deeply to the core of international relations theory as the origins of diplomatic alignments. If only one of the great powers had chosen a different alliance strategy at any of several critical junctures over the past century, the course of world history might have been radically altered. Germany might have succeeded in the conquest of Europe, or it might have been deterred from hostilities altogether. Much depended on Great Britain, which avoided entangling itself in continental crises until each world war had already become inevitable. By making a stronger commitment to France in the early 1910s, or by forging a close partnership with the Soviet Union in the late 1930s, Britain might have been able to persuade German leaders that military conoict would not have been worth the risk. Given the enormous stakes of great power politics, it is of vital importance for the aeld of international relations to provide a compelling account of how states choose their allies and adversaries. The academic debate over alignment has centered on two schools of thought within the realist paradigm. One view posits that states tend to balance against the most powerful actor in the system; the other asserts that states concern themselves only with speciac threats to their national security. Using these theories as a point of departure, many scholars have also explored secondorder factors that affect great power alignments, including offense-defense balance, revisionist motives, domestic regime characteristics, and intra-alliance bargaining dynamics. Such works have not directly challenged the core asThe Political Economy of Alignment

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British rearmament and the Treasury, 1932-1939

The Political Economy of Alignment: Great Britain's Commitments to Europe, 1905–39

https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/S0020818300033087

The foreign policy of a declining power

This book integrates strategy, technology and economics and presents a new way of looking at twentieth-century military history and Britain's decline as a great power. G. C. Peden explores how from the Edwardian era to the 1960s warfare was transformed by a series of innovations, including dreadnoughts, submarines, aircraft, tanks, radar, nuclear weapons and guided missiles. He shows that the cost of these new weapons tended to rise more quickly than national income and argues that strategy had to be adapted to take account of both the increased potency of new weapons and the economy's diminishing ability to sustain armed forces of a given size. Prior to the development of nuclear weapons, British strategy was based on an ability to wear down an enemy through blockade, attrition (in the First World War) and strategic bombing (in the Second), and therefore power rested as much on economic strength as on armaments.

Arms, Economics and British Strategy: From Dreadnoughts to Hydrogen Bombs

Between 1889 and 1939 Britain created security for itself through alliances, rearmament, or appeasement (either alone or in some combination). The existing literature emphasizes the role of geopolitics, domestic characteristics, and individual idiosyncrasies to explain Britain's choices. I argue that within Britain, two broad and logrolled coalitions (outward-looking internationalist bloc and inward-oriented nationalist faction) battled to advance their faction's preferred security strategy and to capture the associated distributive benefits. Supporters and opponents understood that how Britain secured itself would create internal winners and losers. Supporters and opponents also recognized that any changes in the security strategy would have domestic redistributional consequences. I apply this model to Britain and use a longitudinal controlled comparison over three periods: 1889–1914, 1914–1919, and 1919–1939.

background

Politics and National Security: The Battles for Britain

Over ten years have passed since Michael Howard offered what he himself called a controversial thesis about British defence policy before the Second World War. This was that ‘the Empire brought Britain no strength in her dealings with Germany. Yet British strength had nevertheless to be dissipated in the Empire's defence.’ By 1937 the needs of home defence against air attack and of imperial defence seemed so overwhelming toBritish policy-makers that the cabinet decided that no expeditionary force could be spared to help maintain the European balance of power. Howard stressed that he was offering only a ‘very rough preliminary sketch’, which was ‘probably distorted and certainly incomplete’, in view of the limited range of documents which he had had time to consult. In particular, what was missing from his thesis was any attempt to give weights to the relative importance of home and imperial defence problems as explanations for lack of preparation to commit land forces to help allies on the European continent.

British rearmament and the Treasury, 1932-1939

Citations

The Political Economy of Alignment: Great Britain's Commitments to Europe, 1905–39

The foreign policy of a declining power

Arms, Economics and British Strategy: From Dreadnoughts to Hydrogen Bombs

Politics and National Security: The Battles for Britain

The Burden of Imperial Defence and the Continental Commitment Reconsidered

Related Papers (5)

The Collapse of British Power

British military policy between the two world wars

Theory of International Politics

British rearmament 1936–9: Treasury,trade unions and skilled labour

The Rise and Fall of British Naval Mastery