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Acknowledgements
- Benjamin Grob-Fitzgibbon
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Contents
- Benjamin Grob-Fitzgibbon
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6 - The continental surprise and the fall of the Labour government
- from Part 1 - Imperial Europeans
- Benjamin Grob-Fitzgibbon
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Ernest Bevin was in a meeting with Dean Acheson when, on 9 May 1950, a civil servant brought him a note from the French ambassador René Massigli requesting an urgent meeting that afternoon. Bevin agreed immediately and noticed that Acheson was visibly affected by the interruption. Acheson was in London for the upcoming tripartite conference with the British and the French, and Bevin had the distinct impression that the American Secretary of State had foreknowledge of the French ambassador's request. When Bevin hosted Massigli that afternoon, the ambassador informed him that only hours before the French cabinet had voted in favour of a proposal to create a supranational authority in Western Europe that would control all steel and coal production. Although it would have no ownership rights, it would have controlling power. The French cabinet, Massigli told Bevin, believed it was ‘the first concrete proposal to bring about the unity of Western Europe’. Bevin, shocked by this unexpected news, thanked the ambassador for his time but said he could make no comment until he had seen the plan in full. He would not have to wait long, Massigli replied. The proposal would be published in the French press that evening and officially submitted to the tripartite conference for consideration later that week.
When Bevin read the newspapers – seeing the proposal for the first time, as with millions of other Frenchmen and -women, Germans, Britons and other Europeans – his alarm only grew. It claimed that ‘for more than twenty years’, France had taken ‘upon herself … the role of champion of a united Europe’. It denied economic motive, claiming that its essential aim was only ‘the service of peace’. It then stated that at the heart of a united Europe must be a strong Franco–German partnership, completely reversing the French opposition over the past four years to British plans to bring West Germany back into the mainstream of European politics. The French government proposed ‘to take action immediately on one limited but decisive point’ by placing Franco–German production of coal and steel under a common higher authority ‘within the framework of an organisation open to the participation of other countries of Europe’.
Part 2 - Post-imperial Eurosceptics
- Benjamin Grob-Fitzgibbon
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15 - Seasons of discontent
- from Part 2 - Post-imperial Eurosceptics
- Benjamin Grob-Fitzgibbon
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When it awoke on the morning of 1 January 1973 as a full member of the European Economic Community (EEC), the British public was deeply ambivalent. In a poll taken from 3–7 January 1973, 36 per cent of the public reported being ‘quite or very pleased’; 33 per cent were ‘quite or very displeased’ and an astonishing 20 per cent purported to be ‘indifferent’ (the remaining 11 per cent were undecided, but not indifferent). Even so, fully 51 per cent believed it would be a good thing for them and 66 per cent felt that it would be good for their children. Overall, Britons were not enthused about joining the EEC, with only a third pleased with the outcome, yet the majority – perhaps grudgingly – recognised that it was probably in the best interests of the country, particularly for its economic future.
The Prime Minister Edward Heath did not share this ambivalence. Claiming in his autobiography that the Conservative victory in the October 1971 debate was his ‘greatest success as Prime Minister’ and that signing the Treaty of Accession in January 1972 was the ‘proudest moment in my life’, he later wrote of his ‘thrill [that] setting out to establish a peaceful Europe had come to fruition’. He was not the only one to feel a sense of great accomplishment. One member of the cabinet described a ‘mood of euphoria in the Establishment’. On the night of the 1971 vote in Parliament, Harold Macmillan lit a bonfire of celebration on the cliffs of Dover, and David Heathcoat-Amery – who was later to become a leading Eurosceptic in the Conservative Party – cracked open a bottle of champagne. Margaret Thatcher, who by this point had experienced a rapid rise through the parliamentary ranks to become Secretary of State for Education, was ‘wholeheartedly in favour of British entry’, although became somewhat concerned about the ‘psychological effect [entry had] on Ted Heath. His enthusiasm for Europe had already developed into a passion. As the years went by it was to become an obsession’.
Notes
- Benjamin Grob-Fitzgibbon
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7 - The realities of government
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- Benjamin Grob-Fitzgibbon
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The Prime Minister finalised his cabinet in the late hours of 30 October 1951. At its first meeting that day, he made no mention of either the Commonwealth or Europe, instead appointing a committee to begin an ‘urgent’ investigation into how to reverse the Labour government's Iron and Steel Act, which had nationalised the steel industry. He also announced that all ministers would take a reduced salary for three years and suggested that Britain should support Israel in its ongoing dispute with Egypt, the latter having blocked the passage of oil tankers bound for Haifa through the Suez Canal. When the new Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden spoke against this, arguing that it was more important to avoid creating resentment in Egypt and other Arab states than to support Israel, Churchill deferred to his judgment and so the status quo remained in the Middle East. Beyond this brief discussion, there was no further mention of foreign or imperial affairs.
When the cabinet met for the second time, on 1 November, there was again no consideration of Europe or the Commonwealth, its members instead examining the recommendation by the new Chancellor of the Exchequer, R. A. Butler, for a drastic reduction in government expenditure. That evening, when speaking in the House of Commons for the first time as newly re-elected Prime Minister, Churchill called for ‘several years of quiet, steady administration, if only to allow Socialist legislation to reach its full fruition’, and, at the cabinet meeting of 7 November, his only reference to the Empire was to ask Oliver Lyttelton, the new Colonial Secretary, to investigate ways to reduce the cost of the ongoing counter-insurgency operations in Malaya. It was clear that the new government's focus would be on economics rather than foreign policy and that its priority would be to reduce public spending. For a party that, in opposition, had spoken with sweeping rhetoric of grand visions for the world, the first days in government for the Conservatives were marked by a distinct and unambitious pragmatism.
Yet if in his initial weeks as Prime Minister Churchill had been more concerned with reducing the cost of peacetime governance than with foreign policy, for others in the government and civil service Europe, the Empire-Commonwealth and Britain's place in the world more generally were at the forefront of their deliberations.
4 - The German problem
- from Part 1 - Imperial Europeans
- Benjamin Grob-Fitzgibbon
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With hindsight, the path that led to the twenty-fourth of June 1948 can easily be traced. On that date, the Russian government severed all land and water communications between the Western zones of Germany and Berlin, in the heart of the Soviet zone but itself divided into four. It also halted all rail and canal traffic into and out of the city and required all road traffic to take a twenty-three kilometre detour. The Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin had been worried by the steadily hardening position of the Soviets towards Germany ever since the Potsdam Conference of July 1945 but had held out hope that a reconciliation was possible. However, relations between Eastern and Western Europe rapidly deteriorated after American Secretary of State George Marshall's offer of aid to Europe and the Soviet refusal to participate in the summer of 1947. Following Russian intransigence at the Council of Foreign Ministers in November and December 1947, Marshall feared that the USSR was shaping Eastern Germany into a totalitarian state akin to others in Eastern Europe, and he wrote that the ‘desire for an undivided Germany cannot be made an excuse for inaction in Western Germany, detrimental to [the] recovery of Western Europe as a whole’.
Consequently, on 23 February 1948, American and French delegations travelled to London at Bevin's invitation to begin a tripartite conference on the future of Western Germany. They were later joined by delegations from Holland, Belgium and Luxembourg, and, on 6 June 1948, released a joint communiqué announcing the merger of the three Western zones of Germany into a single economic unit with a single currency, the ‘West mark’, to begin circulating on 20 June. The Soviet authorities responded by stopping traffic on the autobahn into Berlin and delaying train services with lengthy inspections. On 21 June, they halted a US military supply train and prevented it from reaching Berlin. Finally, on 22 June, Marshal Vasily Sokolovsky, the head of the Soviet Military Administration in East Germany, announced that the Soviet Union would introduce with immediate effect an East German currency, which would become the only legal tender throughout Berlin, including in the Western zones. The United States and Great Britain responded by flooding Berlin with West marks printed with a special ‘B’ for Berlin, soon to become known as B-marks.
5 - A disunited Europe?
- from Part 1 - Imperial Europeans
- Benjamin Grob-Fitzgibbon
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Winston Churchill was not immune to the effects of the Berlin crisis on his calls for European unity. Yet nor did he think it in any way undermined the underlying principles he had championed since the end of the war; after all, he had been one of the first to warn of the Soviet threat and the first to suggest that Germany needed to feel the welcoming embrace of the West sooner rather than later. In late July 1948, shortly after the crisis in Berlin began, he dispatched Anthony Eden to West Germany to report first-hand on the situation there. In almost all respects, Eden found it ‘far better than it was a year ago’. The Germans had now ‘passed out of the stage of apathy which characterised the first two years of the post-war period’, and the British and American authorities were ‘enjoying considerably more friendly support than they had hitherto’. In Berlin, there was even a ‘wave of enthusiasm for the Western Allies’, which Eden found quite remarkable given that not three years had passed since they were at war. Nevertheless, he was disturbed by the ‘fundamental lack of understanding among almost all classes and ages of the meaning of the word “democracy”’, and he found that although the Germans had ‘largely discarded Nazism as such, … nothing has taken its place’. The time was ripe for the British to fill the void with their own ideologies.
Churchill's position was strengthened by a public opinion poll published in the Daily Express on 8 September 1948, which suggested that the ‘Government are not carrying their own people with them in their policy’ of only gradual moves towards European Union. Starting with the premise that the French cabinet had now publicly voiced its support for a European Assembly and a Western Union that would ‘embrace Great Britain, France, the Netherlands, Belgium and Luxembourg’, the poll found that 65 per cent of the British public favoured an ‘economic union … with common Customs’ (with just 13 per cent opposed), 68 per cent supported a ‘military union’ where all countries would ‘give and receive armed assistance to any member of the Western Union if attacked’ (with 16 per cent opposed) and 58 per cent wanted a ‘political union providing for a European Supreme Court with power to impose sanctions’ (with, again, 16 per cent opposed).
Bibliography
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9 - The decline and fall of the imperial Europeans
- from Part 1 - Imperial Europeans
- Benjamin Grob-Fitzgibbon
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When Anthony Eden entered the House of Commons as Prime Minister on 6 April 1955, he was greeted with a standing ovation. Although this was a parliamentary tradition for any new premier, it was perhaps just a little bit more satisfying for Eden. He had, after all, been waiting a long time for this moment; thirteen years earlier, Churchill had even written to George VI telling him that should he (Churchill) die in the course of carrying out his wartime duties, the King should ‘entrust the formation of a new Government to Mr. Anthony Eden, the Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, who is in my mind the outstanding Minister in the largest political party in the House of Commons and in the National Government over which I have the honour to preside’. As Sir Evelyn Shuckburgh noted in his diary, ‘It is a relief that one can now revert to admiring W[inston] for what he has done and been, and not worry about what he is doing or will do. … The “myth” will now take over, and none will want to listen to the carping voice or the awkward derogatory fact. … The great thing is that he has gone from the active scene and can be a great man again without damage’.
Eden's ascent of the greasy pole brought few changes to the government. He moved Macmillan from the Ministry of Defence to the Foreign Office and promoted Selwyn Lloyd from the Ministry of Supply to Defence, but he left Butler as Chancellor of the Exchequer, Lloyd George as Home Secretary, Lennox-Boyd as Colonial Secretary, Thorneycroft as President of the Board of Trade and Duncan Sandys as Minister of Housing. It was the leader of the government rather than his cabinet that had been replaced, and Eden's ministry would be one of continuity rather than change.
Nevertheless, the emergence of a fresh leader at the head of the party provided an immediate up-tick in Conservative fortunes. Given that the last General Election was held in October 1951, Eden was not required to request a dissolution of Parliament until October 1956, but he decided to go to the country earlier rather than later, setting the date at 26 May 1955. The Labour Party was in a buoyant mood, and a Gallup Poll in early May suggested that it was in a strong position to regain control of the government.
Frontmatter
- Benjamin Grob-Fitzgibbon
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8 - Perfidious Gaul
- from Part 1 - Imperial Europeans
- Benjamin Grob-Fitzgibbon
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Six months after the Treaty for a European Defence Community (EDC) was signed in Paris, none of the national parliaments of the six signatories had yet ratified it. As Eden explained to Churchill in early January 1953, the West Germans were concerned that the EDC Treaty conflicted with German Basic Law, which made no allowance for rearmament. The treaty would therefore need a two-thirds majority in the Bundestag to pass rather than a simple majority. However, the German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer had only the support of just over half of German parliamentarians – far short of the necessary two-thirds. The German Constitutional Court was examining the issue, and Adenauer was ‘determined to secure German ratification as soon as this is politically and constitutionally practicable’. In doing so, however, he faced a political risk: the German people were by no means united around his policies of greater integration with other European countries, and a narrow victory in the Bundestag could undermine his support in the long run.
In France, the problem was even greater. Antoine Pinay's government had been defeated in the recent election, leading to the rise of René Mayer. It was the eighteenth change of power in France since the end of the war, and Mayer was the twelfth man to lead the French government in eight years. He immediately attempted to renegotiate the Treaty, linking its ratification to the drafting of some additional protocols, a definition of the European status of the Saar region and closer British association with the EDC. Bidault, replacing Schuman as French Foreign Minister for the third time, assured the British government that there was ‘no question of modifying the main principles of the E.D.C. and that the new protocols are intended to clarify and reassure French opinion’. Nevertheless, he had yet to make their wording public, which had ‘perturbed’ Adenauer. The British Ambassador in Paris, Sir Oliver Harvey, had patiently explained to Bidault the reasons why it was impossible for the United Kingdom to become a member of the EDC, but his position had been undermined by Field Marshal Montgomery, who had publicly urged British Members of Parliament visiting the headquarters of the Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe (SHAPE) to reconsider their position and accept British membership of the EDC.
14 - Entering the promised land? Britain joins ‘Europe’
- from Part 2 - Post-imperial Eurosceptics
- Benjamin Grob-Fitzgibbon
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The French rejection of Britain's application to join the European Economic Community (EEC) was not the only shock to rock British politics that November. On the eighteenth of the month, Wilson was forced to devalue the pound by 14.3 per cent to just $2.40. His actions confirmed publicly what many had already known in private: the government was no longer able to manage the sterling crisis without drastic intervention, despite having received more than $4,370 million from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and other central banks since 1964. The November crisis was ‘shorter in duration and – until the last hours – less intense than those which sterling had weathered in the three preceding years’, but Wilson was under no illusions about its seriousness. In his memoirs, he wrote ominously, ‘this time it was lethal’.
American President Johnson applauded Wilson's courage in devaluing the pound but could not hide his dismay at the hard times upon which the United Kingdom had fallen. Commenting that it was ‘somehow just wrong for Britain to be off balance this way’, he promised that Wilson would have his support at the IMF, adding that his ‘faith’ was ‘deep that the British people have the will and the means both to pay their way and to continue to play the part they must in the world’. The Conservative opposition and British press were less kind. Ted Heath seized upon Wilson's words that the ‘pound in the pocket’ would not be effected by devaluation, and, from that point until the 1970 General Election, a centre-piece of Conservative rhetoric was that Wilson had lied. The conservative newspapers – particularly the Daily Express and Daily Mail – spent countless columns highlighting the effects of devaluation on everyday price increases, and even de Gaulle's infamous ‘non’ to British EEC membership ten days later did little to draw attention from the failing British economy. As Wilson later wrote, British politics at that time became ‘totally dominated by devaluation’.
The UK's economic crisis not only affected the value of sterling but also its worldwide commitments. In the summer of 1967, the cabinet concluded that it needed to reduce its military commitments in order to find economic efficiencies, particularly in the area east of Suez.
16 - Half-hearted Europeans
- from Part 2 - Post-imperial Eurosceptics
- Benjamin Grob-Fitzgibbon
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The world that faced Margaret Thatcher on 4 May 1979 was very different from the one she had surveyed when becoming Conservative Party leader four years earlier. As Britain's newly elected Prime Minister, one of the first briefings she received from the Cabinet Secretary that afternoon concerned ‘European Issues’, and it laid out the great ‘challenge and opportunity’ in Europe that faced the new government in May 1979. The challenge lay in the ‘number of difficult negotiating objectives’ left unresolved from the previous Labour government, despite the renegotiation of 1975. The opportunity came from the ‘greater commitment to Europe expressed publicly’ by the Tory Party, which would ‘ensure a more sympathetic hearing’ from the other Europeans.
Whilst welcoming the opportunities, Thatcher relished above all else the challenge. When the briefing indicated that ‘in the last two or three years, the mood of the Community has changed and there is less emphasis on supranationalism, and a greater readiness to accommodate different national requirements’, she scribbled ‘good’ in the margins. When advised that ‘The last thing we should do is to give the impression that the United Kingdom is now a soft touch, or to arouse exaggerated expectations’, she wrote ‘agreed’. For her first meeting with a foreign head of government, Thatcher hosted Helmut Schmidt, the West German Chancellor. It fell only days after her ascent to the Prime Ministership and had been arranged by the previous Labour government prior to the General Election. Speaking at the dinner in his honour on 10 May 1979, she warned him, ‘It has been suggested by some people in this country that I and my Government will be a “soft touch” in the Community. In case such a rumour may have reached your ears, Mr Chancellor, … it is only fair that I should advise you frankly to dismiss it. … I intend to be very discriminating in judging what are British interests and I shall be resolute in defending them’. Britain once again had a Conservative government, but it was not the pro-European government of Ted Heath.
17 - Mrs Thatcher, John Major and the road to European Union
- from Part 2 - Post-imperial Eurosceptics
- Benjamin Grob-Fitzgibbon
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On 3 July 1982, Margaret Thatcher spoke to a crowd gathered at Cheltenham. It had been a heady three months for the Prime Minister. Upon announcing the invasion of the Falkland Islands on 3 April, she had been accused by the Labour Party in the House of Commons of abject failure, of bringing a final humiliation to Britain in one of its last colonial possessions. This weighed heavily upon her, already conscious of and sensitive to British decline. In his diary, the Conservative MP and historian Alan Clark described ‘how low she held her head, how knotted with pain and apprehension she seemed’. In a second parliamentary debate later that week, her predecessor Jim Callaghan held the Prime Minister personally responsible for the war and lambasted British unpreparedness, saying, ‘we are sending an aircraft carrier that has already been sold to meet cash limits, from a port that is to be closed, and with 500 sailors holding redundancy notices in their pockets’. But war transforms a person for better or worse, and this was certainly the case with the British Prime Minister. By the time it was all over, ‘All over the world, Margaret Thatcher now became a figure of legend, the embodiment of strong leadership, more famous, perhaps, than any other political leader at the time’.
Addressing the crowd at Cheltenham, she reflected on what the Falklands War had meant for Britain. ‘We have ceased’, she said, ‘to be a nation in retreat. We have instead a newfound confidence – born in the economic battles at home and tested and found true 8,000 miles away. … And so today we can rejoice in our success in the Falklands and take pride in the achievement of the men and women of our task force. But we do so, not as at some flickering of a flame which must soon be dead. No – we rejoice that Britain has rekindled that spirit which has fired her for generations past and which today has begun to burn as brightly as before. Britain found herself again in the South Atlantic and will not look back from the victory she has won’. There was no need to ask which ‘spirit’ had been lost and rekindled, nor in what way Britain had ‘found herself again’.
13 - Empire eclipsed, Europe embraced, Britain rejected
- from Part 2 - Post-imperial Eurosceptics
- Benjamin Grob-Fitzgibbon
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When Harold Wilson walked through the polished black door of 10 Downing Street on 16 October 1964, he was very much a ‘Commonwealth man’, keenly supporting the ‘multiracial grouping of nations with Britain as its leader’. He intended to ‘develop British links with the Commonwealth by extending Commonwealth preferences in new commodities and matching Britain's plans for national economic development with specific needs in the Commonwealth’. For Wilson, the Commonwealth was the key to future British economic success, looming far larger than either Europe or the United States. He had supported Hugh Gaitskell's opposition to British entry into the European Economic Community (EEC) in 1962–63, and he was as ambivalent about American power as Ernest Bevin had been two decades earlier. His analysis of Britain's place in the world economy differed sharply from Macmillan's, Eden's or Churchill's before him, all of whom had recognised (at least to some extent) that the Commonwealth would play an increasingly small role in British economic life. As the Labour Party manifesto stated before the 1964 General Election, ‘Although we shall seek to achieve close links with our European neighbours, the Labour Party is convinced that the first responsibility of a British government is to the Commonwealth’.
Much had happened over the months leading up to the election, from the French veto in January 1963 to October 1964. Immediately after the veto, the Daily Mirror opined that ‘the world now knows’ what Britain had always suspected, that General de Gaulle would forever ‘sabotage Britain's efforts to join the European Common Market’. The newspaper was not despondent, however, as Britain's course was clear: ‘She is forced to mark time in her attempt to join the Common Market as it now stands. But she must not turn her back on Europe. This government (and the next) must continue to strive for a wider European unity. … This is the real European ideal’. The French newspaper Le Monde also blamed de Gaulle, lamenting that ‘A single man in the name of his own idea of Europe and the world, has vetoed the entry into the Common Market of a country whose application had the sympathy of all our allies’. It wondered how ‘after such a display of bad faith, can one be believed when one repeats that the door remains open to England’.
Dedication
- Benjamin Grob-Fitzgibbon
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1 - A world undone
- from Part 1 - Imperial Europeans
- Benjamin Grob-Fitzgibbon
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For the first time in six years, floodlights cast shadows across London's streets, brightly illuminating Nelson's Column in Trafalgar Square, the great clock at Westminster and Buckingham Palace. The brilliance of the White Ensign, the Union Flag and the Blue Ensign on the Cenotaph contrasted with the grime-caked stones behind, a continuing reminder of Britain's industrial revolution. Despite the lateness of the hour, crowds still converged around the great monuments, and bonfires burned in many of London's open spaces, more than a few with effigies of Hitler sitting on top. The bells of churches across the capital continued to ring, competing with the sporadic fireworks and making sleep impossible, even if it were desired.
The eighth of May 1945 had been a full day for the Prime Minister, beginning in the early hours of the morning with his radio address to announce Germany's unconditional surrender. There had followed an attendance in Parliament for Question Time, a procession to the Church of St Margaret for an impromptu service of thanksgiving, further pronouncements in the House of Commons and then, at four o'clock, an audience with the King. Some hours later, the Right Honourable Winston Churchill stepped onto the flag-draped balcony of the Ministry of Health, causing an enormous roar from the crowds who had been waiting expectantly for their leader to speak. Wearing his war-worn boiler suit, his polished top hat balanced incongruously on his head, Churchill addressed them through a loudspeaker: ‘God bless you all. This is your victory!’ At this, many voices in the crowd interrupted to correct him, ‘No – it is yours’. The Prime Minister finished his evening sometime after ten o'clock with a return appearance on the balcony to lead the crowd in a roaring rendition of ‘Land of Hope and Glory’.
VE Day was a celebration in Britain, but the elation of Germany's unconditional surrender could not last long. Europe lay in ruins, Japan remained undefeated and the empire that had sustained Britain throughout its long war was showing signs of fatigue and restlessness. Even those with the greatest reason to rejoice could find little energy to do so. Field Marshal Lord Alanbrooke, Chief of the Imperial General Staff and, as chairman of the Chief of Staffs’ Committee, Churchill's foremost military advisor, wrote in his diary on 7 May that he simply couldn't ‘feel thrilled’, instead experiencing ‘infinite mental weariness’.
10 - At sixes and sevens
- from Part 2 - Post-imperial Eurosceptics
- Benjamin Grob-Fitzgibbon
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Eden sought continuity in his cabinet following his ascent to the premiership, intentionally demonstrating a unity of purpose with the Churchill government. Macmillan tacked a different course, promoting Peter Thorneycroft as Chancellor of the Exchequer and moving Duncan Sandys to the Ministry of Defence. The press immediately noticed that the new Prime Minister had brought two of Parliament's most ardent Europeans into the inner cabinet, the Labour MP Richard Crossman opining in the Daily Mirror that Macmillan's reshuffle revealed ‘a lot about the policy he intends to follow’. In particular, his aim in foreign policy would be ‘a European Third Force, led by Britain and backed by the United States’. Crossman disapproved, but felt sure that Britain's North American allies would be satisfied: ‘The Americans have always believed in the United States of Europe and blamed us British for dragging our feet. … If Mr. Macmillan can get together with the French and Germans and create a Third Force which can stand on its own feet without dollar assistance, no one will be happier than the Americans’.
If Crossman was hostile to Macmillan's European turn, those on the continent were more receptive. The Foreign Secretary Selwyn Lloyd reported from Rome on 18 January 1957 that the Italian government was ‘most friendly’ towards the British position and wanted to further discuss Lloyd's ‘grand design’ for Europe. In particular, the Italians had welcomed his call for a wider European Free Trade Area (FTA), including and closely associated with the organisations of ‘the Six’, which would ‘lead the way to cooperation between us and Europe’. Consequently, and with Italian support, the British government submitted a memorandum to the Organisation of European Economic Cooperation (OEEC) outlining UK plans for a European FTA in early February. The French Ambassador René Massigli commended it and suggested to Macmillan that the British government ‘hurry with our plans for European unity’. It was, as one historian has written, ‘European policy par excellence. … [I]t was extremely clever in both conception and design. From a British point of view, moreover, it promised neatly to defuse the European problem … without compromising either Britain's Commonwealth ties or, still more vital for the Treasury, the world-wide role for sterling’.
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