No'ar, Gush Emunim, Haganah, Hassadeh, IDF, Israel, Israeli Defence Forces, Kadima, Kfar Milal, Lebanon War, Likud, Mapai, Mifleget Poalei Eretz Yisrael, Mitla Pass, obituary, Operation Peace for Galilee, Phalangists, Pinhas Lavon, Qibya, Rheinwiesenlager, Sabra, settlements, Shatila, Six Day War, Suez Crisis, Unit 101, War of Attrition, War of Independence, Wilhelm Gesenius, Yom Kippur War

Ariel Sharon is dead. Warrior and politician, Arik, as he was known to his friends, was reviled, feared, and admired by many. He lived his life under a shadow of controversy and epitomised Israeli sabra culture – lacking in charm, eloquence, or idealism but having an abundance of self-reliance and no-nonsense, can-do grit.

Ariel Sharon 1966Born Ariel Scheinermann on February 26, 1928, in a family of Belorussian Jews in Kfar Malal, Sharon joined Hassadeh, a Zionist youth movement literally meaning the Field, at 10. At 14, he took the week-long training of the Gdudei No’ar (youth battalions), and participated in armed patrols of his moshav. Sheinermann joined the Haganah the same year, 1942, as the turbulence in Europe reached a frenzied pitch in the Middle East. With the proclamation of the State of Israel on May 14, 1948, the Haganah became the Israeli Defence Forces and the future prime minister was pulled into Israel’s first war. For his valour at the Battle of Latrun in which he was severely wounded, Israel’s first prime minister David Ben-Gurion bestowed upon the young Sheinermann the name of Sharon, meaning ‘body armour’ in Hebrew (it is unlikely that a Jewish audience would have taken theologian Wilhelm Gesenius’ meaning of Sharon as upright or just).

Sharon was regarded as a tough soldier and a brilliant commander which helped him rise rapidly through the ranks despite his frequent insubordination. By the end of Israel’s War of Independence, he was already a company commander; during the Suez Crisis, Sharon was a major. He rose to major-general rank by the Six-Day War, and in 1969, he was put in charge of the IDF’s Southern Command. Sharon retired from the military in 1973 just a few months before the Yom Kippur War to form the right-wing Likud party, a complete about-turn from his early inclinations towards the socialistic Mifleget Poalei Eretz Yisrael, or Mapai. However, Sharon paused his political career to return to military service and fight in Israel’s most trying conflict.

As in his military career, Sharon moved through different positions in the government – special security advisor to Yitzhak Rabin, minister of agriculture and minister of defence under Menachem Begin, minister of national infrastructure and the foreign minister under Benjamin Netanyahu – until he rose to the highest office of the land in 2001. After losing the support of his own party in 2005 over the removal of Jewish settlements in the Gaza Strip, Sharon left the Likud to form the Kadima and called for general elections – elections he appeared poised to win had he not suffered a serious stroke in January 2006 and gone into a coma until his death.

It is not surprising that Sharon’s life was surrounded by bloodshed; his long military career and Israel’s troubled existence hardly allowed anything else. However, Sharon’s critics point to the several massacres by Israeli units under his watch in the military or in government. To them, Sharon is an unrepentant war criminal and a scheming politician whose actions were excessive even in times of war.

As head of Unit 101 in 1953, Sharon’s men were accused of massacring over 60 civilians at Qibya in Jordanian-occupied West Bank. However, this was in retaliation to the constant raids by Palestinian fedayeen into Israel – over 9,000 between 1948 and 1956 according to Israel – that had left dozens of Israelis dead and damaged agriculture and infrastructure. Moreover, the attack had received sanction from Defence Minister Pinhas Lavon and Ben-Gurion himself. Despite public perception, most of Unit 101’s raids were on military targets in Egypt, Syria, and Jordan.

Ariel SharonSharon’s aggressiveness got him into trouble as many times as it earned him accolades; his command came under strong rebuke during the Suez Crisis in 1956 for disobeying orders and provoking a battle with Egyptian forces at Mitla Pass, but his actions at Abu-Ageila proved decisive on the southern front during the Six Day War and received praise from strategists all around the world. In Israel, he was christened, The Lion of God (meaning of Ariel in Hebrew), and The King of Israel by the public. Similarly, during Israel’s darkest hour during the Yom Kippur War in 1973, Sharon’s forces crossed the Suez into Africa and moved towards Ismailia and Cairo to cut off Egypt’s Second Army and encircle its Third Army in the Sinai. As a result, Sharon was seen as the architect of Israel’s military victory in the Sinai in 1973.

It was during the War of Attrition, that death-by-a-thousand-cuts period between the Six Day War and the Yom Kippur War, that Sharon earned a reputation for being in favour of Israeli settlements in disputed and occupied territories. Not only was this a blatant violation of international law, but the settlements resulted in dispossession, deaths, and deportation of Palestinians from the areas. In 1971, as a measure to pacify the Palestinian Liberation Organisation, Sharon had resorted to bulldozing hundreds of homes in the Gaza Strip. Again, although Sharon’s actions in the Gaza Strip did not have higher authorisation, he received full support from then prime minister Golda Meir and the evacuations were given post facto approval. As a new minister in Begin’s government, Sharon supported the Gush Emunim settler movement and doubled the number of Jewish settlements in the occupied territories before the end of the decade.

Perhaps the most controversial episode in Sharon’s career was the invasion of Lebanon in 1982. Sharon, then defence minister, is thought to have masterminded the operation with the end goals of evicting the PLO from Lebanon, ending Syrian influence in the country, and installing a Christian pro-Israel government in Beirut. The war has a complex background and history with several paramilitary actors fighting alongside government forces, and in September 1982, the Phalangists, a Christian militia, entered the camps of Sabra and Shatila and massacred anywhere between 800 and 3,000 Palestinian men, women, and children with incredible brutality as revenge for the assassination of their leader, Bachir Gemayel. It was later learned that the assassination was masterminded by Syria and not the PLO.

The Knesset-appointed Kahan Commission, despite its many weaknesses, found that Ariel Sharon bore a personal if indirect responsibility for the massacre as he, along with Begin and Chief of Staff Rafael Eitan, had agreed to allow the Phalangists into the camps to search for terrorists. Given the ties between the IDF and the Phalangists, not to mention the IDF forward command post barely 200 metres southwest of Shatilla, it would be impossible for the Phalangists to have done their dastardly deed. However, a bodyguard of Phalangist commander Elie Hobeika wrote in his memoirs that the massacre at the camps had been carried out contrary to Israeli instructions. If this is true, it reduces Sharon’s culpability but the safety of the camps was, regardless, Israel’s responsibility as the occupying power and it is improbable that the IDF did not know what was happening just down the road.

Despite his aggressiveness on the battlefield, Sharon was ultimately a pragmatist. During the Camp David talks with Anwar Sadat, he advocated the dismantling the settlements in the Sinai if it bought peace. In 2003, Sharon accepted a Road Map to Peace proposed by the United States, European Union, and Russia. Israel adopted the Disengagement Plan the next year, and by August 2005, all Israeli settlements in Gaza and a few in the West Bank had been abandoned. Sharon faced strong opposition not only from the military and intelligence arms but also within his own party. Among the public, initial support for his plan was at nearly 70% but dropped to approximately 55% by the time the settlements had been removed, probably due to disenchantment with implementation.

Yet Sharon’s military record and reputation for aggressive strategy gave him credibility in any peace overture – few Israelis had forgotten that their prime minister had fought in every one of their country’s wars. In popular parlance, he was Israel’s Nixon who could go to China. To be clear, Sharon’s plan was no naïve utopia – it was merely a foundation upon which peace could be built if, as he stressed, he found a reliable partner for peace. Palestinians were not consulted in the removal of settlements, nor did Israel give up control over Gaza’s coast or airspace. Furthermore, the construction of the security fence was accelerated.

Sharon was a deeply controversial figure, a war criminal even, for those who think that life is quantifiable and can be neatly codified. A pertinent question to ask is whether Israeli history would have been different without Sharon. Given the country’s policies and other behaviour, at Entebbe for example, it is unlikely that Suez, the Six Day War, or Lebanon could have been avoided; it would just have been someone else instead of Sharon.

It is ironic that the final legacy of a man of war was peace – almost. After conquering land for Israel and expanding Jewish settlements throughout his career, Sharon’s last days were spent considering land for peace and giving up the settlements. The former Israeli prime minister has been made out to be a monster but his did nothing more than many generals in war. Even the haloed George S Patton was implicated in the massacre of 73 Italians at Biscari, and the same callous approach to prisoners of war was shown at Normandy on D-Day. Similarly, over 10,000 German prisoners died at Rheinwiesenlager, the Allied POW camp, from starvation, dehydration, and exposure. There is also the case of the massacre of the Dachau prison guards by American soldiers who flew into a rage at the sight of the camp’s inmates. While one crime does not excuse another, these incidents illustrate the nature of war.

Ariel Sharon remains one of Israel’s most popular sons, and for all the differences they may have had with him, Israelis will miss him. May G-d comfort him among the other mourners of Zion and Jerusalem.

המקום ינחם אותך בתוך שאר אבלי ציון וירושלים


This post appeared on Daily News & Analysis on January 11, 2014.

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