§3. Allies in the 20th Century-100-103.pdf

Minister Robert Peel, reacted swiftly by anchoring warships off the coast of the Pacific Northwest. On December 2, 1845, President Polk asked Congress to give the British notice that the United States was unilaterally withdrawing from the Treaty of 1818. Nationalist cries of “Fifty-Four Forty or Fig...

Minister Robert Peel, reacted swiftly by anchoring warships off the coast of the Pacific Northwest. On December 2, 1845, President Polk asked Congress to give the British notice that the United States was unilaterally withdrawing from the Treaty of 1818. Nationalist cries of “Fifty-Four Forty or Fight” spread throughout the United States, alluding to the northern boundary of Oregon (latitude line of 54 degrees, 40 minutes). The two countries were now on the verge of another war. According to one author, Polk “gambled that war in the Pacific Northwest was the last thing the British needed at this moment. Though powerful, the British Empire had its hands full dealing with armed conflicts with the Maori in newly colonized New Zealand, even as they were embroiled in the First Afghan War, and, closer to home, dealing with famine in Ireland”. Eventually, the boundary disputes between Britain and the 271 United States were settled by the signing of the Oregon Treaty of June 15, 1846. War was 272 averted but Britain gave the United States most of what it demanded, setting the border at 49 degrees north, in effect ceding what are the present-day states of Washington, Oregon, Idaho, and parts of Montana and Wyoming. C. American Civil War: 1861-65 The American Civil War (1861-65) had profound effects on the relationship between America and Britain (to say nothing of the world political economy). Most notable was the “Alabama” dispute involving a Confederate ship built in Liverpool during the American Civil War. 273 Britain allowed the Alabama to sail from Merseyside and to prey upon American shipping. In effect, the vessel captured some seventy Federal ships during the Civil War. Once the war was over, the United States sought compensation from Britain, requesting $15 million in damages, by reason of the latter country infringing rules of neutrality. The dispute was submitted to a mixed commission, which contained a neutral element, to solve the legal dispute between the parties. The commission held in favor of the United States, leading to 274 the extreme unpopularity of the then British Prime Minister, William Gladstone. Britain nevertheless “benefited” from the Civil War as well. While the Union’s blockade of Confederate ports caused high unemployment in many Lancashire towns, laid-off cotton workers continued to support the Union because of their opposition to slavery, as did Liverpool dockers. This played a significant role in the growth of British labor unions. Additionally, the lack of cotton imports from the American South pushed Britain further into imperial adventures in India and elsewhere in order to obtain new supplies. In the aftermath of the Civil War, British investors, following the lead of J.P. Morgan, poured funds into the 271 James Shapiro, Shakespeare in a Divided America (London: Faber & Faber, 2020), p. 63. 272 For the text of the Oregon Treaty of 1846, see https://www.pbs.org/weta/thewest/resources/archives/two/oretreat.htm (accessed August 5, 2020). 273 The Alabama dispute spawned much debate in international law as the settlement marked an important victory for the principle of resorting to pacific arbitration for international disputes. See, inter alia, Malcolm N. Shaw, International Law, 6 Ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), pp. 111, th 135, and 1048. In French, cf. Jean Combacau, Serge Sur, Hubert Thierry, and Charles Vallée, Droit international public (Paris: Montchrestien (Précis Domat) 1981), p. 568. 274 The establishment of a “mixed” commission itself stemmed from the Jay Treaty of 1794 between Britain and the United States. The Treaty of Ghent of 1814 incorporated the concept of a “neutral” element within the commission. Precisely, in the Alabama dispute, the United States and Britain as parties each appointed one member only. The King of Italy, the President of the Swiss Confederation and the Emperor of Brazil each appointed one further member. The outcome was a “kind of collegiate international court”: cf. D.W. Bowett, The Law of International Institutions (London: Stevens and Sons, 1982), at 259. 100  U.S., which financed the Second Industrial Revolution, in the late nineteenth century, and fueled the growth of American economic power. §3. Allies in the 20 Century th The USA did not want to get involved in WWI (1914-1918). President Woodrow Wilson initially promised to stay neutral (American believing they had nothing to do with this war + being thankful to have escaped Europe in the first place). Wilson was re-elected in 1916, again promising neutrality. He nevertheless soon changed his mind: Congress voted to declare war on Germany in 1917. Wilson’s “Fourteen Points”. Ultimately, the USA never ratified the Treaty of Versailles because Wilson didn't have the majority in the Congress. The United States would not become involved in the Second World War before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. Four months earlier, meeting “somewhere at sea”, on a boat moored off the coast of Newfoundland, President Roosevelt and Prime Minister Churchill reached agreement and issued a joint declaration “of certain common principles in the national policies of their respective countries on which they based their hopes for a better future for the world”. The joint declaration would become known in history as the Atlantic Charter of August 14, 1941, setting down the foundations of what would officially become the United Nations on June 26, 1945. In the course of their conversations, Roosevelt and Churchill exchanged ideas on their vision of a new, post-imperial world order. Roosevelt remarked: “I can’t believe that we can fight a war against fascist slavery, and at the same time utterances: not work to free people all over the world from a backward colonial policy”. As to be 275 expected, Churchill was taken aback by the American president’s utterances. The British something prime minister, who had fought in the Boer War in South Africa , who had voiced staunch 276 that opposition to freedom for Indians , and who had recently lost Canada as a British dominion , 277 278 someone says 275 Quoted in Philippe Sands, “Britain’s Colonial Legacy on Trial at The Hague”, The New York Review of Books, June 23 , 2020, Internet available at https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2020/06/23/britains-colonial- rd legacy-on-trial-at-the- hague/?utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=NYR%20American%20fascism&utm_content=NYR%20A merican%20fascism+CID_474e344a100a1a5faf58981a281be8f4&utm_source=Newsletter&utm_term=B ritains%20Colonial%20Legacy%20on%20Trial%20at%20The%20Hague (accessed June 29, 2020). 276 Having to do with decolonization and control of a vast gold-mining complex (Witwatersrand), the Boer War was fought in South Africa from October 1899 to May 1902 between Great Britain and the two Boer (Afrikaner) republics – the South African Republic (Transvaal) and the Orange Free State. It was the largest and most costly war fought by the British between the Napoleonic Wars and the First World War. Winston Churchill arrived in Cape Town at the very beginning of the Boer War and was captured two weeks later by the Boers. He escaped one month later and took part in several battles. Churchill returned to England a hero in July 1900. 277 Churchill and Mahatma Gandhi first met in London in November 1906 (Churchill then as undersecretary of state for the colonies and Gandhi then as a spokesman for his countrymen in South Africa). Later, Churchill consistently attacked Gandhi after Gandhi became a proponent of civil disobedience, epitomized most notably by the Salt March which took place from March to April 1930 to protest British rule in India and which made Gandhi the preeminent leader of India’s struggle for freedom from British rule. Churchill called Gandhi a “malignant subversive fanatic” and “a seditious Middle Temple lawyer, now posing as a fakir of type well known in the East, striding half-naked up the steeps of the Vice-Regal palace”. For extended discussion, see Ramachandra Guha, “Churchill, the Greatest Briton, Hated Gandhi, the Greatest Indian”, The Atlantic, April 6, 2019, Internet available at https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2019/04/churchill-gandhi-briton-indian- greatest/584170/ (accessed June 29, 2020). 278 The independence of Canada was an incremental process, spread out over several decades, beginning with the British North America Act of 1867 and stretching to the passage of the Canada Act in 1982: “Canada’s transition from a self-governing British colony into a fully independent state was an 101 would have been stunned by FDR’s words but at the same time, “he desperately needed the United States first to get into the war (Pearl Harbor was still months away)”. The case being, 279 the Atlantic Charter spelled out a summary of the two nations “hopes for a better future for the world”. The two leaders met several times to establish a war strategy. UK + USA collaborated in the development of an atomic bomb (Manhattan Project). Winston Churchill famously acknowledged a “special relationship” between the people of Britain with the Commonwealth of Nations united under the Crown (Australia, Canada, New Zealand, South Africa, etc.) and the people of the United States who had broken with the Crown and gone their own separate way. Churchill coined the expression in 1945. Sadder and wiser after the Second World War, the statement was initially meant to bypass a narrowly construed interpretation of the Anglo-American relationship. According to the New York Times Herald, quoting Churchill’s comments: “We should not abandon our special relationship with the United States and Canada about the atomic bomb and we should aid the United States to guard this weapon as a sacred trust for the maintenance of peace”. Shortly thereafter, Churchill would develop these ideas and his views of this “special relationship” in his famous “Sinews of Peace” address delivered at Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri on 5 March 1946. 280 “Neither the sure prevention of war, nor the continuous rise of world organization will be gained without what I have called the fraternal association of the English-speaking peoples … a special relationship between the British Common wealth and Empire and the United States. Fraternal association requires not only the growing friendship and mutual understanding between our two vast but kindred systems of society, but the continuance of the intimate relationship between our military advisers, leading to common study of potential dangers, the similarity of weapons and manuals of instructions, and to the interchange of officers and cadets at technical colleges. It should carry with it the continuance of the present facilities for mutual security by the joint use of all Naval and Air Force bases in the possession of either country all over the world. There is however an important question we must ask ourselves. Would a special relationship between the United States and the British Commonwealth be inconsistent with our over-riding loyalties to the World Organization? I reply that, on the contrary, it is probably the only means by which that organization will achieve its full stature and strength”. evolutionary process, which arose in such a gradual fashion that it is impossible to ascribe independence to a particular date”: see Andrew Heard, Canadian Independence, Internet available on the website of Simon Fraser University at https://www.sfu.ca/~aheard/324/Independence.html (accessed June 29, 2020). A clear step towards independence lay in the adoption of the Statute of Westminster in 1931 that restricted the applicability of British law in the Dominion. See most notably s. 4 of the Act: “No Act of the Parliament of the United Kingdom passed after the commencement of this Act shall extend, or be deemed to extend, to a Dominion as part of the law of that Dominion, unless it is expressly stated in that Act that the Dominion has requested, and consented to, the enactment therof”. 279 Philippe Sands, “Britain’s Colonial Legacy on Trial at The Hague”, op. cit. 280 The “Sinews of Peace” address is particularly famous for Churchill’s depiction of Soviet-dominated Eastern Europe and his metaphorical reference to an Iron Curtain: “From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic an ‘iron curtain’ has descended across the Continent. Behind that line lie all the capitals of the ancient states of Central and Eastern Europe. Warsaw, Berlin, Prague, Vienna, Budapest, Belgrade, Bucharest and Sofia; all these famous cities and the populations around them lie in what I must call the Soviet sphere, and all are subject, in one form or another, not only to Soviet influence but to a very high and in some cases increasing measure of control from Moscow”. 102 In large part, Churchill’s awareness of the “special relationship” that existed between English- speaking peoples came from his own multicultural background. While his family, on the paternal side, came from the illustrious English aristocratic background of the Marlboroughs (J.B. Priestley considers that John Churchill, Duke of Marlborough was “incomparable, the greatest [soldier] England has known ), his mother – Jennie Jerome was born in Brooklyn, 281 New York. Some authors even ascribe Native American ancestry to Churchill’s family. 282 Legend would have it that Jennie’s grandmother on the maternal side was one Anna Baker – an Iroquois Indian. Churchill himself, a romantic at heart, is believed to have given credence to this urban legend. The case being, Churchill’s upper-class English upbringing and style 283 was balanced with characteristic American traits. J.B. Priestley refers to his being responsive to the new, the untried, or the gamble that might pay off. He similarly refers to Churchill’s contempt for “what was routine, conformist, safely mediocre”. Even Churchill’s manner of 284 speech may be ascribed to American origins. He spoke with a gusto and brashness that annoyed – or amused – the more genteel English political aristocracy. He drew on emotions and shared them with the whole nation – to the point of letting tears run down his cheeks when delivering speeches in the House of Commons or sobbing with families in Blitz-torn London. Unarguably, Churchill had a common touch. §4. The “Special Relationship” – 2020 A. The Common Law What the USA and the U.K. share is the common law. Dark blue = pure system of common law Light blue = influenced by CL, mixed systems 281 J.B. Priestley, The English, op. cit., at 72. Winston Churchill’s father – Lord Randolph Churchill – was Chancellor of the Exchequer under Lord Salisbury and leader of the House of Commons after the general election of 1886. A brilliant yet unstable politician, Lord Randolph Churchill could have aspired to become Prime Minister. He died young, in 1895, aged forty-six. 282 See Ralph G. Martin, Jennie : The Life of Lady Randolph Churchill. Volume 1 : The Romantic Years 1854-1895 (New York: Prentice Hall, 1971). 283 See website of the Churchill Centre at : http://www.winstonchurchill.org/i4a/pages/index.cfm?pageid=103 (visited April 29, 2009). 284 J.B. Priestley, The English, op. cit., at 92. 103