中東におけるイギリス・アメリカ「非公式帝国」の起源 -一九四五年-一九四七年-

国際政治のなかの中東

抄録

One of the remarkable features of contemporary great power hegemony is the existence of global networks of strategic bases for naval and air forces. In the Middle East, where Britain had built up an elaborate informal empire during the interwar period, the United States assumed its predominant position by stages. It is usually the 1950s and after, however, that most scholarship explores presumably because it seems, at its surface, the United States only began to intervene into the region after the 1950s (e. g. Iranian Crisis of 1951-3). Moreover, the conventional literature is concerned more with the activities of the United States concerning the Cold War, rather than the question of how United States leadership evolved out of the debris of the European empires, especially the British Empire.
This paper explores how Anglo-American hegemonic change took place in the Middle East during the crucial years between 1945 and 1947. It focuses on the British Labour government's efforts to achieve strategic preponderance in the Middle East (as well as in the Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean) amidst adverse economic circumstances at home and rising nationalist movements in the region. Although the Prime Minister, Clement Attlee, and the Foreign Secretary, Earnest Bevin, held divergent views about the feasibility of defending the Middle East under conditions of modern warfare, they were ultimately at one in that Britain should remain a great power in the post-war world. Attlee, sometimes described as a humble Little Englander, in fact placed much importance in keeping nuclear weapon exclusively at Britain's disposal for prestige reasons and was ready to use various frameworks of the newly evolving United Nations in order to curtail the cost of the increasingly difficult task of running an empire. When the United States started to demand bases in the British Empire in an effort to establish a worldwide strategic network, the British used the American move to ‘intertwine’ the strategic interests of the two countries and transform their traditional sphere of influence in the Middle East into a new Anglo-American informal empire.
This paper also suggests that as far as the security matter of the Middle East was concerned, there were curious “unspoken” relations (image management) between the United States and Britain during the period. In short, the United States did not want to appear before its domestic public that it was helping “imperialist” Britain in the “colonial” region of the Middle East while Britain desired to appear that she was still the predominant power in the region in spite of declining prestige.