Abstract
One of the great ironies of the Cold War was that the new strategic paradigm created by the need to contain Soviet expansion meant that many members of the ‘free world’, including Britain, now found themselves ranged alongside their former enemies from the Second World War in the shape of West Germany, Italy and Japan. Indeed, the denial of all three of these countries to the Soviet bloc was one of the most important strategic goals in the post-war world. As Saki Dockrill demonstrated in her first book, this new reality meant that Britain had soon to contemplate and approve the rearmament of its recent German foe.1 Moreover, in order to seal the security of Western Europe, it was necessary for Britain to encourage the development of a military alliance in the form of NATO that would see Italy join as a founder member in 1949, with West German entry coming in 1955.2 These were undoubtedly tough decisions to take, for memories of the recent war naturally led many amongst the British elite and public to view these new allies with distaste and suspicion, but the exigencies of national security meant that sentiment could not be allowed to trump pragmatism.3
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Notes
Saki Dockrill, Britain’s Policy for West German Rearmament, 1950–1955 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991).
See also Spencer Mawby, Containing Germany: Britain and the Arming of the Federal Republic (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1999).
See Effie Pedaliu, Britain, Italy and the Origins of the Cold War (Basingstoke: Palgrave/Macmillan, 2003).
Sabine Lee, Victory in Europe: Britain and Germany since 1945 (Harlow: Longman, 2001);
and John Ramsden, Don’t Mention the War: The British and the Germans since 1890 (London: Little, Brown, 2006).
For the occupation period, see Roger Buckley, Occupation Diplomacy: Britain, the United States and Japan, 1945–52 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982)
and Peter Lowe, Containing the Cold War in East Asia: British Policies towards Japan, China and Korea, 1948–53 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997).
For the economic relationship, see Junko Tomaru, The Postwar Rapprochement of Malaya and Japan, 1945–61: the Roles of Britain and Japan in Southeast Asia (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000),
and Noriko Yokoi, Japan’s Postwar Economic Recovery and Anglo-Japanese Relations 1948–1962 (London: Routledge-Curzon, 2003).
For aspects of relations in the 1960s, see: Kweku Ampiah, ‘Anglo-Japanese Collaboration about Africa in Early 1960s: the Search for “Complementarity” in the Middle of Decolonisation’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth Studies, 39/2, (2011), pp. 269–95;
James Llewelyn, ‘Diplomatic Divergence: the Japanese and British Responses to Indonesia’s Confrontation of Malaysia 1963–1966’, Asia-Europe Journal, 4 (2006), pp. 583–605; and idem., ‘Steadfast Yet Reluctant Allies: Japan and the United Kingdom in the Vietnam War’, Diplomacy and Statecraft, 22/4, (2011), pp. 608–33.
The following edited collections also contain valuable essays: Ian Nish and Kibata Yoichi, The History of Anglo-Japanese Relations, 1600–2000: the Political–Diplomatic Dimension, Vol. II, (Basingstoke: Palgrave/Macmillan, 2001);
Iokibe Makoto, Caroline Rose, Tomaru Junko, and John Weste (eds), Japanese Diplomacy in the 1950s: from Isolation to Integration (London: Routledge, 2008),
and Shigeru Akita & Nicholas J. White (eds), The International Order of Asia in the 1930s and 1950s (London: Routledge, 2009).
Three exceptions are: Peter Lowe, ‘Uneasy Readjustment, 1945–58’, and Tanaka Takahiko, ‘Anglo-Japanese Relations in the 1950s: cooperation, friction and the search for state identity’, in Nish and Kibata (eds), pp. 174–200 and pp. 201–34 respectively; and Yoichi Kibata, ‘Peacemaking and After: Anglo-Japanese Relations and Japan’s Re-Entry into International Society’, in Hugo Dobson and Kosuge Nobuko (eds), Japan and Britain at War and Peace (London: Routledge, 2009), pp. 97–111. But even these are limited to analysis of the 1950s alone.
For Japanese politics in this period, see Tetsuya Kataoka, The Price of a Constitution: The Origin of Japan’s Postwar Politics (New York: Crane Russak, 1991), pp. 101–23.
Diary entry 24 January 1955, in Peter Catterall (ed.), The Macmillan Diaries: the Cabinet Years, 1950–57 (London: Pan, 2004), p. 384.
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© 2013 Antony Best
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Best, A. (2013). ‘A Cardinal Point of Our World Strategy’: The Foreign Office and the Normalisation of Relations with Japan, 1952–63. In: Young, J.W., Pedaliu, E.G.H., Kandiah, M.D. (eds) Britain in Global Politics Volume 2. Security, Conflict and Cooperation in the Contemporary World. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137313584_6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137313584_6
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