The Empire Project: The Rise and Fall of the British World-System, 1830–1970 (109 page)

Designs and defeats

In Africa, as in the Middle East, the British had found that in giving up their authority they had also surrendered their influence. As the continent was drawn into the global Cold War, the limits of British capacity – ideological and material – became more and more glaring. The presumption that a self-governing Africa would remain a huge sphere where British influence was preponderant had ceased to be credible by the end of 1963. By that time, London was hustling its remaining dependencies towards the threshold of sovereignty as fast as it could: in the Caribbean via the failed experiment of a West Indies Federation. It had scrambled out of Cyprus in 1960, clutching its ‘sovereign base areas’ after a long guerrilla struggle from which no exit seemed likely and which was tying down some 27,000 troops. The settlement that allowed the British to leave was framed not in Whitehall but between Greece and Turkey at Zurich, and sprang from their fear of a communal conflict between Greek and Turkish Cypriots.
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The biggest commitments to which London was still tied lay on the maritime edge of the Arab Middle East (in the protectorates and trucial states of the Persian Gulf and in South Arabia and Aden) and in Southeast Asia. Here the British hoped to secure the future of successor states where they still had interests in oil, investment and trade. Strategically, they could be viewed as a remnant of the Anglo-Australian connection, long seen in London as a valuable adjunct to Britain's world status. But, by 1963, both were becoming much more costly and burdensome.

If by that date they were beginning to look like the redundant accessories of a now bankrupt enterprise, the change had been sudden. In the late 1950s it still seemed just possible that British world power would gain a new lease of life. The architect of this last, neo-imperial phase was Harold Macmillan. Macmillan had become prime minister in January 1957 in succession to Eden partly because he seemed more deeply imbued with the Churchillian ethos of British great power than his main rival, R. A. Butler, a doubter over Suez. Indeed, throughout his six-year premiership, he dominated British foreign policy as completely as Churchill, his model in this as in other respects. Macmillan set out to exude a breezy self-confidence and dispel the gloom and division that followed Eden's catastrophe. His immediate aim was to repair the damage Suez had done to Anglo-American relations and rebuild the personal friendships shattered by Eden's bitter quarrel with Dulles, the American Secretary of State, and his ‘breach of faith’ with Eisenhower. He was also keen to smooth over the angry reaction to Suez in parts of the Commonwealth, and embarked on a tour of Commonwealth capitals. As Chancellor of the Exchequer at the time of Suez, Macmillan had had a harsh education in the weakness of sterling. Well before the crisis broke, he had mused on the perils of a long confrontation. ‘It is absolutely vital to humiliate Nasser…We must do it quickly or our M[iddle] East friends…will fall. We must do it quickly, or we shall ourselves be ruined.’
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Macmillan was keen to restore sterling's status as an international reserve currency by making the pound freely convertible. To strengthen the export economy, he pressed on with the struggle to cut defence spending (‘It is defence expenditure that has broken our backs’, he had told Eden in March 1956),
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and the demands it imposed on the wider economy, not least through conscription. He was anxious to reassert Britain's authority in Europe – the aim behind ‘Plan G’ whose formulation had coincided with the intense preoccupation with Suez in late 1956. ‘The inner balance of Europe is essential to the balance of world power’, he declared as an axiom in March 1953.
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Finally, Macmillan turned a critical eye on the vast tail of dependencies that Britain still dragged in its wake. It is easy to exaggerate both the degree of Macmillan's detachment from the old ‘colonial mission’ and the coherence of his ideas about profit and loss on the colonial account. But there is little doubt that he saw (or soon began to see) that too little progress towards colonial self-rule would be a huge hostage to fortune as the scope of East–West competition grew wider. For that was the prism through which he now came to view the future of British world power.

From this list of intentions, we can infer the rudiments of a larger ‘plan’. Macmillan was anxious to stabilise Britain's external position and thought he could do so. In the phase of geopolitical rivalry that he saw opening up, the search for influence in the ‘uncommitted’ world had become the vital arena. Here Britain enjoyed a major advantage if its Commonwealth and colonial ‘assets’ could be sensibly managed. Its role as the co-architect of the West's world policy would become more important. Its claim to special status within the Western alliance would be enhanced. The imperial ‘legacy’, artfully repackaged as the great work of nation-building, could be turned to account at home and abroad. The Conservatives’ appeal as the party of ‘greatness’, badly damaged by Suez, could be resurrected and its disgruntled ‘imperialists’ reconciled. Meanwhile, economic expansion, low unemployment and the widening of ‘affluence’ would heal the scars of depression and reposition Conservatism in domestic politics. As the champion of the welfare state and of a ‘property-owning democracy’, its electoral position would be hard to assail. With its home base secure, a Conservative government could avoid the disasters to which (so it seemed) the French had succumbed. It could reject both imperial intransigence (of the kind that had trapped the French in Algeria) and a headlong retreat into an inward-looking Europe (the gross defect of the EEC project). It was a seductive vision and Macmillan (for all his mask of worldly-wise cynicism) was a man less of vision than of visions.

At first, things went well. Macmillan quickly restored good relations with Eisenhower with whom he maintained a close and frequent correspondence.
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At the conference in Washington in October 1957, he scored two hugely gratifying successes. The Americans withdrew the restriction on the sharing of nuclear knowledge in force since the McMahon Act in 1946. Eisenhower agreed to a ‘Declaration of Common Purpose’ which proclaimed the principles of inter-dependence and partnership, the combining of resources and the sharing of tasks, as the bases of Anglo-American relations – a ‘declaration of inter-dependence’ as Macmillan described it to an admiring Cabinet.
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Touring the Commonwealth was a definite signal that Britain's role as its ‘leader’ was taken seriously in London, and gave Macmillan the chance to exert his personal influence on its most prominent figures. The formal transfers of power in Ghana and Malaya in 1957 passed off smoothly, and the joint Anglo-American intervention in Lebanon and Jordan in 1958 softened the blow of the Iraq revolution which erased (literally) Britain's most powerful friends in the Arab world. The defence white paper of 1957, marking a shift to missile-based deterrence, promised large savings in manpower and money, lifting the burden on the civilian economy. The dash to convertibility at the end of 1958 heralded the transition from the post-war ‘siege economy’ towards Britain's (and London's) old place as a pivot of the global economy.

But, as Macmillan himself periodically sensed, the material base for his grand superstructure was dangerously fragile and liable to capsize. By the late 1950s, the British no longer possessed a world-system but only its shadow. Without India or the commercial empire once ruled from the City, without their old claim on the ‘white dominions’, or effective command of the ‘imperial oasis’ in the Arab Middle East, London peered out on an empire whose assets had been stripped. The desperate effort to retain a Middle East satrapy had died with a whimper: what was left was the rind. The brief post-war hope that Britain's African colonies would become a new India was already flickering out and would soon be extinguished. The burden of world power had thus been thrown back upon Britain itself: the costs of world influence would have to be met there. Everything rested on Britain's economic revival and on exploiting the leverage that the British enjoyed as a great power in Europe and as America's principal ally.

The strain was soon felt. Macmillan had intended that ‘inter-dependence’ would mean the coordination of policy between London and Washington, in which the British provided the know-how and the Americans supplied (most of) the military strength. The West's defence of its worldwide interests against the communist threat would be jointly managed by its two ‘trustees’. It would revive the elements of the wartime alliance in which the commands were shared out but the resources were pooled.
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By the late 1950s, however, the gross disparity in military power (the United States spent ten times as much on defence as the British), the growth of American overseas interests, and the Americans’ confidence in their own expertise (through a huge expansion in their diplomatic and intelligence machinery) made this expectation unreal. The American reaction to the threatened advance of Soviet influence was not to defer to British advice. Even in Black Africa, where American involvement had been small and came late, there was a rapid response to the signs of political change: the visit by Vice-President Nixon in 1957 was followed by the quintupling of economic aid between 1958 and 1963.
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The Americans were impatient with the crab-like progress towards majority rule in Britain's African colonies. They were extremely mistrustful of British attempts to solve the chaos in the Congo (with its worrying scope for Soviet intrusion) by a federal scheme that preserved much of Katanga's autonomy. In late 1962, they broke with the British to back Katanga's reconquest by a UN military force. And, on an old battleground of Anglo-American diplomacy, they simply imposed their will: in March 1961, after dogged resistance, Macmillan was forced to agree to send British troops to Laos as part of a joint intervention. He was saved from the furore at home when President Kennedy reversed the decision.
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But he might have reflected on how different things had been only seven years earlier when Eden had coolly resisted intense American pressure to fight a war in Vietnam.

But it was ‘summit diplomacy’ that burst the bubble of Macmillan's pretensions. In another echo of Churchill, Macmillan attached enormous importance to a face-to-face meeting between the Soviet and Western leaders. He had rushed to Moscow in February 1959 in an effort to relieve the high tension over Berlin which Khrushchev had threatened to cut off from the West. He waged a furious campaign against American scepticism: ‘We must have a summit’, he told his Foreign Secretary, Selwyn Lloyd.
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He was enraged when Eisenhower and Khrushchev decided that they would hold separate talks: the ‘UK had better give up the struggle and accept…the position of a second-rate power’, was his bitter reaction.
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The ‘summit’, in fact, was a crucial part of Macmillan's grand scheme. Regular meetings of the American, Soviet, British and French leaders would choke off the trend towards bi-polar diplomacy, and entrench British (and French) influence at a global ‘top table’. But the summit when it finally came in May 1960 was a diplomatic disaster. It was wrecked at the outset by the dramatic shooting down of an American spy-plane, the famous U-2, over Soviet airspace. Amid the furious row that erupted between Khrushchev and Eisenhower, Macmillan's entreaties for the talks to go on fell on deaf ears. The summit collapsed. It was the moment, recorded Macmillan's private secretary, when he ‘suddenly realised that Britain counted for nothing’.
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It may have been also the moment when the weakness of Britain's position in Europe began to seem serious. The British were infuriated by De Gaulle's refusal to discuss the merger of the impending European Economic Community – ‘the Six’ – with a larger and looser ‘Free Trade Area’ of which Britain would be part. In January 1959, the EEC was duly inaugurated. Most British opinion, including within Macmillan's own party and among his Cabinet colleagues, regarded exclusion as a price worth paying to keep the trade with the Commonwealth, and continue the heavy reliance on Commonwealth foodstuffs. But, when Macmillan ruminated on the consequences of May 1960, it was obvious to him that continued exclusion would damage Britain's prospects of economic revival. Still more pressing was the fear that Britain would be squeezed between a European bloc of which France was the leader, and an American superpower veering erratically between special treatment for Britain and disregard of its interests. In July 1961, Macmillan wrung from his colleagues approval for the attempt to enter the EEC – provided Commonwealth interests were not sacrificed in the effort.
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The British embarked upon the arduous struggle for terms that would safeguard key Commonwealth interests. After a year of exhausting diplomacy, De Gaulle intervened. At an Elysée press conference, Britain's entry was vetoed. Macmillan was shattered. ‘All our policies at home and abroad are in ruins’, was his private lament.
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To its supporters in Britain a European future had been the solution to British decline. The European market would be the tonic required by a flagging economy. European capital, managed from London, would restore the City's pre-eminence in global finance. Britain's place at the centre of European politics would ensure that the continent faced outwards not in, and took its full share in the West's global commitments. This was the key argument in Macmillan's so-called ‘Grand Design’ and in the case he put to the Cabinet for a British application.
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London's key role in this European effort would make it the pivot of the Atlantic alliance and invest the ‘special relationship’ with a whole new importance. With the ‘home base’ thus strengthened, the British could use their Commonwealth links to greater advantage in the struggle to influence the ‘uncommitted world’. The crushing defeat that Macmillan's plan suffered is usually attributed to Britain's ‘missing the bus’ of European unity in 1955–8. But this is much too anglocentric a view. It was really the consequence of a diplomatic revolution in Europe. The arrival in power of General De Gaulle in May 1958 transformed the balance of Anglo-French power. This was not because France had become stronger than Britain, though its economic growth was much faster. It was still deeply embroiled in the Algerian struggle that threatened De Gaulle's survival, political and physical. But De Gaulle was determined to restore France's greatness on a European platform, a project that was bound to be at Britain's expense. His rapprochement with West Germany was the vital foundation. De Gaulle achieved this in part by exploiting British mistakes: Macmillan's apparent reluctance to stand firm on Berlin in 1958–9; his courting of Khrushchev and zeal for summit diplomacy; the empty threats directed at Bonn when ‘Plan G’ was resisted (that the British would withdraw their forces in Germany); and his contemptuous dismissal of the ‘half-crazy Adenauer’. From Bonn's point of view, Macmillan became an unreliable ally: De Gaulle was the stalwart against the Soviet peril. It was this grand realignment that enabled De Gaulle to resist British pressure for a free trade agreement, to dismiss their request for EEC membership and to face down the dismay of his other EEC partners.
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The ‘inner balance’ of Europe had turned against Britain.