by Tony Judt
But the British after 1945 had no realistic hope of holding on to their imperial heritage. The country’s resources were hopelessly overstretched, and the costs of maintaining even the Indian empire were no longer balanced by economic or strategic advantage: whereas exports to the Indian sub-continent in 1913 were nearly one-eighth of the British total, after World War Two they were just 8.3 percent and falling. In any case it was obvious to almost everyone that the pressure for independence was now irresistible. The Commonwealth, created by the 1931 Statute of Westminster, had been intended by its framers to obviate the need for rapid moves to colonial independence, offering instead a framework for autonomous and semi-autonomous territories to remain bound by allegiance and obedience to the British Crown, while relieving them of the objectionable trappings of Imperial domination. But it was now to become instead a holding club for former colonies, independent states whose membership in the British Commonwealth constrained them only to the extent of their own interests and sentiments.
India, Pakistan and Burma were granted independence in 1947, Ceylon the following year. The process was hardly bloodless—millions of Hindus and Muslims were massacred in ethnic cleansing and population exchanges that followed—but the colonial power itself withdrew relatively unscathed. A Communist insurgency in neighboring Malaya, however, led the British government in June 1948 to declare a State of Emergency that would only be lifted twelve years later with the rebels’ decisive defeat. But on the whole, and in spite of the accompanying retreat from India and its neighbors of thousands of colonial residents and administrators, Britain’s departure from South Asia was both more orderly and less traumatic than might have been expected.
In the Middle East, matters were more complicated. In the British Mandate territory of Palestine, Great Britain abandoned its responsibilities in 1948 under humiliating but (again, from the British point of view) relatively bloodless circumstances—it was only after the British had quit the scene that Arabs and Jews set upon one another in force. In Iraq, where Britain and America had common oil interests, the US progressively displaced the UK as the dominant imperial influence. But it was in Egypt, paradoxically a country that had never been a British colony in the conventional sense, that Britain experienced the ironies and drama of de-colonization and suffered a defeat of historic proportions. In the Suez Crisis of 1956 Britain underwent for the first time the sort of international humiliation—illustrating and accelerating the country’s decline—that had become so familiar to the French.
The British interest in Egypt stemmed directly from the importance of India, to which was added in later years the need for oil. British troops first seized Cairo in 1882, thirteen years after the opening of the Suez Canal, administered from Paris by the Suez Canal Company. Until World War One Egypt was ruled in fact if not in name by a British Resident (for much of this period the redoubtable Lord Cromer). From 1914 to 1922 Egypt was a British Protectorate, after which it became independent. Relations between the two countries remained stable for a while, formalized in a 1936 Treaty. But in October 1952 the new government in Cairo, led by army officers who had overthrown the Egyptian King Farouk, abrogated the Treaty. In response the British, fearful for the loss of their privileged access to a strategically crucial waterway, re-occupied the Canal Zone.
Within two years one of the revolutionary officers, Gamal Abdul Nasser, had become head of the government and was pressing for the departure of British soldiers from Egyptian soil. The British were disposed to compromise—they needed Egyptian cooperation. The UK was increasingly reliant on cheap oil, imported via the Suez Canal and paid for in sterling. If this supply was disrupted, or the Arabs rejected payment in sterling, Britain would have to use her precious currency reserves to buy dollars and get the oil elsewhere. Moreover, as Anthony Eden, then Foreign Secretary, had advised the British Cabinet in February 1953: ‘Military occupation could be maintained by force, but in the case of Egypt the base upon which it depends is of little use if there is no local labour to man it.’
Accordingly, London signed an agreement in October 1954 to evacuate the Suez base by 1956—but on the understanding that the British military presence in Egypt could be ‘re-activated’ if British interests were threatened by attacks on or by states in the region. The agreement held and the last British soldiers were duly evacuated from Suez on June 13th 1956. But by then Colonel Nasser—who had declared himself President of Egypt in November 1954—was becoming a problem in his own right. He was a prominent player in the newly formed movement of independent states from Asia and Africa, which met at a conference in Bandung (Indonesia) in April 1955 and condemned ‘colonialism in all of its manifestations.’ He was a charismatic beacon for Arab radicals across the region. And he was beginning to attract Soviet interest: in September 1955 Egypt announced a major arms deal with Czechoslovakia.
By 1956, then, the British were coming increasingly to regard Nasser as a threat—both in his own right as a radical despot sitting athwart a vital waterway, and by the example he was setting to others. Eden and his advisers regularly compared him to Hitler; a threat to be addressed, not appeased. Paris shared this view, though French dislike of Nasser had to do less with his threat to Suez or even his growing friendship with the Soviet bloc, than with his disruptive influence on France’s North African subjects. The United States, too, was not well pleased with Egypt’s President. At a meeting with Tito in Yugoslavia on July 18th 1956, Nasser—together with India’s Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru—issued a joint statement of ‘Non-Alignment’, explicitly disassociating Egypt from any dependence on the West. The Americans took offense: despite having initiated talks in November 1955 on American financing for Egypt’s Aswan High Dam on the Nile, US Secretary of State Dulles now broke these off, on July 19th. A week later, on July 26th, Nasser nationalized the Suez Canal Company.108
The initial reaction of the Western powers was a united front: Britain, the US and France convened a conference in London to decide on their response. The conference duly met, and on August 23rd drew up a ‘plan’ that the Australian Prime Minister Robert Menzies was to present to Nasser. But Nasser rejected it. The London conferees then met again, from September 19th to the 21st, this time agreeing to form a Suez Canal Users Association. Meanwhile the British and French announced that they would refer the dispute over Suez to the United Nations.
Up to this point the British especially had taken care to align their own response to Nasser’s acts with that of Washington. Britain was still heavily indebted to the US, paying interest on outstanding loans; pressure on sterling in 1955 had even led London to consider seeking a temporary waiver of these payments. London was always more than a little skeptical of American motives in the region: Washington, it was believed, harbored plans to supplant Britain in the Middle East, which was why American spokesmen indulged in occasional anti-colonialist rhetoric, the better to seduce local elites. But relations between the two countries were generally good. Korea—and the dynamic of the Cold War—had papered over the mutual resentments of the 1940s, and the British felt they could rely on American sympathy for Britain’s international interests and commitments. And so, even though they had been told by Eisenhower himself that they were worrying altogether too much about Nasser and the threat he posed, British leaders took it for granted that the US would always support them if matters came to a head.
It was in this context that the British Prime Minister Anthony Eden (who had succeeded the ageing Churchill the previous year) set out to deal once and for all with the troublesome Egyptian. Whatever their public posture, the British and French were impatient with the UN and its cumbersome procedures. They didn’t want a diplomatic solution. Even as the various conferences and international plans provoked by Nasser’s actions were being convened and discussed, the British governmentbegan secret negotiations with France, planning a joint military invasion of Egypt. On October 21st these plans were extended to include the Israelis, who joined the French and British in top-secret
negotiations at Sèvres. The Israeli interest was quite straightforward: the border separating Egypt and Israel had been secured by armistice in February 1949, but both sides regarded it as impermanent and there were frequent raids, notably across the frontier at Gaza. The Egyptians had blockaded the Gulf of Aqaba as early as July 1951, a restriction on Israeli trade and freedom of movement that Jerusalem was determined to remove. Israel was out to reduce Nasser and secure its territorial and security interests in and around Sinai.
At Sèvres the plotters reached agreement. Israel would attack the Egyptian army in Sinai, pressing forward to occupy the whole peninsula, including the Suez Canal on its western edge. The French and British would issue an ultimatum requiring that both sides withdraw and then, ostensibly as disinterested third parties acting on behalf of the international community, France and Britain would attack Egypt: first by air and then by sea. They would seize control of the Canal, assert that Egypt was incompetent to run so important a resource fairly and efficiently, restore the status quo ante and fatally undermine Nasser. The plan was kept very secret indeed—in Britain only Eden and four senior cabinet ministers were aware of the protocol signed at Sèvres after three days of discussion, October 21st-24th.
At first everything proceeded according to schedule. On October 29th, two weeks after the UN Security Council failed to agree on a solution for Suez (thanks to a Soviet veto), and just one week after the Sèvres meeting, Israeli forces crossed into Sinai. Simultaneously, British vessels sailed east from their base in Malta. The following day, October 30th, Britain and France vetoed a UN motion calling for Israel to withdraw, and issued an ultimatum to Israel and Egypt, disingenuously calling on both sides to cease fighting and accept an Anglo-French military occupation of the Canal Zone. The next day British and French planes attacked Egyptian airfields. Within forty-eight hours the Israelis completed their occupation of Sinai and Gaza, ignoring a UN General Assembly call for a cease-fire; the Egyptians for their part sank boats in the Suez Canal, effectively closing it to shipping. Two days later, on November 5th, the first Anglo-French ground troops landed in Egypt.
And then the plot began to unravel. On November 6th Dwight Eisenhower was re-elected President of the United States. The Administration in Washington was furious at the Anglo-French deception and deeply resentful at the lies it had been told about its allies’ real intentions: London and Paris had patently ignored both the letter and the spirit of the 1950 Tripartite Declaration, which committed Britain, France and the US to acting against the aggressor in the event of any Israel-Arab conflict. The US began to place considerable public and private pressure on Britain in particular to put a stop to its invasion of Egypt, even threatening to ‘pull the plug’ on the British pound. Shocked at such direct American opposition, but unable to withstand the accelerating run on sterling, Eden hesitated briefly but then capitulated. On November 7th, just two days after the first British paratroopers landed at Port Said, the British and French forces ceased fire. That same day the UN authorized the dispatch to Egypt of a Peacekeeping Force, which Nasser accepted on November 12th, provided that Egyptian sovereignty was not infringed. Three days later the UN Peacekeeping Force arrived in Egypt and on December 4th it moved into Sinai.
Meanwhile the British and French announced their own withdrawal from Suez, a retreat that was completed on December 22nd. Britain, whose sterling and dollar reserves had fallen by $279 million in the course of the crisis, was promised American financial aid (and received it in the form of a $500 million line of credit from the US Export-Import Bank); on December 10th the IMF announced that it had approved a $561.47 million loan for Britain, and a stand-by commitment for a further $738 million. Israel, having secured a public US commitment to its right of passage through the Gulf of Aqaba and the Straits of Tiran, withdrew its own troops from Gaza in the first week of March 1957. Clearance of the Suez Canal began a week after the completion of the Anglo-French withdrawal and the Canal was reopened on April 10th 1957. It remained in Egyptian hands.
Each country took its own lesson away from the Suez débâcle. The Israelis, despite their dependence on French military hardware, saw very clearly that their future lay in aligning their interests as closely as possible with those of Washington—the more so following the US President’s announcement of the ‘Eisenhower Doctrine’ in January 1957, stating that the US would use armed force in the event of ‘International Communist’ aggression in the Middle East. Nasser’s standing in the non-aligned world was greatly enhanced by his apparent success in facing down the old colonial powers—as the French had feared, his moral influence and example upon Arab nationalists and their supporters now reached new heights. The failure in Egypt presaged more trouble for the French in Algeria.
For the United States, the Suez adventure was a reminder of its own responsibilities, as well as an opportunity to flex its muscles. Eisenhower and Dulles resented the way Mollet and Eden had taken American support for granted. They were annoyed with the French and British: not just for secretly undertaking so ill-conceived and poorly executed an expedition, but also for their timing. The Suez crisis coincided almost to the hour with the Soviet occupation of Hungary. By indulging in so patently imperialist a plot against a single Arab state, ostensibly in retribution for the exercise of its territorial sovereignty, London and Paris had drawn the world’s attention away from the Soviet Union’s invasion of an independent state and destruction of its government. They had placed their own—as it seemed to Washington, anachronistic—interests above those of the Western alliance as a whole.
Worse, they had given Moscow an unprecedented propaganda gift. The USSR exercised almost no role in the Suez crisis itself—a Soviet note of November 5th, threatening military action against France, Britain and Israel unless they accepted a cease-fire, played little part in the proceedings, and Khrushchev and his colleagues had no plans to follow through on the threat. But by allowing Moscow to perform, even if only symbolically, the role of protector to the injured party, France and Britain had initiated the Soviet Union into a role that it would improvise with gusto in the coming decades. Thanks to the Suez crisis, the divisions and rhetoric of the Cold War were to be imported deep into the Middle East and Africa.
It was on Britain that the impact of the Suez miscalculation was felt most acutely. It would be many years before the full extent of the conspiracy against Nasser was made public, though many suspected it. But within weeks, Anthony Eden was forced to resign, humiliated by the incompetence of the military strategy he had approved and by the very public American refusal to back it. Although the ruling Conservative Party itself did not especially suffer at the polls—under the leadership of Harold Macmillan, who had somewhat reluctantly taken part in the planning of the Suez expedition, the Conservatives won the general elections of 1959 quite comfortably—the British government was forced into a radical re-appraisal of its foreign policy.
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, s
outhern 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.’