From empire to atlantic ‘system’: The round table, chatham house and the emergence of a new paradigm in anglo-american relations

Abstract

The aim of the article is to investigate the ideological and material influence by the Round Table Movement on the origins of the Royal Institute of International Affairs (Chatham House) in London, and the Council on Foreign Relations in New York, in the definition of a new paradigm in Anglo-American relations. The entrance of the United States into the forefront of world power politics had permanently changed the world’s balance of power, which now required a direct and perpetual association of the United States in the maintenance of the world’s economic and political stability. But in the United States there did not then exist the subjective conditions for their association to the direction of world politics. The interwar historical role played by the Round Table was to steer the transition from an Anglo-French to an Anglo-American dyarchy in the management of world power.