Commissioned Book Review: Srdjan Vucetic, Greatness and Decline: National Identity and British Foreign Policy
| Author | Ben Wellings |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/14789299221095058 |
| Published date | 01 May 2023 |
| Date | 01 May 2023 |
| Subject Matter | Commissioned Book Review |
Political Studies Review
2023, Vol. 21(2) NP13 –NP14
journals.sagepub.com/home/psrev
Commissioned Book Review
1095058PSW0010.1177/14789299221095058Political Studies ReviewCommissioned Book Review
book-review2022
Commissioned Book Review
Greatness and Decline: National
Identity and British Foreign Policy by
Srdjan Vucetic. Montreal, QC, Canada;
Kingston, ON, Canada: McGill-Queen’s
University Press, 2021, 312 pp., C$37.95
paperback, ISBN 9780228005872.
This monograph asks a deceptively simple ques-
tion: is there a relationship between national
identity and foreign policy? Srdjan Vucetic has
provided us with a systematic answer in the
affirmative in his constructivist account of the
directions of British foreign policy since 1950.
Crucially, Vucetic situates the legitimacy of that
foreign policy formation within the wider con-
text of British national identity.
This conclusion builds on Vucetic’s earlier
arguments that policy follows identity. This
work, however, seeks to understand how that
identity is constructed and the ‘discursive fit’
that legitimises foreign policy choices and
actions (Vucetic, 2021: 18). For Vucetic, ‘dis-
cursive fit can help us grasp the political
dynamic between national identity contestation
on the one hand and foreign policy on the other’
(Vucetic, 2021: 18). The word ‘contestation’ is
important in this analysis. National identity is
not seen as a fixed entity predicated on objec-
tive features or equated with the national inter-
est. Rather, it is political contestation over what
Britain ought to be that shapes the contours of
how Britons understand each other, and their
collective place in the world.
From this perspective, Vucetic argues that
‘Britain’s search for global leadership was
always an expression not so much of bi-partisan
consensus, ruling class interests, elite culture,
or the “official mind,” but of everyday self -
understanding circulating in British society
as a whole’ (Vucetic, 2021: 13). This approach
accordingly helps us explain seeming anoma-
lies in British (or any) foreign policy; anomalies
that are generated if we take an overly narrow
materialist approach to understanding foreign
policy decision-making.
His argument is grounded in what we might
call ‘enhanced interpretivism’ and, perhaps
unusually for interpretivist explanations of for-
eign policy formation in published monographs,
he provides an account of the methodology
informing the analysis and conclusions. This
will make this book one of great interest to
those researching foreign policy formation and
not just that of the UK alone. Building on the
idea of ‘situated agency’, Vucetic seeks foreign
policy legitimacy in a wider context than found
in the ‘traditions and dilemmas’ approach to for-
eign policy analysis. As such, he uses speeches,
newspapers, school textbooks, novels and films
over a six-decade period to create a representa-
tive approximation of the discursive context in
which British national identity was produced
from the 1950s to the 2000s.
Vucetic is best known for his research on the
Anglopshere and the role that this identity
played in the formation of relations among the
Anglopshere countries themselves and between
them and their significant others. This research
builds on this idea. As with Jack Holland’s
recent research on the same topic, there is a
dash of Gramsci supporting Vucetic’s claims.
The ideas and identities that underpin the argu-
ment must be hegemonic to the extent that they
are unquestioned by elites and masses – what
former diplomat Sir Oliver Franks called ‘part
of the habit and furniture of our minds’ (Vucetic,
2021: 21) – as elites and masses are engaged in
the common project of creating that hegemony.
In light of this preponderance of hegemony,
it might be asked what place there is for the
contestation that is also central to the idea of
national identity in this analysis?
As a result of this inductively oriented dis-
course analysis (Vucetic, 2021: 225), Vucetic
finds that Britishness is formed of five circles:
progressive, democratic, manly, capitalist and
nostalgic (Vucetic, 2021: 192). This construc-
tion of national identity matters for foreign
policy formation because of what Vucetic sees
as the ‘mutual constitution of national identity
and international order’ (Vucetic, 2021: 201).
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