Brexit or Bremain: what future for the UK's European diplomatic strategy?

A major public debate on the costs and benefits of the United Kingdom's membership of the European Union is presently under way. The outcome of the referendum on 23 June 2016 will be a pivotal moment in determining whether the EU has a future as a component of the UK's European diplomatic strategy or whether there is a major recalibration of how the UK relates to Europe and more widely of its role within international relations. Since accession to the European Economic Community the UK has evolved an uncodified, multipronged European diplomatic strategy. This has involved the UK seeking to reinforce its approach of shaping the security of the continent, preserving a leading diplomatic role for the UK in managing the international relations of Europe, and to maximize British trade and investment opportunities through a broadening and deepening of Europe as an economically liberal part of the global political economy. Since accession the UK's European diplomatic strategy has also been to use membership of the EU to facilitate the enhancement of its international influence, primarily as a vehicle for leveraging and amplifying broader national foreign and security policy objectives. The strategy has been consistent irrespective of which party has formed the government in the UK. Increasing domestic political difficulties with the process of European integration have now directly impacted on this European strategy with a referendum commitment. Whether a vote for a Brexit or a Bremain, the UK will be confronted with challenges for its future European strategy.     

Britain,the United Arab Emirates and the defence of the Gulf revisited

This article investigates the deepening of the UK's security and defence arrangements with the United Arab Emirates (UAE). In recent years there has been a flurry of diplomatic activity indicating far closer engagement between London and Abu Dhabi. Rather than being an innovative initiative of the Cameron government, the interaction has deeper roots, with this article uncovering the importance of the relatively unknown Defence Cooperation Agreement (DCA) of 1996, signed by the Major government. Furthermore, the UK‐UAE defence relationship is shown to have endured beyond the infamous UK withdrawal from ‘east of Suez’ in 1971. The current engagement is, however, more intense and potentially far‐reaching than it had been in recent decades, with the defence sector being placed at the forefront of UK efforts to bolster the relationship with the oil‐rich Gulf emirate. Using official statements from London and Abu Dhabi, this article suggests that the UK‐UAE relationship has always remained intact, although it lost focus following the end of the Major government until the refocusing on the Gulf by the Cameron government. The article concludes with an assessment of the expectations of the UAE, and the strategic drivers underpinning UK policy.     

A spin of the wheel? Defence procurement and defence industries in the Brexit debates

Whether a ‘Brexit’ would threaten the United Kingdom's national security has become a central theme in the run‐up to the in/out referendum on EU membership. Although national security has been a central facet of both the ‘Remain’ and ‘Leave’ campaigns thus far, there has been little mention of the implications of a Brexit for UK defence industries or defence procurement, let alone formal debate or analysis. The article addresses this gap by analysing the potential implications of a Brexit for defence procurement and industries in the UK and the EU member states. The first section analyses the policy context for a Brexit by exploring existing levels of EU defence procurement integration in the UK's and Europe's defence industries. The second section draws on Jozef Bátora's ‘institutional logics’ framework to identify two pro‐Brexit and two pro‐Remain narratives, each employing differing assumptions on the relative benefits of national sovereignty and closer EU integration The final section analyses the way in which these ‘logics’ or narratives will be deployed by their advocates in the run‐up to the UK's EU referendum. The article concludes that the national security battleground in the 2016 referendum will be fought over competing narratives and arguments, partly because there is a dearth of data and evidence concerning UK and EU defence procurement and industries, which renders this crucial area of national security vulnerable to the politics of spin.     

Entangling alliances? The UK's complicity in torture in the global war on terrorism

The global war on terrorism gives rise to a range of legal, political and ethical problems. One major concern for UK policy‐makers is the extent to which the government may be held responsible for the illegal and/or unethical behaviour of allies in intelligence gathering—the subject of the forthcoming Gibson inquiry. The UK government has been criticized by NGOs, parliamentary committees and the media for cooperating with states that are alleged to use cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment (CIDT) or torture to gain information about possible terrorist threats. Many commentators argue that the UK's intelligence sharing arrangements leave it open to charges of complicity with such behaviour. Some even suggest the UK should refuse to share intelligence with countries that torture. This article refutes this latter view by exploring the legal understanding of complicity in the common law system and comparing its more limited view of responsibility—especially the ‘merchant's defence’—with the wider definition implied in political commentary. The legal view, it is argued, offers a more practical guide for policy‐makers seeking to discourage torture while still protecting their citizens from terrorist threats. It also provides a fuller framework for assessing the complicity of policy‐makers and officials. Legal commentary considers complicity in relation to five key points: identifying blame; weighing the contribution made; evaluating the level of intent; establishing knowledge; or, where the latter is uncertain, positing recklessness. Using this schema, the article indicates ways in which the UK has arguably been complicit in torture, or at least CIDT, based on the information publicly available. However, it concludes that the UK was justified in maintaining intelligence cooperation with transgressing states due to the overriding public interest in preventing terrorist attacks.     

Conceptualising environmental governance in turbulent times: Insights from Brexit and waste in the UK

Institutional turbulence created by the UK's EU exit (Brexit) prompts a wider need to re-think whether our conceptualisations of governance in the environmental sphere sufficiently understand the dynamics of change. In this context, Boltanski and Thévenot's ‘Orders of Worth’ (OoW) framework, has particular merit. This conceptualises governance regimes as composed of compromises between plural and incommensurable orders of the public good, with innate potential for instability; especially - we would add - when the territoriality of governance is in flux. The OoW approach is applied to an analysis of waste governance debates in the UK following the 2016 EU referendum. Documentary and interview data show how present and prospective governance arrangements in the waste and resources sector are subject to rival justifications, with actors advancing different compromises between economic, industrial, civic and environmental orders, but that each is also attached to conceptions of the relevant governance scale (EU, UK, devolved nation). Our study shows the wider potential fragility of environmental reforms, arising from the secondary status of environmental concerns in compromises with dominant market, industrial and civic orders. The ‘orders of worth’ framework requires attention to the scales of political authority being mobilised in disputes, which add their own incommensurability.     

Emerging UK Arctic policy

How is the United Kingdom engaging with changing geopolitics of the Arctic in the twenty‐first century? This article considers the UK's contemporary interest(s) in the Arctic at a time of unprecedented change in the northern latitudes of our planet. In particular, it focuses on the ongoing emergence of UK Arctic policy as an assemblage of processes involving various actors—government officials, scientists and other academics, environmental campaigners, journalists and the private sector—which not only define UK interests but also delimit what the term ‘Arctic’ means to, and demands of, the UK. The focus of the article is directed at the recent activities by the Ministry of Defence, the House of Commons Environmental Audit Committee and the related work of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office to develop an Arctic Policy Framework, drawing on official government documents and a series of interviews conducted between 2010 and 2013 for evidence. The article concludes with the author's thoughts on tensions and contradictions that remain in the UK's policy towards the Arctic and the implications this might have at a time when global interest in the Arctic is growing rapidly.     

The strath report: britain confronts the H‐Bomb, 1954–1955

Late in 1954, the British government convened a secret committee of civil servants to explore the implications of the hydrogen bomb for Britain in a nuclear war. Headed by William Strath, this small and secret cadre of experts thought through the destruction that would follow a thermonuclear attack on the UK. This paper examines the recently declassified “Strath Report” and its ramifications. Drawing on intelligence assessments, technical analysis and economic predictions, its conclusions were profoundly pessimistic. Its portrayal of widespread devastation and the likely collapse of civil society shocked politicians and government officials, and led not only to massive revisions in the UK's plans for war but to official attempts to suppress public discussion of thermonuclear weapons and civil defence.     

European policy under Gordon Brown: perspectives on a future prime minister

Tony Blair's decision to provide an indication of his departure date from 10 Downing Street has generated interest in the policies and style of his most likely successor, the current UK Chancellor of the Exchequer, Gordon Brown. Brown's ambitions for European policy are considered by a number of commentators to be less clear. This is because so far he has not produced a comprehensive vision of how he sees the UK's future relationship with the EU. However, as this article demonstrates, close examination reveals that his position on many aspects of European policy is actually already well documented.     

Discovering Networked Information in the Internet Age: The JISC Resource Guide to Geography & the Environment

As networked information resources are used ever more in higher edu cation, the requirement for subject-specific, quality-assured resource selection assumes greater importance. The UK's Joint Information Systems Committee has implemented the Resource Guide initiative in which seven subject-specific printed and web-based guides to electronic resources have been provided. The centralised coordination of the guides ensures consistency in resource awareness across UK higher education and the training element packaged within each aims to improve students' approaches to resource discovery.     

International reactions to the Scottish referendum

The referendum on whether Scotland should become an independent country will be held on 18 September 2014. This article reflects on the evolution of foreign governments' attitudes towards the referendum since its confirmation in October 2012, and on their expectations should a ‘yes’ vote result. With few exceptions, they have adopted a policy of non‐intervention, treating the referendum as the UK's domestic affair. President Obama's expression on 5 June 2014 of his desire for the UK to remain ‘a strong, robust, united and effective partner’ may, however, be seen as a sign of increasing apprehension abroad. Concerns of foreign governments aroused by the referendum include the diminution of the UK's power and role in international affairs, the possible encouragement of other secessionist movements, and disturbance to international organizations and alliances. It is commonly assumed that Scotland would become a reasonably prosperous and reliable small state. But how would the rest of the UK (rUK), a much more powerful and populous country, respond to ‘the loss of Scotland’? How would it affect the UK's already unsettled relations with the EU, including the prospect of a referendum on EU membership? Despite many uncertainties and a febrile political atmosphere, it is widely expected abroad that Scotland and rUK would settle into a cooperative relationship after a difficult transitional period, and that an independent Scotland would be accepted into the EU and NATO if it displayed flexibility on important issues.     

The End of the Beginning?: Welsh Regional Policy and Objective One

'West Wales and the Valleys' now qualify for EU Objective One status, entitled to draw down up to 1.3 billion in EU funds, matched from public and private sources between 2000 and 2006. However, there are many issues raised by the process of organizing the subsequent programme. There are questions over policy focus in the economically diverse Objective One areas, how governance of these policies will work, and the wider implications of Objective One in financial and political terms. There is also debate over previous regional policy initiatives in a Wales that for many years had access to a relatively large share of the UK's regional policy budget and EU funds, yet still faced falling GDP per head as a proportion of the UK average, west Wales and the Valleys' very Objective One status relying on GDP per capita under 75% of the EU average.     

The security of Africans beyond borders: migration,remittances and London's transnational entrepreneurs

This article provides an overview of selected aspects of how the economic security of growing numbers of Africans is linked to international migration. It first examines the emergence since 2005 of a new international policy discourse emphasizing the positive economic benefits of migration through remittance flows, the transfer of ideas and inward investment by migrants. The article outlines European policy responses to the recent upsurge in illegal Africa migration across the Mediterranean and examines the reaction of African governments and the Africa Union to increased migration and the enhanced dependence of African economies on remittance flows. The final section highlights the way in which the accelerated settlement of Africans in the UK prefigures longer term changes in the UK's relationship with Africa.     

Of Mumps and Men: Masculinity and the Severity of a Vaccine Preventable Disease in Western Medicine, 1760s–1960s

This article, based on an analysis of English language medical literature on mumps’ manifestation in men, women and children from the late eighteenth to the early twentieth century, examines the role of gender in shaping conceptualisations of mumps’ severity and medical significance. Over time, gendered social roles undermined the medical notion of mumps as a severe disease of women while elevating mumps’ reputation as a severe and significant disease of men, eventually casting the disease as a threat to masculinity. When the modern mumps vaccine was commercialised in the 1960s, its development built on a long history of gendered conceptualisations of mumps and its use cast children as safeguards of a legacy of masculine citizenship defined by military activity and fatherhood.     

'My Son's a Bit Dizzy.' 'My Wife's a Bit Soft': Gender,children and cultures of parenting

What it means to be a child and what it means to be a parent are both cultural inventions, ideologies which are (re)constructed and (re)produced over time. The two are deeply intertwined. The dominant contemporary Western imagining of children as vulnerable and incompetent in public space contributes towards structuring the way that parents look after their offspring and determine their children's personal geographies. Children's safety in public space from traffic accidents and stranger-dangers is an issue that is high on the public agenda in the USA and UK, heightening parental anxieties about the amount of independence and spatial freedom they should grant their offspring. Mothers' and fathers' understandings of their children's safety and the culture and conduct of parenting are gendered processes. This paper therefore explores how parents' attitudes towards girls' and boys' respective vulnerabilities and competencies to handle danger in public space vary. It then goes on to consider the way that parental practices, such as taking responsibility for managing children's spatial boundaries and disciplining them for any infringements, are also gendered.     

Cultural Worldview and Preference for Childhood Vaccination Policy

In the face of the reemerging threat of preventable diseases and the simultaneous vaccine risk controversy, what explains variations in Americans’ policy preferences regarding childhood vaccinations? Using original data from a recent nationwide Internet survey of 1,213 American adults, this research seeks to explain differing public opinions on childhood vaccination policies and related issues of governance. As Mary Douglas and Aaron Wildavsky's grid‐group cultural theory of policy preference formation suggests, cultural biases have a significant impact on the formation of preferences toward various vaccination policies. Hierarchs are in support of mandatory vaccination, oppose religious and philosophical exemption, and believe the government should preside over vaccination‐related decisions. Fatalists strike a bold contrast in their opposition to mandatory vaccination policy and support for religious and philosophical exemptions and the role of parents in deciding on vaccinations. Falling between hierarchs and fatalists, egalitarian support for vaccinations is stronger than individualists‘.     

Saving the Girls: Medical Colonialism and the HPV Programme

ABSTRACT

Mass immunisation is a central aspiration of global health programmes, such as in the 2000 Millennium Development Goals (MDG), as a means of addressing the glaring inequalities in life expectancy that separate the Global North and South. A recent initiative, the Human Papillomaviruses (HPV) vaccine, is being rolled out in so-called developing countries to prevent a number of sexually transmitted diseases, including one of the rarer forms of cervical cancer. Despite its apparent good intentions, resistance to the vaccine has occurred, in developed as well as in developing countries, not least because it constitutes a largely gendered form of medical intervention which is promoted according to Western concepts of risk, biomedical knowledge and normative understandings of female sexual behaviour. As a major component of the MDG health strategy aimed at developing countries, the HPV vaccine initiative carries implicit tendencies towards ‘medical colonialism’ underpinned as it is by hegemonic scientific masculinity, in which gendered forms of structural violence are legitimised through the discursive affiliations of progress and global health. This paper will examine the intersecting themes of political economy, gendered structural violence and hegemonic medical masculinity underpinning HPV immunisation programmes within the context of development. It interrogates how masculine scientific narratives of disease prevention, which legitimises the state-endorsed (and increasingly mandated) pharmaceuticalised protection of young women as objects of patriarchal care and control, have become the new missionary voices, saving bodies rather than souls.     

You (Br)exit,I stay: The effect of the Brexit vote on internal migration

The profound divisions that emerged around the UK's decision to leave the European Union have stimulated a heated debate on whether the referendum, by exposing intolerance and exacerbating societal tensions, has affected individuals' choices. The UK is one of the most mobile societies in Europe, and internal migration plays a key role in national well-being and in the efficient functioning of the labour and housing markets. In this article, we examine the consequences of polarizing politics on individuals' propensity to migrate internally. We show that, in the aftermath of the vote, individuals were less inclined to move when they were aligned with the Brexit preferences of their district. As ‘Remainers’ found themselves on the losing side, they were more likely than ‘Leavers’ to value the alignment to their district, given their ‘misalignment’ to the country. We also show that, when they do move, non-aligned individuals tend to relocate to a district to which they can then feel (re)aligned.     

Preserving the Global Nuclear Order: The Trident Agreements and the Arms Control Debate, 1977–1982

ABSTRACT

The Trident negotiations were a pivotal moment in establishing the US–UK nuclear relationship as an accepted element of the global nuclear order. The Trident agreements marked the first supply of a US delivery system to the UK since the signing of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and the development of Superpower arms control. In turn, the development of these agendas in the international sphere influenced Anglo-American discussions on the replacement to Polaris. The Carter White House procrastinated on the provision of Trident due in part to their concerns over the political ramifications for their wider non-proliferation and arms control goals. However, fortuitously for the UK's nuclear programme, US–UK discussions on the replacement to Polaris coalesced with the reorientation of US foreign policy towards containment of the Soviet Union under Jimmy Carter and then Ronald Reagan – enabling the finalisation of the sale of Trident to the UK. As such, the status of the US–UK nuclear relationship as a broadly accepted element of the global nuclear order is a legacy of the ‘long 1970s’ alongside the early Cold War.     

Ethical dilemmas? UK immigration,Legal Aid funding reform and caseworkers (Respond to this article at http://www.therai.org.uk/at/debate)

The article considers the kinds of responsibilities anthropologists might have when working on immigration and asylum matters, particularly in the light of recent ‘reforms’ to the funding of legal aid in the UK. The article focuses on a single case study in its context, exploring an interaction between an immigrant applicant and a lawyer/case worker in a not‐for‐profit Law Centre. The paper shows how case workers find themselves caught in the middle, squeezed between increasing financial pressures and their ethical obligation to their clients. In their everyday work they are faced with the contradictory imperatives of giving sympathy and advice to genuinely deserving cases on the one hand while being required to check up on opportunist and possibly deceitful clients on the other. In the context of ‘reform’, they are increasingly encouraged to prejudge the probable outcomes of cases by reference to ‘value for money’. These effects, we argue, have severe consequences given the adversarial nature of the UK's system of law. As anthropologists, our aim was to investigate the day‐to‐day realities of case worker/client interactions, to enable both ourselves and legal practitioners, in conversation, to reflect on our own and each others' interpretations of the situation, and to place these in the public domain.     

Changing interest among physicians toward pneumococcal vaccination throughout the twentieth century

Interest in using pneumococcal vaccination among physicians has come full circle since the early twentieth century. Interest first arose during an epidemic among South African gold miners when a potential therapeutic agent, ethylhydrocupreine, caused significant toxicities. When a safe and effective vaccine became available in 1946, interest in using it paradoxically waned as its introduction coincided with the advent of penicillin. Physicians believed that this effective new antibiotic would change pneumonia from a dreaded infection to a casual, infrequent occurrence. The manufacturer was unable to promote vaccine use and withdrew it from the market. Enthusiasm for vaccination remained low long after limitations in antibiotic therapy of pneumococcal infections became clear in the 1960s and a new vaccine once again became available in 1978. Interest in vaccination was eventually renewed in the 1990s when the propagation of pneumococcal resistance to multiple agents diminished the complete confidence that physicians had in antibiotics and when populations at risk for infection were expanding. Scientific evidence of vaccine efficacy, demonstrated in 1944 and 1977, has not alone been sufficient to convince physicians to use vaccination. Rather, doctors have accepted the need to vaccinate for pneumococcus when they have recognized the shortcomings of therapeutic measures during epidemic periods.