International Relations
Posts in The Copybook tagged ‘International Relations’
Our peculiar brand of democracy and liberty is a noble thing, but we should be wary of recommending it to other countries.
Historian Mandell Creighton believed unlike our Continental neighbours, when the English laid down our Constitution we were driven not by ideological purity or a passion for order but by a desire to protect our customs and little oddities. Though this worked well for us, foreign nations had some trouble getting it to work for them — and they were starting to notice it.
We English would not hand out so much unsolicited advice to foreign countries if we knew more about their history.
In a lecture entitled ‘The English National Character’ historian Mandell Creighton argued that the English were the first to create for themselves a national character, standing aloof from the debates and upheavals of the Continent and muddling along in our own way. Over the years, this had made the English into one of the great nations of the world, but it had also made us insensitive and frankly very annoying.
Richard Cobden questioned both the wisdom and the motives of politicians who intervene on foreign soil.
At the Vienna Congress in 1815, Napoleon’s former empire was shared out by Britain and other European Powers. A semi-autonomous Kingdom of Poland was allotted to Russia, which Russian troops occupied in response to the November Uprising of 1830-31. Calls grew loud for the British and Turkish Empires to restore ‘the balance of power’, but Richard Cobden heard only arrogant self-preservation.
Richard Cobden told an Edinburgh peace conference that the biggest threat to the United Kingdom’s security was her own foreign policy.
In May 1853, Russia took military action to liberate Christians in Moldavia and Wallachia (modern-day Romania) from Turkey’s harsh rule. In England, the talk was of sending troops to defend poor Turkey, and of Russia’s secret designs on western Europe. That October, Richard Cobden told a peace conference in Edinburgh that our fears and economic hardships were all of our own making.
Sir Bernard Pares warned that after the Great War, Western powers must not assume Germany’s role as supercilious bully.
In 1916, Sir Bernard Pares looked ahead cautiously to the end of the Great War, and to the prospect of an end to Germany’s high-handed economic domination over Russia. Knowing the Russian Emperor Nicholas’s goodwill towards England, Pares urged Prime Minister Herbert Asquith’s government to set an example of restraint, liberty and understanding, and not simply to take the German Empire’s ignoble place.
John Bright asked the people of Birmingham to spread the word that a great nation, like any good citizen and neighbour, does not meddle officiously in the affairs of others.
In the 1850s, prevailing opinion in Europe was that peace and prosperity depended on the diplomacy and military interventions of a few exceptional ‘Great Powers’. John Bright MP, however, told his Birmingham constituents that nations had to observe the same humble morality as citizens do. No one likes domineering and meddlesome people, and history shows that there is always a reckoning eventually.