Historia Global: a geopolitica da transicao imperial, entre Gra-Bretanha e EUA (livro)

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Table of Contents

H-Diplo Roundtable XVI, 26 on Mapping the End of Empire: American and British Strategic Visions in the Postwar World [25 May 2015] [discussion]
by George Fujii
H-Diplo Roundtable Review
Volume XVI, No. 26 (2015)
Published by H-Diplo to the H-Net Commons on 25 May 2015, and accurate as of that date

Roundtable Editors:  Thomas Maddux and Diane Labrosse
Roundtable and Web Production Editor:  George Fujii
Commissioned for H-Diplo by Thomas R. Maddux

Introduction by Akira Iriye

Aiyaz Husain.  Mapping the End of Empire:  American and British Strategic Visions in the Postwar World.  Cambridge:  Harvard University Press, 2014.  ISBN:  9780674728882 (hardcover, $49.95/£36.95/€45.00).

URL:  http://www.tiny.cc/Roundtable-XVI-26

Contents

Introduction by Akira Iriye, Harvard University. 2
Review by Fritz Bartel, Cornell University. 5
Review by Lucy Chester, University of Colorado Boulder. 10
Review by Benjamin Grob-Fitzgibbon, University of Arkansas. 15
Author’s Response by Aiyaz Husain, Office of the Historian, U.S. Department of State. 18
© 2015 The Authors.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 United States License.

Introduction by Akira Iriye, Harvard University
Aiyaz Husain’s Mapping the End of Empire provides a fresh opportunity to re-evaluate the geopolitical approach to the study of international history. That approach, often referred to as ‘realism,’ considers power as the fundamental factor in international relations. The key actors are states, governments, and military forces that, combined in some fashion, define the world ‘realities,’ which are seen to be dependent on such factors as balance of power, geography, and alliances. Each state determines its security strategy by taking these factors into consideration, an act which is fundamentally seen as a ‘rational’ exercise. Since a few nations – the great powers – are capable of maintaining such power, the ‘world order’ is in effect an equilibrium (or its absence) established by them.



Such an approach to the study of international relations saw its heyday during the early stages of the Cold War, namely from shortly after the end of the Second World War through the onset of the détente in the 1970s. Promoted by writers like the diplomat and historian George F. Kennan, the international relations theorist Hans Morgenthau, and former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, scholars analyzed power relations and geopolitical vicissitudes. In such a framework, the history of international relations was little more than a story of ‘the rise and fall of the great powers,’ as best exemplified by Paul Kennedy’s 1987 book with that title.[1] Husain’s book may be put in the context of this venerable historiographic tradition. It is filled with references to geography, geopolitics, and power. It is as if he is consciously seeking to revive the realist school of international history.



That tradition has not been without challenges. Its overriding preoccupation with power politics has been questioned at two levels. One school of thought tries to relativize military power – what Harvard political scientist Joseph Nye Joseph Nye calls ‘hard power’ – by introducing economic, social, and cultural factors – ‘soft power’ – into a discussion of international relations. A country’s foreign affairs in such a framework would be a product not simply of power equations but also of its economic institutions, educational system, and social relations. These efforts have broadened our understanding of how foreign policy decisions are made.



A second approach redefines international affairs away from a geopolitical preoccupation into something broader so that phenomena and themes that cut across national boundaries, such as  migrations, environmental disasters, human rights, cultural exchanges, even ‘global consciousness,’ would be considered legitimate subjects of study. The result would be to transform our conception of international affairs into something like transnational relations. The transnational turn in the study of foreign affairs has grown quite influential since the 1990s.



Read against such a historiographic background, Husain’s book gives the impression that it is an attempt at going back to the tradition of realist historiography. However, as the three reviews indicate, this no simple reversion to the conventional historiography. Where earlier writers spoke of power realities, Husain’s key term seems to be ‘mental maps,’ that is, geography as conceptualized mentally. By contrasting U.S. ‘globalism’ with Britain’s ‘regionalism’ after 1945, for instance, Husain seems to be suggesting that what matters is as much mental as geopolitical.



The three reviewers are in agreement that this is a unique approach to the study of British and U.S. strategies in the Middle East and South Asia during the transition period from the Second World War to the Cold War. It makes eminent sense to put the conventional story of this transition into the framework of changing mental maps. Sometimes, as the reviewers note, official mental maps are ambiguous and even contradictory, but it is far better to recognize such confusion than to persist in geopolitical determinism.



Participants:

Aiyaz Husain is a Historian in the Policy Studies Division of the Office of the Historian at the U.S. Department of State. He holds a BA in History from Yale University and a Ph.D. in International Relations from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy. His articles and reviews have appeared in The Boston Globe, Tablet, the American Journal of International Law, Cold War History, the Journal of Cold War Studies, and other publications. Mapping the End of Empire is his first book. He is currently writing a global history of the Anglo-World, 1800-2000. The views expressed here are his own, and do not necessarily reflect those of the U.S. Department of State or any other U.S. government agency.



Akira Iriye is Charles Warren Professor of American History, Emeritus, Harvard University. His publications include Cultural Internationalism and World Order (John Hopkins University Press, 1997), Global Community: The Role of International Organizations in the Making of the Contemporary World (University of California Press, 2004), and The Globalizing of America: American Foreign Relations, 1913-1945 (Cambridge University Press, 1993).



Fritz Bartel is a Ph.D. candidate at Cornell University, where he focuses on the international history of the Cold War and the history of capitalism. His article, “Surviving the Years of Grace: The Atomic Bomb and the Specter of World Government, 1945-1950” is forthcoming in Diplomatic History.  Currently, he is completing his dissertation tentatively titled, “The Privatization of the Cold War: Détente and the Rise of Global Finance,” which will examine the pivotal role of Western commercial banks in the politics and economics of the late Cold War.



Lucy P. Chester is Associate Professor of History and International Affairs at the University of Colorado Boulder and the author of Borders and Conflict in South Asia: The Radcliffe Boundary Commission and the Partition of Punjab (Manchester UP, 2009). She earned her PhD in History from Yale in 2002. Dr. Chester’s current research examines connections between British India and the Palestine Mandate in the decades leading up to Britain's withdrawal. Her recent publications have appeared in the Journal of Historical Geography, Sh’ma: A Journal of Jewish Responsibility, and an edited volume on Order, Conflict, and Violence (Cambridge University Press, 2008).



Benjamin Grob-Fitzgibbon received his Ph.D. from Duke University. He is currently Cleveland C. Burton Professor of International Programs, Associate Professor of History, and Director of the International Relations/Studies Program at the University of Arkansas. He has written three books, most recently Imperial Endgame: Britain’s Dirty Wars and the End of Empire (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011). His current research explores the effects of decolonisation on Britain’s interactions with the European continent.

Review by Fritz Bartel, Cornell University
How does an empire know when its time has come and gone? When does it become clear that an empire’s responsibilities and ambitions far outreach its material capabilities? As the United States’ twin habits of accruing debt to China and intervening militarily in every corner of the world continue apace, these questions lurk behind today’s headlines with ever increasing relevance. They also motivate Aiyaz Husain’s new book, Mapping the End of Empire, in which the author traces Great Britain’s imperial retrenchment and the United States’ expanding global ambition in the 1940s.  Over the course of nine chapters that discuss Anglo-American diplomacy in Palestine, Kashmir, the Levant, Indonesia, and the founding of the United Nations, Husain makes extensive use of American and British archival records to reconstruct each nation’s strategic vision at the dawn of the postwar era. Husain argues that the British and American governments maintained different ‘mental maps’ of Eurasian geography in the mid to late 1940s, and that these divergent conceptions of geography affected policy in meaningful ways.


Husain titles these British and American geographic outlooks regionalism and globalism, respectively. For Husain, regionalism refers to the British Labour government’s conviction that “Turkey and Greece, Palestine and Egypt, Iran and Arabian oil, are all really wrapped up in the same package,” (4) and that therefore British policy governing the retreat from empire should take account of Muslim opinion in this region. The author argues that British influence in the region “relied increasingly on Arab complicity” (44), and convincingly demonstrates that the Atlee government was ever mindful of how its policies, particularly in Palestine and Kashmir, would be perceived in the Arab world. Husain ably demonstrates the perceived interdependence of these two theaters of imperial withdrawal, as the Labour government readily assumed that Muslim reactions to political events would primarily be driven by religious solidarity instead of national, local, or economic interests. As Great Britain beat a hasty retreat from many areas of formal imperial control, Husain makes clear that the Atlee government believed the Middle East would be the most important region for the future projection of a more modest imperial role and focused its resources accordingly.



Of course, as Great Britain fell, the United States rose. Husain writes that American globalism “echoed the manifest destiny of nineteenth-century frontier expansion and suggested aspirations toward a worldwide Monroe Doctrine for a new era of American primacy” (5). But beyond comparisons to the Monroe Doctrine and Manifest Destiny, it is difficult to tell what exactly Husain means by globalism. At various points, globalism refers to containment [its “basic precept” (4)], the American inclination toward universal and moralistic rhetoric, anti-colonialism and support for United Nations (UN) trusteeships, securing the supply of oil from the Middle East, and the retention of oversees military bases after the Second World War. This capacious and often contradictory understanding of American globalism leads to two problems in the book that I will explore below.



First, Husain attributes policy outcomes to American globalism that most American officials at the time believed to clearly detract from U.S. global strategic interests. A closer look at the book’s first case study on the end of the British mandate in Palestine helps illustrate this point. On the eve of World War II, the British government issued a White Paper outlining its policy for the coming decade in Palestine. Its tenets were threefold: the creation of an independent and unified state after a ten year transition period; limits on the ability of Jewish settlers to purchase land; and most significantly at the time, a requirement of ‘Arab acquiescence’ to Jewish immigration to Palestine, which could not exceed 75,000 individuals over the next five years. When the terms of the immigration regulations expired at the end of World War II, Zionist leaders lobbied both British and American officials to expand the immigration quota, particularly now that there were an estimated 100,000 Jews in Europe who had been displaced by the war and now sought resettlement. They found a receptive audience in the Truman White House, where officials such as Clark Clifford, David Niles, and eventually Harry Truman himself, adopted the cause of increasing Jewish immigration to Palestine and, of course, in time recognized the state of Israel. As the Atlee government slowly realized that it could not oppose increased Jewish immigration in the face of American support for it, they sought the next best alternative – to increase American participation in resolving Palestine’s fate. Despite significant reluctance in the State Department and the military, the Truman White House slowly became involved, at first endorsing the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine, then proposing a UN trusteeship over Palestine to stabilize the transition to an independent Israel, then considering American military intervention to enforce the partition and prevent an Arab invasion of country, and finally recognizing Israel in May 1948.



Throughout these chapters, Husain presents British policy coherently and persuasively. Unable to create or impose a solution that pleased both Zionists and Arabs, Prime Minister Clement Atlee and Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin shrewdly sought ways to spread the blame, first to the United States and then to the United Nations.  Their overriding goal in the postwar Middle East was to create “a sea of friendly successor states” (47) in the wake of formal British colonialism in the region, and they were not going to let the fate of Palestine endanger this broader goal. They were, in short, exemplary models of Husain’s regionalism.



Husain’s discussion of American policy, on the other hand, is perplexing. The author writes at the beginning of his second chapter, “the course of Anglo-American diplomacy to resolve the Arab-Israeli dispute…proved just how differently [the British Foreign Office and the U.S. State Department] conceived of the territory of Palestine and its immediate regional context” (52). While the British government considered Palestine within the context of the broader Middle East, Husain claims that important constituencies in the American government considered Palestine in conjunction with the plight of European Jews. Driven by globalism, these officials maintained a “quasi-Braudelian” (11) view of the Mediterranean and believed the resettlement of European Jews in Palestine would serve American interests if considered in a broader global context. This led the Truman administration to support increased Jewish immigration to Palestine after the war, to consider sending American troops to enforce UN resolutions, and finally to recognize the state of Israel.

          

The problem is that very few American officials appear to have held this view. In fact, most sounded very much like their British “regionalist” counterparts. Throughout the 1940s, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the vast majority of State Department officials, and the nascent American intelligence agencies warned the Roosevelt and Truman administrations that active support for the Zionist cause would endanger broader U.S. strategic interests in the region and around the world by inciting hostile Arab reaction. In discussing potential U.S. support for partition, Husain writes that the Joint Chiefs of Staff believed that American support “could endanger a wide range of U.S. interests” from military basing rights to the Marshall Plan (60). The State Department Policy Planning Staff could not have been clearer in its opposition.



In the Mediterranean and the Middle East, we have a situation where a vigorous and collective national effort…could probably prevent the area from falling under Soviet influence and preserve it as a highly important factor in our world strategic position. But we are deeply involved, in that same area, in a situation [in Palestine] which has no direct relation to our national security, and where the motives of our involvement lie solely in past commitments of dubious wisdom…(294, n35)

          

So why, then, did the Truman administration support policies that so much of the government believed were counter to American global interests? There was one other mental map that weighed on the minds of the Truman White House in 1947 and 1948, but it had little to do with the world beyond American shores. That of course was the U.S. electoral one.  Throughout the body of his chapters on Palestine, Husain follows the historiographic lead in granting significant explanatory power to domestic political concerns in the run-up to the 1948 presidential election. He quotes Truman, who wrote about a decision to support partition at the United Nations, “I do not think I ever had as much pressure and propaganda aimed at the White House as I had in this instance” (61). But despite his own overwhelming evidence of domestic politics considerations, Husain focuses his conclusion on a claim that rests on a much thinner evidentiary base. “Globalism led officials at the White House…to connect the plight of Jews fleeing Europe with the future of Palestine” (76). There is no doubt that the Truman White House connected the plight of European Jews with the future of Palestine, but there is little reason to believe it did so because of the mandates of American globalism. Instead, as Husain’s evidence from military and diplomatic officials shows, U.S. global strategic interests counseled precisely the opposite policy.



The second problem with Husain’s discussion of American globalism stems from the comparative structure of his argument. In framing his analysis as a comparison between national “sets of assumptions” through which “groups of officials in Washington and London viewed the postwar world” (7), Husain ascribes cohesion to American strategic thought where there was little, particularly with regard to the issues and regions of the Global South that populate his book. If the military and the State Department were united in the belief that intervention in Palestine did not serve American strategic interests, on other issues the two bureaucracies were stridently opposed.



In an interesting, albeit not historiographically new, section on the status of the Japanese Mandated Islands at the end of World War II, Husain clearly describes how the State Department believed the islands needed to become a UN trusteeship in order to maintain the credibility of the United States’ commitment to the principles of the Atlantic Charter, while the military demanded that the United States annex them to serve as cornerstones of the forward projection of U.S. military power in the Pacific.[2] The British Colonial Office looked on with a keen interest in the outcome: if the U.S. military prevailed, the office would have a much easier time defending Britain’s own direct colonial possessions from being placed under UN trusteeship. As the dispute worked its way up to President Roosevelt’s desk, the two nations’ bureaucracies were not driven by national “mental maps,” but instead by a kind of transnational version of “where you stand depends on where you sit,” with the U.S. military and the British Colonial Office aligning against the anti-colonial internationalism of the State Department. Even the dispute’s muddled outcome - the islands became a “strategic area” trusteeship administered by the United States, effectively exempt from international oversight – signal that the definition of U.S. strategic interests in this period was contested and not the product of a coherent globalism.

          

Husain might have done well to make room for these contests and contradictions in the overall structure of his argument. As the book makes clear, the U.S. government was rife with bureaucratic disputes and widely divergent visions for the course of American foreign policy. But when the author draws conclusions, he returns to the notion that an overarching globalism guided U.S. policy. American policymakers and the public at large agreed that an American globalism was necessary after the Second World War, but what form this global engagement would take remained an open question and heated topic of debate.



One way to deal with this diversity of viewpoints while still tracking the development of an overarching U.S. strategic outlook would have been to trace the consolidation of a particular brand of U.S. globalism over the course of the 1940s. The disparity between the Atlantic Charter and NSC-68, which roughly bookend the decade, suggests that profound changes swept over U.S. strategic thought in those years. But the organization of Mapping the End of Empire, which follows neither a strictly chronological nor thematic format, does not allow Husain to pursue this and in fact makes it difficult to understand how the rapidly changing geopolitical context, particularly the burgeoning Cold War, influenced the diplomacy Husain describes. The book roughly follows a U-shaped chronology, with early chapters focused largely on events from 1946-1949, middle chapters focused on debates over the postwar order from 1943-1945, and a last section centered again on the postwar years. This makes for moments of repetition in the narrative, with Palestine, Kashmir, and the founding of the United Nations each handled twice in different sections of the book. But more importantly, it fails to engage with the question of how American globalism was forged as much by the unexpected course of the postwar era as it was by any American postwar plans. Husain writes, “regionalism was a prism through which postwar British strategists were forced to see the world [original italics]” and suggests a “deeper impact of geopolitical thought” on the development of American globalism (247). But if globalism influenced postwar events, surely those events also influenced the nature of American globalism. A narrative structure attuned more precisely to chronology would have allowed Husain to trace the effects of this feedback loop on the nature of American globalism.



With Mapping the End of Empire, Aiyaz Husain has examined an enormously important period in international history, one that resonates strongly with the present day. Husain’s thorough research has shed light on the intricate bilateral diplomacy that marked the end of the Pax Britannica and the advent of the American imperium. But without a rigorous definition of American globalism, Husain leaves substantial ambiguities about the nature of that imperium and the history of its founding moments.



Review by Lucy Chester, University of Colorado Boulder
In Mapping the End of Empire: American and British Policy Visions in the Postwar World, Aiyaz Husain examines a transitional moment when the United States and Britain reevaluated their international priorities and possibilities. Husain argues that two distinct strategic worldviews, U.S. globalism and British regionalism, played major roles in shaping each power’s foreign policy during the power shifts that followed World War II. He illustrates the interaction of these views primarily by means of two case studies: the end of the Palestine Mandate and the creation of Israel, where he argues that U.S. and UK perspectives clashed, and the crisis in Kashmir, where they largely cohered. Husain contends that these mental maps also conflicted during the creation of the United Nations, with U.S. globalism emerging victorious in establishing a global body that (selectively) championed self-determination and sovereignty. In both Israel/Palestine and Kashmir, the United Nations failed to take effective action; UN inaction in the early post-war years is a major theme of the book. Overall, the book provides a thought-provoking analysis of geographical perceptions and their influence on policy during a pivotal period.


One of the book’s strengths is Husain’s integration of scholarship on decolonization, the early Cold War, and the origins of the UN. He contributes to all three fields and shows convincingly that they should be “interwoven in a single grand narrative of sweeping change” (263). Particularly influential for him is Wm Roger Louis, whose imperial histories span multiple subfields and time periods.[3] This book is multi-archival international history in the same vein as that of Paul Kennedy, whose thoughts on imperial overstretch are clearly on Husain’s mind.[4] Ronald Robinson, John Gallagher, and Alice Denny’s concept of the ‘official mind’ is at play in Husain’s focus on how institutions develop distinctive ways of seeing.[5] He also adapts Neil Smith’s geographical analysis of America’s place in the twentieth century.[6] In doing so, Husain effectively melds insights from a range of subfields. He demonstrates the importance of looking at the many continuities between the periods of colonial control and early independence, which runs counter to scholarly tendencies to specialize in categories like pre-war vs. post-war, or colonial vs. independent. And his linking of events in the Middle East and South Asia, showing how these areas were connected in the minds of imperialists and anti-colonialists alike, suggests that historians of the Middle East need to pay attention to South Asian history and vice versa.



The book focuses on what Husain sees as the differing worldviews of U.S. globalism and British regionalism. For Husain, British regionalism was based on a “holistic” (44) view of Muslim areas as an interconnected whole, from the Levant to India. He calls this area an “arc of crisis” (59), where Britain’s primary concern was with Muslim reaction in one area on that arc to events in another area. U.S. globalism proves more difficult to define. Husain describes it as “inchoate,” “rough,” and “ill-defined” (158, 265), suggesting that it was not yet clear in the mind of U.S. policymakers themselves in the period during and after World War II. Husain sees globalism as based on Washington’s desire for strategic bases, trade routes, and air and sea communication lines; he emphasizes that U.S. policymakers considered Europe and the Middle East to be linked by oil and by the need to resettle Jewish refugees. He also stresses U.S. interest in Kashmir as related to U.S. fears of Soviet penetration and to the region’s potential value in a possible future world war. But he concludes that in this pre-containment era, U.S. policy was “unguided by clear precepts or strategic doctrine” (269).



Husain turns to the UN for further evidence, citing the Atlantic and UN charters as evidence of the victory of U.S. globalist designs (with their hallmark emphasis on self-determination). He offers a systematic explanation for the lack of robust great power intervention, arguing that “unresolved tensions between competing mental geographies [that] persisted into the United Nations era” (207) explain the Security Council’s failure to intervene effectively in Israel-Palestine, Kashmir, or Indonesia. Through the UN’s observer missions in Kashmir and in Israel-Palestine, Husain traces the early development of peacekeeping as a compromise between embarrassing inaction and vigorous peace enforcement operations that would have required great powers to make significant troop contributions.



Husain also examines the ways that these overarching perspectives related to local nationalist movements. He suggests that the success of the Zionist movement and the Pakistan campaign lay in part in their compatibility with U.S. and British geographical assumptions. U.S. globalism and UK regionalism both supported a durable Pakistan, as a defense against Soviet influence and as a key element of Central Asian stability. In contrast, Husain argues, regionalism pulled Britain in a pro-Arab direction at the end of the Palestine Mandate, while American globalism meshed with Zionism (although in this case there were important intra-U.S. divisions between the White House and the State Department that Husain perhaps underplays).



Husain’s discussion of nationalism focuses on the efforts to establish Pakistan and Israel, with some attention to the secularism of Indian nationalist leader Jawaharlal Nehru but little discussion of Palestinian Arab views. Husain argues that the movements to create Israel and Pakistan were reinforced by American globalism in ways that others strands of anticolonial activism were not. But surely it would have been useful to examine other anticolonial movements that did not dovetail as neatly with great power views in order to clarify the limits of those perspectives.



The book’s underlying theme seems to be that British officials understood and sought to operate within the regional limits that resulted from their post-war economic and strategic difficulties, while U.S. officials had a broader but somewhat incoherent vision. As Husain writes, the “inchoate American vision of the postwar world” was in search of intellectual guidance, while “regionalism was a prism through which postwar British strategists were forced to see the world” (247, emphasis in original). The conclusion makes clear that Husain sees the British reevaluation as largely successful, in contrast to the French and Dutch refusals to recalibrate their imperial footprints. Oddly, he does not offer a clear analysis of U.S. failure or success in reshaping its foreign policy. The book implies that although U.S. globalism was not yet clearly developed, it became stronger and more distinct in the 1950s, after NSC-68’s articulation of the perceived Soviet threat, but would have benefitted from a stronger statement on this point.



Husain covers a huge amount of material, ranging across a wide geographic area. There is no obvious chronological framework that would cover all this material. But as it stands, the book’s structure is sometimes confusing, particularly when the narrative steps back in time. It begins, in Chapters One through Four, with the Israel/Palestine and Kashmir case studies intended to show the policy effects of globalism and regionalism. Chapter Five then moves to briefer studies of French policy in Syria and Lebanon and of Dutch decision-making in Indonesia during and after World War II, contrasting these empires’ efforts to cling to power with what Husain sees as “a British Empire willingly in retreat” (130). Chapter Six steps back to examine the intellectual development of globalism and regionalism within the wartime and post-war U.S. and British governments. Chapter Seven returns to wartime planning to explain the development of the UN system, especially its internal contradictions between the Security Council’s role as a “consortium of power” and the Charter’s aspiration to create a “world of coequal, sovereign states” (204). Chapter Eight traces the earlier origins of European thinking about sovereignty, in order to examine the relationship between European conceptions of sovereignty and South Asian and Jewish visions of statehood. Chapter Nine investigates the development of UN peacekeeping and the emergence of weak post-colonial states.



Husain ultimately presents a dynamic picture of attitudes developing and hardening over time, but the reader has to work to understand how this process unfolded. The initial focus on the two primary case studies has the effect of presenting U.S. globalism, in particular, as a fully formed worldview; not until Chapter Six does it become clear that the globalism of the 1947-1948 period rested on recent and somewhat shaky foundations. Although it would be difficult to impose a chronological structure on a story with such broad geographical range, Husain’s analysis of the development over time of key ideas and institutions would have been better served by a framework that more clearly brought out the contrast between origins and results.



This multifaceted project incorporates geopolitical, comparative, and transnational approaches. Husain also provides insights into practical issues like the impact of personnel movement within institutions and the ways that mental maps are shared. He acknowledges that the historian’s task is complicated by the fact that important assumptions are often implicit rather than clearly stated. He also makes the intriguing suggestion that governmental cartography, like policy documents that include certain regions while excluding others, can transmit the assumptions that underlie mental maps.



The subject of mental maps would seem to lend itself readily to visual analysis of the physical maps resulting from these perspectives. The book includes six maps, all obtained from U.S. archives, which are mentioned briefly in the text. These images are rich sources in and of themselves that would have rewarded close-grained analysis. For example, since Husain identifies the ‘M Project’ as the “core intellectual database of wartime American globalism” (245), a detailed discussion of the M Project map in Figure 6 would have been enlightening. Discussion of maps could help illustrate Husain’s intriguing suggestion that “visual cues that trigger certain elements of mental maps—can allow aggregated conceptions of territory . . . to accumulate as a form of organizational knowledge” (162). More cartographic illustrations would also have helped explain the role of U.S. air power and far-flung military bases in shaping the post-war American worldview. Perhaps most usefully, visual analysis could have highlighted inconsistencies in these geographical visions.



Husain has carried out extensive archival work in the U.S. and UK, as is appropriate for a book focused on American and British thinking. He also uses the published papers of Zionist leader Chaim Weizmann and at least some documents from Indian nationalist organizations, including the Muslim League and Indian National Congress; it is not clear how deeply he has delved into the primary sources for other nationalist thinkers (due in part to the fact that the book lacks a bibliography). Because it relies primarily on archival material generated by colonial powers and on published sources, the book sits less comfortably in the literature on anticolonial nationalism than it does in other historiographies. Since Husain’s avowed focus is on British and U.S. policy, it may be unfair to criticize him on this point; analysis of nationalist thinking is not central to this book. But Husain’s conclusions about the interplay between Western geopolitical outlooks and nationalist ideologies are intriguing enough to leave the reader wishing he had applied his analytical framework to a more in-depth study of nationalist politics.



British officials with regionalist perspectives reacted, at least in part, to the perceived views of anticolonial thinkers, particularly those who saw themselves as part of transnational or transcolonial associations. Many Muslim opponents of empire invoked membership in the ummah, the worldwide Muslim community, when encouraging their followers to protest against Western influence in other areas. Husain briefly discusses the Khilafat movement of the 1920s, in which Indian Muslims expressed their concern over the precarious position of the Ottoman sultan-caliph, but does not mention the surge in Indian interest in Palestine sparked by the 1937 Peel Commission’s proposal to partition the mandate. In addition, the book’s focus on Palestine warrants more discussion of Arab views. And there were other anticolonial mental maps; Nehru in particular felt a strong connection to anticolonial activists outside of India, regardless of religion or ethnicity, and had at least some socialist links (through, for example, the League Against Imperialism). American globalism, similarly, was in part a reaction against the perceived worldview of communist sympathizers. All in all, examining the mental maps of U.S. and UK opponents would have enriched Husain’s argument.



Husain seems to take much of what British and U.S. officials and diplomats said and wrote at face value. One wonders whether some U.S. officials who, for reasons of their own, favored policies that were compatible with globalism and thus adopted the language of that perspective in order to persuade superiors who subscribed to globalist views. In other words, were there times when officials cited ‘Muslim unrest’ or ‘communist infiltration,’ even though their own concerns lay elsewhere, because they knew such arguments would be well received in London and Washington?  If so, the documents they generated might contribute to a façade of overwhelming acceptance of globalism when in fact U.S. officials held more diverse views. Husain acknowledges the existence of internal disagreements on both sides of the Atlantic, but understates them in his overall argument, which tends to depict policymakers as more or less on the same page as their compatriots. It would have been more convincing and ultimately more interesting to analyze the role that such disagreements played in the development of these worldviews. It would also have been useful to see more on British criticism of U.S. globalism and vice versa.



This inventive and thought-provoking book will interest scholars of UK and especially U.S. post-war foreign policy. It is relevant to ongoing policy questions about what might be called ‘right-sizing hegemony,’ to adapt a phrase from another work on the importance of place.[7] Husain concludes that Britain’s post-war regionalism serves as a case study of “how redrawn mental maps are essential for reframing the basic geopolitical assumptions that underlie major strategic reassessments at transitional periods in history” and closes with the persuasive proposal that “collective official perceptions of geography serve as a powerful and compelling construct for gauging . . . a great power’s ideal global footprint” (272). If British regionalism was a “sensible blueprint for British overseas power projection in the postwar world” (273), what does Husain think of U.S. power projection?  Was postwar globalism the source of later overstretch, or was it another sensible blueprint?  Husain doesn’t say, but this book would seem to invite the reader to consider how—and how well—today’s U.S. policymakers are redrawing their mental maps.

Review by Benjamin Grob-Fitzgibbon, University of Arkansas
Geography matters. Or rather, the perceptions of geography held by strategists in London and Washington, DC mattered, particularly in the post-war era when Anglo-American policy-makers, faced with the realities of decolonisation and post-colonial rebuilding, sought to re-shape the world. So argues Aiyaz Husain in his Mapping the End of Empire: American and British Strategic Visions in the Postwar World. Husain contends that British and American post-war strategies can only be understood in the context of their geographic assumptions and perceptions. Great Britain, an empire in retreat, revised its “geographic conception of [its] postwar interests,” becoming “more limited, more practical, and more concerned with only the most vital interests” (3). The United States, in contrast, expanded to “fill distant, residual spaces vacated throughout the postwar world by defeated Axis enemies and imploded empires” (2). The ‘American Century’ replaced the Pax Britannica, and “both Atlantic powers—one falling, one rising—adhered to distinct geographical conceptions of their security needs in the new international order, conceptions that helped shape their respective postwar foreign policies” (3).


In exploring these geographical conceptions, Husain maintains that the British government adopted a foreign policy predicated on a “new regionalism that both pared down the key geographical nodes that anchored British defense planning and drew special linkages between them,” whereas the United States developed a “new globalism, one that echoed the manifest destiny of nineteenth-century frontier expansion and suggested aspirations toward a worldwide Monroe Doctrine for a new era of American primacy” (4-5). Thus, Husain argues, “assumptions about geography came to form key underpinnings of the geographical ‘official minds’ driving American and British postwar foreign policy and the strategic thought behind it” (8). To make this argument, he explores in detail the British withdrawal from Palestine and the Indo-Pakistani conflict over Kashmir, before turning to shorter case-studies of British and French approaches to the Levant, American policy in the Levant, British and Dutch conceptions of the East Indies, and the American attitude to Indonesian independence. Finally, he examines how these different strategic world-views came together in the newly-formed United Nations, arguing that “the UN system represented a reconciliation of the American and British geographical conceptions of postwar order” (187).



Mapping the End of Empire offers an original and challenging argument, one which if taken seriously promises to reconceptualise our understanding of the end of empire and Anglo-American post-war strategy. There are, however, some areas that require further exploration and explanation. The title is, perhaps, an over-reach (his work is limited to just one area of the end of empire—the greater Middle East) and it is from this that the main shortcomings occur. First, the book’s structure is confusing. In chapters one and two, Husain provides a very good narrative account of the end of the British mandate in Palestine, followed in chapters three and four by a similarly strong treatment of Kashmir. There is, however, no connection between the two, the section on Palestine ending abruptly and the one on Kashmir beginning with no transitory statements or analysis. The section on Palestine does not reference Kashmir and vice versa; indeed, there is no reason why the section on Kashmir could not have come before that on Palestine. These two sections read, in fact, like two separate projects, with very little connection. Chapter five continues this trend, offering fourteen pages on the Levant and fifteen on the Dutch East Indies/Indonesia, without reference to either Kashmir or Palestine. Each of these sections—whilst highly interesting and well-written in their own right—read as separate narratives of a particular geographical location, not as part of a larger narrative. There are certainly dots to connect, but Husain does not do so. It is not until the sixth and seventh chapters that he revisits his central argument about mapping and geographical perceptions in a systematic fashion. These are by far the most interesting and original chapters in the book and expand his twin concepts of the origins of American globalism on the one hand, and British regionalism and retreat on the other. Given their importance to the work, this reader is left wondering why they did not come before rather than after the narrative sections on Palestine, Kashmir, the Levant, and Indonesia, which would then have allowed Husain to draw from the material in these chapters and analyse his case-studies in a more methodical way.



More fundamentally, Husain supports his argument about American globalism and British regionalism using what he calls the ‘strategic arch’ as his evidence, an area that stretched from the Levant through the Middle East to South Asia. He implies that whereas American strategic planners viewed this arch as part of a global map that considered simultaneously all other areas of the world (hence, ‘globalism’), British planners approached this arch on its own terms without reference to other areas of the world (hence, ‘regionalism’). American globalism demonstrated the truly worldwide aspirations of a rising superpower, whilst British regionalism betrayed the shrinking ambitions of a declining power. Yet was this really the case? British policymakers certainly approached the Levant, Middle East, and South Asia as a single whole (Husain’s narrative makes this perfectly clear), and looked with a different analysis upon, say, Malaya or Kenya or the Dominions of Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, but was this not a continuation of the way they had always managed their empire? Had British strategic thinkers ever developed a ‘grand strategy’ for the British Empire in the same way that American strategists developed a post-war grand strategy in the Cold War? Did they not simply continue in decolonisation in the same vein as they had at the height of their empire? After all, the India Office had always been a separate entity from the Colonial Office which, later, was quite distinct from the Dominions Office—and all were separated from the Foreign Office. Have not British strategic thinkers always viewed the world through the lens of what Husain calls ‘regionalism’? If so, how is a post-war regionalism demonstrative of a declining power?



Furthermore, Husain’s own research seems to suggest that the British did indeed make worldwide connections, if in a different sense from American strategic thinkers. He writes: “The Middle East was the central node in the empire’s linkages of the home islands with India, the Far East, and Australia. Suez provided the critical seaborne communication between the Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean for commerce and naval defense. Alexandria hosted the principal British naval base in the region. Oil reserves in Iraq and Persia and the Abadan refinery near the Iran-Iraq border represented key energy supplies for the British military, while the pipeline from northern Iraq to the Eastern Mediterranean port of Haifa constituted a critical piece of infrastructure for the transhipment of oil”  (179-180). Yet Husain does not limit his comments to these connections in the Middle East. He acknowledges that there was “also a regionalism that bound the British Isles to all of the empire, as well as the dominions that made up the Commonwealth” (181). It is here that Husain’s concept of regionalism versus globalism is on softer ground, as the visions of British policymakers were indeed worldwide, if focussed in a more pragmatic and compartmentalised way than the perceptions of the American government.



The argument Husain puts forward in this work is a bold one, and makes compelling reading. His introduction lays out an exciting concept, one that the later chapters of his work explore fully. Yet by restricting his focus to the greater Middle East, he is not able to explain how one British ‘regionalism’ interacted with another ‘regionalism’, nor how they fit into a larger Cold-War ideology (which British strategic thinkers certainly adopted). The reader is left in the dark about the overall British map of its world. His narrative chapters on Palestine, Kashmir, the Levant, and Indonesia are captivating in their own right, but do not provide a strong base of support for his argument; his concepts of mapping and geographical perceptions are not as well integrated as they might have been. Despite this, Husain’s books deserves to be read, and read widely, as it introduces a new concept to our understanding of the end of empire and post-war British and American strategic thinking. His is an argument that should be taken seriously by historians and one which will no doubt have an influence on the thinking of scholars for many years to come.

Author’s Response by Aiyaz Husain, Office of the Historian, U.S. Department of State
I am deeply grateful to Akira Iriye for introducing these reviews, and thank Fritz Bartel, Lucy Chester, and Benjamin Grob-Fitzgibbon for their detailed comments.



Before I address Fritz Bartel’s comments, I should clarify my conception of British regionalism: in my formulation it was not, as Bartel argues, a worldview that led the British to link developments throughout the territories covered in the book with the Middle East. Instead, the book holds that regionalism led British officials to link developments in parts of the Islamic world like South Asia and the Middle East with one another, anchored in the assumption that unrest or discontent anywhere along the so-called ‘arc of crisis’ could spread rapidly. So not only did Arabs in Palestine express solidarity with Pakistani and Kashmiri Muslims; the Arab-Zionist dispute likewise prompted then leader of the All-India Muslim League, Muhammad Ali Jinnah, to cause problems by organizing ‘Palestine Day’ activities.



Bartel writes that my work “…attributes policy outcomes to American globalism that most American officials at the time believed to clearly detract from U.S. global strategic interests.” This is true, in a sense. Despite considerable numbers of military officials, Arabists in the State Department, and others who believed that U.S. recognition of the Jewish State could harm American interests in the strategic oil-rich Middle East and the wider Muslim world, the Truman White House still chose to do so. Truman’s decision was both rooted in a minority view and underpinned by globalism.



Bartel also holds that “very few American officials” seem to have linked Palestine with the Eastern Mediterranean world. That linkage is precisely the one behind the “one other mental map in the minds of the Truman White House in 1947 and 1948” that he considers the “electoral” one. This “electoral” map -- and the humanitarian inclination to save European Jews displaced or newly liberated from occupied Europe -- was perfectly compatible and concomitant with the mental map of globalism: Palestine was on the eastern edge of the Mediterranean—and therefore Europe. And it was a logical refuge for European Jews. For many like Truman and his White House advisors David Niles, and Clark Clifford, European Jews were first and foremost Europeans—whose plight America had to address. Electoral politics surely did impact the Truman administration’s calculus in late 1947 and early 1948, but those considerations were complementary to, and bound up with, the mindset that a European war mandated European solutions—like relocating the displaced to the shores of the Eastern Mediterranean/the Levant. Indeed, perhaps the domestic political appeals to save the plight of displaced Jews resonated as loudly as they did in the United States because they were reinforced by an American sense of solidarity with Zionism’s Judeo-Christian religious underpinnings. In this sense, mental maps of globalism saw Jews bound for Palestine as European migrants seeking refuge in the southeastern edge of the continent.



Bartel claims that I “[ascribe] cohesion to American strategic thought where there was little.” However, the book time and again makes clear that globalism and regionalism were not monolithic worldviews shared by all, and that different organizational entities were more or less ‘globalist’ or ‘regionalist’ in their outlooks vis-à-vis one another. In discussing the degrees to which globalism pervaded the U.S. government, for instance, I contrast the Joint Chiefs of Staff with the State Department explicitly; and discuss how the British Foreign Office was more ‘regionalist’ in its outlook than the Colonial Office in the run-up to the London Conference of 1946-7, before the Colonial Office abandoned plans for partition, and British policy on Palestine became synchronized at last around February 1947. I should note that my acknowledgment of the diversity of interagency views on both sides of the Atlantic occurs not only in the body chapters; it is reiterated in the conclusion.



Bartel also claims that I “might have done well to make room for these contests and contradictions in the overall structure of [my] argument.” I would contend that I have done so. As I state with candor in both body chapters and the book’s conclusion, mental maps did not always shape policy outcomes. They were heuristics; interpretive lenses through which large numbers of officials saw key parts of the world.



I am impressed by, and thankful for, the penetrating insights in Lucy Chester’s careful reading of this book, given that she is probably the foremost expert in the geographical bases for, and implications of, the partitions of Palestine and British India. I fully concede that the cases chosen to illustrate facets of regionalism and globalism were selective, and that the book could have considered other movements that were less compatible with great-power worldviews.



On the point that the book makes a stronger statement about the relative success of British policy as opposed to American policy, I agree completely that the book does not weigh in more decisively on the implications of U.S. globalism. The reason for this is that I feel that much of the full impact of globalism was not entirely felt until after after the Roosevelt/Truman years, and NSC-68 and the U.S. application of the doctrine of containment of Communism throughout much of the world. In a sense, the historical moment treated in the book was a ‘right endpoint’ for British policy whose implications could be assessed more easily; for America in the world, it was more of a ‘left endpoint’ marking the beginning (or at least the continuation) of a new era of global engagement, whose fortunes had yet to be determined.



Chester and Grob-Fitzgibbon both claim that the presentation of the book’s content is not strictly chronological, a qualm echoed by other readers during the prepublication stages. The issue of structure is one that I thought long and hard about given the scope and complexity of this book. Ultimately, I decided that the parallel trajectories of Jinnah’s rise and Jewish Agency Executive Committee Chairman David Ben-Gurion’s struggle to establish a Jewish state were stories that needed to be traced in self-contained ways, without the intertwining and haphazard switchbacks that would have been inescapable had both tales been told strictly chronologically. This decision was reinforced by my desire to add treatments of the creation of the United Nations and (at least token) accounts of the French withdrawal from the Levant and the Dutch evacuation from the East Indies. It was my rationale that attempts to trace all of these complex stories in parallel through a strictly chronological narrative would have confused many a reader, jumping chaotically from New York to Washington to London to Jerusalem to Karachi. The fact that the book comprehensively traces Zionism’s ascent from the late 1890s and the history of Kashmir from the late nineteenth-century British Empire onward would have made the intertwining of these narratives in order to preserve chronological order all the more difficult.



The claim that the book would have been enriched by deeper treatments of the mental maps of anticolonial leaders beyond the sketches of Jinnah’s idea of Pakistan and Ben-Gurion’s territorial objectives is absolutely true. Sadly I was unable to undertake research in Pakistan and Israel to expand the treatments of those cases, which would have provided more multidimensional coverage of those nationalist movements. This, however, would likely have expanded the length of the book even more than the sizable 364 pages it reached in final form, and my goal was to keep the book readable and accessible for a wide audience—a goal that seems to have been achieved given the book’s reviews in outlets like The Wall Street Journal and The Hindu.



Partly echoing Bartel’s comments, Chester’s point that globalism and regionalism are often presented as monolithic views reflects choices that I felt were necessary to make the book’s basic premises about American and British worldviews cohere. I will let readers judge for themselves how comprehensive the book’s treatments of interagency discord (such as between the State Department and the U.S. military and the rift between the Colonial and Foreign Offices on Palestine mentioned earlier), and Anglo-American clashes (especially over the radioactive issue of trusteeship) are. But they are there. They have been acknowledged; the book does not omit them. In the end, the American and British governments took specific decisions; they adopted strategies guided by specific precepts. I felt that these had to be characterized and rendered after all the divergences and disputes shook out. Without the rubrics of ‘globalism’ and ‘regionalism,’ the book would have become a sea of details and accounts of contradictory bureaucratic priorities without a basic interpretive paradigm or argument about what American and British strategies were, in the final balance. Decisions like Truman’s directive to recognize the Jewish State and Churchill’s acquiescence to the Trusteeship scheme did give shape and definition to the fateful courses that America and Britain chose.



Finally, I would slightly modify Grob-Fitzgibbon’s interpretation of my argument that “whereas American strategic planners viewed this [strategic] arch [from the Levant through the Middle East to South Asia] as part of a global map that considered simultaneously all other areas of the world (hence, ‘globalism’), British planners approached this arch on its own terms…” What the book is really about is rather how British strategists considered/valued the linkages within the Muslim lands and peoples along this arch, whereas American officials instead looked without, outward from its two endpoints: westward toward the Mediterranean and Western Europe from Palestine, and eastward/southward down into the subcontinent from Kashmir.



This, ultimately, is the central insight of Mapping the End of Empire, one that I believe will challenge and reshape existing approaches to the study of the midcentury end of the British Empire (and perhaps other European colonial empires), and that will educate a broad general audience on this critical period in the history of the modern world in the process.

Notes

[1] Paul Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers (New York, 1987)

[2] The most detailed account of this debate remains Wm. Roger Louis, Imperialism at Bay: The United States and the Decolonization of the British Empire (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978).

[3] See for example Wm Roger Louis, The British Empire in the Middle East, 1945-1951: Arab Nationalism, the United States, and Postwar Imperialism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984).

[4] Paul Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers: Economic Change and Military Conflict from 1500 to 2000 (New York: Vintage Books, 1987).

[5] John Gallagher and Ronald Robinson, with Alice Denny, Africa and the Victorians: The Official Mind of Imperialism (London: Macmillan, 1961).

[6]  Neil Smith, American Empire: Roosevelt’s Geographer and the Prelude to Globalization (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003).

[7] Brendan O’Leary, Ian S. Lustick, and Thomas Callaghy, Right-Sizing the State: The Politics of Moving Borders (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2002).