Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 (34 page)

If the European Coal and Steel Community was so much less than was claimed for it—if the French commitment to supranational organisms was simply a device to control a Germany that they continued to distrust, and if the European economic boom owed little to the actions of a High Authority whose impact on competition, employment and prices was minimal—why, then, did the British refuse to join it? And why did it seem to matter so much that they stood apart?

The British had nothing against a European customs union—they were quite in favour of one, at least for other Europeans. What made them uncomfortable was the idea of a supernational executive implied in the institution of a High Authority, even if it only directed the production and pricing of two commodities. London had been clear about this for some time—in 1948, when Bevin discussed with the Labour Cabinet American proposals for a future Organisation for European Economic Cooperation, his main concern was that ‘effective control should be in the hands of the national delegations . . . to prevent the secretariat (or an ‘independent’ chairman) from taking action on its own . . . There should be no question of instructions being given by the organization to individual members.’

This British reluctance to relinquish any national control was obviously incompatible with Monnet’s purpose in the ECSC. But the British saw the ECSC as the thin edge of a continental wedge in British affairs, whose implications were the more dangerous for being unclear. As Bevin explained to Acheson when justifying Britain’s refusal to join, ‘Where matters of such vital importance are at stake we cannot buy a pig in a poke, and [I am] pretty sure that if the Americans had been placed in a similar position they would have thought the same.’ Or, as he put it more colourfully to his aides when expressing his misgivings over the Council of Europe: ‘If you open that Pandora’s Box, you never know what Trojan ’orses will jump out’.

Some of the British reasoning was economic. The British economy—particularly that part of it which relied on trade—appeared in far healthier condition than that of its continental neighbours. In 1947 British exports represented, by value, the sum of the exports of France, Italy, western Germany, the Benelux countries, Norway and Denmark combined. Whereas western European states at that time traded chiefly with one another, Britain had extensive commerce with the whole world—indeed, Britain’s trade with Europe in 1950 was much
less
than it had been in 1913.

In the eyes of British officials, therefore, the country had more to lose than to gain by committing itself to participation in binding economic arrangements with countries whose prospects looked very uncertain. A year before Schuman’s proposal, the UK position, expressed in private by senior civil servants, was that ‘there is no attraction for us in long-term economic cooperation with Europe. At best it will be a drain on our resources. At worst it can seriously damage our economy.’ To which should be added the Labour Party’s particular anxiety at joining continental arrangements of a kind that might limit its freedom to pursue ‘socialist’ policies at home, policies closely tied to the corporate interests of the old industrial unions who had founded the Labour Party fifty years earlier: as acting Prime Minister Herbert Morrison explained to the Cabinet in 1950, when Schuman’s invitation was (briefly) considered: ‘It’s no good, we can’t do it, the Durham Miners won’t wear it.’

And then there was the Commonwealth. In 1950 the British Commonwealth covered large tracts of Africa, South Asia, Australasia and the Americas, much of it still in British hands. Colonial territories from Malaya to the Gold Coast (Ghana) were net dollar earners and kept significant sums in London—the notorious ‘sterling balances’. The Commonwealth was a major source of raw materials and food, and the Commonwealth (or Empire as most people still referred to it) was integral to British national identity, or so it seemed at the time. To most policymakers it was obviously imprudent—as well as practically impossible—to make Britain part of any continental European system that would cut the country off from this other dimension of its very existence.

Britain, then, was part of Europe but also part of a world-wide Anglophone imperial community. And it had a very particular relationship with the United States. The British people tended to be ambivalent about America—perceiving it from afar as a ‘paradise of consumer splendours’ (Malcolm Bradbury) in contrast to their own constricted lives, but resenting it for just that reason. Their governments, however, continued to profess faith in what would later be called the ‘special relationship’ between the two countries. In some degree this derived from Britain’s presence at the wartime ‘top table’, as one of the three Great Powers at Yalta and Potsdam, and as the third nuclear Power following the successful test of a British bomb in 1952. It drew, too, on the close collaboration between the two countries during the war itself. And it rested, a little, on the peculiarly English sense of superiority towards the country that had displaced them at the imperial apex.
⁴³

The Americans were frustrated by the UK’s reluctance to merge its fate with Europe and irritated by Britain’s insistence upon preserving its imperial standing. However, there was more to London’s stance in 1950 than imperial self-delusion or bloody-mindedness. Britain, as Jean Monnet would later acknowledge in his memoirs, had not been invaded or occupied: ‘she felt no need to exorcise history.’ The British experienced World War Two as a moment of national reconciliation and rallying together, rather than as a corrosive rent in the fabric of the state and nation, which was how it was remembered across the Channel. In France the war had revealed everything that was wrong with the nation’s political culture; in Britain, it had seemed to confirm everything that was right and good about national institutions and habits. World War Two, for most Britons, had been fought between Germany and Great Britain and the British had emerged triumphant and vindicated.
⁴⁴

This sense of quiet pride at the country’s capacity to suffer, endure and win through had marked Britain off from the continent. It also shaped the political culture of the post-war years. In the elections of 1945 Labour won a clear parliamentary majority for the first time in its history and, as we have seen, pressed through a broad range of nationalizations and social reforms culminating in the constitution of the world’s first universal welfare state. The government’s reforms were mostly popular—in spite of prompting remarkably little change in the deepest habits and affinities of the nation. In the words of J.B. Priestley, writing in the
New Statesman
in July 1949, ‘We are a Socialist Monarchy that is really the last monument of Liberalism.’

Domestic politics in post-war Britain were taken up with matters of social justice and the institutional reforms it required. This was to a considerable degree the result of a cumulative failure on the part of previous governments to address social inequalities; the belated re-centering of debate around urgently needed public expenditure—on health, education, transport, housing, pensions and the like—seemed to many to constitute a well-earned reward for the country’s recent sacrifices. But it also meant that most British voters (and many British Members of Parliament) had absolutely no idea of how poor their country was and what it had cost them to win their epic struggle with Germany.

In 1945 Britain was insolvent. The British mobilized more completely, and for longer than any other country: in 1945 10 million men and women were under arms or making them, in an employed population of 21.5 million adults. Rather than tailor the British war effort to the country’s limited means, Winston Churchill had gone for broke: borrowing from the Americans and selling British overseas assets to keep money and matériel flowing. As one wartime Chancellor of the Exchequer put it, these years saw ‘England’s transition from a position of the world’s largest creditor nation to the world’s largest debtor nation.’ The cost of World War Two to Britain was twice that of World War One; the country lost one quarter of its national wealth.

This accounts for Britain’s recurrent post-war currency crises, as the country struggled to pay off huge dollar-denominated debts from a drastically reduced income. That is one reason why the Marshall Plan in Britain had almost no impact upon investment or modernization in industry: 97 percent of the counterpart funds (more than anywhere else) were used to pay off the country’s massive debt. These problems would have been bad enough for any medium-sized European country in Britain’s straitened post-war circumstances; they were hugely exacerbated in this case by the global scale of British imperial responsibilities.

The cost to Britain of remaining a Great Power had greatly increased since 1939. The country’s expenditure on all military and diplomatic activity in the years 1934-38 was £6 million per annum. In 1947, on military expenditure alone, the government budgeted £209 million. In July 1950, on the eve of the Korean War—i.e.
before
the increase in defense spending that followed the outbreak of war—Britain had a full naval fleet in the Atlantic, another in the Mediterranean and a third in the Indian Ocean, as well as a permanent ‘China station’. The country maintained 120 Royal Air Force squadrons worldwide and had armies or parts of armies permanently based in: Hong Kong, Malaya, the Persian Gulf and North Africa, Trieste and Austria, West Germany and the United Kingdom itself. In addition there was a large and expensive diplomatic, consular and intelligence establishment spread worldwide, together with the colonial civil service, a significant bureaucratic and administrative burden in its own right even though it had recently been reduced by Britain’s departure from India.

The only way for the country to pay its way in these overstretched circumstances was for the British to impose on themselves unprecedented conditions of restraint and voluntary penury—which accounts for the much remarked upon feature of these years: that proud, victorious Great Britain seemed somehow tighter, poorer, grayer and grimmer than any of the erstwhile defeated, occupied and ravished lands across the water. Everything was rationed, restricted, controlled. The editor and essayist Cyril Connolly, admittedly a pessimistic soul at the best of times, nonetheless captured the mood of the times all too well in a comparison between America and Britain in April 1947:

‘Here the ego is at half-pressure; most of us are not men and women but members of a vast, seedy, overworked, over-legislated neuter class, with our drab clothes, our ration books and murder stories, our envious, strict, old-world apathies—a care-worn people. And the symbol of this mood is London, now the largest, saddest and dirtiest of great cities, with its miles of unpainted, half-inhabited houses, its chopless chop-houses, its beerless pubs, its once vivid quarters losing all personality, its squares bereft of elegance . . . its crowds mooning around the stained green wicker of the cafeterias in their shabby raincoats, under a sky permanently dull and lowering like a metal dish-cover.’

This was the age of austerity. In order to increase the country’s exports (and thus earn vital foreign currency) almost anything was either rationed or simply unavailable: meat, sugar, clothes, cars, gasoline, foreign travel, even sweets. Bread rationing, never imposed during the war, was introduced in 1946 and not abandoned until July 1948. The government ostentatiously celebrated a ‘bonfire of controls’ on November 5th 1949; but many of those same controls had to be re-imposed with the belt-tightening of the Korean War, and basic food rationing in Britain only ended in 1954—long after the rest of western Europe. Street scenes in post-war Britain would have been familiar to citizens in the Soviet bloc—in the words of one English housewife, recalling these years, ‘It was queues for everything, you know, even if you didn’t know what you were queuing for . . . you joined it because you knew there was something at the end of it.’

The British proved remarkably tolerant of their deprivations—in part because of a belief that these were, at least, shared fairly across the community—although the accumulated frustration with rations and regulations, and a certain air of puritanical paternalism that clung to some Labour ministers (notably the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Sir Stafford Cripps), contributed to Conservative electoral recovery in the 1950s. The sense that there was no choice and that the government knew best made the first generation of post-war England, in novelist David Lodge’s recollections of his youth, ‘cautious, unassertive, grateful for small mercies and modest in our ambition,’ in marked contrast to the generation that would succeed them. And the mercies did not seem so very small. As Sam Watson, the veteran leader of the Durham miners union, reminded the Labour Party’s annual conference in 1950: ‘Poverty has been abolished. Hunger is unknown. The sick are tended. The old folks are cherished, our children are growing up in a land of opportunity.’

Britain remained a deferential, class-divided society—and the welfare state, as we have seen, benefited the ‘middling sort’ above all. But income and wealth really
were
redistributed as a result of post-war legislation—the share of the national wealth held by the richest 1 percent of the population fell from 56 percent in 1938 to 43 percent in 1954; and the effective disappearance of unemployment pointed an optimistic contrast with the grim pre-war decade. Between 1946 and 1948 150,000 Britons migrated to Canada, Australia and New Zealand and many more contemplated following in their footsteps; but beginning in 1951 it seemed as though the worst of the austerity years were over and the country offered itself the optimistic spectacle of a ‘Festival of Britain’, marking the centennial of Prince Albert’s great Exhibition of 1851.

The feelings of the moment are nicely captured in Humphrey Jennings’ contemporary film documentary of England in 1951, ‘Family Portrait’. The title itself points to something distinctive about the country—no documentary film-maker in France or Italy or Germany or Belgium would have thought to use it. The film is a celebration of Englishness, strongly coloured by shared recollections of suffering and glory in the recent war, and it is suffused with an only partly self-conscious pride in the peculiarities of the place. There is much emphasis upon science and progress, design and work. And there is no reference whatsoever to England’s (
sic
) neighbours or allies. The country is presented in 1951 as it truly stood in 1940: alone.