Date: 10/09/2024
Author: Mark Kaye and Max Dixon
Mark Kaye
Max Dixon
Bio:
Mark is a second year PhD candidate (Area Studies). With a background in contemporary British and European history and politics, his PhD research focuses on the cultural, social and political consequences of Brexit. Funded by the SCDTP, Mark’s primary supervisor is Wolfram Kaiser. Mark also works as the Media Coordinator for the Centre for European and International Studies Research.
Max is a first year PhD student at the University of Portsmouth, his thesis considers the role of Taiwan in British foreign policy after democratisation and is supervised by Dr Isabelle Cockel.
Introduction
The House of Commons, once labelled by Winston Churchill as the ‘the shrine of the world’s liberties’, has in recent years borne witness to numerous vibrant parliamentary debates on the very state of the world and the UK’s place in it. These include the furious dispute in February 2024 over British support for a ceasefire in Gaza and the instant unity proffered to Ukraine in February 2022. Yet, what significance should we place on these debates in the formation of British foreign policy? Moreover, how do we as academics approach such a topic? Here we argue that analysing parliamentary debates is quintessential to understanding the construction of British foreign policy, and more broadly, that such work should focus on the linguistic and discursive elements of such debates.
We hold that it is necessary to illuminate the variegated, contested and sometimes contradictory ways in which parliamentarians have discursively constructed international relations and geopolitical events, as well as the responsibility and capability of the UK to respond to them. We further contend, and seek to evidence that interpretivism, rooted in critical realism, is best suited to this task. However, this article is also underwritten by a normative objective: to evidence that in an increasingly unstable world where global military spending has risen considerably, it is important to question positivist assumptions that postulate that material capabilities dictate the global trajectory of security and state’s policies. In times of global crisis politicians and policymakers are not merely observers but also interpreters. As Ron Hirschbein has argued in his analysis of the Cuban Missile Crisis, Kennedy and Khrushchev were not merely presented with an immutable future deferred by objective events, but were “interpreters of cryptic texts and symbolic performances”. An interpretivist recognises the agency and autonomy of policymakers and thus, by extension, their capacity to challenge and change the fatal instability that shrouds contemporary international relations.
Interpreting Foreign Policy
There is no “pre-discursive geography of international relations”. Instead, the interpretivist paradigm focuses on the ‘meaning making’ inherent in discursive constructions, such as using discourse analysis to investigate foreign policy debates which enables researchers to recognise the “logic of interpretation” in the making of foreign policy. Through this logic, one interpretation overcomes another. Where Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is deemed as an existential threat to European stability, Israel’s offensive in Gaza is framed as a form of pre-emptive defence. As Roxanne Doty argues, nothing ‘means’ in the social world but is animated through the meaning deferred upon it. For the tangible reality of US troops in Grenada is only rendered as important when an ‘American’ nationality is recognised in the soldiers and the geographic space they traverse is rendered as ‘Grenada’. The action is given importance through discursive practices which categorise the event as an invasion, show of force or training exercise.
Thus, the material components of governments in the UK, Iraq and Syria are observable and objective, yet transmit no intrinsic meaning. To this end, the language used by politicians is instrumental to legitimising or making abhorrent particular foreign policy avenues. In studying discourse we can see how certain ‘norms and beliefs’ perpetuate particular policy avenues. Indeed, Ole Wæver’s discourse analysis outlined the ‘structures of meaning’ that underpinned policy decisions on European integration, whilst Jennifer Milliken cites the ‘regimes of truth’ that animated state’s foreign policies and their connection to colonial identities. In studying such ‘regimes of truth’ and their plasticity it enables scholars to recognise the disquieting genealogies of certain policies, questioning seemingly fixed foreign policy traditions.
We posit that it is both instrumental and imperative to recognise the influence of dominant discourses in the construction of British foreign policy. Such an approach, imbued with a vital critical understanding of the inherent colonialities that have long defined British foreign policy is also integral to understanding the practice of British foreign policy. Where British foreign policy once had an ‘oligarchic flavour’, seen as the preserve of the Prime Minister and the Cabinet, the influence of Parliament has developed considerably. In recent years fierce parliamentary debates over Iraq, Syria and Gaza as well as sombre assemblies in the Commons over the withdrawal from Afghanistan and the invasion of Ukraine underscore the extent to which British foreign policy is debated and defined in Parliament.
Good and Evil: Britain in the Middle East
The salience of ‘regimes of truth’ is perhaps most acutely evident in the construction of British foreign policy towards the Middle East. The Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in the early days of the post-Cold War world placed the US and by extension the UK in an international predicament. The enormous complexity of the region refuted the simple binaries that had defined the Cold War, making legitimising military action in a ‘far away land of which we know little’ particularly difficult for the Governments of George Bush Snr. and John Major. Klaus Dodds argues that in such a void, the conflict was framed in terms of a “simple fight between good and evil”, with narratives of the Second World War as a “good and just war” used to explain British involvement. Indeed, numerous references were made in Hansard at the time of the Gulf War that combined the plight of Kuwait with the legacy of the Second World War in fighting autocracy, casting Saddam Hussein’s Iraq as an evil akin to Nazi Germany.
In the run-up to the US-UK invasion of Iraq, Prime Minister Tony Blair in the Commons referred to Iraq as part of the “axis of evil”. In framing Iraq within a ‘tradition’ of British foreign policy of fighting against ‘evil regimes’, this discursive construction sought to legitimise military action. Such discourse was critiqued by Edward Said, author of Orientalism, who chastised politicians whose good-evil dichotomy employed towards Iraq “fabricated an arid landscape for American power”. Parliamentary references to “evil” were used consistently in appeals for British military action in both Libya and Syria underscoring the prevalence of a ‘good versus evil’ meaning structure that underpinned British foreign policy in the Middle East. Yet crucially, such dichotomous discursive constructions belied the fundamental specificity inherent in the conflicts to which they were employed. The all-encompassing ‘evil’ framing afforded to the brutal regimes of Muammar Gaddafi and Bashar al-Assad emboldened a militaristic foreign policy avenue that proved simplistic, when the void left by such regimes was filled by numerous Islamic State offshoots that would later receive an equivalent ‘evil’ framing. Thus, the discursive constructions of an ‘evil’ and existential threat to the UK proved exceedingly crude, for they would be deployed again to the very group that would usurp the regimes initially targeted in British military action.
Following the damning revelations that Saddam Hussein’s Iraq did not possess nuclear weapons, such binaries became harder to sustain. David Cameron’s cautious convention on Parliament’s right to vote on military deployments appears to have recognised the importance of establishing a parliamentary mandate for war. The seismic vote and Government defeat on action in Syria in 2013 shows directly how important parliamentary constructions have become in facilitating or frustrating foreign policy action. In stark contrast to Blair’s appeals to facing down an ‘evil regime’, Cameron couched his appeal on the importance of ‘international law’ in challenging Assad’s use of chemical weapons. However, Cameron’s motion was defeated. This was in part due to Opposition Labour leader Ed Miliband’s refusal to commend military action without a UN Security Council vote to distance his party from the legacies of the Iraq War. In understanding such norms, beliefs and traditions, the manner in which British foreign policy is constructed becomes clear. Indeed, nowhere is this nuance more important than in the midst of the Israel-Gaza war that emerged in October 2023, where simplistic dichotomies of ‘good and evil’ have consistently stymied debates.
Britain and Europe
Perhaps nowhere is the influence of discursive constructions in Parliament and its impact on British foreign policy more prominent than in the debates on the nature of British involvement with its other European neighbours. The UK’s exit from the European Union (EU), otherwise known by its popular portmanteau, Brexit, was one of the most important and consequential events in the UK since the Second World War. Though perhaps more domestic than foreign, Brexit necessitated a seismic reorientation of the country’s foreign policy, concomitant with a re-imagining of its international role.
In its contingent form, Brexit was defined by the political opportunism of the former Prime Minister David Cameron, who sought to dampen the flames of Conservative party infighting over Europe while concurrently extinguishing the growing electoral threat presented by UKIP. Rather than putting out the fire, the referendum became a conflagration that swept through the country, leaving scholars, policymakers and journalists puzzling as to ‘what Britain is and where it is headed’. Yet, Brexit was not merely the consequence of one person’s political miscalculation. It is best understood as a critical juncture, a moment or process rooted in a variety of historical, cultural and political nexuses. To understand how Brexit came about and where it might lead the nation, an examination of the UK’s relationship with Europe that is historically, ideationally and discursively conscious is needed. This can be partially achieved by investigation of the parliamentary record, for, by examining what has been said in Parliament, one attains insight into ‘what was going on’.
Between 1973 and 2015, Members of Parliament (MPs) represented the UK as both at the centre and in the margins of the EU. These perceptions were largely influenced by the protagonists’ personal ideologies and normative positions. However, irrespective of whether the UK was represented as central or marginal to the European project, it was most commonly discursively constructed as in some way distinct to or separate from the rest of Europe. We were either leading or being left behind by them.
In terms of foreign policy, this positioning is rooted in the Churchillian vision of the UK’s three spheres of influence. However, the persistent discursive construction of separateness in parliamentary debates over the forty years of the UK’s membership of the EC/EU reveals a prolonged uncertainty as to whether the UK belonged in Europe at all. Moreover, these discourses of separateness fed into historic narratives of British exceptionalism in Europe, what Daddow has termed the UK’s ‘outsider tradition’ in foreign policy, which together laid the ideational foundations that made the reality of Brexit possible.
The importance of interpretivist investigation of parliamentary discourse becomes perhaps even more salient when seeking to understand the UK’s attempts to reorientate its foreign policy and reposition itself internationally after Brexit. Brexit was a choice between the status quo and the unknown. After the UK – or rather, Wales and England – opted for the latter, it had to be given form and meaning. As it relates to foreign policy and international relations, this was to be articulated in the vision of a ‘Global Britain’. The UK was, Boris Johnson said while Foreign Secretary, to have a ‘truly global foreign policy’. Yet, an examination of the Parliamentary debates and statements in 2019 and 2021 reveals the persistent concerns of MPs with what appeared to be a vague and contradictory foreign policy position, particularly as it related to the EU and the Government’s ambitions for fresh trading arrangements with new international partners.
Jacob Rees-Mogg, former Leader of the House, provided an essentially vacuous vision of British foreign policy and the UK’s international role in an exchange in Parliament in 2019. Responding to a request by Plaid Cymru MP Li Saville to provide impact assessments on the withdrawal agreement, Rees-Mogg told the House his assessment was that Brexit would bring ‘a golden age for the United Kingdom when we are free of the heavy yoke of the European Union’. The then Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, repeatedly turned to this image of a ‘golden age’ in parliamentary debates throughout 2019. Ignoring the wilful misunderstanding of empire and colonial dynamics inherent in these statements for the time being, what they reveal is that for some time, Brexit had taken the form of a creation myth and lacked substantive practical propositions.
An attempt to concretise the idea of Global Britain was made by the then Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab in February 2020, when he told Parliament that the strategy would consist of three pillars: to continue to be the best possible allies and partners with Europe; to be an energetic champion of free and open trade; and for the UK to be an even stronger force for good in the world. Since this explanation, the UK has formally withdrawn from the EU and signed the Trade and Cooperation Agreement. It has also signed landmark free trade agreements with Australia, New Zealand, Singapore and joined the CPTPP, despite the fact that British exports to CPTPP countries in 2018 amounted to less than three quarters of exports in the same year to Germany. The post-Brexit period has also seen the merging of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office with the Department for International Development. As such, the contours of the UK’s post-Brexit foreign policy, and its vision of its own international role, may be coming into sharper focus. However, the UK’s reorientation is still underway and the long-term consequences of Brexit remain obfuscated by the mists of time.
War with China? Taiwan in British foreign policy
The UK has a limited historical association to Taiwan, yet in recent years amidst an increasingly bellicose Chinese approach to Cross-Strait relations and a divergent Taiwanese identity amongst much of Taiwan’s population that has disavowed its historical ‘Chinese’ identity, Taiwan has become a “dangerous flash point” in global politics. Thus, the salience of Taiwan in parliamentary debate and the manner in which British parliamentarians discursively frame Taiwan provides a vital insight into the potential policy avenues London could take in the event of a military confrontation across the Taiwan strait. Indeed, as leading politicians in the United States and Australia, two of the UK’s foremost allies, become increasingly vocal about the prospect of defending Taiwan, undertaking a discourse analysis of references to Taiwan is instrumental to understanding the trajectory of British foreign policy in an increasingly fractious Asia-Pacific.
Furthermore, Taiwan’s complex history and unique international status demands the requisite specificity that an interpretivist approach defers. Taiwan has all the facets of state-hood, its own armed forces, government and currency, yet is overlooked in state-centric theories of international relations, serving as a mere pawn in great-power competition calculations, and as an absent ‘other’ in models that focus on the international institutions from which Taiwan is absent on account of Chinese diplomatic pressure. Indeed, Taiwan is in essence a “philosophical issue” delineated purely by discourse. Taiwan’s convoluted sovereignty vis-à-vis China is inherently defined by competing discourses in Beijing, where it is deemed as an integral part of Chinese territory as a ‘renegade province’. In the US it was once framed as ‘free China’ and is increasingly seen as a vital Asian liberal democracy, while in Taiwan itself a growing ‘Taiwaneseness’ has seen identities diverge across the Taiwan Strait and a distinct Taiwan nation-building dynamic emerge.
How the UK responds to the growing insecurity that such competing discourses brings is vital; any US decision to shed its ‘strategic ambiguity’ on defending Taiwan along with Australia would leave two of the UK’s AUKUS partners at a war footing with China, yet Taiwan has often served as a mere footnote in Sino-British relations. Undertaking a discourse analysis it becomes clear that in the 1990s Taiwan was seen predominantly as an economic opportunity, with fractious Cross-Strait relations akin to a “quarrel in a faraway country”. However, in recent years the discursive constructions of Taiwan have shifted significantly. Ministerial framings of Taiwan’s security as vital to the UK’s economy have served to escalate the role of Taiwan in British foreign policy. The discourses employed frame Taiwan as essential to British economic security, making possible foreign policy avenues that would have been unpalatable were Taiwan’s tensions with China outlined by politicians as a mere relic of the Cold War.
Conclusion
An interpretivist approach to studying British foreign policy is vital for understanding the traditions, trials and trajectory of the UK’s global approach. This problematises British parliamentary discourse, refuting claims of British foreign policy as a rationalist endeavour defined by material realities and objective social facts. Indeed, it is the potency of such perceptions and their manifestation in parliamentary discourses that have throughout the Twentieth and Twenty-first Centuries presented dangerous dichotomies and immutable international instability as a justification for certain foreign policy actions. Instead, an interpretivist approach recognises the complicity of language in making possible certain foreign policy actions, and the role of British parliamentarians in the ‘meaning-making’ of key international issues. As we have sought to show in this article, the extent to which Iraq came to be seen as an existential threat to the UK whilst Europe became an essential ‘other’ in the British political psyche can be charted through the vital task of analysing parliamentary debates.
