US/UK 'Special Relationship', Britain's financial empire

An interesting post at Duck of Minerva on Britain's relations with the US.

It has long been noted that the UK's national interest foreign policy-wise is halfway between the US and the EU. Yet what Brits fail to realise is that our value to the US very much depends on being part of the EU. Actually, I think a lot of the political elites do understand this but the nationalist (or perhaps a better word would be 'sovereigntist') lobby is still very powerful and a lot of parliamentary political fates depend on it, especially for the Tories.

The one major thing that's missing from Stacey's analysis is the UK's financial sector, which has the British political system in its pocket, even now. The Conservative government seem to see Britain's future in its economic and financial empire, connected through its former colonies in the British Virgin Islands, Gibraltar, etc. (Britain's "Second Empire", as Ronen Palan calls it.) The overriding national interest, as the right-wing elites see it (though not so much the right-wing electorate -- that's the schism), is to maintain Britain's position within the world's financial networks and to dig in deeper if possible. Hence the austerity agenda isn't just neoliberal ideological madness (though it is that) -- they also intend to strip away as much regulation as possible while choking off the last remnants of social democracy so as to give Britain an edge in the 'race to the bottom' of the barrel of global finance. David Cameron's recent rhetoric on tax avoidance, etc. would suggest the contrary to this but his words are hollow and in no way represent his government's actions or intentions. Because this path is a road to economic -- and consequently political -- ruin for most of the country the real question is whether they can achieve all their goals before the next election, which they look rather likely to lose at this rate.

I don't know as much as I should about Britain's military capabilities but it is remarkable that our government continues to insist (as did the Labour govt. before it) that we still need a so-called independent nuclear deterrent but we can do without the kind of resources that would actually be of use in the 21st century neo-colonial, interventionist style of warfare that seems to be the new norm. Maybe Britain needs to get it's priorities straight. I won't hold my breath.

Anyway, when push comes to shove on the EU I expect Britain's relationship to remain largely unaltered. If renegotiation happens it'll involve getting out of whatever taxes or regulations the EU wants to put on the City of London. Leaving the EU would be generally popular with the public but business has no desire for it and that, as I have mentioned, is where Britain's national interest is seen to reside.

Materialism and World Politics Conference: ANT and IR, Offshore

I finished my paper for the upcoming Materialism and World Politics conference hosted by the Millennium journal at the LSE over the weekend. Apparently papers are going to be posted on the conference website but I've posted mine below anyway (also available here). My paper is for the Theory Talks panel on 'Accounting for Symmetries in the International.'

The paper explores the benefits of Actor-Network Theory for International Relations by taking up the case of 'offshore' in general and offshore financial markets in particular.  I take ANT to be a social ontology (that makes things themselves social) and a spatial topology (that defines space by connection between elements, not in terms of an abstract container).  I find that what I call 'absolute' conceptions of space are intimately bound up with social/material dualism and that offshore can only be consistently, symmetrically and materially understood through ANT's 'network' space.  I conclude that ANT has great potential for IR but we need to avoid, as John Law argues, naturalising any one spatial topology.  My case study indicates a strong future for ANT in IR but, moreover, I suggest that IR could benefit ANT insofar as, in many ways, it does not fit its ontological and methodological presuppositions (and therefore it challenges them).