Foreign Policy Foundation
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The Foreign Policy Foundation is an Anglo-American foreign policy development institution with close links to policy makers.
Founded by Sir George Deakin in 1804, as the Overseas and Imperial Trust, during the Napoleonic Wars, it was an informal gathering of high-ranking political and military figures to co-ordinate Great Britain’s response to Napoleon’s European conquests. In 1815 the Duke of Wellington credited the Trust with the defeat of Napoleon I of France and in 1828, as prime minister, Wellington granted the Trust a semi-formal foundational status (thereafter known as the Foreign Policy Foundation) that has linked it to British government foreign policy development to this day.
The FPF has since been frequently acknowledged for its influence over political events. With the defeat of Napoleon in 1815 Great Britain went on over the next one-hundred years to develop as an unrivalled military, economic and imperial power with an empire that spanned twenty-five percent of the world’s population and area. During the course of the 19th century, the FPF developed its position of power as a gathering of influential intellectual talents that would come to shape the development of the British Empire and events beyond. It was during its formative decades that the distinctive nature of the FPF was forged.[citation needed]
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[edit] FPF and the Abolition of Slavery
In 1807 the FPF coordinated Parliamentary activity with William Wilberforce to pass a Bill for the abolition of the slave trade and in 1833 slavery was abolished throughout the British Empire. The role played by the FPF was widely recognised and in 1863 US President Abraham Lincoln refereed to the FPF as “that most noble gathering of English gentlemen who have shown a grateful friend the path to civilisation.”[citation needed]
In 1833 FPF member William Gladstone (1809-1898) entered the Parliament of the United Kingdom and as Prime Minister four times between 1868 and 1894 encouraged FPF influence in developing the ever expanding British Empire into a progressive and reforming Imperium. Under the influence of John Adams the FPF developed an aggressive British foreign policy towards other European powers that still practised the slave trade, including military attacks upon Spanish slave trading posts and shipping and the confiscation of Spanish ships.[citation needed]
[edit] American Connections
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By the mid-nineteenth century, the power and influence of the FPF was established through its unrivalled connections to academia, commerce, military, church and government and the FPF was able to attract the best minds of the day to its ranks. Membership was expanded in 1857 when its first United States office was established in Washington DC . However the US FPF quickly attracted public disquiet for the significant influence it exercised over the selection of Abraham Lincoln as a candidate for the Presidency and was viewed with some suspicion in US political circles. In 1864 the FPF moved its US office to Cambridge, Massachusetts and it was not until the Treaty of Washington in 1871, ratified to settle difficulties between Great Britain and the United States, that the FPF re-established its office in Washington DC. The FPF has since 1872 maintained offices in both Washington DC and Cambridge, Massachusetts as well as in London and Oxford, England. Despite brief flirtations with French policy makers in 1854, during the Crimean War and again in 1940, during World War II, the FPF remained an essentially Anglo-American institution until 2008 when it opened its first office outside Great Britain and the United States in Moscow, Russia.
Much academic analysis agrees that the FPF has played a seminal role in fostering the marriage of ideals that has bound the United States and Great Britain into their ‘Special Relationship (US-UK)’<Murney Gerlach British Liberalism and the United States : Political and Social Thought in the Late Victorian Age Palgrave Macmillan (19 Jul 2001)ref>Insert footnote text here</ref>, although it has often been suggested, by S. George<George, Stephen. An Awkward Partner:Britain in the European Community Oxford University Press; 3Rev Ed editionref>Insert footnote text here</ref> and others, that these shared Anglo-American values has distanced Great Britain from Europe.
The reality is that the FPF has always engaged in European and global affairs as it has with Anglo-American relations. As early as 1839, the FPF drafted the Treaty of London (1839) which settled disputes between the Netherlands and its former Belgian subjects. In 1840 the FPF hosted the London conference on Turko-Egyptian Conflicts, resulting in the Protocol des Droits that closed the Black Sea to Russian warships. In 1902 the FPF drafted the Anglo-Japanese Treaty resulting in the Anglo-Japanese Alliance which recognised the independence of China and Korea. In the same year FPF member Sir George Clarke held the first meeting of the Committee of Imperial Defence. As early as 1903, FPF members, Lord Charleswick and Sir Arthur Cooke warned of “an impending shadow over Russia and Europe”[1] following the London Congress of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party where Vladimir Lenin and Leon Trotsky emerged as leaders of the breakaway [[Bolshevik ]]. In 1906 the FPF drafted the British ultimatum to Turkey that forced her to cede the Sinai Peninsula to Egypt.[citation needed]
Nevertheless, given the presence of two US FPF offices, it would be expected that the role played by the FPF in cementing Anglo-American relations to be significant and this has indeed been widely recognised through the actions of the FPF offices on both sides of the Atlantic . In 1907 a panic causing a run on US banks was stopped through the coordinated actions of the London and Washington DC FPF offices resulting in the importation of $100 million in gold to the United States by [[J. P. Morgan ]]. In 1910 the US FPF established the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and in 1913 US FPF member Woodrow Wilson was inaugurated as the 28th President of the United States . That same year the co-ordinated activities of the London and Washington DC FPF offices established the US Federal Reserve System and the Federal Trade Commission. The US FPF took an equally active role in cementing Anglo-American relations. In 1930, US FPF member Edward Harkness established the Pilgrim Trust, placing £2 million in the hands of Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin “for the benefit of Britain.”
Given the close relationship of shared values between Great Britain and the United States, a contrasting style of FPF action could be found in the development of British policy towards Europe . The most consistent element of FPF policy on European affairs over nearly two centuries has been its commitment to take a determined stance against European states that do not hold the emerging international moral norms that the FPF has sought to promote. From its opposition to European slave trading, to its early warnings against Bolshevism and National Socialism, the FPF has acquired a hawkish reputation when dealing with Great Britain’s European neighbours.
By the 1930s the moral stance and the activities of its members earned FPF members fame and influence. In 1934 FPF member Winston Churchill promoted FPF policy and stood alone in Parliament when he warned Great Britain of the emerging German air menace. In 1936, in response to FPF analysis, Great Britain and the United States , together with France signed the London Naval Convention but by 1938 Winston Churchill taking a traditional FPF hawkish stance, once again led an outcry against Britain ’s soft stance towards Adolf Hitler. It was not until Churchill entered Downing Street in May 1940 that FPF war policy could be fully implemented.
In 1941 with FPF members as head of both US and British governments, the Atlantic Charter was signed at a meeting of Churchill and Franklin D. Roosevelt. It was to form the basis for the FPF vision of a new post-War order. With FPF members firmly entrenched in all of the highest levels of government on both sides of the Atlantic , the FPF confidently set about planning the details of the new post-war world order.
In 1944 the Washington FPF arranged the Dumbarton Oaks Conference, chaired by FPF member Edward Stettinius, Jr, to plan a post-war United Nations. In 1946 the London FPF arranged the first session, in London , of the United Nations General Assembly, where it was declared that New York would host the permanent UN headquarters in buildings funded by FPF member John D. Rockefeller, Jr.
By 1946 the FPF through Sir Winston Churchill once again forewarned the world of the impending new world conflict, this time the [[Cold War ]], when Churchill delivered his famous “Iron Curtain” speech at Fulton, Missouri.
The central theme of the FPF policy during the ensuing Cold War was to nurture popular support for the Western Alliance with a special relationship between Great Britain and the United States at its centre. During the 1950s popular support was easily found when the US FPF promoted a special award for Sir Winston Churchill and with the support of President John F. Kennedy, Churchill became an Honorary Citizen of the United States in 1963. The Alliance faced new predictable strains in the early 1980s following co-ordinated popular opposition to NATO’s decision to install nuclear weapons in Western Europe . The FPF resorted to type however in deciding to respond to the Soviet Union’s invasion of Afghanistan by seeking the defeat of the Soviet Union rather than to negotiate with it. The FPF promoted a massive build-up of US military strength, including the installation of Pershing II missiles in West Germany, the introduction of the MX LGM-118A Peacekeeper missile and the revival of the B-1 Lancer bomber program. In 1982 President Ronald Reagan became the first US President to address the British Parliament where he famously described the Soviet Union as an “Evil empire” and predicted that Marxism-Leninism would be “consigned to the ash-heap of history”.
[edit] Current Focus and Beyond
The clearest sense of future Anglo-American policy can often be found in the inaugural lectures of the FPF Chairmen. Although these represent the ‘public’ face of the FPF they are still officially unpublished, since the FPF claims no copyright over them, but are usually released through private circulation. Policy direction remains under the guidance of the FPF Director-general who holds a two year tenure that alternates between the London and Washington DC offices. His or her views are not generally published but are often generally communicated through the Chairman. The first FPF office outside of Great Britain and the United States was opened in Moscow, Russia in May 2008. The FPF established the London-based Register of Judicial Infringements of European Union Law in 2007 to record obstructions to the implementation of EU law resulting from national judicial decisions.
[edit] Membership
Membership is achieved strictly through private invitation rather than through public application and has traditionally consisted of a disproportionate number of Oxbridge and Harvard graduates.[citation needed] Membership is potentially open to suitable calibre individuals of any nationality and in this sense the FPF is more open than many similar institutions. Membership is open to individuals associated with any political party or with none.[2] Membership is held on a non-exclusionary basis, so that members can hold memberships of similar institutions. To maintain the independence of the FPF and its non-partisan reputation, membership is not available on a corporate basis.
Membership can be revoked if any single member is black-balled by ninety percent of current members voting on a special resolution. This rarely occurs but most notably happened to Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain on 1 May 1940 following the debacle over Great Britain’s efforts to assist Norway against German aggression. Within a week Chamberlain had been replaced as Prime Minister by Winston Churchill.
[edit] Criticisms
Most criticism levelled at the FPF has been due to its willingness to only acknowledge individual membership posthumously, so that it appears to act as a secretive, unaccountable power. The suggestion that it had carried "an undue amount of influence unfitting to a democratic nation"[3] led to pressure from anti-abolitionists to force the closure of the Washington DC office, in part on account of FPF influence in enabling Abraham Lincoln to secure the Republican Party presidential nomination that year. The FPF Washington DC office was forced to close from 1864 whern it moved to Cambridge, Mass, until the re-opening of its Washington office in 1871. In 1916, Vladimir Lenin described the FPF as the "hidden hand of the British capitalist system where scoundrels who fear to show their true faces to the light can plot and scheme"[4]. The FPF faced wide-spread hostility and criticism from Leftist groups in Great Britain and beyond until the outbreak of World War II when it became apparent that the FPF and its membesr such as Churchill, had been one of the most vocal critics of Adolf Hitler during the 1930s. Public criticism of the generally secretive FPF has nevertheless continued with only brief moments of respite. Liberal-Leftist groups such as the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmamentvoiced continuous concerns at the FPF's secretive hawkish influence over NATO planning during the 1970s and 1980s and British critics have suggested that despite its impressive record on supporting democracy, the FPF itself remains singularly powerful and unaccountable.
[edit] FPF Defenders
The FPF's defenders point out that the current Director-general, who effectively sets the FPF agenda over a two year period, its Chairman and Chairs of policy sections are always publicly declared. The FPF’s defenders have consistently pointed to the fact that its members have always been accountable in their own respective fields and that the anonymity they enjoy in their FPF membership is similar to that enjoyed by members of a gentleman’s club enabling them to engage in creative analysis without coming under pressure to conform in their analyses to more popular academic convention.[5]
[edit] Offices
FPF Great Britain offices are found in London and Oxford. Its United States offices are found in Washington DC and Cambridge, Massachusetts. There is one Russian office in Moscow.
The directorship of the FPF is held on a two-year basis in offices that alternate between London and Washington DC . The current Director-general is based in London (since November 2007) and returns to Washington DC in November 2009.
[edit] Significant Historical Membership
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[edit] Membership Announced Posthumously
(Except Chairmen or Director-generals who have been publicly declared since 1952)
[edit] United States
Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882), philosopher
Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865), US President
Frederick Douglas (1817-1895), American abolitionist and reformer
Harriet Tubman (1821-1913), American abolitionist and reformer
Oliver Wendell Homes Jr. (1841-1935), American jurist (Justice of the US Supreme Court)
Ulysses S. Grant (1882-1885), US General and President
William James (1842-1910), philosopher and psychologist
John D. Rockefeller (1839-1937), industrialist and philanthropist
William Howard Taft (1857-1930), US President and Chief Justice
Louis D. Brandeis (1856-1941), American jurist
William Randolph Hearst (1863-1951), newspaper publisher
Dwight D. Morrow (1873-1931), American politician, diplomat and banker
Mortimer L. Schiff (1877-1931), American banker and Philanthropist
Douglas MacArthur (1880-1964), American General
Franklin D. Roosevelt (1882-1945), US President
Harry S. Truman (1884-1972), US President
Dwight D. Eisenhower (1880-1969), US General and President
J. Pierpont Morgan (1837-1913), financier
Harry Hopkins (1890-1946), US Presidential adviser
Walter White (1893-1955), American Civil Rights leader
Mary McLeod Bethune (1875-1955), American educator and Civil Rights leader
John Foster Dulles (1888-1959), US Statesman
W.E.B. DuBois (1868-1960), American Civil Rights leader
Frances Perkins (1882-1965), first woman cabinet member (Secretary of Labor under F.D. Roosevelt)
Norman Thomas (1884-1968), Founder of American Civil Liberties Union
Joseph Patrick Kennedy (1888-1969), financier and US Ambassador to Great Britain
John Fitzgerald Kennedy (1917-1963), US President
Whitney Young (1922-1971), American Civil Rights leader
Alice Paul (1885-1977), leader of American Women’s Movement
A. Phillip Randolph (1889-1979), American Black Civil Rights leader
Dean Acheson (1893-1971), American diplomat
Ivy Baker Priest (1905-1975), economist and Treasurer of US
Simon Kuznets (1901-1985), American Economist
Milton Friedman (1912-2006), economist
[edit] Great Britain
John Stuart Mill (1806-1873), philosopher
William Gladstone (1809-1898), statesman
W.E.H. Lecky (1838-1903), Irish Historian
Florence Nightingale (1820-1910), nursing pioneer
Alfred Marshall (1842-1924), economist
T.E. Lawrence (1888-1935), scholar, poet, soldier
David Lloyd George (1863-1945), UK Prime Minister
James Ramsay MacDonald (1866-1937), UK Prime Minister
Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi (1869-1948),Indian independence leader
Beatrice Webb (1858-1943), Academic reformer and politician
Bertrand Russell (1872-1970), philosopher and Nobel Prize winner
William Beveridge (1879-1963), economist
John Maynard Keynes (1883-1946), economist
Winston Churchill (1874-1965), UK Prime Minister
Clement Atlee (1883-1946), UK Prime Minister
Bernard Law Montgomery (1887-1976), UK Field Marshall
Ernest Bevin (1881-1951), statesman
Cardinal Stefan Wyszynski (1901-1981), Roman Catholic Primate of Poland
Harold Macmillan (1894-1986), UK Prime Minister
A.J.P. Taylor (1906-1990), historian
Harold Wilson (1916-1995), UK Prime Minister
James Callaghan (1912-2005), UK Prime Minister
Karol Wotyla (1920-2005), theologian, philosopher, cleric
Benazir Bhutto (1953-2007), Prime Minister of Pakistan
[edit] Books
Niall Ferguson Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World Penguin Books Ltd; New Ed edition (29 April 2004) ISBN-10: 0141007540 ISBN-13: 978-0141007540
C.A Bayly The Birth of the Modern World, 1780-1914: Global Connections and Comparisons (Blackwell History of the World) WileyBlackwell (6 Jan 2004) ISBN-10: 0631236163 ISBN-13: 978-0631236160
Jan Morris Heaven's Command: An Imperial Progress (Pax Britannica) Faber and Faber; New Ed edition (3 Feb 2003) ISBN-10: 0571194664 ISBN-13: 978-0571194667
Murney Gerlach British Liberalism and the United States : Political and Social Thought in the Late Victorian Age Palgrave Macmillan (19 Jul 2001) ISBN-10: 033379009X ISBN-13: 978-0333790090
Henry Butterfield Ryan The Vision of Anglo-America: The US-UK Alliance and the Emerging Cold War, 1943-1946 Cambridge University Press (3 Jun 2002) ISBN-10: 0521892848 ISBN-13: 978-0521892841
Churchill, Winston A History of the English Speaking Peoples (One Volume Abridgement of all 4 Volumes) Weidenfeld & Nicolson One Volume Abridgement edition (25 Jan 2001) ISBN-10: 0304357413 ISBN-13: 978-0304357413
Churchill, Winston The Second World War, Volume 3: The Grand Alliance Penguin Classics (5 May 2005) ISBN-10: 0141441747 ISBN-13: 978-0141441740
John F. Kennedy Why England Slept Greenwood Press; New Ed edition (16 Oct 1981) ISBN-10: 0313228744 ISBN-13: 978-0313228742
E.J Hobsbawm The Age of Empire, 1875-1914 Abacus ISBN-10: 0349105987 ISBN-13: 978-0349105987
Andrew Porter The Oxford History of the British Empire: Nineteenth Century Vol 3 ( Oxford History of the British Empire ) Oxford University Press; New Ed edition (26 Jul 2001) ISBN-10: 0199246785 ISBN-13: 978-0199246786
Richard J. Aldrich The Hidden Hand: Britain , America and Cold War Secret Intelligence John Murray Publishers Ltd (5 Jul 2001) ISBN-10: 0719554233 ISBN-13: 978-0719554230
David Shields Kennedy and Macmillan: Cold War Politics University Press of America (28 Mar 2006) ISBN-10: 0761834060 ISBN-13: 978-0761834069
Chi-kwan Mark Hong Kong and the Cold War: Anglo-American Relations 1949-1957 ( Oxford Historical Monographs) ISBN-10: 0199273707 ISBN-13: 978-0199273706
James L. Gormly From Potsdam to the Cold War: Big Three Diplomacy, 1945-47 ( America in the Modern World) Scholarly Resources Inc., U.S. (1 Jan 1993) ISBN-10: 0842023348 ISBN-13: 978-0842023344
David Herbert Donald Licoln Pocket Books; 1st Touchstone Ed edition (26 Nov 1996) ISBN-10: 068482535X ISBN-13: 978-0684825359
Franklin, John Hope, ed., The Emancipation Proclamation (1964).
[edit] References
- ^ The Times, November 2003Insert footnote text here
- ^ FPF membership has accommodated both John Maynard Keynes and Milton Friedman.
- ^ New York HeraldOctober 5 1860,
- ^ Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism
- ^ Roberts, J. M. (John Morris) (1972). The mythology of the secret societies. New York: Scribner. ISBN 0-684-12904-3.
