Power and identity in world politics: Explaining British security diplomacy, 1898-1914

This dissertation investigates the relationship between force and diplomacy, or what will be called "security diplomacy." More precisely, security diplomacy involves the efforts of state leaders to coordinate mutual expectations about the political and territorial status quo with their respective deployment of military forces. Negotiations on security diplomacy often result in agreements described as alliances, ententes, and peace treaties.;To explain how states arrive at these outcomes, the study draws upon two bodies of theory: political realism and Kantian liberalism. The realist approach views international politics as an arena in which sovereign groups struggle for power under conditions of anarchy. Nation-states use diplomatic negotiations to manipulate the distribution of power resources on terms favorable to national interest. These interests are often defined in terms of support for or against the political or territorial status quo. Immanuel Kant's theory of world politics posits that liberal states--those possessing a system of democratic governance, juridical rights, a market economy, and private property--can escape from an anarchic, power-driven world and establish enduring relations of peace. In the Kantian schema diplomacy is one of the key instruments that liberal states employ to resolve disputes over the status quo and thus to preserve the peace.;This study derives hypotheses on security diplomacy from each of these theories; it then tests these contending propositions against evidence drawn from the history of Great Britain's diplomatic relations with five states--the United States, Japan, France, Russia, and Germany--between 1898 and 1914. Britain's diplomatic negotiations with Japan, Russia, and Germany--the nonliberal states in this sample--offer a baseline for evaluating security diplomacy from the standpoint of political realism. The study then explores Britain's ties to the United States and France, the two liberal states among her competitors, to determine whether these relationships depart from the realist account.;This historical comparison reveals that Anglo-American relations conformed closely to the inferences drawn from the Kantian model. This outcome stands in stark contrast to realist predictions. However Anglo-French relations mirrored more closely the expectations of political realism. The study explores why these two cases diverged, and it uses the resulting explanation to shed light on the future of interstate security diplomacy, and in particular the diplomatic ties between the member states of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and European Community.