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British soft power in Asia: a (post-)imperial project?

Introduction
Lauriane Simony and Mélanie Torrent

Full text

  • 1 HM government, “Global Britain in a Competitive Age: the Integrated Review of Security, Defence, De (...)
  • 2 House of Lords, Select Committee on Soft Power and the UK’s Influence, Persuasion and Power in the (...)
  • 3 Joseph Nye, Bound To Lead: The Changing Nature of American Power (Basic Books, New York, 1990); and (...)

1In March 2021, the Integrated Review of Security, Defence, Development and Foreign Policy of the United Kingdom government stated that one of its core foreign policy goals in the post-Brexit era was to become “a soft power superpower”.1 At a time when the successive Conservative governments of Theresa May and Boris Johnson were trying to give substance to the concept of “Global Britain”, used to refer to the UK’s revised international ambitions since 2016, the appeal of “soft power” was not in itself new. In 2013 already, a Select Committee of the House of Lords had been entrusted with an examination of soft power, and its final report had underlined its importance in the new world order as a means to “generat[e] international power through influencing other countries to want the same things as the UK, by building positive international relationships and coalitions which defend our interests and security, uphold our national reputation and promote our trade and prosperity”.2 Joseph Nye himself, the American political scientist who had coined the term “soft power” in the late 1980s as a form of “co-optive power”,3 was interviewed by the Committee. Early on in his evidence, Nye stated:

Britain has a lot of assets in the area of soft power. […] the ability to use those assets that you have of previous networks is something that Britain stands well prepared for.

  • 4 Joseph Nye, Evidence Session no. 10, Unrevised transcript of evidence taken before The Select Commi (...)

Let me just tick off a few things that might be worth noticing—there are many more. If soft power is the ability to get what you want through attraction and persuasion, the fact is that Britain has institutions that have been widely admired and often emulated in other parts of the world; Britain has the English language, which gives you access to many more networks; Britain’s historical role still has a residue in the Commonwealth, which means that you have contacts not just among Governments but among many social groups, as you know so well, through the Commonwealth; there are Britain’s universities and the role that Britain plays in educating people in British universities; there is broadcasting, and you could argue that the BBC is still the most credible of the international broadcasters; and there is the monarchy, which is quite fascinating. […] I could go on and on. Britain has an extraordinary number of assets, without getting into many aspects of British culture: arts, literature or painting.4

2Back in 2013, membership of the EU was also, for Nye, “a second arrow in [the UK’s] quiver”. By 2021, the question was therefore the extent to which other partnerships and forms of engagement could serve Britain’s influence in the world.

  • 5 Tim Summers, “Limited appeal: China’s soft power in the United Kingdom” in Ties Dams, Xiaoxue Marti (...)
  • 6 Tim Summers, “Britain and Hong Kong: the 2019 protests and their aftermath”, Asian Education and De (...)
  • 7 Cleo Paskal, “Indo-Pacific strategies, perceptions and partnerships: the UK and the Indo-Pacific”, (...)
  • 8 HM government, “Integrated Review Refresh 2023: Responding to a More Contested and Volatile World”, (...)
  • 9 Ibid., p. 3.

3The question was posed more specifically, in the Integrated Review, in relation to Asia. The Integrated Review acknowledged the geostrategic importance of Asia on the international stage and gave prominence to the idea of an “Indo-Pacific tilt”, which included the development of economic partnerships with several East Asian countries, a stronger British military presence in the area, and new commitments in terms of security and environmental policy. Importantly, it expressed the United Kingdom’s goal to become the European country with the largest economic, strategic and cultural presence in Asia by 2030, in line with its ambition to strike an independent course of action, outside of the European and American circles. The Integrated Review also confirmed that developing cultural relations with Asian countries had become a significant aspect of the UK’s ambition to redeploy its power and redefine its world role in the post-Brexit era. This came with a series of complicated issues in the UK’s relationship with China, whose own soft power in the UK is limited.5 In the period leading up to the review, the attention of officials in Whitehall – and many in the UK – was drawn to the threats posed to UK security by China and by Chinese telecommunications businesses, and to the violent repression against the pro-democracy movement in Hong Kong, with growing, ultimately successful calls to give holders of the British National (Overseas) Passport right of abode in the UK.6 Simultaneously, British interests and the best channels for securing them in Asia were interpreted differently by decision and policy makers. During a series of interviews and a roundtable held at Chatham House in 2019, “conflicting assessments were [noted on] ‘Global Britain’ and the UK’s place in the Indo-Pacific more specifically, with foreign policy and business communities tending in one direction, and defence and security communities in another”: the latter, in particular, had “less broad-spectrum, more focused goals” and a definite reticence towards the UK touting a “rules-based order” in discussions with its allies and prospective partners in the region. Two important conclusions were that “it was essential not to take close allies for granted and to have a continuing, and committed, presence in the region”.7 In early 2023, the Integrated Review Refresh highlighted the progress that the UK had made towards carrying out an “Indo-Pacific tilt” in a fast-changing geopolitical environment dominated by a variety of Chinese, Russian and North Korean threats. In Asia, it stated, the UK’s goal to become a major player and support “the concept of a free and open Indo-Pacific”8 could perhaps best be achieved through an important deployment of soft power. Although the Integrated Review Refresh reaffirmed that “the security and prosperity of the Euro-Atlantic [would] remain [the UK’s] core priority, bolstered by a reinvigoration of [the UK’s] European relationships”,9 the Indo-Pacific region was clearly identified as one of Britain’s main areas of interest in terms of foreign policy and strategic commitments, with most of the efforts to give body to the idea of a “Global Britain” since 2021 conducted there.

HM Government, “Integrated Review Refresh 2023: Responding to a More Contested and Volatile World”, CP 811, March 2023, p. 23.

HM Government, “Integrated Review Refresh 2023: Responding to a More Contested and Volatile World”, CP 811, March 2023, p. 23.
  • 10 Irene S. Wu, “Tools for measuring soft power. A review of recent quantitative analyses” in Naren Ch (...)
  • 11 Gary Rawnsley, “Challenging the Snake-Oil Salesmen: A Critique of British Approaches to Soft Power” (...)

4Assessing British soft power in Asia is a vast and ambitious task, in time span and geographical scope, while the methodologies for defining and assessing soft power are complex. As Irene S. Wu has argued, “[s]oft power resources reside in civil society, in the minds of individual people, who are agents in their right and not necessarily biddable by the state”. What impact soft power has is complicated to measure, if one considers with Wu that it involves “the channels that influence foreigners’ opinions about a country, what observable actions foreigners take when they are attracted to a country, and the impact these actions can have on that foreigners’ society”.10 For Gary Rawnsley, it is also essential to “discuss how governments and other agencies can generate soft power”, which has at least two implications: “recognis[ing] that soft power is a resource first, and an instrument second,” and considering the “subtle but crucial difference” between two of the objectives pursued through soft power, i.e. “[p]ersuading publics in other countries to want what you want, or to want what you want them to want (there is a subtle but crucial difference between the two)”.11 Using different methodologies from the humanities and social sciences and focusing on different time periods, the contributors gathered here seek to assess the extent to which an imperial thread runs through the conception and implementation of British soft power in Asia, from the colonial period to the contemporary post-Brexit era. While they also consider issues of reception, they are particularly focused on what Wu terms “‘producer’ action”, by a wide range of groups, institutions and individuals. They identify specific processes or objectives of soft power deployment, in historical or contemporary perspective, in combination with or as a substitute for hard power, while reflecting on the specificities of Asia’s place in British policies and world views. In order to do so, the contributors focus on three related questions: perceptions and redefinitions of “Asia” for British policy makers and decision makers; the non-state, individual and collective actors who projected influence, and the ways in which a de-centring of the UK and of the UK state is necessary; and finally, the impact of imperial and colonial legacies, both during and after the lives of the formal European empires.

(Re-)definitions of “Asia” in British foreign policy: from the “Far East” to “East-of-Suez” and the “Indo-Pacific tilt”

  • 12 Laurence Badel and Pierre Singaravélou, “Le dialogue Asie-Europe en perspective (XIXe-XXe siècle)”, (...)
  • 13 Adrien Rodd and Sophie Croisy, special issue on “Oceania and the Pacific Rim”, Cultures of the Comm (...)
  • 14 Adrien Rodd, “The Pacific in the ‘Asian Century’”, Outre-Terre 58-59:1/2, 2020; see Adrien Rodd, “O (...)
  • 15 Edmund Terence Gomez, Cheong Kee Cheok and Vamsi Vakulabharanam (eds.), “China, India and Southeast (...)
  • 16 Yuen Foong Khong, “Power as prestige in world politics”, International Affairs 95:1, 2019, pp. 138, (...)
  • 17 Ajaya K. Sahoo (ed.), Routledge Handbook of Asian Transnationalism (London, Routledge, 2023); Jens (...)

5In recent years, the rising power of China and India has stimulated a wealth of new studies, of which the current volume takes stock. In 2016 for instance, two issues of Relations Internationales, edited by Laurence Badel and Pierre Singaravélou, and Claude Hauser and Pierre Journoud, were published at the time of the twentieth anniversary of the Asia Europe Meeting (ASEM), promoting institutional dialogue between ASEAN and the EU. In their introduction to the first volume, Badel and Singaravélou were careful to stress the dangers of considering Asia and Europe as “two homogenous and durable entities”, opting instead to see them as frameworks, or analytical categories, which could not be exclusive and whose very “existence” could not be taken for granted. The objective of their contributors was thus to “examine the Eurasian relation in the longue durée and […] in global perspective”.12 The UK featured in only one of nineteen articles – Journoud’s analysis of Franco-British relations and security in Southeast Asia during the Cold War – even though it was discussed as part of Europe in several of the contributions. The UK’s marginal place is also evident in studies of Asia that consider international dynamics from the perspective of Oceania and the Pacific. This is the case for instance in Adrien Rodd and Sophie Croisy’s special issue of Cultures of the Commonwealth on “Oceania and the Pacific Rim”,13 and in Adrien Rodd’s special issue on “The Pacific in the ‘Asian Century’”14 in Outre Terre – where Britain features as part of wider groups, as in Rodd’s article on great power rivalries in Oceania or in Annick Cizel’s article on military multipolarity in the region. In The Round Table: The Commonwealth Journal of International Affairs, Asia features in 10 out of 28 special issues published between 2014 and 2023. Only two focus explicitly on trans-Asian, transnational politics – on security in Southeast Asia, and on the influence of China and India in the region;15 but no article is centred on the UK or its influence. In his study of prestige as “one’s reputation for power or the shadow cast by power”, Yuen Foong Khong argues that the United States and China are at present the two main forces in Asia vying for the top space, with China the “rising challenger and peer competitor”.16 Recent (and less recent) publications in international affairs also show the importance of Asian transnationalism, of China’s cultural diplomacy, Afro-Indian connections and Afro-Asian transregionalism.17 As Scott Edwards and Robert Yates put it in this volume, Asia is a “crowded” space, and the UK’s ambitions, role and impact should always be considered within this wider perspective.

  • 18 See for example Thibaud Harrois, “Towards ‘Global Britain’? Theresa May and the UK’s Role in the Wo (...)
  • 19 Jamie Gaskarth, “Global Britain in the Indo-Pacific”, special issue of the RUSI Journal 167:6-7, 20 (...)
  • 20 See for instance Oliver Turner, “Global Britain and the Narrative of Empire”, The Political Quarter (...)
  • 21 For example, for Robert Saunders, “Global Britain” is rather rooted in a form of heroic vision of B (...)

6Where the UK does feature prominently, is in a series of new publications on definitions of what “Global Britain” means exactly, beyond a vague expression of the UK’s major redirection of its foreign policy objectives carried out since 2016. For example, political scientists Thibaud Harrois and Oliver Daddow have published detailed studies of the role that Britain intends to find and define for itself after Brexit, on the world stage and in relation to Europe.18 Jamie Gaskarth’s special issue for the RUSI Journal, “Global Britain in the Indo-Pacific”, which came out in 2022,19 brings together excellent experts in the field who analyse the contemporary dynamics and implications of the Indo-Pacific tilt. When contemplating “Global Britain”, scholars have also focused on how several governmental and non-governmental actors have interpreted the UK’s new ambitions as a neo-colonial or neo-imperial strategy,20 even though “Global Britain” cannot be reduced to mere imperial nostalgia or an empire 2.0.21 While Asia does feature at times in these studies – we will return to this below – there is still much scope for further research. Our selected case studies therefore take stock of this recent scholarship, to offer additional insights into the shifting importance of “Asia” for the British state and for the individuals who aimed, more or less consciously, to stimulate British attractiveness in the region and gather support for its policies – including its imperial and post-imperial endeavours.

  • 22 The scholarship on British expansion in Asia is very rich and would be impossible to reference exha (...)
  • 23 Anthony Best (ed.), Britain’s Retreat from Empire in East Asia (London, Routledge, 2017), p. 1.
  • 24 Burma was the world’s largest rice producer in the 1940s, and therefore used by the British as the (...)
  • 25 Best, Britain’s Retreat, pp. 1-2.

7Historically, the expansion of the British empire in Asia spanned several centuries and reflected the diversity and evolution of British interests in the region. It was largely, at first, the result of a commercial expansion: it started in the early 17th century with the establishment of the English East India Company’s first trading ports in India, gathered pace in the early 19th century as the East India Company strengthened its position in the region against its Dutch rival until the Company was dissolved and gave way to full political domination by the British government with the creation of the British Raj in 1858. A number of other Crown colonies were formed in the region in the late 18th and 19th centuries, including Ceylon (Sri Lanka) in 1796, Burma (Myanmar) – which was annexed as a result of several Anglo-Burmese wars between 1824 and 1885 – Hong Kong in 1843, and the Straits Settlements (which included Singapore) in 1867. Still in the course of the 19th century, Britain struck several trade or protection deals with other territories in Southeast Asia, which retained more or less informal connections with the British Crown up to the 20th century. British possessions or areas of influence included protectorates such as North Borneo, Brunei, Federated and Unfederated Malay States as well as the kingdom of Sarawak, and Siam (Thailand), with which Britain had established a form of free trade regime after the signing of the Bowring Treaty in 1855.22 British influence also reached the North of Asia, as Britain established a wide treaty system with China to secure preferential trading arrangements in the 19th century and early 20th century, with a number of leased concessions in major Chinese cities, a naval base at Weihaiwei, and a flourishing port: Shanghai.23 On the eve of the Second World War, the British Empire therefore stretched across most of the Asian continent, covering a wide array of different territories, although South and Southeast Asia represented the most important regions, both economically and strategically, to the UK. Indeed, this area of high commercial importance to Britain24 also enjoyed a very strategic position, notably thanks to Singapore, Britain’s most important naval base.25

  • 26 Brian P. Farrell, S.R. Joey Long and David J. Ulbrich (eds.), From Far East to Asia Pacific, Great (...)
  • 27 Philippe Pelletier, “Imaginer le nom d’Extrême-Orient”, La Géographie 1558:3, 2015, pp. 29-32.
  • 28 Claire Sanderson, “La Grande-Bretagne et l’Asie du Sud-Est depuis 1945 : réalités, réajustements, r (...)
  • 29 See for instance Peter Lowe, Contending with Nationalism and Communism: British Policy towards Sout (...)
  • 30 Claire Sanderson, “La Grande-Bretagne et l’Asie du Sud-Est”, pp. 62-64.

8After the Second World War, Britain’s formal retreat from empire, which started with the independence of India and Pakistan in 1947, followed closely by Burma (Myanmar) and Ceylon (Sri Lanka) in 1948, gathered pace and led to significant reassessments of British commitments in Asia, as well as redefinitions of the region by British politicians and diplomats.26 While the “Far East” had been imagined by Western powers to refer approximately to the Asian continent prior to the 20th century,27 the expression came to reflect, during and after the war, the evolution of the organisation and conception of British imperial defence in Asia, with the first Far East Command (in 1940-1942) focused mostly on Singapore, Malaya and Burma, and the second Far East Command (1963-1971) organised around the two main naval bases of Hong Kong and Singapore, which enabled it to oversee a wide region stretching all the way to Japan and China.28 Asia retained significant geostrategic importance for Britain during the Cold War, and which largely conditioned subsequent strategies of retreat from its empire.29 However, the Suez crisis in 1956, as well as increasing financial constraints, led Prime Minister Harold Macmillan to announce important reductions in defence spendings, and the retreat of British forces from “East of Suez”, that would be completed by Prime Ministers Harold Wilson and Edward Heath: the Hong Kong base was closed between 1957-59, followed by Aden in 1967 and eventually Singapore in 1971.30 The UK did however choose to retain defence relations with some countries of the area, as illustrated by the creation of the Five Power Defence Arrangements (FPDA) with Malaysia, Singapore, Australia and New Zealand in 1971, enabling the five powers to consult each other in the event of a military threat. But as the last British troops left South-East Asia in the 1970s, British foreign policy was essentially redirected towards Europe, with membership of the European Economic Community (EEC) secured in 1973.

  • 31 Boris Johnson, “Britain is back East of Suez” speech, Bahrain, 9 December 2016, https://www.gov.uk/ (...)
  • 32 According to International Monetary Fund figures, India and China jointly contribute about half of (...)
  • 33 HM government, “Global Britain in a Competitive Age”, p. 26.

9In 2016, the referendum on European Union (EU) membership, in which 51.9% of the British population voted “Leave”, led to a major reassessment of the importance of Asia in British foreign policy and of the need to return to “East of Suez”, as the then Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson claimed.31 Since the early 2020s, the “Indo-Pacific tilt”, which broadly includes the UK’s main diplomatic partners in Asia, as well as Australia, New Zealand and smaller Pacific islands (see map below this introduction), has therefore been part of a broader foreign policy strategy, aiming to reinforce British presence “East of Suez” by strengthening diplomatic, economic, military and cultural ties with countries of the region. It also reflects the growing economic weight and diplomatic place of the Asian continent on the international stage, especially centring around China and India.32 According to the 2021 Integrated Review, this may be even more true in the coming years: “By 2030, it is likely that the world will have moved further towards multipolarity, with the geopolitical and economic centre of gravity moving eastward towards the Indo-Pacific”.33

  • 34 HM government, “Integrated Review Refresh 2023”, p. 2.
  • 35 Department for Business and Trade, “UK signs treaty to join vast Indo-Pacific trade group as new da (...)
  • 36 HM government, “Integrated Review Refresh 2023”, p. 14.

10In many ways, British policy makers have been rather efficient in carrying out this ambitious diplomatic, military and economic plan for the Indo-Pacific zone, as outlined by the 2023 Integrated Review Refresh. Within two years, the UK achieved dialogue partner status with the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), reinforced its military presence in the region, notably through AUKUS and the Global Combat Air Programme (GCAP) with Italy and Japan,34 and joined the Comprehensive and Progressive Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP) in July 2023.35 This multi-faceted “Indo-Pacific tilt” has also entailed a strong desire to enhance the UK’s soft power in the region, as previously suggested. Again, this was reiterated in the Integrated Review Refresh, which commits the UK to develop the activities of its two main cultural diplomatic institutions, the BBC and the British Council.36

British soft power in Asia: cultural brokers, favoured areas and strategic challenges

  • 37 Vanessa Alayrac-Fielding, La Chine dans l’imaginaire anglais des Lumières (1685-1798) (Paris, Press (...)
  • 38 Henrietta Harrison, The Perils of Interpreting: The Extraordinary Lives of Two Translators between (...)
  • 39 Marine Bellégo, Enraciner l’empire : une autre histoire du jardin botanique de Calcutta (1860-1910)(...)
  • 40 Marie de Rugy, Imperial Borderlands. Maps and Territory-Building in the Northern Indochinese Penins (...)
  • 41 Christina Jialin Wu, Des scouts en Malaisie britannique. Une histoire de la mondialisation culturel (...)
  • 42 Chi-Kwan Mark, The Everyday Cold War: Britain and China, 1950-1972 (London, Bloomsbury, 2017).
  • 43 This also comes out of other very recent and stimulating studies of colonial Asia, such as Vivian K (...)
  • 44 Su Lin Lewis, “Skies That Bind: Air Travel in the Bandung Era” in Stephen Legg, Mike Hefferman, Jak (...)
  • 45 Project: Afro-Asian Networks: Transitions in the Global South, “Visualisation” (collective research (...)
  • 46 Jeremy Adelman, “What is Global History?”, “What is global history now?” Aeon, 2 March 2017, https: (...)

11When investigating the processes and assumptions of soft power diplomacy, the contributors to this volume pay particular attention to who facilitates British attraction, how consciously and with what means. This includes the study of plant collectors, journalists and press agencies, and cultural bodies, all with varying degrees of dependence on state funding and institutions, but also politicians and Whitehall officials, as well as their interlocutors in various parts of Asia. While the work of political scientists on soft power and nation branding has helped refine understandings of how a state can gain – or lose – power of attraction, the work of cultural historians has opened up new understandings of individual cosmologies, epistemic communities, and cultural brokers in diplomatic negotiations and people-to-people relations. Vanessa Alayrac-Fielding’s work on China in the English imagination during the Enlightenment is a key example,37 as is, more recently, the excellent study of Henrietta Harrison on the role of two translators/interpreters between Qing China and the British empire, showing not only that cultural brokers put their lives at risk but that knowledge is something that ebbs and flows: “absences of knowledge”, as she highlights – and as some of our contributors show in very different periods of history – have very tangible impact.38 Feelings of familiarity and difference also intersect with circuits in knowledge, as Marine Bellégo has shown in relation to colonial Calcutta,39 and as Marie de Rugy has traced in her study of maps and territory-building in Indochina at the turn of the 20th century.40 Tensions between national(ist) projects, trans-imperial circulations, intellectual exchanges and youth education are also at the heart of Christina Jialin Wu’s recent study of scouting in British Malaya.41 Research on the Cold War in Asia has also focused on what Chi-Kwan Mark calls “the everyday Cold War”, i.e. the “diplomatic ritual, propaganda rhetoric and symbolic gestures” that drove Chinese policy against Britain in several countries including Vietnam, Taiwan and Hong Kong.42 Mobility and migration are equally important, as shown particularly by Frances O’Morchoe, Erika Rappaport and Emily Harris in their contributions to this volume.43 Rappaport also gives particular prominence to spaces, forums and exhibitions, in the connected ages of decolonisation and the Cold War in South Asia. As historian Su Lin Lewis has argued when situating “the high diplomacy of Bandung [within] a broader arc of conferences”, including the Asian Relations Conference of 1947 and the Afro-Asian People’s Conference in Tashkent in 1957, lesser-known gatherings and complex journeys to these places offer core insights into meanings and practices of internationalism, solidarity and alternative paths to decolonising international relations and institutions.44 Such studies also help to situate the UK itself within a web of networks that bypassed Europe altogether, as shown by the visualisation project of “Afro-Asian Networks: Transitions in the Global South”,45 while Jeremy Alderman has pointed to the current disconnection between political dreams of a “Global Britain” and the focus of virtually half of UK historians on Britain and Ireland.46

  • 47 HM government, “2030 Roadmap for India-UK future relations”, 4 May 2021, https://www.gov.uk/governm (...)
  • 48 Ibid.
  • 49 For instance, Peg Murray-Evans mentions Secretary of State for International Trade Liam Fox’s speec (...)
  • 50 Adrien Rodd, “British diplomatic re-engagement in the Pacific: more than just words?”, Contemporary (...)
  • 51 HM government, “Integrated Review Refresh 2023”, p. 3.

12Unsurprisingly, Commonwealth countries located in the Indo-Pacific region feature high on the UK’s foreign policy priority list, as shown by the India-UK 2030 Roadmap, an important policy paper which was released in 2021. The Roadmap highlights the value of combining soft and hard power (i.e. “smart power”) in order to achieve broader foreign policy objectives in the region, as it gives as much weight to cultural and scientific relations as to security and economic cooperation with India.47 For example, the plan includes measures to encourage educational cooperation, academic partnerships, student and teacher mobility between British and Indian universities, the pooling of technical and scientific expertise between higher education institutions and companies in the two countries, and the implementation of “India-UK Together”, a joint cultural exchange programme aiming to strengthen artistic cooperation and creation. Simultaneously, the rhetoric of the India-UK 2030 Roadmap is somewhat reminiscent of the ties that are said to bind Commonwealth members together: “shared history, values and culture, with the strong understanding of each other that it brings”.48 For some British decision makers, some of whom are staunch Brexiteers, reviving the Commonwealth connection, and with it new possibilities for economic partnerships and “people-to-people” diplomacy, was presented as a credible alternative to the European Union.49 Boris Johnson’s decision to expand the UK’s diplomatic network in 2018, which included the opening of three new diplomatic posts in small Pacific islands (Samoa, Tonga and Vanuatu) of little economic value to the UK, can be interpreted in a post-imperial framework, as a “fairly inexpensive way for Britain to strengthen its overall presence in the Asia-Pacific” through the revival of old connections in a strategic region.50 The influence that the UK hopes to have in the Indo-Pacific also relies on actions which could help support an “open and stable” international order or address key societal challenges. The UK has for instance committed to support “sustainable development and poverty alleviation”, as well as to tackle “shared challenges including climate change” in Asia,51 in particular through the Climate Action for a Resilient Asia programme, launched in 2021.

  • 52 See for instance Fred Pearce, “Why is Britain retreating from global leadership on climate action?” (...)
  • 53 HM government, “Integrated Review Refresh 2023”, p. 14.
  • 54 Thibaud Harrois, “L’Integrated Review de 2021”.
  • 55 See for instance the special issue: Peter Clegg (ed.), “Brexit and the Commonwealth: What Next?”, T (...)
  • 56 Mélanie Torrent, “Le Brexit au prisme du Commonwealth : vers une perte d’influence britannique ?”, (...)
  • 57 Jamie Gaskarth, “Jamie Gaskarth on British Foreign Policy, Brexit, The Commonwealth, David Cameron (...)

13But a major retreat from environmental commitments under Rishi Sunak, and uncertainties about Labour’s own agenda regarding net-zero, tell a different story.52 And in the field of development aid, the UK has failed to deliver a strong message, in spite of its renewed commitment to “reinvigorate its position as a global leader on international development”.53 While aid was formerly central to the UK’s soft power, the budget allotted to development aid was reduced to 0.5% of the Gross National Income (GNI) in 2020, i.e. below the 0.7% objective defined by the United Nations. This budget cut was reflected, institutionally, by the merging of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office and the Department for International Development into the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO) in September 2020, which marked the end of a fully-fledged and independent ministry devoted to the question of international development.54 The UK’s Commonwealth trade routes lag behind the density of the UK’s networks with the EU,55 even now. And if attraction lies, as noted above with Nye, “in the eye of the beholder”, then the UK’s position is far from secure. As noted elsewhere, the UK suffered from a sizeable image deficit in several key Commonwealth member states, including Pakistan and India, with a drop registered in both countries and a series of complicated issues on the table of negotiations.56 If immigration and asylum policies were identified by Nye in 2013 as key areas which were prejudicial to British soft power, developments since 2019 have hardly improved the situation, despite efforts to woo Indian professionals and students. In a recent interview, international relations professor Jamie Gaskarth noted that many of the British foreign secretaries he interviewed, when asked about any regrets, said they wished they “had done more with the Commonwealth”. But as Gaskarth points out, “the question of empire” and its persistent remnants has been a consistent obstacle.57

Greater Britain, Global Britain and the legacies of empire

  • 58 See for instance Philip Taylor, British Propaganda in the Twentieth Century, Selling Democracy (Edi (...)
  • 59 See Shigeru Akita, Gerold Krozewski and Shoichi Watanabe (eds.), The Transformation of the Internat (...)

14In redirecting British interests towards Asia, the Conservative vision for “Global Britain” has included a renewal of historical links with former colonies in the region, notably India, Pakistan, Singapore, Malaysia, Myanmar and Sri Lanka, in particular to foster scientific cooperation and cultural exchanges with these countries. To assess the successes and limits of British soft power in the contemporary era, especially towards a region that was so vital to the UK’s imperial interests and with which British policy makers have expressed the desire to revive historical connections, the shifts and continuities of British foreign policy objectives since the imperial period are essential. Historians have argued that the Suez crisis in 1956 constituted a pivotal moment in the information and communication work of the UK government, as its complete failure to achieve its goal through hard power led it to deploy soft power on a much larger scale.58 But as noted above, the UK’s reliance on soft power as a key aspect of its foreign policy strategy towards Asia is far from new, although it has gained much importance since the mid-20th century. As the process of decolonisation unfolded, soft power became an essential tool for the UK to rebuild broken bilateral ties, where its prestige and position were being challenged by anti-colonial and nationalist movements, by other European competitors and by the advent of two new superpowers in the Cold War context. The connection between soft power and development aid was perhaps best illustrated by the creation of the Colombo Plan in 1950,59 in the context of Britain’s retreat from South Asian and Southeast Asian countries. Its goal was, and still is, to encourage technical cooperation and the transfer of scientific expertise, especially towards developing countries of the region, within a multilateral framework that goes beyond the confines of the Asian members of the Commonwealth. Yet as Rappaport shows in this volume, the UK’s ability to achieve its policy objectives was limited by the analysis that its Asian partners made of its intentions, and of the style in which it sought to project “British” values and identity.

  • 60 In Evidence Session.
  • 61 Rawnsley, “Challenging the Snake-Oil Salesmen”, p. 13.
  • 62 See for instance Dimitrios Stroikos, “China and India as Rising Powers and the Militarisation of Sp (...)
  • 63 Daya Thussu, “The Scramble for Asian Soft Power in Africa”, Les Enjeux de l’information et de la co (...)
  • 64 Mikael Weissman, “Capturing Power Shift in East Asia: Toward an Analytical Framework for Understand (...)
  • 65 See for instance Ole Jacob Sending, Vincent Pouliot and Iver B. Neumann (eds.), Diplomacy and the M (...)
  • 66 Philip Murphy, “The contradictions of soft power and the Commonwealth: the case of the ‘British’ mo (...)
  • 67 Ian Hall and Frank Smith, “The Struggle for Soft Power in Asia: Public Diplomacy and Regional Compe (...)

15In this respect, the contributions in this volume should be read in light of three major areas of historical enquiry. First is the close interplay between soft and hard power. As Lord Howell of Guildford, who chaired the House of Lords Select Committee when they interviewed Nye, suggested, “the most effective soft power is projected by countries with the strongest economies and the biggest resources”.60 Nye himself concurred that the use of hard power – as in the British intervention in Sierra Leone in the early 21st century, for instance – can bolster soft power, when military action is seen to be just. Or as Rawnsley puts it, “[h]ard power mechanisms can be involved in soft power activities; and states may exercise soft power to reinforce their hard power capacity”.61 In Asia, China and India matter to UK foreign policy because of their economic and military might – including their space ambitions62 – and their new cultural initiatives outside Asia, notably in Africa.63 For Mikael Weissman, for instance, economic power needs to be taken into account in analyses of both power relations and the expression of soft power in East Asia, given China’s ambitions and actual policies.64 This is also in line with theoretical analyses of diplomacy which consider the overlap between state and non-state actors, and between the practice of diplomacy and the theory (and history) of international relations as a discipline.65 Soft power should not, in any case, be idealised as invariably a force of good. It can be used for very different ends, under different sets of values; as Philip Murphy has underlined, one of the states to have used Commonwealth soft power most effectively in the last twenty years was Sri Lanka under Mahinda Rajapaksa (and Paul Kagame in Rwanda).66 And as Ian Hall and Frank Smith have noted, taking Asia as their case study, the “struggle for soft power” can also “aggravate rather than ameliorate tensions in the region”.67

  • 68 Carruthers, Susan, Winning Hearts and Minds: British Governments, the Media and Colonial Counter-In (...)
  • 69 Yasmin Khan, The Great Partition. The Making of India and Pakistan (Yale, Yale University Press, 20 (...)
  • 70 Paul Dixon, The British Approach to Counterinsurgency: From Malaya and Northern Ireland to Iraq and (...)
  • 71 See Brian Drohan, Brutality in an Age of Human Rights: Activism and Counterinsurgency at the End of (...)
  • 72 Rawnsley, “Challenging the Snake-Oil Men”, pp. 6, 3-4.
  • 73 Ibid., pp. 1-2.

16Second is the history of the violent and conflicted end of the British empire in several territories, including in Asia. This is, of course, not new and the work of Susan Carruthers on the role of the British media at the end of empire, for instance, shows clearly that violence and abuses were reported at the time and known to the public, even when they were not consistently – far from it – condemned.68 But there has been a growing body of work on British decolonisation as an age of violence, far from the smooth transition from Empire to Commonwealth that had been dominant. This includes the experiences and legacies of the partition of British India,69 with several events marking its 70th anniversary in 2017, the counter-insurgency in Malaya70 and the UK’s complex relation with the emerging regime of human rights in the second half of the 20th century.71 To return to Rawnsley’s analysis, “soft power is what happens elsewhere” and it is also a concept which some see “as essentially Anglo-American, western-centric, and providing a convenient justification for the continuation of practices that can be described as ‘cultural imperialism’”.72 This leads him to conclude that soft power is not merely “synonymous with cultural attraction and familiarity”, and should be understood as “the attractive power of political institutions, processes and principles” – which means that states need to lead by example.73

  • 74 See for instance Sarah Stockwell, The British End of the British Empire (Cambridge, Cambridge Unive (...)
  • 75 See for instance Alan Lester, Deny and Disavow. The British Empire in the Culture War (London, SunR (...)
  • 76 Paul M. McGarr, “‘The Viceroys Are Disappearing from the Roundabouts in Delhi’: British Symbols of (...)
  • 77 Rahul Rao, “Gandhi falling … and rising”, Journal of Historical Geography 82, 2023, pp. 1-10.

17Third, the question of imperial and colonial legacies in contemporary societies74 is central to this volume, because it has had a deep impact on the UK’s current ambitions in Asia. In 2022-2023, several new histories of the Empire’s impact on British state and society have confirmed the importance of acknowledging the ways in which imperial legacies and vestiges continue to influence contemporary politics and institutions. But their reception has also confirmed how heated debates on these questions remain in both politics and academia.75 This means that while some Conservative politicians argue that past imperial connections can facilitate the deployment of new diplomatic relations in Asia, this is very much dependent on a number of other factors. They include what British narratives of empire are being promoted, what British state and non-state actors consider the duty of the UK to be regarding its colonial past, and the extent to which they are prepared to de-colonise relations – definitely an unfinished task. At a time when physical and immaterial colonial vestiges are being challenged,76 as is the status of some long-standing anticolonial “heroes” – take Gandhi in India77 – it seems doubtful that British soft power can flourish without an acknowledgement of the enduring, devastating impact of Empire in formerly colonised spaces, in and outside Asia. The “imperial amnesia” of some, and in certain cases, an avowed, celebrated pride in empire, limit the UK’s ability to benefit from any shared history, and to reflect upon the way in which empire may have affected the UK’s position and image in the world, including in Asia and in its former Asian colonies. This is not to say, however, that all actors in Asia, state and non-state, individual and collective, want the same from the UK, or that the UK state cannot negotiate more influence for itself, in certain contexts and given certain concessions. It is precisely these negotiations for influence and norm-making, between state and society, between hard and soft power, and across several regions, that the contributions to this volume investigate.

Tracing soft power in imperial, colonial and decolonising worlds: articles and case studies

18Frances O’Morchoe opens this special issue with her study of British plant collectors as agents of informal imperialism, focusing on the life and work of Dundee-born Dr Augustine Henry, who worked as a customs official for the Chinese Maritime Customs Service at the turn of the twentieth century. Tracing the connections between colonial science and popular gardening, she investigates how Henry’s activities as an amateur collector connected with wider British attempts to control “knowledge” of Asia in substance and form. She argues that the concept of a “temperate imagination”, which connected the Chinese provinces where Henry worked to life back in Britain, served to give popular support to imperial endeavours in the hearts and minds of Britons. This does not mean, as O’Morchoe shows, that Henry was an agent of the British state; he was also in contact with several other European and Asian authorities, and requests or guidance that came from institutions such as Kew Gardens were questioned, ignored or sometimes bypassed. But the activities and writings of Henry, and other plant collectors in the region, contributed to transforming the plants that were brought back to Britain into “contact zones”, part of a wider material culture of empire in which some of the strategies for British influence in Asia were rooted.

19Relations with state structures and government ambitions are at the heart of the article by Cathy Monarque, on the evolving role of Reuters as a lever of British influence in Southeast Asia, from the time of its foundation in London in 1851 to the late 1970s. Monarque shows that Reuters developed an imperial information service as the British formal and informal empire expanded in the course of the 19th and early 20th centuries, and that Reuters’ network and influence served several of the policy objectives of successive British governments in the region. But she also traces mounting competition from a variety of European and Asian information agencies, and highlights growing resistance in Asia to information networks dominated by Europeans or, more generally, by the Western media. Reflecting on the challenges posed by the Second World War, the liberation wars that saw the formal end of the British, Dutch and French empires in large swathes of the region, and the US war in Vietnam, Monarque offers a nuanced study of the challenges faced by Reuters in a changing world order. Reuters was never fully independent from the British government, which provided essential funding, but it was not a compliant and submissive voice. In this respect, the comparison she draws with the French Havas – later Agence France Presse – is illuminating.

20Monarque’s conclusions on the prominent role played by British experts in promoting information cooperation within UNESCO and the Council of Europe in Strasbourg, and the questions she raises on responsible news management, connect with Erika Rappaport’s study of the Colombo Plan Exhibition of 1952 as “A Vast Publicity Exercise” – as a secret brief drafted by British diplomats termed it. As Rappaport shows, the Colombo Plan stimulated cooperation across Commonwealth and non-Commonwealth countries, with Australia and Singapore playing a significant part in the late 1950s. What Rappaport argues, is that British propaganda in the early years of the Colombo Plan generated fierce criticism of British ambitions in the region, and led several members of the “new” Commonwealth to propose alternative narratives and policies for post-colonial development. Reflecting on nation-branding in the transition out of empire and at a time of Commonwealth expansion, Rappaport considers the theories and the practices behind the propaganda exercise around the Colombo Plan, as it affected donor and recipient partners and redefined postcolonial identities. Tracing the role of publicists in the years preceding Bandung, and focusing on the competing objectives of Britain and Ceylon/Sri Lanka, Rappaport concludes that imperialist and paternalistic narratives, and images of Britishness and “partnership” found little traction. British political and cultural influence was further marginalised by London’s “vast publicity exercise” – a grand design but an ultimately unsuccessful one.

21The connections between theory and practice, national ambitions and cultural influence abroad are similarly at the heart of Emily Harris’s article on the “Re:Imagine India” project, launched in 2015 as a funding scheme run by the Arts Council, the British Council and the National Lottery. Its principal aims were to promote diversity and intercultural dialogue in and through the arts, by enabling transnational collaborations between British and Indian artists and arts groups, and funding bilateral mobility. Reflecting on several of the funded projects, Harris shows that in many ways, “Re:Imagine India” shows the benefits that Britain can derive from a reinvigorated cultural diplomacy in former colonies, where a shared past can give it an edge over other countries. But as Harris argues, this shared past is overcast by memories of empire and imperialism, and recent Conservative policies on migration, apologies and repatriation contradict some of Britain’s rhetoric of partnership in the region. Focusing on the tensions between the objectives, policy and language of cultural and state actors, she concludes that British soft power is still fundamentally conceived, consciously or not, as an extension of the excellence and superiority that was seen to underpin the imperial project. At a time when India is an increasingly attractive partner for many countries in the world, including in Europe, Britain runs the risk of seeing its soft power decrease, unless a more genuinely grassroots approach is adopted.

22This is particularly true given the economic shifts since Brexit and, more widely, geopolitics and the constant evolutions of the international system. The last two articles lead us back to the “Indo-Pacific tilt” and its impact on the attributes, channels and limits of British power as a whole. Soft power, they stress, is part of a wide arsenal of foreign policy and diplomatic levers that also include defence capabilities and procurement. Marc Fourches takes a long-term view to show that the “tilt” is only partly a new direction taken by British foreign-policy makers. Tracing the evolution of naval commitments and military bases back to imperial expansion and the challenges of the Second World War, Fourches returns to the motives behind and the debates around the withdrawal from “East-of-Suez” in the late 1960s and early 1970s. He shows that it was only a very partial retraction of Britain’s overall military and strategic commitments. It should therefore come as little surprise that for many international policy planners, British influence remains closely linked to the visible power of the Royal Navy, and Fourches concludes that the Queen Elizabeth Carrier Strike Group, which is involved in close cooperation with the Indian Navy, is seen as a key component of British operations and reputation in Asia.

23But as Scott Edwards and Robert Yates emphasise in their article, what influence and reputation the UK has, and can have in Southeast Asia, ultimately depends on the expectations and assessments of the Southeast Asian governments and nations themselves. Drawing on role theory and on interviews with ASEAN officials as well as Thai and Indonesian security practitioners, Edwards and Yates offer a nuanced analysis of recent British ambitions in Southeast Asia. While some of the grand objectives of the successive Integrated Reviews have met with criticism in the region, there is some desire for the UK to be a strong security and economic partner, and to play a role in capacity building in Southeast Asia. Reflecting on role claims and role legitimation, the article offers theoretical perspectives on how states – and specifically the UK post-Brexit – can negotiate a role outside their immediate region. Edwards and Yates focus their attention on the epistemic communities of decision makers and policy makers, the normative claims that the UK is a “free world” leader in a region where authoritarianism remains strong, and the strategies used to “perform a constructive role” in Southeast Asia, thereby shedding important light on the evolution of soft power conceptions and dynamics in the contemporary world. In the field of maritime security, the UK has a useful role to play in Southeast Asia, provided it is negotiated in real dialogue with the regional stakeholders. Recent developments suggest, they conclude, that the UK has the capacity to build up its influence in the region provided how it conceives of its role is informed by what its intended partners expect of it.

24Changing expectations and the importance of dialogue, negotiation and adaptability are all central to the experiences recounted by Vijay Krishnarayan in his interview. Drawing on his years in the UK and the Caribbean, and on his career devoted to promoting civil society, including as head of the Commonwealth Foundation, Krishnarayan discusses Commonwealth work and shifting international dynamics in South and Southeast Asia. People-to-people links have been most successful in the areas of micro-finance or gender, but civil society organisations often face challenges, or at the very least scepticism, from states and governments. For the Commonwealth itself, soft power has been – not just in Asia – about maintaining a clear distance with the UK, but British policy makers have only rarely seen the Commonwealth as a useful partner in the deployment of soft power. Looking ahead, at a time when the Commonwealth as an organisation faces a number of internal and external challenges, Krishnarayan stresses – echoing several of the contributors to this volume – that facing up to its colonial past and legacies will be vital.

25The volume concludes on three books reviews: Thierry Di Costanzo on Kirstin Stapleton’s The Modern City in Asia (CUP, 2022), Lori Maguire on Brian Cuddy and Frederik Logevall’s The Vietnam War in the Pacific World (UNCP, 2022), and Andrew Yu on Chris Patten’s The Hong Kong Diaries (Penguin, 2022). To some extent, they resonate with some of the perspectives, conceptual and methodological choices which this special issue has opted for: the importance of Asia, in its different conceptions and perimeters, for the UK state and for British society; the impact of practitioners in conceiving, legitimising or compromising hard and soft power over time; the influence of place and conflict in the negotiation of new world roles; and a reflection on the complex and partial de-centring of the UK in a region where it is – and has been – one among very many external partners, competitors and influences. As the following case studies show, awareness of alternative worldviews, and the willingness and ability to understand the value of grassroots projects and co-ownership, are key to the success – or failure – of soft power.

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Notes

1 HM government, “Global Britain in a Competitive Age: the Integrated Review of Security, Defence, Development and Foreign Policy”, CP 403, March 2021, p. 9, https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/60644e4bd3bf7f0c91eababd/Global_Britain_in_a_Competitive_Age-_the_Integrated_Review_of_Security__Defence__Development_and_Foreign_Policy.pdf, consulted on 20 December 2023.

2 House of Lords, Select Committee on Soft Power and the UK’s Influence, Persuasion and Power in the Modern World (London, HMSO, March 2014), https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/ld201314/ldselect/ldsoftpower/150/15003.htm, consulted on 20 December 2023.

3 Joseph Nye, Bound To Lead: The Changing Nature of American Power (Basic Books, New York, 1990); and Soft Power: The Means to Success in World Politics (New York, PublicAffairs, 2004).

4 Joseph Nye, Evidence Session no. 10, Unrevised transcript of evidence taken before The Select Committee on Soft Power and the UK’s influence, 15 October 2013, https://www.parliament.uk/globalassets/documents/lords-committees/soft-power-uk-influence/uc151013Ev10.pdf, consulted on 24 January 2024.

5 Tim Summers, “Limited appeal: China’s soft power in the United Kingdom” in Ties Dams, Xiaoxue Martin and Vera Kranenburg, China’s Soft Power in Europe: Falling on Hard Times (Den Haag, The Netherlands Institute of International Relations / Clingendael Institute, 2021).

6 Tim Summers, “Britain and Hong Kong: the 2019 protests and their aftermath”, Asian Education and Development Studies 11:2, 2021, pp. 276-286. The decision to grant right of abode was taken in July 2020: HM Government, “UK to Extend Residence Rights for British National (Overseas) Citizens in Hong Kong”, 1 July 2020, https://www.gov.uk/government/news/uk-to-extend-residence-rights-for-british-nationals-overseas-citizens-in-hong-kong. The decision not to do business with Huawei was taken around the same time: HM Government, “Huawei to be Removed from UK 5G Networks by 2027”, 14 July 2020, https://www.gov.uk/government/news/huawei-to-be-removed-from-uk-5g-networks-by-2027, consulted 20 December 2023.

7 Cleo Paskal, “Indo-Pacific strategies, perceptions and partnerships: the UK and the Indo-Pacific”, Chatham House, 23 March 2021, https://www.chathamhouse.org/2021/03/indo-pacific-strategies-perceptions-and-partnerships/03-uk-and-indo-pacific, consulted 20 December 2023.

8 HM government, “Integrated Review Refresh 2023: Responding to a More Contested and Volatile World”, CP 811, March 2023, p. 13, https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/641d72f45155a2000c6ad5d5/11857435_NS_IR_Refresh_2023_Supply_AllPages_Revision_7_WEB_PDF.pdf, consulted on 20 December 2023.

9 Ibid., p. 3.

10 Irene S. Wu, “Tools for measuring soft power. A review of recent quantitative analyses” in Naren Chitty, Lilian Ji and Gary D. Rawnsley (eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Soft Power (London, Routledge, 2023 [2016]), p. 70.

11 Gary Rawnsley, “Challenging the Snake-Oil Salesmen: A Critique of British Approaches to Soft Power”, Journal of International Communication 24:1, 2018, pp. 8, 4.

12 Laurence Badel and Pierre Singaravélou, “Le dialogue Asie-Europe en perspective (XIXe-XXe siècle)”, Relations Internationales 167:3, 2016.

13 Adrien Rodd and Sophie Croisy, special issue on “Oceania and the Pacific Rim”, Cultures of the Commonwealth 23, 2020.

14 Adrien Rodd, “The Pacific in the ‘Asian Century’”, Outre-Terre 58-59:1/2, 2020; see Adrien Rodd, “Oceania in the Face of Great Power Rivalries”, pp. 303-326; Annick Cizel, “The United States on the Move? Military ‘Enhanced Engagement’ at the Risk of Multipolarity in the Indo-Pacific Zone”, pp. 377-399.

15 Edmund Terence Gomez, Cheong Kee Cheok and Vamsi Vakulabharanam (eds.), “China, India and Southeast Asia: Paths to Development”, special issue of The Round Table: The Commonwealth Journal of International Affairs 105:6, 2016; Aakriti Tandon and Michael O. Slobodchikoff (eds.), “Security in South Asia”, special issue of The Round Table: The Commonwealth Journal of International Affairs 108:2, 2019.

16 Yuen Foong Khong, “Power as prestige in world politics”, International Affairs 95:1, 2019, pp. 138, 119.

17 Ajaya K. Sahoo (ed.), Routledge Handbook of Asian Transnationalism (London, Routledge, 2023); Jens Damm, Ondřej Klimeš, Jarmila Ptackova and Gary Rawnsley (eds.). Transnational Sites of China’s Cultural Diplomacy: Central Asia, Middle East, Southeast Asia and Europe Compared (Basingstoke, Palgrave, 2019); Barnaby Joseph Dye, “New convergence tilt in India’s South-South cooperation with Africa”, LSE Blog, 10 March 2022, https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/southasia/2022/03/10/new-convergence-tilt-in-indias-south-south-cooperation-with-africa/ (consulted 24 February 2023); Ross Anthony and Uta Ruppert (eds.), Reconfiguring transregionalisation in the Global South: African-Asian Encounters (Cham, Palgrave Macmillan, 2020). See also Gerard McCann, India and Africa – Old Friends, New Game (London, Zed Books, 1999).

18 See for example Thibaud Harrois, “Towards ‘Global Britain’? Theresa May and the UK’s Role in the World after Brexit”, Observatoire de la société britannique 21, 2018, pp. 51-73; Thibaud Harrois, “L’Integrated Review de 2021 : une stratégie tous azimuts au service d’une Global Britain à l’ambition vague”, Observatoire du Brexit, 25 May 2021; Oliver Daddow, “Brexit and Britain’s Role in the World” in Patrick Diamond, Peter Nedergaard and Ben Rosamond (eds.), Routledge Handbook of the Politics of Brexit (London, Routledge, 2018), pp. 208-222.

19 Jamie Gaskarth, “Global Britain in the Indo-Pacific”, special issue of the RUSI Journal 167:6-7, 2022.

20 See for instance Oliver Turner, “Global Britain and the Narrative of Empire”, The Political Quarterly 90:4, 2019, pp. 727-734.

21 For example, for Robert Saunders, “Global Britain” is rather rooted in a form of heroic vision of British past, not necessarily centred on its empire; Robert Saunders, “Brexit and Empire: ‘Global Britain’ and the myth of imperial nostalgia’’, The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 48:6, 2020, p. 21.

22 The scholarship on British expansion in Asia is very rich and would be impossible to reference exhaustively. Recent analyses include: Douglas M. Peers and Nadini Gooptu (eds.), India and the British Empire (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2012); Chris Nierstrasz, Rivalry for Trade in Tea and Textiles: The English and Dutch East India Companies (1700-1800) (Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2015); Gareth Knapman, Anthony Milner and Mary Quilty (eds.), Liberalism and the British Empire in Southeast Asia (New York, Routledge, 2019); Stan Neal, Singapore, Chinese Migration, and the Making of the British Empire, 1819-67 (Woodbridge, The Boydell Press, 2019); David Veevers, The Origins of the British Empire in Asia, 1600-1750 (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2020).

23 Anthony Best (ed.), Britain’s Retreat from Empire in East Asia (London, Routledge, 2017), p. 1.

24 Burma was the world’s largest rice producer in the 1940s, and therefore used by the British as the region’s “rice basket”; Malaya was the world’s most important rubber producer, and its rubber and tin mining industries were very profitable to the British.

25 Best, Britain’s Retreat, pp. 1-2.

26 Brian P. Farrell, S.R. Joey Long and David J. Ulbrich (eds.), From Far East to Asia Pacific, Great Powers and Grand Strategy 1900-1954 (Oldenbourg, De Gruyter, 2022).

27 Philippe Pelletier, “Imaginer le nom d’Extrême-Orient”, La Géographie 1558:3, 2015, pp. 29-32.

28 Claire Sanderson, “La Grande-Bretagne et l’Asie du Sud-Est depuis 1945 : réalités, réajustements, retraits” in Pierre Journoud (ed.), L’évolution du débat stratégique en Asie du Sud-Est depuis 1945, Études de l’IRSEM 14, 2012, pp. 53-68, 57.

29 See for instance Peter Lowe, Contending with Nationalism and Communism: British Policy towards Southeast Asia, 1945-65 (Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2009) and Christopher E. Goscha et Christian F. Ostermann (eds.), Connecting Histories: Decolonization and the Cold War in Southeast Asia, 1945-1962 (Washington, D. C., Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 2009).

30 Claire Sanderson, “La Grande-Bretagne et l’Asie du Sud-Est”, pp. 62-64.

31 Boris Johnson, “Britain is back East of Suez” speech, Bahrain, 9 December 2016, https://www.gov.uk/government/speeches/foreign-secretary-speech-britain-is-back-east-of-suez, consulted 22 December 2023.

32 According to International Monetary Fund figures, India and China jointly contribute about half of world’s GDP growth in 2023-2024.

33 HM government, “Global Britain in a Competitive Age”, p. 26.

34 HM government, “Integrated Review Refresh 2023”, p. 2.

35 Department for Business and Trade, “UK signs treaty to join vast Indo-Pacific trade group as new data shows major economic benefits”, 16 July 2023, https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/cbp-9121/, consulted 20 December 2023.

36 HM government, “Integrated Review Refresh 2023”, p. 14.

37 Vanessa Alayrac-Fielding, La Chine dans l’imaginaire anglais des Lumières (1685-1798) (Paris, Presses de l’université Paris Sorbonne, 2015).

38 Henrietta Harrison, The Perils of Interpreting: The Extraordinary Lives of Two Translators between Qing China and the British Empire (Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2023), p. 274.

39 Marine Bellégo, Enraciner l’empire : une autre histoire du jardin botanique de Calcutta (1860-1910) (Paris, Muséum national d’Histoire naturelle, 2021).

40 Marie de Rugy, Imperial Borderlands. Maps and Territory-Building in the Northern Indochinese Peninsula (1885-1914) (Leiden, Brill, 2021); the book was first published in French as Aux confins des empires. Cartes et constructions territoriales dans le nord de la péninsule indochinoise, 1885-1914 (Paris, Éditions de la Sorbonne, 2018).

41 Christina Jialin Wu, Des scouts en Malaisie britannique. Une histoire de la mondialisation culturelle de la jeunesse (Paris, Presses de Sciences Po, 2024).

42 Chi-Kwan Mark, The Everyday Cold War: Britain and China, 1950-1972 (London, Bloomsbury, 2017).

43 This also comes out of other very recent and stimulating studies of colonial Asia, such as Vivian Kong, Multiracial Britishness: Global Networks in Hong Kong, 1910-1945 (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2023).

44 Su Lin Lewis, “Skies That Bind: Air Travel in the Bandung Era” in Stephen Legg, Mike Hefferman, Jake Hodder and Benjamin J. Thorpe (eds.), Placing Internationalism. International Conferences and the Making of the Modern World (London, Bloomsbury, 2022), p. 234. See also Su Lin Lewis and Carolien Stolte, “Other Bandungs: Afro-Asian Internationalisms in the Early Cold War,” Journal of World History 30:1-2, 2019, pp. 1-19; and Christopher J. Lee (ed.), Making a World after Empire: the Bandung Moment and its Political Afterlives (Athens, Ohio, Ohio University Press, 2019).

45 Project: Afro-Asian Networks: Transitions in the Global South, “Visualisation” (collective research project supported by the Arts & Humanities Research Council, International Institute of Social History, University of Bristol, Universiteit Leiden) https://afroasiannetworks.com/visualisation/ consulted 20 February 2024.

46 Jeremy Adelman, “What is Global History?”, “What is global history now?” Aeon, 2 March 2017, https://aeon.co/essays/is-global-history-still-possible-or-has-it-had-its-moment, consulted 20 February 2024.

47 HM government, “2030 Roadmap for India-UK future relations”, 4 May 2021, https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/india-uk-virtual-summit-may-2021-roadmap-2030-for-a-comprehensive-strategic-partnership/2030-roadmap-for-india-uk-future-relations#contents, consulted 20 December 2023.

48 Ibid.

49 For instance, Peg Murray-Evans mentions Secretary of State for International Trade Liam Fox’s speech in 2017; Peg Murray-Evans, “Brexit and the Commonwealth: Fantasy Meets Reality” in Patrick Diamond et al., Routledge Handbook of the Politics of Brexit, pp. 197-207, 197.

50 Adrien Rodd, “British diplomatic re-engagement in the Pacific: more than just words?”, Contemporary British History 37:4, 2023, pp. 605-632.

51 HM government, “Integrated Review Refresh 2023”, p. 3.

52 See for instance Fred Pearce, “Why is Britain retreating from global leadership on climate action?”, YaleEnvironment360, 17 October 2023, https://e360.yale.edu/features/ungreening-britain-sunak-climate-change, last consulted 23 February 2024.

53 HM government, “Integrated Review Refresh 2023”, p. 14.

54 Thibaud Harrois, “L’Integrated Review de 2021”.

55 See for instance the special issue: Peter Clegg (ed.), “Brexit and the Commonwealth: What Next?”, The Round Table: The Commonwealth Journal of External Affairs 105: 5 (2016).

56 Mélanie Torrent, “Le Brexit au prisme du Commonwealth : vers une perte d’influence britannique ?”, Recherches Internationales 117, 2020, pp. 9-25.

57 Jamie Gaskarth, “Jamie Gaskarth on British Foreign Policy, Brexit, The Commonwealth, David Cameron and William Hague”, Thinking Global Podcast, E-International Relations, 18 December 2023, https://www.e-ir.info/2023/12/18/thinking-global-podcast-jamie-gaskarth, c. 20’, last consulted 25 February 2024.

58 See for instance Philip Taylor, British Propaganda in the Twentieth Century, Selling Democracy (Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press, 1999), p. 228.

59 See Shigeru Akita, Gerold Krozewski and Shoichi Watanabe (eds.), The Transformation of the International Order of Asia: Decolonization, the Cold War, and the Colombo Plan (Abingdon, Routledge, 2015).

60 In Evidence Session.

61 Rawnsley, “Challenging the Snake-Oil Salesmen”, p. 13.

62 See for instance Dimitrios Stroikos, “China and India as Rising Powers and the Militarisation of Space” in Thomas Hoerber and Iraklis Oikonomou (eds.), The Militarization of European Space Policy (London, Routledge, 2023).

63 Daya Thussu, “The Scramble for Asian Soft Power in Africa”, Les Enjeux de l’information et de la communication 17:2, 2016, pp. 225-237.

64 Mikael Weissman, “Capturing Power Shift in East Asia: Toward an Analytical Framework for Understanding ‘Soft Power’”, Asian Perspective 44:3, 2020, pp. 353-382.

65 See for instance Ole Jacob Sending, Vincent Pouliot and Iver B. Neumann (eds.), Diplomacy and the Making of World Politics (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2015).

66 Philip Murphy, “The contradictions of soft power and the Commonwealth: the case of the ‘British’ monarchy”, Conference on “Soft power in the contemporary Commonwealth: Approaches, opportunities and challenges”, Institute of Commonwealth Studies, 15 March 2023, https://www.sas.ac.uk/podcasts/soft-power-contemporary-commonwealth-approaches-opportunities-and-challenges, c. 25’, last consulted 24 February 2024.

67 Ian Hall and Frank Smith, “The Struggle for Soft Power in Asia: Public Diplomacy and Regional Competition”, Asian Security 9:1, 2013, pp. 1-18.

68 Carruthers, Susan, Winning Hearts and Minds: British Governments, the Media and Colonial Counter-Insurgency 1944-60 (Leicester, Leicester University Press, 1995).

69 Yasmin Khan, The Great Partition. The Making of India and Pakistan (Yale, Yale University Press, 2017, new ed.); Kavita Puri, Partition Voices. Untold British Stories (London, Bloomsbury, 2022 [2017]).

70 Paul Dixon, The British Approach to Counterinsurgency: From Malaya and Northern Ireland to Iraq and Afghanistan (London, Palgrave Macmillan, 2012); Martin Thomas and Gareth Curless (eds.), Decolonization and Conflict. Colonial Comparisons and Legacies (London, Bloomsbury, 2018).

71 See Brian Drohan, Brutality in an Age of Human Rights: Activism and Counterinsurgency at the End of the British Empire (Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 2018); and Erik Linstrum, Age of Emergency: Living with Violence at the End of the British Empire (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2023).

72 Rawnsley, “Challenging the Snake-Oil Men”, pp. 6, 3-4.

73 Ibid., pp. 1-2.

74 See for instance Sarah Stockwell, The British End of the British Empire (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2018); Stuart Ward and Astrid Rasch (eds.), Embers of Empire in Brexit Britain (London, Bloomsbury, 2019); and Berny Sèbe and Matthew G. Stanard (eds.), Decolonising Europe? Popular Responses to the End of Empire (London, Routledge, 2020).

75 See for instance Alan Lester, Deny and Disavow. The British Empire in the Culture War (London, SunRise Publishing, 2022); Charlotte Riley, Imperial Island. A History of Empire in Modern Britain (London, Penguin Books, 2023). And for opposing voices in the debate: Nigel Biggar, “On Colonialism: A Moral Reckoning: A Reply to Alan Lester”, The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 51:4 (2023), pp. 736-824.

76 Paul M. McGarr, “‘The Viceroys Are Disappearing from the Roundabouts in Delhi’: British Symbols of Power in Post-Colonial India”, Modern Asian Studies 49:3, 2015, pp. 787-831.

77 Rahul Rao, “Gandhi falling … and rising”, Journal of Historical Geography 82, 2023, pp. 1-10.

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References

Electronic reference

Lauriane Simony and Mélanie Torrent, “British soft power in Asia: a (post-)imperial project?”Revue Française de Civilisation Britannique [Online], XXIX-1 | 2024, Online since 29 March 2024, connection on 23 January 2026. URL: http://journals.openedition.org/rfcb/11529; DOI: https://doi.org/10.4000/rfcb.11529

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About the authors

Lauriane Simony

Lauriane Simony est maîtresse de conférences à CY Cergy Paris Université et chercheuse au laboratoire AGORA (EA 7392). Ses recherches en histoire britannique portent sur le British Council en Birmanie après l’indépendance et sur les questions de diplomatie culturelle dans le double contexte de la décolonisation de l’Empire britannique et de la Guerre froide. Parmi ses travaux récents, elle a contribué à l’ouvrage From Far East to Asia Pacific: Great Powers and Grand Strategy, 1900-1954 (sous la direction de Brian P. Farrell, SR Joey Long et David J. Ulbrich ; paru en 2022 aux éditions De Gruyter). Elle a également co-dirigé, avec Mélanie Torrent, un numéro spécial de la revue Contemporary British History intitulé "Diplomatic Departures: negotiating Britain's international outreach in the contemporary world" (paru en 2023), pour lequel elle a également rédigé un article : "Cultural diplomacy in times of crisis: the British Council's departure from Burma during the military dictatorship (1962-1966)". Enfin, en 2019, elle a reçu une bourse de la Société des Anglicistes de l’Enseignement Supérieur afin de mener des recherches aux Archives Nationales du Myanmar.

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Mélanie Torrent

Mélanie Torrent est professeure des universités à l’université de Picardie Jules Verne, membre de l’UR CORPUS 4295 et Senior Research Fellow à l’Institute of Commonwealth Studies de l’université de Londres (School of Advanced Studies). Elle a été membre junior (2016) de l’Institut universitaire de France. Ses recherches portent sur les fins connectées des empires français et britannique, leur influence sur l’État et la société contemporaine britanniques, avec un intérêt particulier pour les conceptions et pratiques de la diplomatie et de la politique étrangère. Elle a récemment co-dirigé avec Lauriane Simony le numéro spécial “Diplomatic Departures: negotiating Britain's international outreach in the contemporary world” (Contemporary British History 37: 4, 2023).

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