The ties that bind

The Economistに掲載されているキャメロン首相のインド訪問に関する記事から英語表現を拾います。記事には、過去に扱った英語表現が多数登場するので、参考にしてください。また、記事の中見出しには、FosterのA Passage to Indiaがもじられており、ウィットに富んでいます。

the jewel in Borussia Dortmund's crown - 田邉祐司ゼミ 常時英心：言葉の森から
eye candy - 田邉祐司ゼミ 常時英心：言葉の森から
The silence of life - 田邉祐司ゼミ 常時英心：言葉の森から

さて、見出しですが、こちらはThe Ties That Bindという表現をもじっています。The Ties That Bindは曲や小説のタイトルにもなるくらい有名な表現で「関係性」やそれに関連する表現を表すときに使用します。今回はTies that no longer bindなので「もはや結ばれているとは言い難い関係性」と捉えることができます。

この記事は、英語表現よりも内容の方が面白いと思うので気になった箇所を引用しておきます。(Othello)

Ties that no longer bind - Bagehot

Happily, Mr Cameron, who is due to return to Delhi next week, does not bruise easily. Improving British-Indian relations remains one of his most important foreign-policy objectives. This is well judged. They were long neglected by his terror-fighting Labour predecessors. And Britain badly needs to boost its business with fast-growing emerging markets, India especially. Britain is India’s seventh biggest export market—after the Netherlands—and its 21st biggest source of imports. This is despite the two countries sharing a common law and language and aspects of culture. Britain also has 1.5m subjects of Indian origin, representing its biggest ethnic-minority group. This shared inheritance should make Britain and India far closer, in trade and otherwise.

(中略)

History also makes Indians resistant to British diplomatic charm. Resentment of the colonial period is one of the defining principles of modern Indian identity. Those who consider the historic ties between India and Britain to be special are therefore unlikely to view them positively. India’s foreign-policy gurus, for example, consider Britain biased towards Pakistan—just as, they argue, it was towards Indian Muslims in colonial times. Less well-educated or younger Indians (who learn little in school about Britain’s 200-year rule in India) have few feelings about Britain either way. On a rare visit to India, Tony Blair was asked in a television interview whether he acknowledged Britain’s responsibility for the seemingly inextinguishable conflict in Kashmir. The former prime minister, appearing momentarily nonplussed, stammered that the colonial era was now irrelevant. “Then why are you here?” many Indians would have wondered.
（中略）
Britain had better hope not: it needs all the diplomatic ballast it can get in its dealings with India. The former jewel in its imperial crown considers, probably rightly, that Britain needs India a lot more than it needs Britain. To his credit, Mr Cameron is the first British prime minister to have registered that important truth.