[The English] are a worn-out people. They need to regenerate themselves.
CHARLES DE GAULLE, 19641
For half a century we have been obsessed by a doubt: are we still a great people?
EDOUARD BALLADUR, French prime minister, 19942
The Second World War and the Cold War ended three centuries of European internal wars and imperial domination. Elites and peoples willingly replaced nationalist passions with a ‘Venusian’ devotion to peace, prosperity and cooperation, extended to most of the Continent after the collapse of the Soviet Union. There were two important exceptions: France and Britain did not forsake Mars, or readily acquiesce in their reduced role. They continued to claim exceptional rights – even virtues – and accept corresponding duties. The fear of national decline marked the outlook of their politicians and peoples. In Britain it was often expressed as sour self-denigration; in France as blustering self-affirmation. The desire to arrest decline helped to push through undeniable changes. France after de Gaulle’s return to power in 1958 and Britain after the Thatcher years of the 1980s could no longer be considered economically, socially or politically moribund, as both had been before. They converged with each other in wealth, power and population, and yet they followed different paths to revival. Both still claimed prominent roles both outside and inside Europe, whose leadership they regularly disputed. This shared outlook at times revived the entente cordiale, and periodically over sixty years there have been calls for partnership. Yet their ambitions have more often caused rivalry than solidarity. Each, it can safely be predicted, will continue to find the other a necessary help and a perpetual hindrance, fluctuating between profuse expressions of friendship and traditional abuse.
CHAPTER 13
The tragedy of it all is that we agree with de Gaulle on almost everything. We like the political Europe (union des patries . . .) that de Gaulle likes. We are anti-federalists; so is he. We are pragmatists in our economic planning; so is he . . . but his pride, his inherited hatred of England . . . above all his intense ‘vanity’ for France – she must dominate – make him half welcome, half repel us, with a strange ‘love–hate’ complex.
HAROLD MACMILLAN, 29 November 19611
Our greatest hereditary enemy was not Germany, it was England. From the
Hundred Years War to Fashoda, she hardly ceased to struggle against us . . . She wants to stop us succeeding with the Common Market. True, she was our ally during two world wars, but she is not naturally inclined to wish us well.
CHARLES DE GAULLE, 27 June 19622
The fall from power of Churchill in July 1945 and of de Gaulle in January 1946 showed that their electorates wanted the fruits of peace harvested quickly. Yet successive governments in both countries were far from accepting diminished ambitions. They were eager to renew and deepen a partnership that could enable them jointly to lead and defend Europe against possible Soviet aggression and the risks either of American withdrawal or of American hegemony. As we shall see, genuine differences of view over relations with Germany, the United States, and the Arab world broke up their partnership. This hastened the decline of their power outside Europe, and began a still continuing struggle to shape Europe in their own image.
European Visions, 1945–55
To proceed as the French suggest, namely by making advance commitments and hoping that the details will look after themselves, is likely to lead to acute disappointment. Foreign Office dispatch, 19503
It is commonly believed in Britain that a great post-war opportunity was somewhere lost: that its leaders, chasing outdated imperial glories or the illusion of a special relationship with America, refused the proffered leadership of Europe, and lost the chance of controlling the formative period of ‘European construction’. In the words of Tony Blair, ‘British politicians surveying Europe then, in those almost unrecognizable days of powdered egg and Empire, failed the test . . . clutching at irrelevant assumptions and forgotten shibboleths.’4 Some of those taking this view believe that the aim should have been to lead the inevitable march to European unity; others, to head it off in a different direction. This is myth. Britain’s policy-makers were neither blind nor indifferent to what was happening. Britain did have ambitious aims for European leadership. But, as Alan Milward states bluntly, ‘Europe was not asking to be led.’ The notion that Britain could have taken the helm ‘is shot through with nationalistic assumptions . . . as great as and more misguided than’ those underlying its world-power pretensions.5
The bluff trade-union veteran Ernest Bevin, Labour foreign secretary from 1945 to 1950, wanted a ‘Western Union’, centred on a Franco-British partnership, taking in the Benelux countries, Scandinavia and a democratic Germany, and having links with British, French and Belgian African colonies and independent Commonwealth countries. This, he believed, would make a unit economically and militarily strong enough to act as an equal with the United States, and resist the Soviet threat. Bevin wanted American protection against the Red Army, but only to ‘gain time’ until ‘the countries of Western Europe would be independent both of the US and the Soviet Union’. He hoped in four or five years to have the Americans ‘eating out of our hands’.6 French politicians, and particularly the socialist Léon Blum (who had survived a German concentration camp), broadly accepted this view, and were willing to follow British leadership. Blum negotiated the first step, the Franco-British Treaty of Dunkirk (1947) – he and Bevin chose the place to show the rebirth of the old alliance. De Gaulle, out of power, opposed it. The Treaty of Brussels (1948) brought in the Benelux countries, and also promised ‘harmonization’ in economic matters, and common social and cultural policies. Anglo-French leadership of an ambitious and outward-looking Europe seemed to be emerging. Bevin looked forward to a common market and a common currency, and believed that ‘we’ve made the union of England and France’.7 But there were formidable counter-currents.
Cross-Channel economic interests had diverged. Since the eighteenth century, the two economies had been complementary: France had bought British coal and machinery; Britain had bought agricultural products and luxury goods. Britain had been France’s biggest export market. The Wall Street Crash, the panicky protectionism of the 1930s, and then the war had reduced and then stopped exchanges. Peace did not restore the old relationship. The two economies proved impossible to coordinate, as the austerity policy followed by the Labour government, aimed at controlling inflation, contradicted the French policy of export-led modernization. Two events, now forgotten, signalled a parting of the ways. In the disastrous winter of 1947, as blizzards paralysed transport and industry, financial crisis threatened and trouble erupted in the Balkans and Palestine, Europe ran short of coal, which supplied over 80 per cent of primary energy needs. Britain thereupon suspended coal deliveries to France, causing an acute economic crisis. This was ‘almost as important as the psychological break of 1940’.8 It drove the first steps towards integration of the Continent’s coal supplies, as British coal was replaced by German. Two years later, in 1949, Britain devalued sterling without warning France, hitting French exports. Germany took Britain’s place as France’s main trading partner. Moreover, while British purchases remained largely traditional (fashion goods, wines, spirits) German purchases (cars, chemicals, electrical goods) helped the rapid modernization that was beginning to transform France.
A fundamental political divide was also appearing: what Robert Frank has called ‘the German obsession of the French and the American obsession of the British’.9 For the French, Germany, though necessary economically, remained potentially an enemy and a threat – a deep conviction built on three wars and three invasions in eighty years. They refused any suggestion that Germany might become an ally. In 1945 de Gaulle had wanted (echoing 1918) the detachment of the Ruhr and Rhineland from Germany, and controlof Rhineland coal to enable France to replace Germany as Europe’s leading steel producer, thus blocking future German rearmament. But the British and Americans regarded Russia as the greater threat. They decided to maintain Germany’s western frontier and restore its economy as the motor for European recovery. They intended that a new democratic West Germany should in time be recruited as an ally. They promised guarantees for French security, but the French, recalling the 1920s, considered Anglo-Saxon promises insufficient: America might again withdraw its forces from Europe, in which case Britain would do so too. The French had to find another way of controlling Germany, and this has always remained the basis of their European policy.
The Soviet takeover of Czechoslovakia and pressure in Scandinavia and Germany caused a crisis, leading to the Berlin blockade and airlift in 1948–9. When British and French military staffs met to make contingency plans in case of a Soviet attack, they could only debate whether they should immediately withdraw on Dunkirk or stage a longer retreat to the Pyrenees.10 Bevin’s idea of an independent Europe dimmed. Both London and Paris concluded that American protection was indispensable for the foreseeable future. Bevin came to see Britain’s role less as a partner with France than as the ‘pivot’ or bridge between Europe and America. The North Atlantic Treaty, of which France was the main proponent, was signed in April 1949, to last in the first instance for ten years. But the treaty contained a provision for Germany to join when suitable. The French, with deep misgivings, had been forced to accept the ‘Anglo-Saxon’ view of European security.
Their persisting fears of German military revival and of possible Anglo-Saxon abandonment increased their desire to tighten their grip on Germany. Supranational European control – an idea familiar since Aristide Briand’s hard-headed attempt at rapprochement in the 1920s – provided an answer. Thus French fears – with hindsight groundless – were to be decisive for European integration. There had since the 1920s been many voices – including the high-minded, the eccentric, and the calculating – urging European unity. The French philosopher Julien Benda wrote in 1933 that ‘Europe will not be the fruit of a mere economic or even political transformation, it will only truly exist if it adopts a system of moral and aesthetic values’.11 In Britain too there were enthusiastic federalists, some of the pioneers, at first sight surprisingly, being visionary imperialists too. Christian anti-modernists such as the writers G.K. Chesterton, T.S. Eliot and C.S Lewis yearned for ‘a super-national state made up of units like Wessex and Picardy’.12At a less elevated level, there had been a steel cartel and a campaign for a customs union. The war had given a strong impetus to such ideas on both the right and the left. Nazi espousal of the ‘European’ theme had not discredited it, but for some had further proved that the era of independent states was over. For the chairman of the Fabian Society, G.D.H. Cole, ‘better be ruled by Stalin than by a pack of half-hearted and half-witted social democrats . . . who still believe in the “independence” of their separate obsolete national states’.13 Shared disaster between 1929 and 1945 created a desire to overcome past enmities and build anew. Memory of the economic failures of the 1930s and experience of wartime economic controls made the post-war years the heyday of centralization and planning. Not only ‘the man in Whitehall’, but also the men in Paris, Bonn, Moscow and Luxembourg really did seem to know best. The Cold War and decolonization seemed to be creating trading blocs, regional federations and supranational organizations. The leading Labour intellectual Harold Laski predicted in 1944 that ‘the age of the nation state is over . . . economically, it is the Continent that counts: America, Russia, later China and India, eventually Africa . . . the true lesson of this war is that we shall federate the Continent or suffocate’.
In time, most of these visions faded: including pan-Africanism, pan-Arabism, the European Defence Community (a 1950s scheme for European armed forces controlled by a European quasi-government), and the European Political Community (1952). Others survived. For those that did, idealism had little influence compared with diplomatic and economic necessities. But the visionary aspect of European integration did give lustre to often rather sordid bargaining, and ensured an enthusiastic following that prosaic economic organizations such as the European Coal and Steel Community could hardly have inspired unadorned. A foundation myth built up, by which pragmatic and rather haphazard initiatives were interpreted in retrospect as a predestined march towards unity. The main importance of this belief was that it favoured expanding membership, and this would inevitably transform the institutions set up in the unrepeatable circumstances of the 1950s.14
In Britain and France there was both popular and political resistance to federalism. Both countries possessed strong traditions of representative self-government, had recently defended national independence, retained imperial or Commonwealth links, and shared a simple suspicion of interfering foreigners. Moreover, in Britain, integration had against it overwhelming economic interests. So London persistently pushed for open, inter-governmental organizations, such as the Organization for European Economic Cooperation, the Council of Europe, and the Western European Union, and away from supranational or federal institutions. But the French were less confident about remaining outside the current. Paris fluctuated between close alliance with Britain and a more integrationist strategy with Continental partners. Old fears tipped the balance. A degree of integration would prevent France being left alone (as in the 1920s) to control Germany, and might induce Germany to surrender key elements of its sovereignty. Some politicians and officials (especially those with regionalist, Catholic and trade-union backgrounds) were eager for supranational apolitical bodies. Jean Monnet believed that only a strong and unaccountable executive could take fast and decisive action. The Schuman Plan (drafted by Monnet and put forward by the French foreign minister Robert Schuman in 1950) provided for a ‘high authority’ of neutral experts to control the coal and steel industries of Germany, France and the Benelux countries. A council of ministers, a court, and an assembly were added to provide some legitimacy and idealism – ‘illusions and dreams’, as one French minister put it to Bevin. This initiative, less grandiose than Bevin’s visions of world power, still required ‘tough and even brutal’ negotiations. The Americans applied strong pressure to conclude. Of all the governments involved, the United States was by far the keenest on supranationalism, because it wanted a cooperative and effective economic and Cold War partner in matters that seemed too important to subject to shaky European democracy.15 Europeans, if less enthusiastic, could also see attractions: ‘to the French [it was] a flag of convenience, to the Italians it was preferable (by definition) to government by Rome, to the Germans a welcome escape route, and to the Benelux nations a better choice than being dominated by powerful neighbours’.16 To politicians, a supranational authority offered a way of passing on unpopular decisions (closing coal mines) and expensive burdens (subsidizing agriculture). The Treaty of Paris (April 1951) set up the European Coal and Steel Community, with an explicit commitment to eventual political unity.
That Attlee’s Labour government did not join is often taken as a historic failure to participate in European integration at the outset, and so to be the origin of the interminable dilemma over ‘Europe’ that has marked British foreign and domestic politics for more than half a century. Moreover, it enabled France to take political leadership inside Europe, which, in an unprecedented triumph of single-minded determination, it retained for at least four decades. In taking this bold step, Schuman and Monnet acted with American backing. Five days after Bevin had told the American secretary of state Dean Acheson that Britain would not take on ‘obligations’ in Europe that restricted its interests elsewhere, Acheson urged Schuman to assume ‘leadership of Europe on these problems’ for France.17 Bevin was angry at what seemed a Franco-American plot. The British were suspicious of supranational institutions – ‘a Pandora’s box full of Trojan horses’, in Bevin’s attributed phrase. Labour’s sweeping policy of nationalization, especially of coal and steel, meant that government and unions were unwilling to hand over recently acquired control to an unaccountable body in Luxembourg – the meaning of the home secretary Herbert Morrison’s famous pronouncement that ‘the Durham miners won’t wear it’.18
The British position was genuinely difficult. Since the 1930s, its trade had moved outside Europe, to the United States and especially to the Empire and Commonwealth, aided by sterling payments and preferential tariffs. Britain imported cheap food and exported manufactured goods. In 1950, Europe, though a reviving market, took only 10 per cent of British exports, while the Commonwealth and colonies took over 50 per cent. Australia was as economically important to Britain as ‘the Six’ (members of the Coal and Steel Community) combined, and New Zealand more important than Germany. This was clearly abnormal – the proximity and size of Continental markets would naturally attract trade if markets were freer, and Commonwealth countries would also diversify their trade. It would be damaging for Britain in the long run to be shut out of a European trading bloc if one formed, but it would be devastating to lose Commonwealth trade. Moreover, Europe seemed at the time too vulnerable to Soviet aggression and Communist subversion for it to be chosen deliberately as the pillar of the British economy. Such doubts were not only a British phenomenon: the Belgian foreign minister (and later ‘father of Europe’) Paul-Henri Spaak seriously considered whether Belgium and Holland should apply to join the Commonwealth.19 An open ‘one-world’ trading system was the constant British aspiration. The worst outcome would be isolation between a protectionist Europe and an inward-looking America. As well as being economically disastrous, it would reduce Britain’s influence and prestige, always crucial for Whitehall: Britain might lose at every table – powerless in Europe, fading in the Commonwealth, discounted in Washington.
In the mid-50s, France and Britain were on parallel courses. They wished to follow independent military policies. They had worldwide interests. Both wished to maintain an imperial role. In European matters, both opposed federalism. They were suspicious when in 1955 Holland and Belgium pressed for a committee, chaired by Spaak, to study further steps to European integration. The French representative on the Spaak committee assured his British colleague that France would only accept further integration on one condition: ‘that the United Kingdom was also taking part or in some way closely associated . . . if the United Kingdom seemed to disassociate itself . . . France would make no move’. The Paris embassy was sure the French parliament would take a similar stand. So the British representative withdrew from the committee, confident, as a foreign office official put it, that ‘the dragging of French feet will stop the Six from forging ahead’.20 Britain’s strategy – to be ‘associated’ with Europe economically, while maintaining global connections – thus depended on French support. Imperial crises seemed to make that support more solid than ever.
Imperial Debacle, 1956
The war had left Britain and France with new reasons for wanting to maintain imperial roles. Both wished to bolster their status. Both needed colonial trade and resources. Both aimed to resist Communism. So both were willing to some extent to cooperate, even though both at times found the other’s presence an exasperating nuisance. Yet their strategies were different. The Empire had been the pillar of Free France. De Gaulle had made Algiers his capital in 1943; colonial troops had helped liberate Paris; and France’s damaged prestige made the retention of imperial power a keenly felt obligation. Britain, in contrast, was aware of the strategic and financial burdens of imperial defence. There were also long-standing ideological differences. The Republican tradition saw French imperialism as emancipation, freeing benighted peoples as 1789 had freed French peasants. This involved their accepting French values and culture. Abandonment of this ‘civilizing mission’ would be a defeat not only for France as a power, but for French ideas of progress. Their remedy for discontent was not decolonization, but a modernized imperial structure. The Brazzaville Conference, called by de Gaulle in 1944, had declared that ‘the aims of the civilizing mission . . . exclude any idea of autonomy and any possibility of evolving outside the French empire’. Demands for independence were condemned as reactionary. British imperialism, even at its most missionary, had never been so ambitious. It had aimed to modernize, to maintain peace; to secure communications and trade; and to recruit when necessary collaborative local rulers. But it had rarely sought to supplant local cultures, or absorb territories and peoples into a Greater Britain. It had not seriously attempted to prevent self-government in settler colonies. So the idea of a freely associated Commonwealth as the natural culmination of empire was broadly accepted. On a cynical viewing, this offered a dignified way of abandoning empire when it became unprofitable, unpopular or impossible to maintain. Geography and practicality were also, of course, important. The size of India meant that the most diehard imperialist realized that it could not be held by force. This was not obviously the case with Indochina. For reasons of proximity, it was easier to imagine Algeria as part of France than Kenya as part of Britain. Consequently, especially under a Labour government, Britain was willing to accept a gradual process of decolonization. France, even under socialist governments, was not.
The first post-Liberation tussle between London and Paris was once again over Syria and Lebanon, while the war in Europe and Asia was still raging. De Gaulle accused the British in highly intemperate terms of trying to push the French out of an area where they claimed special privileges. The Levant was an unfortunate sign of things to come. French determination to regain authority in Indo-China and North Africa conflicted with the expectations of local nationalists that the defeat of 1940 had been the beginning of the end of French rule. It was no coincidence that the first major outbreak of violence in Algeria took place amid celebrations of VE Day, 8 May 1945. Although the British helped to re-establish the French empire in 1944–5 (for example, by shipping French forces to Syria and Indochina), they became increasingly opposed to what became full-scale colonial wars in both Indochina and Algeria. French determination – increasingly backed by the Americans – to keep on fighting in Indochina rather than negotiating a settlement seemed to London hopeless and destabilizing for the whole region, especially for economically precious Malaya, where the British were successfully defeating a Communist revolt thanks in part to the promise of independence. The final Indochina disaster, predicted by the British, came when a large French force was killed or captured at Dien Bien Phu in May 1954. This led to negotiations, in which the British prime minister, Anthony Eden, brokered a settlement at Geneva in July. Algeria was another matter. It was for the French what India, Ireland, Australia and Southern Rhodesia combined had been for the British: the jewel in their imperial crown; a source of bitter internal dissent; their largest colony of settlement; and the home of an insubordinate settler population. Moreover, it provided them with oil, gas and space for atomic weapons testing.
The Algerian revolt, which became more violent and more widespread from 1955 onwards, had serious consequences for Franco-British relations. The British thought the French too intransigent. Their conduct was damaging Western, especially British, relations with the Arab world, where Britain was trying to maintain hegemony by supporting client states – something the French resented and criticized. Eden, francophile though he was, exasperatedly declared that the French were ‘our enemies in the Middle East’, especially because of France’s support for Israel, which the British regarded as destabilizing, and which risked involving Britain in a war against Israel in defence of its protégé Jordan. Britain refused to supply helicopters for use in Algeria, and would not allow its anti-insurgency specialist General Templer to give advice on what he had learned in Malaya. But the main impact of Algeria on Franco-British relations was that it led indirectly to the most dramatic event in the twilight of the two empires, the Suez crisis.
Colonel Gamal Abdel-Nasser, the popular Egyptian dictator, caused France and Britain to shelve their differences. His ambition was to destroy Western – which principally meant British – power in the Middle East. He was also encouraging the Algerian revolt against the French, by means of arms (some British-made), training and political support. In July 1956, he ordered the nationalization of the Suez Canal, run by an international company largely owned by the British and French. In addition to its practical consequences, this was a challenge to London and Paris, a calculated blow against their prestige in the Arab world. So France and Britain had a common enemy.
They also had prime ministers, the Conservative Anthony Eden and the socialist Guy Mollet, who for the first time in 100 years were fluent and willing speakers of each other’s languages, and both wanted to strengthen their alliance. Mollet was a former English teacher from a traditionally anglophile Protestant background. Eden was a true and life-long francophile. He enjoyed French literature, and had a collection of paintings that included works by Corot, Monet, Degas, Cézanne and Braque. During the war, he had defended de Gaulle against the Americans and Churchill, and the recognition given to France after the war, including a permanent seat on the UN Security Council, owed more to him than to any other individual.21 Eden admired his French colleagues, several of whom had Resistance backgrounds. Of Mollet, he said ‘I have never enjoyed more completely loyal understanding with any man.’22 Sadly, this increased the dangers: the usual cross-Channel suspicion might have inspired greater prudence.
Historical bugles blew in both capitals, as governments imagined themselves facing another Munich, with Nasser as Hitler – the first time that ‘Munich’ became a rhetorical standby. Though the stakes were high, both sides greatly exaggerated them. The French believed that the Algerian revolt, following the humiliating defeat in Indochina, threatened France’s self-respect, status and internal stability, but that without Nasser’s help and encouragement the revolt could be defeated. Otherwise, they assured the Americans, the whole of Africa would be lost to Communism.23 The British believed that their dominance of the Middle East was at stake, and with it their supply of cheap oil paid for in sterling. Whitehall estimated that if oil had to be bought in dollars, it would cost the economy another $500–700 million annually, and cause economic collapse. British gold reserves would disappear, the sterling area would disintegrate, and they would be unable to pay for their armed forces – ‘a country that cannot provide for its own defence is finished’.24
On 10 September 1956 Mollet came to London and revived the 1940 idea of a Franco-British Union, with France (and perhaps Belgium, Holland and Norway) joining the Commonwealth trading system. Eden was keen to respond, despite resistance in Whitehall. No other European states had ever twice considered voluntary political union. This demonstrated the desire of the French Left to maintain a special relationship with Britain. Few remember this approach, which at best is regarded as simply bizarre. But had the Suez adventure ended differently, at least a symbolic link might have been created between the two countries at a turning point in European history. France and Britain would necessarily have taken a common position over the Common Market negotiations that a few months later would materialize in the Treaty of Rome. In short, Britain’s relationship with the Continent over the next half century was to be decided on the banks of the Seine – and the Nile.
While Whitehall wrung its collective hands over Egypt, the Quai d’Orsay came up with a bold plan: an invasion to remove Nasser. They offered to place their armed forces under British command. This was not a sign of confidence in superior British leadership – far from it – but a means to tie them into joint action. A problem for the British, though apparently not for the French, was that Nasser had the legal right to nationalize the canal. The Law Officers advised that ‘we are on an extremely bad wicket’.25 Fortunately, the Lord Chancellor thought of a way round the UN Charter. But there was a danger that Nasser might offer concessions. The French again had the answer: their Israeli friends would attack Egypt, and the Franco-British expedition could go in to keep the two sides apart and safeguard the canal – and replace Nasser with someone more amenable. Eden nervously sent two officials for a secret meeting with the French and Israelis in a private house outside Paris, and was distressed when they came back with an agreement on paper – he had wanted nothing written down. The intervention force gathered with painful slowness. Its commander, a New Zealander, worried that the French ‘are doing a lot covertly’ to help the Israelis. Eden warned Mollet – in what the French must surely have regarded as a prize example of English hypocrisy – that such acts would ‘harm . . . our role as peacemakers’.26 Throughout these transparent cloak-and-dagger preparations, the Americans warned repeatedly against the use of force. Eden assumed that they would acquiesce in a fait accompli.
In October 1956, Israeli forces crossed the border. The Egyptian air force was destroyed on the ground. On 5 November, the Allies reached Port Said. The Russians made threats, which were not taken very seriously. The Almighty Dollar was another matter. Sterling was being sold, and the Bank of England was losing its gold and dollar reserves. They were too small to cope. In October 1956, they stood at $2.24 billion. As $2 billion was regarded as the minimum, the Bank had a cushion of only $244 million, and $50 million was lost during the first two days of the Suez operation. Simple arithmetic showed that a sterling crisis – indeed a possible run on the currency, the collapse of the Sterling Area, and the ruin of Britain’s commercial position – was only days away unless the Americans provided credit in dollars. It had been supposed that they would, as in the past. But genuinely angered at being both ignored and deceived, President Eisenhower said that ‘he did not see much value in an unworthy and unreliable ally and that the necessity to support them might not be as great as they believed’.27 To maintain and increase the viability of sterling, it had been made partly convertible into dollars as recently as February 1955. It was this that made Britain vulnerable to American pressure that France – whose currency was not convertible – could defy. The chancellor of the exchequer, Harold Macmillan, told the Cabinet that they faced an imminent sterling crisis. Washington’s condition for a loan was an immediate ceasefire and a rapid withdrawal of Anglo-French forces. A British diplomat in Washington wrote, ‘they seem determined to treat us as naughty boys who have got to be taught that they cannot go off and act on their own without asking Nanny’s permission first’.28 Eden telephoned Mollet at 4 p.m. on 6 November. In the same room happened to be his foreign minister Christian Pineau and the West German chancellor Konrad Adenauer. Eden told them that the British were frightened of a run on sterling, and that Eisenhower was insisting on a ceasefire within twelve hours. Mollet urged him to play for time, while the troops advanced. Eden answered that it was too late: he had already agreed without consulting the French. Pineau ‘guessed Mollet’s feelings . . . for a convinced partisan of the Franco-British alliance, abandonment in such conditions was a bitter blow’.29 Adenauer commented that it would be wise to accept defeat: ‘Europe,’ he added ‘will be your revenge.’
The Suez crisis led to petrol shortages in both France and Britain
The Suez episode had proliferating consequences for Britain, France and their mutual relationship. For Britain, it threatened a general unravelling of an interconnected world outlook based on partnership with the United States, leadership of the Commonwealth, the international role of sterling, hegemony in the Middle East, and entente with France permitting influence in Europe. But America had been hostile. The Commonwealth had been divided and impotent. Sterling had been the Achilles heel. Hegemony in the Middle East crumbled, with the hostility of Egypt, a nationalist revolution in Iraq, and increasing regional instability. The alliance with France proved insufficient. Not least, the British political class, including the ruling Conservative party, had been divided over Suez: the will to maintain a world role at all costs was not there, as Eden’s successor Harold Macmillan soon showed. The political climate was for rapid decolonization and a renunciation of pretensions to world power. Commonwealth relations were rebuilt, but their meaning had changed: they could no longer be considered an instrument of power; indeed, some would see them as a source of weakness.
The consequences for France were far greater: it was ‘never the same again’ after Suez.30 Like Britain, it had to face the limits of its power. If Britain had been brought to heel by Eisenhower, a mere phone call from Eden had done the same to France. Once again, timorous Albion had let France down. It lost its remaining position in the Middle East, including cultural institutions built up over 150 years in Egypt, and which had formed the basis of a cultural affinity between the old Egyptian ruling class and France. But in contrast with British contrition, French reaction to the humiliation was unforgiving and determined. The month after Suez, plutonium was ordered for a French nuclear weapons programme. It was decided to win the Algerian war whatever the cost. Mollet decided to send conscripts, and eventually 400,000 French soldiers served there. Ruthless methods were adopted by an army no longer willing to allow politicians to accept defeat as they had done in Indochina and Suez. The eventual outcome was a military revolt and the return to power of General de Gaulle in May 1958 as the man to save Algeria and prevent civil war. But de Gaulle, like Eden’s successor Macmillan, saw that imperialism was no longer worth the effort, and by 1962 he withdrew from Algeria. He would concentrate instead on transforming France and its relations with Europe and the world.
Suez required the British and the French to reassess their relations with each other, with America, and with Europe. London and Washington hastily patched up their rift. Though British anti-Americanism was for a time intense, there was a realization in Westminster that Eden had been reckless and the Americans arguably right. A British defence review in 1957 concluded that ‘in a limited war in the Mediterranean or in the Far East the UK would only act in cooperation with the US’.31 The French felt their exclusion from this rapprochement, and resentment of Anglo-Saxon separateness was naturally confirmed. A Foreign Office official said – fortunately not to a Frenchman – that Britain’s alliance with France was like a frustrated suitor going to a whorehouse: ‘The United States was the woman she loved and France the brothel.’32 For the British, Suez proved that only America could be the buttress of their security, power and interests. For the French, Suez proved that America could never be that buttress. This necessarily involved diverging interpretations of ‘Europe’.
Both Britain and France needed Europe as an economic and political prop to their shrinking world power. Britain wanted a broad European-centred free-trading system. Mollet, taking up Adenauer’s suggestion of a European ‘revenge’, resolved France’s disagreements with Germany in the weeks after Suez, and now accepted a more supranational structure. So the Treaty of Rome was signed in March 1957 setting up a European Economic Community committed to ‘ever closer union’. France could hope to lead it, compensating for the humiliation of Suez. The Suez debacle thus caused ‘the two ancient nation-states [to go] their separate ways . . . there was no more talk of Anglo-French union. With much trepidation, France took its road into the Common Market without Britain.’33
European Revenge, 1958–79
I want her naked.
CHARLES DE GAULLE34
He talks of Europe and means France.
HAROLD MACMILLAN, NOVEMBER 196135
It is often said that, under the shock of Suez, both Britain and France had to choose between a diminished but sensible role within an integrating Europe, or a vain attempt to cling to the vestiges of vanished power. Those who discern such a choice invariably see France as having taken the virtuous path. Yet the analysis is misleading in implying that for France a ‘European’ policy meant carpet-slippered retirement, as it did for Germany and Italy. For France ‘Europe’ was not a substitute for a global role, but a means of exercising it; not a means of sharing sovereignty, but of augmenting power. So Paris accelerated its nuclear arms programme, juggled European markets and funds to consolidate its neo-colonial influence in Africa (reminiscent of Ernest Bevin’s earlier dreams), and amplified its voice in world affairs. Britain too saw involvement in Europe not as a renunciation, but as necessary to maintain its influence in Washington and the Commonwealth. This very similarity of ambition made rivalry inevitable. De Gaulle, thought Macmillan, only wanted one cock on the dunghill.
The years after Suez saw a fundamental shift in Franco-British relations: for the first time since the 1860s – perhaps since 1812 – France had the upper hand. This was to last for over thirty years. Before Suez, French governments would rarely contemplate a major step inside or outside Europe without British support, and the British took this for granted. Things unmistakably changed with the return of de Gaulle, through a combination of political self-confidence and relative economic performance. It drew on broader perceptions, within the political classes, the media and the public, of where the two countries were going. France could hardly have ended the 1950s in a worse crisis, amid the atrocities of the Algerian war, with military revolt and a settler uprising threatening a collapse of the State. De Gaulle returned to power in May 1958 in a polite coup d’état after twelve years in the political wilderness. He quelled the army and prepared to leave Algeria. This made him a target for assassination by partisans of ‘French Algeria’, but he survived to give the country firm if relatively unaccountable government. Britain, on the contrary, seemed to slide into decadence and accelerating decline, marked by political scandal, raucous mockery of its rulers, social unrest, and recurrent economic and financial crises on a scale unseen for more than a century. Though Macmillan won the 1959 elections with the slogan ‘You’ve never had it so good’, Britain soon became the ‘sick man of Europe’. La maladie anglaise caused much head-shaking and some Schadenfreude. Both French strength and British weakness were perhaps exaggerated. But for a whole generation, pessimism reigned in Whitehall and Westminster. The waning of Britain’s overseas power begun by the collapse of influence in the Middle East, accelerating economic decline, and the apparent unravelling of its social and cultural cohesion – all seemingly out of control – led to a panicky loss of self-confidence among the elites.
Economic performance was the bedrock of domestic politics and international power. The generation after 1945 saw a level of economic and social change in France – dubbed ‘the Thirty Glorious Years’ – that enabled it to surmount chronic domestic political conflicts and recover from bloody and humiliating colonial wars. France was transformed from a fragile and somewhat archaic economy with a large peasant sector and a flagging birthrate into an industrial power that by the 1960s compared in technique and productivity with the world’s best. The Caravelle airliner (though with Rolls-Royce engines), the Renault Dauphine, Mirage fighters, the Tour Montparnasse and nuclear power symbolized a new France, strong as well as chic. The bébé boom suddenly increased the population at a rate unknown for over a century. These transformations were believed to owe much to state planning by the brainy technocrats of Jean Monnet’s Commissariat-Général du Plan, to growing European economic integration, and to a change in collective mentality arising from the war – a rejection of old habits and a shared determination to change. This gave muscle to de Gaulle’s revived international assertiveness. It put France ahead of Britain not only in wealth, but in perceived international influence. This provoked an upsurge in francophobia balanced by grudging admiration. For Britain did not experience economic transformation. It did not have a comparable agricultural sector to develop. But there were perhaps cultural and political reasons too. It is often observed that defeat was a necessary condition for an ‘economic miracle’ in the 1950s, and that France had been sufficiently defeated to make a break with the past. Britain, proud of its wartime achievements in economic and social as well as military domains, and thirsting to enjoy the rewards of victory, was not under such pressure to change: old industries, old methods, old markets and old attitudes survived, and for a time prospered. Only from the late 1950s, and especially from the late 1960s, did it seem that things were going wrong. But it was far from clear how, if at all, they could be put right.
Attempts had been made from the beginning to negotiate associate status with ‘the Six’. No British government could be attracted by a protectionist Continental system that would curtail its trade with the Commonwealth and North America. The economic effects would have been devastating, and anyway it would have been politically impossible. British governments from 1945 persistently advocated worldwide reduction of trade barriers. This would have permitted trade with the Continent without closing off that with the rest of the world. The Treaty of Rome – with its tariff wall, protectionist agricultural policy, and goal of economic and monetary union – contradicted these aims, unless it could be modified or circumvented. Britain’s answer was a Free Trade Area. Within this, the Six could pursue economic and political integration through their new Common Market, while permitting other European and Commonwealth countries to trade with them. This was not a vain or foolish idea: it would have been more favourable to Third World economic development and to long-term European growth.36 The great obstacle was agriculture, which in all countries was subsidized, regulated and politically powerful. French (also Italian and Danish) farmers did not want to compete in European markets with Commonwealth imports. So the British suggested leaving agriculture out of their free trade system. But that removed the attraction for Continental farmers – free access to the British food market, Europe’s largest importer. There were other political obstacles. Free trade was anathema to federalists, for it would undermine the regulatory and protectionist function that was the sinew of political integration. Nevertheless, the proposed Free Trade Area had a good chance of being accepted. It offered political and economic benefits, not least to German exporters, who wanted Britain in a European trading system. Ludwig Erhard, the powerful German finance minister and architect of the ‘economic miracle’, was a strong supporter of the Free Trade Area.37 The British thought that Germany, and in particular Erhard, would have a decisive influence. Practical problems, it seemed, could be resolved by negotiation. Macmillan, the first foreign leader to visit de Gaulle in June 1958, tried to convince him that Britain’s European plan was necessary for security in the face of the Soviet menace.
De Gaulle, however, feared that the British were trying to take over European leadership.38 A free trade area would damage French agriculture. Above all, it would tend to loosen the economic and political influence France intended to exercise over Germany, always its principal policy objective. In November 1958, the negotiations – ‘vain tractations’39 – were abruptly stopped by de Gaulle, who feared they would succeed. This was the first and most damaging of his three vetoes. It confirmed France’s cutting loose from Britain occasioned by the Suez crisis. De Gaulle had made sure that Chancellor Adenauer, who regarded the Paris–Bonn relationship as indispensable, would follow his lead, and Erhard was overruled.40 This required political nerve in Paris, for it was based – like all Gaullist and post-Gaullist policy – not on confidence in French power, but on ‘weakness and sometimes desperation’.41 The French wanted to stem what they saw as their relative economic, political and military decline while there was time. De Gaulle, strongly anti-federalist, would probably have refused to sign the Treaty of Rome had he been in power at the time, but once in power he accepted it. French industry, and above all agriculture, needed a privileged European market, not a free-for-all with New Zealand butter and Canadian wheat. This was guaranteed just over three years after de Gaulle’s veto, in 1962, when the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) was signed. France’s international priority was partnership with Germany within an integrated (though non-federal) European system – an alternative which in various forms it had flirted with since the 1920s, if not since the 1860s. For the moment, de Gaulle could treat Bonn with condescension, and even arrogance. But the French knew that they had only a limited time to enmesh Germany in a European net. Britain could not be allowed to fray the strands with proposals for a free trade area: zone de libre-échange became dirty words.
De Gaulle’s veto led Britain to set up the European Free Trade Association in 1959, with Sweden, Denmark, Norway, Iceland, Finland, Switzerland, Austria, Ireland and Portugal. This worked efficiently, cheaply, and amicably – it has recently been proposed as a model for a decentralized and non-bureaucratic European union. Had it not been for the CAP, and French determination, EFTA and the EEC would probably have merged fairly quickly to form a wider free trade area, such as now exists between the EC and the remaining EFTA members, Switzerland, Norway and Iceland.42 But EFTA was too small to provide the diplomatic clout craved by Whitehall. Besides, Washington disliked it as a distraction from their aim of an integrated Europe – a very important consideration for Macmillan. The Americans put heavy pressure on London to apply to accede to the Treaty of Rome. The government duly did. ‘It is only full membership, with the possibility of controlling and dominating Europe,’ wrote an optimistic official, ‘that is really attractive.’ Whitehall still assumed that it could make ‘Europe’ accommodate its non-European political and economic links, at least during a long transitional period. ‘The question is,’ wrote the foreign secretary Selwyn Lloyd, ‘how to live with the Common Market economically and turn its political effects into channels harmless to us.’
The ambition to use Common Market membership to bolster Britain’s influence in Washington and the Commonwealth as their ‘bridge’ to Europe remained central. Otherwise, thought the Foreign Office, ‘at the best, we should remain a minor power in an alliance dominated by the United States, at the worst we should sit hopelessly in the middle while the two power blocs drifted gradually apart’. The Foreign Office was more interested in influence than in sovereignty, an issue that the cabinet now considered for the first time. Some fears were expressed of ‘the ghosts of Louis XIV and Napoleon’. The Lord Chancellor pointed out that the Treaty of Rome ‘would go far beyond the most extensive delegation of powers . . . that we have ever experienced.’ But Edward Heath, the minister leading negotiations, declared that only in specific commercial policies was sovereignty affected. Federalism was not in the treaty, he said, and anyway it would recede once Britain joined. ‘We could certainly make it clear in parliament and elsewhere that we had no intention of agreeing to a federation.’43 It suited most of those involved to deny or play down the dynamic nature of the treaty’s commitment to ever closer union, to dismiss it as quaint foreign rhetoric, or to assume that once inside Britain could prevent it. This is a wonderful example of the ingrained British tendency, complained of by the French at least since Napoleon, to ignore what agreements actually said in favour of what British common sense assumed they ought to mean. As Alan Milward puts it, there was a general agreement in Britain to accept something that was not on offer,44 and particularly not on offer from de Gaulle. Concluded one historically minded official, ‘Let us hope that Pitt will have the last word: we will save England by our exertions and Europe by our example.’45
De Gaulle understood the British position perfectly: it was, after all, similar to his own – to use Europe as a pedestal for national power. In sinking the Free Trade Area, he had blocked the persistent British ambition to combine ‘European’ and global connections. The long transitional period the British wanted for entry, de Gaulle suspected, was another stratagem with the same purpose, and would wreck the pristine Community. Often recalling Churchill’s declaration that Britain would always choose ‘the open sea’ over Europe, he wanted to force Britain to make the choice: Europe or, not Europe and.46 This is a choice the British – like the French themselves – have obstinately resisted. Macmillan tried to change de Gaulle’s mind by offering to help him acquire nuclear weapons, and to persuade Washington to allow France at least nominal partnership with the Anglo-Saxons in running NATO. But this would have restored France to its previous role as Britain’s junior partner in an alliance dominated by the ‘Anglo-Saxons’ (a term that de Gaulle made current in French political vocabulary). This might have tempted de Gaulle’s predecessors. It was anathema to de Gaulle, even if – which is doubtful – he thought that Britain could deliver.47
Macmillan’s attempts to woo de Gaulle encountered little entente and less cordiality.
Meetings took place at the presidential chateau at Rambouillet and at Macmillan’s house at Birch Grove in Sussex. These were picturesque occasions. The Macmillans’ cook refused to find room in her fridge for de Gaulle’s blood (for transfusion in case of another assassination attempt): ‘It’s full of haddock.’ Many pheasants were shot by Macmillan in spite of police dogs disturbing the coverts. At Rambouillet, things were much grander, with beaters and loaders in uniform, which reminded Macmillan of Edwardian England – except that he was charged for his cartridges. De Gaulle limited his participation to standing by and commenting when his guest missed. But despite the slight personal thaw, the political climate remained frozen. Macmillan found that de Gaulle ‘does not apparently listen to argument . . . He merely repeats over and over again what he has said before . . . based on intuition, not ratiocination.’ De Gaulle told his ministers that he had offered ‘the poor man’ no encouragement: he had felt like quoting Edith Piaf’s song: ‘Ne pleurez pas, milord!’48
Between 1961 and 1963, British negotiations to enter the Common Market ground laboriously on. At some meetings the French foreign minister Maurice Couve de Murville ostentatiously occupied himself by reading, entering the discussion only to refuse every British amendment. After one late-night session, the Luxembourg foreign minister collapsed from exhaustion. Heath reported that ‘The French are opposing us by every means, fair and foul. They are absolutely ruthless. For some reason they terrify the Six – by their intellectual superiority, spiritual arrogance, and shameful disregard of truth and honour.’49 The perennial problems were Commonwealth imports, notably Indian textiles and Australasian food. Diplomats, led by the indefatigable Heath, employed endless ingenuity to square circles concerning sugar, bananas, lamb and tinned pineapple. The British found the Continentals more protectionist and ‘parochial’ than they had hoped – ‘shrinking into Europe’, as Alan Milward puts it – and indifferent to the needs of the rest of the world, to which Britain was necessarily more sensitive. Yet British ministers and officials, haunted by fear of decline and isolation, saw no alternative to jettisoning most of their Commonwealth links and becoming ‘as parochial as the European Community’.50Their fear was put into blunt words in December 1962 by the former American secretary of state Dean Acheson (‘a conceited ass’ – Macmillan):
Great Britain has lost an empire, and has not yet found a role. The attempt to play a separate power role . . . apart from Europe . . . based on a ‘Special Relationship’ with the United States [or] being head of a ‘Commonwealth’ which has no . . . unity or strength . . . this role is about played out.
Commonwealth trade fell sharply as businesses and governments prepared for British concessions to the Six. The danger for the French was that the negotiations might therefore succeed – though it is possible that even if they had the British government would have split and Parliament and public opinion would have found the terms unacceptable. De Gaulle spared the British that painful dilemma.
His famous televised press conference on 14 January 1963 – the first anniversary of his success in securing the Common Agricultural Policy – took everyone by surprise, including his own ministers. He was a master of the regal style, a philosopher-king disposing of respectfully prearranged questions before a large invited audience in the gilded salons of the Elysée. When the subject of Britain and Europe came up, he delivered his grand judgement:
England is an island, sea-going, bound up, by its trade, its markets, its food supplies, with the most varied and often the most distant countries . . . The entry of Great Britain first, and then of those other states will completely change the whole set of established adjustments, agreements, compensations and rules . . . We would have to think of building another Common Market [with] all the problems of economic relationships with a host of other countries . . . The cohesion of all these very numerous, very diverse members would not last long, and in the end there would emerge a colossal Atlantic community under American dependence and direction . . . This is not at all the truly European construction that France has wanted and still wants. It is possible that one day England will manage to transform herself sufficiently to take part in the European Community, without restriction or reservation and in preference to anything else, and in that case . . . France will raise no obstacle.51
This admirably trenchant statement – underlined a fortnight later by the Elysée Treaty between France and Germany – summarizes what de Gaulle really thought. He had already told Macmillan so privately in November 1961, when he had said that Britain’s ‘great escort’ of global connections would disrupt the complicated arrangements negotiated with such difficulty between the six neighbours. The British had been told that though the Gaullists regarded Monnet’s supranational ideas as ‘wholly impracticable and very dangerous’, they equally rejected a ‘Western worldwide free trade area’ or anything that diluted the vision of a white, Christian, non-American ‘European Europe’.52 Though Macmillan had assured him that Britain was ready to jettison the Commonwealth, embrace the CAP, and cooperate over European nuclear defence, de Gaulle did not believe that nations – ‘incomparable, inalterable’ – could so easily change their spots. Eight hundred years of European history, he reflected, revolved round Britain’s struggles with the Continent. He expressed doubts to Macmillan that Britain would really agree to ‘shut itself up’ in Europe at such cost to its wider interests.53 Some interpreters have emphasized his undoubted detestation of American hegemony, for which Britain acted as a ‘trojan horse’ – Macmillan and President Kennedy talked this over and agreed that de Gaulle had ‘gone crazy’, which rather confirmed his point.54 The ‘special relationship’ had recently been prolonged by the Nassau agreement to sell Polaris missiles to Britain – Britain, declared de Gaulle, had ‘sold its birthright for a mess of polaris’.55 Britain’s hankering after global trade threatened the Common Agricultural Policy, so important to France economically and to the Gaullists electorally. All these considerations were ‘inextricably mixed’56 for a man who combined romantic ideas of national destinies with a shrewd grasp of present political realities.
In any case, his analysis stands as the historic definition of the matters at stake, which have remained the fundamental issue of European politics ever since – in Brussels jargon, ‘deepening’ versus ‘widening’. He realized that the British wanted ‘a Europe without boundaries’, which he saw as ‘an American Europe’, which would ‘lose its soul’.57 He doubtless also enjoyed avenging ancient and modern slights by the ‘Anglo-Saxons’, of which he was bitterly mindful in private. Occasionally he let it show. When Paul Reynaud, the prime minister of 1940, criticized him for isolating France and ‘flouting the Entente Cordiale’, he replied with a scribbled note ‘to be forwarded to Agincourt or Waterloo’. Macmillan thought that ‘if Hitler had danced in London we’d have had no trouble with de Gaulle’ – a perception that was rather confirmed by some of the general’s own pronouncements.58 But his deepest reason for excluding Britain – apart from an instinctive presumption of Anglo-French rivalry – was his pessimistic belief that the traditional, enclosed, francocentric Europe he and other idealists envisioned would be shattered by an irruption of Anglo-Saxon disorder. ‘We are the last Europeans of the Europe that was Christendom . . . It is no longer a question of whether France will make Europe, but rather of understanding that France may die if Europe dies.’59
Like Groucho Marx, the British placed ever more value on the club that blackballed them. Harold Wilson, Labour prime minister from 1964, began by expressing no interest in what was now called the European Economic Community (EEC), and his party was committed to developing Commonwealth links. But within two years, he was contemplating a new application, as long as it could be ‘the right sort of Europe . . . outward looking and not autarkic’ – in other words, not damaging to Commonwealth trade and not anti-American.60 Wilson’s motivation, like that of Macmillan, was essentially diplomatic. The Foreign Office tirelessly reiterated the dangers of isolation and loss of influence. Financial constraints undermined military commitments ‘east of Suez’, seeming to leave Europe as the only forum for Britain to play an international role, and thus justify its privileged position in Washington. Indeed, Wilson told the American President Johnson that Britain could not afford both an ‘east of Suez’ role and membership of the EEC, given that both would be expensive. Wilson hoped that Britain would be able to act as the bridge between Europe, America and indeed the Commonwealth and the United Nations. Otherwise, de Gaulle, with the Germans in tow, seemed capable of wrecking the Atlantic alliance and leaving soft, rich Europe open to Soviet penetration. Some ministers, especially those on the right of the Labour Party such as Douglas Jay, worried about loss of sovereignty. The orthodox response was that in practice problems would not arise, and that any notional loss of sovereignty would be outweighed by gains in that intangible essence, ‘influence’. In bizarre contrast with these grandiose visions of a renewed global role was the depressing spectacle of chronic economic and financial weakness. The failure ofsuccessive economic planning policies made the EEC seem a necessary crutch for the sick man of Europe, too feeble and incompetent to manage its own domestic affairs. Wilson mused that Britain was like a faded beauty, and Europe a go-ahead young man with good prospects. If not a love match, it could be Britain’s last chance for a comfortable settlement. But could it afford the dowry?
Britain had long been ready to join ‘the right sort of Europe’. But what about the wrong sort of Europe – that is, the ‘Europe’ that actually existed, vigilantly guarded by Charles de Gaulle? Like their predecessors and successors, Wilson and his colleagues convinced themselves that once inside they would steer Europe in a British direction: ‘if we can’t dominate that lot,’ said Wilson, ‘there’s not much to be said for us.’ De Gaulle, oddly enough, tended to agree, suspecting the smaller states of being potential British satellites. But he need not have worried: the British had no ideas, little real confidence, and no plan to wrest control from the French. Their hope was to form a dominating partnership with Paris once de Gaulle had gone – a departure devoutly wished.
Meanwhile, they were willing to sweeten the future entente with joint projects for the aircraft Concorde, Jaguar and Airbus. The French were eager to take up these offers and learn from British expertise – de Gaulle was annoyed that France could not make successful jet engines. But he had no intention of making concessions over Europe, or indeed over NATO or competing interests in Africa. In October 1966, Wilson made a new application without specifying prior conditions, to make it more embarrassing for de Gaulle to veto. If he did veto none the less, the application would be left on the table until he left office – ‘returning the ball . . . into the General’s twenty-five’ – for it was plain that de Gaulle himself was the only insurmountable obstacle to British accession.
Wilson cherished some hope of winning de Gaulle over, and was encouraged by his private secretary Michael Palliser, an extremely europhile Foreign Office man who happened to be the son-in-law of the European ‘founding father’ Paul-Henri Spaak. Palliser’s plan was to ‘appeal to [de Gaulle’s] sense of history and his monumental vanity. He has no doubt that he is the greatest Frenchman since Napoleon . . . To be fair, he is probably right, and wants to go down in history accordingly.’ Wilson’s argument was that only within a Europe including Britain could France be truly great. However, de Gaulle easily outmatched the British in disdain. He said he would ‘perhaps receive’ Wilson but not ‘converse’ with him: ‘he’s light-headed, banging about like a bug in a drum’.61He conceded to Wilson that he was inclined to believe that Britain did now aspire to ‘become a European country.’62 But it had not happened yet.
De Gaulle was in a difficult position, as George Brown, the foreign secretary, marshalled support for Britain’s entry among the other Five. At first Paris tried to persuade the British to drop their application. As they persisted, de Gaulle used their economic weakness to justify another veto at a press conference on 16 May 1967. The Foreign Office thought he used language of ‘quite exceptional bitterness, hostility and scorn’.63 Britain, he said, was economically incapable of bearing the obligations of membership, and its premature desire for accession was driven by desperation – ‘her national personality [was] now at stake’. British entry would disrupt the Community. His other objection was familiar: Britain wanted a mere free trade area that would undermine the Community. The British consoled themselves that France’s relations with the Five had been damaged, and believed that time was on their side.
On this point they were right, as de Gaulle seems to have realized. He even told Wilson that he feared that a ‘European Europe’ might one day be submerged by an Atlantic community – an admission of pessimism that encouraged the British.64 At virtually every European Council meeting ‘relentless’ pressure was put on the French. Yet only after the students of Nanterre and the Sorbonne had dented the general’s majestic prestige in the riots of May 1968 and hastened his retirement was the drawbridge to British membership of the EEC lowered, and the principle of progressive enlargement decisively endorsed. The British, now under Edward Heath’s Conservative government, seized their opportunity with undisguised avidity. Belief that membership at any price was the only cure for Britain’s diplomatic, economic and political ills was now the orthodoxy in most official circles: Britain was ‘the sinking Titanic’, and ‘Europe’ the lifeboat.65 Ironically, the lifeboat was soon to spring a leak itself.
Heath had made his reputation as the dogged negotiator of the first application. To succeed now would ensure his place in history. Sir Roy Denman, an adviser to both Wilson and Heath, has argued that Wilson and the Labour party would not have pushed through the negotiations, and that Heath took what might have been Britain’s last opportunity to join.66 Heath assured President Georges Pompidou that Britain was ready to ‘give priority to [Europe] over their other interests in the world’. Sir Con O’Neill, former ambassador to Brussels, was appointed the chief official negotiator, and the main strategist of Britain’s entry. His views were plain: the EEC was about power. ‘None of its policies was essential to us; many of them were objectionable.’ But outside, Britain would decline into ‘a greater Sweden’67 – something Whitehall regarded as a fate worse than death. O’Neill sympathized with the view expressed by the ultra-europhile Tory backbencher Sir Anthony Meyer: ‘it would be in the interests of this country to join the EEC whatever the terms’. Though the terms were tough – ‘we would of course have had a much easier passage but for the French’ – the British team managed, in O’Neill’s words, to ‘swallow the lot’. They accepted a Common Fisheries Policy, making all coastal fishing waters a common resource – a fait accompli hastily arranged by the existing members. (Norway refused it and stayed out.) They agreed to a disproportionate financial contribution through the CAP as the price of concessions over New Zealand food imports. But O’Neill felt ‘rather complacent’ about Britain’s future ability to influence the Community: the fisheries policy would be moderated, he thought, and the costs of the CAP ‘would tend to diminish’.68 Britain (with Ireland and Denmark) formally entered the EEC on 1 January 1973. When Labour returned to power in 1974, they announced the intention of renegotiating a settlement they condemned as unfavourable, and putting the result to a referendum. Their renegotiation had no significant outcome, but it was represented as a victory. The referendum voted to stay in by 67 per cent of those voting, but only 40 per cent of the electorate as a whole.
This hardly demonstrated popular rapture: Britain had been constrained by fear of isolation and economic decline to join a French-dominated Community structurally unfavourable to its economic interests. Its rulers’ principal motive had been to bolster diplomatic influence; but for public consumption economic benefits were stressed. Politicians and diplomats concealed – perhaps from themselves – the commitments to further integration clearly spelt out in the treaties, dismissed as mere rhetoric. Their outlook combined a highly pessimistic reading of Britain’s economic and social condition with a strangely optimistic belief in their own ability to lead their new partners. Their motives were sincere and patriotic. But it was the despairing patriotism of an elite that had lost confidence in its country, had little faith in its ability to arrest its decline, and could only see salvation as climbing into someone else’s ‘lifeboat’. The ambivalence of the process stored up political trouble for the future.
Moreover, the sea suddenly grew stormy. Beginning in 1973, Middle East oil crises added to Britain’s woes, and also ended both France’s ‘thirty glorious years’ and West Germany’s ‘economic miracle’. Thus ended the halcyon period of post-war European growth and integration, based on a unique combination of post-war reconstruction and economic modernization. The CAP greatly raised food prices in Britain. The introduction of VAT further raised consumer prices. In the words of a recent American historian, this amounted to ‘the maximum adverse impact on every single citizen of the United Kingdom’.69 Attempts to control the situation were at best ineffective, and at worst damaging, as governments tried feebly to imitate French economic planning and German corporatism, but without the concentrated power of the Fifth Republic or the ‘social partnership’ of Germany. Heath, Wilson and James Callaghan were defeated in turn by a deadly combination of economic stagnation and inflation, which reached levels rarely seen in a developed county. The cost of public borrowing rose faster in 1974 than in 1797, when Pitt was forced to abandon gold. Efforts to restrain state spending and limit wage inflation led to strikes and public disorder unknown since the 1920s, or even the 1830s. Britain was in no position to attempt its vaunted leadership of Europe. The Franco-German relationship, begun by de Gaulle and Adenauer, was consolidated by Valéry Giscard d’Estaing and Helmut Schmidt, who barely concealed their contempt for Anglo-Saxon failures. The ambassador in Paris, Sir Nicholas Henderson, noted that Giscard considered that ‘the age-long competitive struggle between France and the UK was over for good, with France the victor’. Henderson seems to have agreed, reporting mournfully in a dispatch that was leaked to the press in June 1979, that ‘our decline in relation to our European partners has been so marked that today we are not only no longer a world power, but we are not in the first rank even as a European one’.70
HIGHER, FASTER, DEARER: THE
CONCORDE COMPLEX
Plans for a supersonic airliner began separately in Britain and France in the 1950s.71 The pace was set by Britain. The motives were political as much as commercial: to foster world-class technology and lubricate entry into the Common Market. The French were less enthusiastic, but allowed themselves to be wooed. In November 1962 a treaty was signed. A highly complex joint administration was created, which needed repeated reorganization as French and British manufacturers began learning to work together. Macmillan had insisted on a non-cancellation clause to stop the French backing out: it was to work the other way, preventing Labour from cancelling the project in the late 1960s and 70s as costs exploded. Anthony Wedgwood Benn, the boyishly enthusiastic minister for technology, stressed its importance for jobs. He also settled a long dispute over the name: Concord or Concorde, the latter supposedly insisted on by de Gaulle himself. Benn accepted the E, he said, for Excellence, Europe and Entente Cordiale – though it seemed to concede French claims that the aircraft was predominantly theirs. When the United States dropped its plans for a supersonic airliner, the project, employing 30,000 people, seemed vindicated. A Russian rival, rumoured to have been copied from stolen plans, crashed at a Paris air show. In May 1971, President Pompidou made an inaugural flight in Concorde 001, while the Queen flew to Toulouse in 002. But the loud supersonic boom caused the United States to ban overland flights in 1973: American airlines cancelled their orders, and the rest of the world followed. The simultaneous leap in world oil prices, as well as straining both countries’ budgets, made Concorde ever more expensive to fly. After much debate, the two governments agreed to persevere: prestige was at stake. But only sixteen aircraft were ever built – one tenth of original expectations. The taxpayers met the development and production costs, so that British Airways and Air France could afford them. Concorde was a remarkable technical success, and won much affection, even among those who could not afford its fares, as a patriotic symbol and an elegant piece of flying sculpture. There was a pattern here, repeated in other joint projects over the last half-century: the political and diplomatic motivation, the complexity of control, the difficulty of backing out, the importance of prestige, and the consolation that someone else was paying part of the bill.
Satisfactions of Grandeur and Pleasures of Decline
France cannot be France without grandeur.
CHARLES DE GAULLE
Sexual intercourse began
In nineteen sixty-three
Between the end of the Chatterley ban
And the Beatles’ first L.P.
PHILIP LARKIN, ‘Annus mirabilis’ (1974)
On 21 December 1958, General de Gaulle was elected first president of the new Fifth Republic, a system designed in his image. In February 1960, France exploded its first atom bomb in the Sahara. That same year, for the first time for several centuries, French GDP per head overtook that of Britain. De Gaulle set out to make France again a great power and the leader of Europe. He intended to stand up to the ‘Anglo-Saxons’, insist on equality of status, and act as a spokesman for non-aligned nations. All this was possible because of de Gaulle’s prestige, both as a war leader and – because the former had not been enough to allow him to get his way in 1946 – as the saviour of France from disaster. The Fifth Republic was intended to lead, rather than follow, the whims of a turbulent people de Gaulle regarded with affectionate contempt. He was a republican and a democrat – his admirers say fundamentally and sincerely so. But it was a different kind of democracy from that which he had criticized and blamed for French weakness between the wars and since 1945. The Third and Fourth republics had been parliamentary systems, with governments accountable to Parliament and frequently overturned. De Gaulle’s system was, as the main draughtsman of its constitution put it, a ‘republican monarchy’.72 The parties and Parliament had their powers curtailed. Economic modernization was pushed ahead, with state assistance and direction, and non-political experts were appointed to high office. Directly accountable to the people, not Parliament, and with a long term of office, the president would reign and rule. Though much criticized at first (François Mitterrand called it a ‘permanent coup d’état’) and never wholly popular during de Gaulle’s tenure of power, the system did win a broad measure of acceptance, which became all the firmer once de Gaulle himself had left office.
Without these political changes, and an underpinning of economic dynamism, it is unthinkable that de Gaulle could have played such a powerful role in Europe and outside. This, if with less panache, has been the policy of his successors ever since: power in and through Europe based on partnership with Germany; a patriotic emphasis on France’s special role in the world, especially in its former colonies; independent military power; and vocal opposition to ‘Anglo-Saxon’ domination. It is a heritage that no subsequent leader can disavow. Given the previous forty years of history – of political division, economic fragility, and unstable leadership – this was an incredible renaissance for France. The country most put in the shade was Britain, its future seemingly at the disposal of the French president. Britain, it seemed, was in irreversible decline and was becoming ungovernable.
Decline could be fun, however, and grandeur rather burdensome. The post-war years – and especially the 1960s and 70s, when the ‘baby-boom’ generation reached puberty – saw profound cultural changes throughout the Western world, associated with increased incomes, educational opportunities and leisure. In Britain, which had previously been unusually stable, unusually secure, and perhaps unusually deferential, these changes were felt with particular acuteness. Conscription was abolished in 1960, while universities multiplied. The humiliations and failures of the ruling elite were liberating for their subjects. The traditional British taste for parody and the absurd was politicized, and ‘satire’ became a characteristic form of expression in television, radio and newspapers. Taboos were gleefully broken. The failed prosecution of Penguin Books in 1960 for publishing D.H. Lawrence’s 1928 novel Lady Chatterley’s Lover, and the Profumo scandal in 1963 (when the Tory minister of war had to resign following involvement with a prostitute), made authority seem both hypocritical and absurd – and media coverage provided children with an early form of sex education. Theatre censorship was abolished in 1969. The rusting away of old industries and the patriarchal working-class communities they had created caused searing hardship and long-term demoralization, but also pushed a new generation into other ways of living.
It is no coincidence that London replaced Paris as the cultural centre of Europe, and England became, for the first time for nearly two centuries, the epitome of cultural modernity. If decline meant liberation, Gaullist grandeur meant state power in the media and patronage in the arts culminating in a ‘culture state’ that combined conformity, bureaucratic control and a touch of nepotism. Certain areas of French cultural life, combining impressive intellectualism with fashionable chic, enjoyed international prestige, not least among British intellectuals. The experimental French cinema was the universal reference. Philosophical plays and novels, the Annales school of history, and reinterpretations of German philosophy applied to literature and the humanities attained unparalleled influence in anglophone university departments. But in mass youth culture, especially that associated with music, clothes and morals, London and Liverpool – that exotic imagined city – had a global impact, in comparison with a Paris where fashion and entertainment were elegantly middle-aged and middle-class. This is too well known to need elaboration. Of interest from our perspective are changing French perceptions of Britain. If the bowler hat, the crown, the kilt and the teacup (and, according to the humorist Pierre Daninos, the cat o’nine tails and the schoolgirl in black stockings) represented Britishness in French imaginations, they were now joined by long hair, miniskirts, ‘yé yé’, films, television programmes, fashion designers and, later, by skinheads, punks, football hooligans and rap artists.
There was, however, commercial and intellectual resistance at first. In the early 1960s, France had its own highly popular Americanized entertainers, such as Johnny Hallyday (né Jean-Philippe Smet) and Eddie Mitchell. The Beatles, already world-famous, were little noticed on their first French tour in 1964, almost ignored by state television, and dismissed by France-Soir as ‘outdated’. When in 1965–6, the Rolling Stones and the Beatles nevertheless began to arouse youthful emotions in France, critics deplored the phenomenon as unhealthy commercial exploitation. But for the first time, masses of French adolescents began to flock across the Channel. Brigitte Bardot sang that ‘le diable est anglais’ and lived in Carnaby Street. In theatre, television and cinema too, the mid-6os saw an influx of British works, from Shakespeare to James Bond.73
If, as Larkin declared, sexual intercourse in Britain began in 1963, this was soon discovered by the French. It was an unexpected find. British sexual incompetence was, and is, an ingrained belief among the French, a foil to their own self-proclaimed virtuosity. Pierre Daninos’s best-seller, Les Carnets du Major Thompson (1954) joked that ‘if Englishmen had found a way to make babies without involving women, they would be the happiest people on earth . . . Frenchmen are the gastronomes of love; Englishmen merely do it.’74 But ‘merely doing it’ was not to be despised by adolescents in a France that was (and to some degree still is) a relatively controlled, conventional and domesticated society. The student revolt of May 1968 started at Nanterre university, legend has it, when a request that boys and girls should be allowed in each others’ rooms was rebuffed by the education minister with the injunction to ‘cool off’ in the new swimming-pool. The realization that girls from non-Catholic and non-‘Latin’ societies might actually be accessible was intoxicating. English girls had long had a reputation for being independent and eccentric, but the ‘Swinging Sixties’ images of miniskirts, flowers and free love added a new dimension. French boys hoped that their national reputation for charm and romance would pay dividends where girls were easy and condoms were available from vending machines.75 The highly popular 1975 film A nous, les petites Anglaises – ‘Come here, English girls’ – gave expression to these fantasies and added a phrase to the language. The film was the story of two French schoolboys sent to England to learn the language, but whose main occupation was what the title suggested.
JE T’AIME, MOI NON PLUS
The most notorious Franco-British cultural product of the 1960s was the record ‘Je t’aime, moi non plus’, a duet whose whispered endearments and ecstatic sighs thrilled and shocked both countries, just when ‘May ’68’ had made Paris the co-capital of the youth revolution. Boosted by being banned by the BBC, forbidden by French radio before 11 pm, and denounced by the Vatican, it reached Number 2 in the British pop charts in 1969 before being withdrawn. The female part had originally been recorded in Paris by Brigitte Bardot, the global symbol of French sensuality, but her entourage vetoed it as too sexy. Her replacement for a new recording at London’s Marble Arch studio was a young English actress, Jane Birkin, who would go on to marry her co-artist, Serge Gainsbourg, the writer of the song. There could hardly be a greater contrast with the pouting, pneumatic Bardot. Birkin was the gawky, slightly toothy Home Counties daughter of a naval officer, with an angelic face, a strong English accent (‘je t’ayme, oh wee’) and a choirboy voice – just what the French thought les petites Anglaises should be. Her cherubic vocalizing gave the record more than a hint of perversity – for the French knew that if the British were not much good at straight sex, kinkiness was their forté. Gainsbourg seemed the quintessence of Left Bank Frenchness, cynical, moody, intellectual, drunken and reeking of Gauloises. After his death, he was compared with other outragers of tradition, Rabelais, Baudelaire and Rimbaud. Yet he had a hidden side – no less typically ‘French’ – that was shy, conventional and even prudish. Like General de Gaulle, he would never be seen naked. Unlike the general, he was an anglophile, much impressed by ‘Swinging London’. His stage name showed his admiration for the painter Gainsborough. He preferred working in London, bought his clothes in the King’s Road, and wrote songs that included scraps of English or Franglais. There was more to this than merely latching on to the fashion for English pop. ‘He loved Tommy Cooper, Morecambe and Wise . . . and London taxis,’ recalled Birkin. ‘It would have meant so much to him if a major British artist – like his idols the Stones – had covered just one of his songs. But it never happened.’ She, however, had a successful film and stage career epitomizing the English ingénue, for which she was awarded the OBE in 2001. She reflected that ‘If I’d stayed in England I’d have ended up just being someone’s wife, and I often think how nice it would be to have a cottage in Kent and someone to pour me a glass of sherry in the evening. But I think the life we have reflects who we are, and that just wasn’t for me.’76
In one form at least cross-Channel relations blossomed: Gainsbourg and Birkin looking sultry.
As in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, there are careers to be made in representing one nation to the other in a way that confirms their expectations. Birkin, like the English roses Charlotte Rampling and more recently Kristin Scott-Thomas, did so in straight acting. More conscious self-caricatures (following in the footsteps of Maurice Chevalier, who worried he was losing his French accent) were Sacha Diestel, more recently Antoine de Caunes, and even footballers such as Eric Cantona. It is intriguing that
British cultural icons in France have all been women, and their French counterparts in Britain all men.
If British women were less commonly imagined now as frumpish prudes, British men – despite Mick Jagger and James Bond – did not enhance their reputation in all quarters. France’s first woman prime minister (in 1991), Edith Cresson – an upper-class Protestant who spoke excellent English, thanks to her nanny – was so cross at not being ogled in the streets of London (‘all girls notice it’) that she complained that ‘the Anglo-Saxons are not interested in women as women . . . It is a problem of upbringing and I consider it a sort of disease.’ She later explained that she knew this because her brothers had been to public schools – an experience ‘from which it is difficult to recover’.77