Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 (61 page)

The first lesson of Suez was that Britain could no longer maintain a global colonial presence. The country lacked the military and economic resources, as Suez had only too plainly shown, and in the wake of so palpable a demonstration of British limitations the country was likely now to be facing increased demands for independence. After a pause of nearly a decade, during which only the Sudan (in 1956) and Malaya (in 1957) had severed their ties with Britain, the country thus entered upon an accelerated phase of de-colonization, in Africa above all. The Gold Coast was granted its freedom in 1957 as the independent state of Ghana, the first of many. Between 1960 and 1964, seventeen more British colonies held ceremonies of independence as British dignitaries traveled the world, hauling down the Union Jack and setting up new governments. The Commonwealth, which had just eight members in 1950, would have twenty-one by 1965, with more to come.

When compared to the trauma of Algeria or the catastrophic consequences of Belgium’s abandonment of the Congo in 1960, the dismantling of the British Empire was relatively peaceful. But there were exceptions. In eastern and, especially, southern Africa, the unraveling of empire proved more controversial than it had in West Africa. When Harold Macmillan informed South Africans, in a famous speech at Cape Town in 1960, that ‘the wind of change is blowing through this continent, and, whether we like it or not, this growth of [African] consciousness is a political fact,’ he did not expect a friendly reception and he did not get one. To preserve the system of apartheid rule in force since 1948, the white settlers of South Africa declared themselves a republic in 1961 and left the Commonwealth. Four years later, in neighboring Southern Rhodesia, the white colonists unilaterally pronounced themselves independent and self-governing. In both countries the ruling minority succeeded for a few years longer in ruthlessly suppressing opposition to their rule.

But southern Africa was unusual. Elsewhere—in East Africa for example— comparably privileged white settler communities accepted their fate. Once it became clear that London had neither the resources nor the appetite for enforcing colonial rule against majority opposition—something that had not been self-evident as recently as the early fifties, when British forces conducted a brutal and secretive dirty war of their own against the Mau-Mau revolts in Kenya—the European colonists accepted the inevitable and went quietly.

In 1968 the Labour government of Harold Wilson drew the final, ineluctable conclusion from the events of November 1956 and announced that British forces would henceforth be withdrawn permanently from the various bases, harbors, entrepôts, fuelling ports and other imperial-era establishments that the country had maintained ‘East of Suez’—notably at the fabulous natural harbor of Aden on the Arabian peninsula. The country could no longer afford to pretend to power and influence across the oceans. By and large this outcome was met with relief in Britain itself: as Adam Smith had foreseen, in the twilight of Britain’s first empire in 1776, forsaking the ‘splendid and showy equipage of empire’ was the best way to contain debt and allow the country to ‘accommodate her future views and designs to the real mediocrity of her circumstances.’

The second lesson of Suez, as it seemed to the overwhelming majority of the British establishment, was that the UK must never again find itself on the wrong side of an argument with Washington. This didn’t mean that the two countries would always agree—over Berlin and Germany, for example, London was far more disposed to make concessions to Moscow, and this produced some coolness in Anglo-American relations between 1957 and 1961. But the demonstration that Washington could not be counted on to back its friends in all circumstances led Harold Macmillan to precisely the opposite conclusion to that drawn by his French contemporary De Gaulle. Whatever their hesitations, however ambivalent they might feel about particular US actions, British governments would henceforth cleave loyally to US positions. Only that way could they hope to influence American choices and guarantee American support for British concerns when it mattered. This strategic re-alignment was to have momentous implications, for Britain and for Europe.

The lasting consequences of the Suez crisis were felt in British society. Great Britain, and England especially, was distinctly optimistic in the early 1950s. The election of a Conservative government in 1951, and the first intimations of an economic boom, had dispersed the egalitarian gloom of the early post-war years. In the first years of the reign of the new Queen, the English basked in a cozy Indian summer of self-satisfied well-being. Englishmen were the first to conquer Everest (1953)—with the help of an appropriately colonial guide—and to run the mile in under four minutes (in 1954). Moreover it was Britons, the country was frequently reminded, who had split the atom, invented radar, discovered penicillin, designed the turbo-jet engine and more besides.

The tone of those years—somewhat over-enthusiastically dubbed a ‘new Elizabethan age’—is well caught in the cinema of the time. The most popular British films of the first half of the Fifties—comedies like
Genevieve
(1953) or
Doctor in the House
(1954)—depict a rather perky, youthful, affluent and self-confident southern England. The settings and characters are no longer grey or downtrodden, but in other respects all remains firmly traditional: everyone is bright, young, educated, middle-class, well-spoken, respectful and deferential. This was an England in which debutantes were still received at Court (an anachronistic and increasingly absurd ritual that the Queen finally abandoned in 1958); where one in five Conservative parliamentarians had gone to Eton; and where the percentage of students of working-class origin attending university in 1955 was no higher than it had been in 1925.

In addition to benign social comedy, English cinema in these years flourished on a steady diet of war films:
The Wooden Horse
(1952),
The Cruel Sea
(1953),
The Dam Busters
(1954),
Cockleshell Heroes
(1955),
The Battle of the River Plate
(1956). All based more or less faithfully on episodes of British heroism from World War Two (with a particular emphasis upon naval warfare), these films were a comforting reminder of the reasons the British had for feeling proud of themselves—and self-sufficient. Without glorifying combat, they cultivated the myth of Britain’s war, paying special attention to the importance of comradeship across class and occupation. When social tensions or class distinctions were hinted at, the tone was usually one of street-wise wit and skepticism rather than conflict or anger. Only in Charles Crichton’s
Lavender Hill Mob
(1951), the sharpest of the Ealing Comedies, does more than a hint of social commentary come across—and here it is an English variant of poujadism: the resentment and dreams of the meek little men in the middle.

From 1956, however, the tone began to darken discernibly. War films like
The Bridge on the River Kwai
(1957) or
Dunkirk
(1958) carried undertones of questioning and doubt, as though the confident heritage of 1940 was starting to crack. By 1960,
Sink the Bismarck
, a war film firmly set in the older mould, appeared curiously anachronistic and quite at odds with the prevailing temper. The new mood was set by John Osborne’s path-breaking play
Look Back in Anger
, first produced in London in 1956 and made into an impressively faithful film two years later. In this drama of frustration and disillusion the protagonist, Jimmy Porter, stifles in a society and marriage that he can neither abandon nor change. He abuses his wife Alison for her bourgeois background. She, in turn, is trapped between her angry working-class husband and her aging ex-colonial father, confused and wounded by a world he no longer understands. As Alison admonishes him, ‘You’re hurt because everything’s changed. Jimmy’s hurt because everything’s the same. And neither of you can face it.’

This diagnosis of Britain’s unstable mood at the moment of Suez was not perhaps terribly nuanced, but it rang true. By the time
Look Back in Anger
arrived in the cinemas it was accompanied by a shoal of similarly minded films, most of them drawn from novels or plays written in the second half of the 1950s:
Room at the Top
(1959),
Saturday Night and Sunday Morning
(1960),
The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner
(1962),
A Kind of Loving
(1962),
This Sporting Life
(1963). The films of the early fifties had all starred either well-groomed middle-class actors with BBC accents—Kenneth More, Dirk Bogarde, John Gregson, Rex Harrison, Geoffrey Keene—or else lovable London ‘types’ usually portrayed by Jewish character actors (Sidney James, Alfie Bass, Sidney Tafler or Peter Sellers). The later films, dubbed ‘kitchen-sink dramas’ for their gritty depiction of everyday life, starred a new cohort of younger actors—Tom Courtenay, Albert Finney, Richard Harris and Alan Bates. They were typically set in northern working-class communities, with accents and language to match. And they represented England as a divided, embittered, cynical, jaundiced and hard-faced world, its illusions shattered. About the only thing that the cinema of the early fifties and early sixties had in common was that women almost always played a secondary role, and everyone was white.

If the illusions of Empire died at Suez, the insular confidence of middle England had been under siege for some time. The disaster of 1956 merely accelerated its collapse. The symbolism of the English national cricket team’s first defeat by a team from the West Indies (in 1950 and on the ‘hallowed soil’ of the home of the game at the Lord’s cricket ground in London) was driven home three years later when England’s soccer team was thrashed in 1953 at its national stadium—by a team from lowly Hungary and by the unprecedented margin of six goals to three. In the two international games that Englishmen had spread across the world, England itself was no longer supreme.

These non-political measures of national decline had all the more impact because Britain in these years was a largely apolitical society. The British Labour Party, in opposition at the time of Suez, was unable to turn Eden’s failure to its advantage because the electorate no longer filtered experience through a primarily party-political grid. Like the rest of Western Europe, the British were increasingly interested in consuming and being entertained. Their interest in religion was waning, and with it their taste for collective mobilization of any kind. Harold Macmillan, a conservative politician with liberal instincts—a middle-class political trimmer masquerading as an Edwardian country gentleman—was very much the appropriate leader for this transitional moment, selling colonial retreat abroad and prosperous tranquility at home. Older voters were well enough pleased with this outcome; only the young were increasingly disenchanted.

The retreat from Empire contributed directly to a growing British anxiety about the loss of national direction. Absent imperial glory, the Commonwealth served Britain largely as a source of food. Thanks to Commonwealth preferences (i.e. tariffs favoring imports from Commonwealth member states), food from the Commonwealth was cheap, and constituted nearly one-third by value of all imports to the UK at the start of the 1960s. But Britain’s own exports to Commonwealth countries represented a steadily
falling
share of national exports, more of which were now heading to Europe (in 1965, for the first time, British trade with Europe would overtake its trade with the Commonwealth). After the Suez débâcle Canada, Australia, South Africa and India had all taken the measure of British decline and were re-orienting their trade and their policies accordingly: towards the US, towards Asia, to what would soon be dubbed the ‘third’ world.

As for Britain itself: America might be the indispensable ally, but it could hardly furnish the British with a renewed sense of purpose, much less an updated national identity. On the contrary, Britain’s very dependence on America illustrated the nation’s fundamental weakness and isolation. And so, even though little in their instincts, their culture or their education pointed them toward continental Europe, it was becoming obvious to many British politicians and others—not least Macmillan himself—that one way or another, the country’s future lay across the Channel. Where else but to Europe could Great Britain now look to recover its international standing?

The ‘European project’, in so far as it ever existed outside the heads of a few idealists, had stalled by the mid-nineteen-fifties. The French National Assembly had vetoed the proposed European army, and with it any talk of enhanced European coordination. Various regional accords on the Benelux model had been reached—notably the Scandinavian ‘Common Nordic Labor Market’ in 1954—but nothing more ambitious was on the agenda. Advocates of European cooperation could point only to the new European Atomic Energy Community, announced in the spring of 1955; but this—like the Coal and Steel Community—was a French initiative and its success lay, symptomatically, in its narrow and largely technical mandate. If the British were still as skeptical as ever about the prospects for European unity, theirs was not an altogether unreasonable view.

The push for a fresh start came, appropriately enough, from the Benelux countries, who had the most experience of cross-border union and the least to lose from diluted national identities. It was now clear to leading European statesmen—notably Paul-Henri Spaak, foreign minister of Belgium—that political or military integration was not feasible, at least for the present. In any event, by the mid-fifties European concerns had shifted markedly away from the military preoccupations of the previous decade. The emphasis, it seemed clear, should be placed on European
economic
integration, an arena in which national self-interest and cooperation could be pursued in concert without offending traditional sensibilities. Spaak, together with his Dutch counterpart, convened a meeting at Messina, in June 1955, to consider this strategy.