Postwar

by Tony Judt

  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.

  The participants at the Messina conference were the ECSC six, together with a (low-ranking) British ‘observer’. Spaak and his collaborators put forward a range of suggestions for customs union, trading agreements and other quite conventional projects of trans-national coordination, all of them carefully packaged to avoid offending the sensibilities of Britain or France. The French were cautiously enthusiastic; the British decidedly doubtful. After Messina the negotiations continued in an international planning committee chaired by Spaak himself, with the task of making firm recommendations for a more integrated European economy, a ‘common market’. But by November 1955 the British had dropped out, alarmed at the prospect of just the sort of pre-federal Europe they had always suspected.

  The French, however, decided to take the plunge. When the Spaak Committee reported back in March 1956 with a formal recommendation in favor of a Common Market, Paris concurred. British observers remained doubtful. They were certainly aware of the risks of being left out—as a British government committee confidentially observed just a few weeks before Spaak’s recommendations were made public, ‘should the Messina powers achieve economic integration without the United Kingdom, this would mean German hegemony in Europe’.109 But in spite of this, the urgings of the Anglophile Spaak, and the fragility of the international sterling area as revealed a few months later at Suez, London could not bring itself to throw in its lot with the ‘Europeans’. When the Treaty establishing a European Economic Community (and Euratom, the atomic energy authority) was signed at Rome on March 25th 1957, and became effective on January 1st 1958, the new EEC—its headquarters in Brussels—comprised the same six countries that had joined the Coal and Steel Community seven years before.

  It is important not to overstate the importance of the Rome Treaty. It represented for the most part a declaration of future good intentions. Its signatories laid out a schedule for tariff reductions and harmonization, offered up the prospect of eventual currency alignments, and agreed to work towards the free movement of goods, currencies and labor. Most of the text constituted a framework for instituting procedures designed to establish and enforce future regulations. The only truly significant innovation—the setting up under Article 177 of a European Court of Justice to which national courts would submit cases for final adjudication—would prove immensely important in later decades but passed largely unnoticed at the time.

  The EEC was grounded in weakness, not strength. As Spaak’s 1956 report emphasized, ‘Europe, which once had the monopoly of manufacturing industries and obtained important resources from its overseas possessions, today sees its external position weakened, its influence declining and its capacity to progress lost in its divisions. ’ It was precisely because the British did not—yet—understand their situation in this light that they declined to join the EEC. The idea that the European Common Market was part of some calculated strategy to challenge the growing power of the United States—a notion that would acquire a certain currency in Washington policy circles in later decades—is thus quite absurd: the new-formed EEC depended utterly upon the American security guarantee, without which its members would never have been able to afford to indulge in economic integration to the exclusion of all concern with common defense.

  Not everyone even in the member states was entirely pleased with the new proposals. In France many conservative (including Gaullist) deputies voted against ratification of the Rome Treaty on ‘national’ grounds’, while some socialists and left radicals (including Pierre Mendès-France) opposed the formation of a ‘little Europe’ without the reassuring presence of Great Britain. In Germany, Adenauer’s own Economics Minister, the enthusiastic free-trader Ludwig Erhard, remained critical of a neo-mercantilist ‘customs union’ that might damage Germany’s links with Britain, restrict trade flows and distort prices. In Erhard’s view, the EEC was a ‘macro-economic nonsense’. As one scholar has perceptively observed, things could well have turned out differently: ‘If Erhard had ruled Germany, the likely result would have been an Anglo-German Free Trade Association with no agricultural component, and the effects of economic exclusion would eventually have forced France to join’.110

  But it didn’t happen that way. And the final shape of the EEC did have a certain logic to it. In the course of the 1950s the countries of continental Western Europe traded increasingly with one another. And they each traded above all with West Germany, on whose markets and products the European economic recovery had thus come increasingly to depend. Moreover, every post-war European state was now deeply involved in economic affairs: through planning, regulation, growth targeting and subsidies of all sorts. But the promotion of exports; the redirection of resources from old industries to new ones; the encouragement of favored sectors like agriculture or transport: all these required cross-border cooperation. None of the West European economies was self-sufficient.

  This trend towards mutually advantageous coordination was thus driven by national self-interest, not the objectives of Schuman’s Coal and Steel Authority, which was irrelevant to economic policy making in these years. The same concern to protect and nourish local interests that had turned Europe’s states inwards before 1939 now brought them closer together. The removal of impediments and the lessons of the recent past were perhaps the most important factors in facilitating this change. The Dutch, for example, were not altogether happy at the prospect of high EEC external tariffs that would inflate local prices, and like their Belgian neighbors they worried about the absence of the British. But they could not risk being cut off from their major trading partners.

  German interests were mixed. As Europe’s main exporting nation Germany had a growing interest in free trade within Western Europe—the more so because German manufacturers had lost their important markets in eastern Europe and had no former colonial territories to exp
loit. But a tariff-protected European customs union confined to six countries was not necessarily a rational German policy objective, as Erhard understood. Like the British, he and many other Germans might have preferred a broader, looser European free trade area. But as a principle of foreign policy, Adenauer would never break with France, however divergent their interests. And then there was the question of agriculture.

  In the first half of the twentieth century, too many inefficient European peasants produced only just sufficient food for a market that could not pay them enough to live on. The result had been poverty, emigration and rural fascism. In the hungry years immediately after World War Two all sorts of programs were put in place to encourage and assist arable farmers in particular to produce more. To reduce dependence on dollar-denominated food imports from Canada and the US, the emphasis was placed upon encouraging output rather than efficiency. Farmers did not need to fear a return of the pre-war price deflation: until 1951 agricultural output in Europe did not recover to pre-war levels, and between protection and government price-supports farmers’ income was anyway effectively guaranteed. In a manner of speaking, the Forties were thus a golden age for Europe’s farmers. In the course of the 1950s, output continued to increase even as surplus rural labor was drained off into new jobs in the cities: Europe’s peasants were becoming increasingly efficient farmers. But they continued to benefit from what amounted to permanent public welfare.