On February 3rd, 2016, the Sun newspaper splashed on a mock-up of David Cameron’s face superimposed on to Captain Mainwaring, the hapless martinet commanding officer from the 1970s sitcom Dad’s Army. Behind him was the familiar image from the show of angry arrows pointed from the Continent at England’s south coast.
Though cloaked in nostalgic humour, the implication was of invasion, or at least aggression, from Europe. But the event being reported was the outcome of a renegotiation of Britain’s EU membership, which Britain had requested.
The European Council meeting in question had only been called to agree a package of altered membership terms designed to keep Britain in the EU. “Who do EU think you’re kidding, Mr Cameron?” read the shrill headline in response to a reasonable but unspectacular set of concessions Cameron had won in Brussels.
A voluntary renegotiation, requested by Britain, resulting in a reasonable if unspectacular outcome, was presented as an abject humiliation. How did such a powerful state end up in this state? Long-standing Financial Times writer Philips Stephens’s new book is an account of the uneven and fascinating history of Britain’s postimperial diplomatic neuralgia.
The bookends are Suez and Brexit, and this book posits that both are symptoms of the same dilemma. The condition was most famously diagnosed by Harry Truman’s secretary of state Dean Acheson, who remarked half a dozen years after the botched attempt to retake the Suez canal that Britain had “lost an empire but not yet found a role”.
It stung at the time, and in the decades afterwards remained an open question – one that British leaders usually struggled to answer. How does a state that spent centuries controlling large parts of the globe accept that it has lost control?
This question has always been complicated by the manner in which British power was ceded. Churchill’s Britain was on the victorious side at the war’s end, but practically bankrupt from the effort. London was only able to maintain its empire, even as it dwindled, with US dollars (coming up on top of the dollars that had funded the war effort itself). The Bretton Woods summit of 1947 not only created much of the international financial system that endures to this day, but also cemented the US as the lynchpin of that system – including by forcing the supremacy of the dollar over sterling as the basis of international trade.
Through this and numerous other explicit policy actions, the US was unequivocal in its undermining of what remained of British global power and the remnants of the empire. Yet, as this book demonstrates, one of the abiding features of UK foreign policy has been an amnesia about this ruthless usurpation, and a continuing belief that the relationship with the US is “special”, even when Washington has acted in stark self-interest.
It did so after the invasion of Suez, when Eisenhower – who, as a former commander of Allied Forces, embodied the transatlantic alliance more than most – isolated and humiliated the UK without hesitation. It did so again a few years later, when Kennedy granted Macmillan access to the Polaris nuclear defence system in a manner that allowed the UK to claim it possessed an independent nuclear deterrent, when in fact the system was reliant on American technology, as its successors have been.
The 60 year-old nuclear fudge is, viewed sympathetically, a diplomatic sleight of hand that allows the UK to amplify its power via claiming an independent deterrent or, viewed more harshly, a damaging fiction that prevents British leaders from more realistic appraisals of the national interest. Stephens calls the bargain a “psychological prison” from which prime ministers have struggled to escape ever since.
That description is certainly true of the country’s relationship with European integration, with which every PM from Churchill onwards – with the singular exception of Edward Heath – has had an ambivalent relationship.
Differential experiences of the second World War, past memories of maritime supremacy, oppositional parliamentary culture, lost imperial grandeur, the chauvinism of the popular press. There are too many plausible factors to explain Britain’s – or, more accurately, England’s – persistent exceptionalism to settle on one causal narrative. And to Stephens’s credit, he does not. Though he does not hide his scepticism about Euroscepticism, the book does not dismiss the idea that Britain’s strategic interest lay in being at the intersection of the US and Europe, rather than simply prioritising one over the other.
Poorly performed
Rather, it shows how poorly that role has often been performed, with delusion or nostaglia rendering a hard-headed balancing of interests impossible. Would the leader of any other European power have sent an American president a blank cheque in a personal note saying: “We will be with you, whatever”, as Tony Blair did to George Bush in the run-up to the Iraq War? Perhaps more to the point, would any American president have ever sent such a note to a British prime minister?
Ronald Reagan, famously close to Margaret Thatcher, certainly didn’t when it came to the Falklands invasion. The US offered military assistance, but only after diplomatic ambivalence over the British case at the United Nations. Nor did Reagan tell Thatcher in advance of the US deposition of the government of Grenada, a Commonwealth member of which the queen was still head of state.
Which brings us to the strange case of the Commonwealth, unarguably the least consequential of the three concentric circles of influence envisaged by Churchill. Britain is not the only former colonial power that tries to leverage (or launder) its imperial past for current strategic purposes – the Francophonie organisation is broadly comparable – but it is the only one where elites see such activity as a plausible alternative to close co-operation with countries just a few nautical miles away.
Sentiment is not an illegitimate tool of foreign policy – Ireland is a world leader at it – but when it descends into silliness and nostalgia, it can become corrosive. Such has been the level of nostalgic distortion in parts of British politics and the media that even real British diplomatic successes have become tools of oppression used against it – whether the European single market or the Belfast Agreement. Both are the product of states working together to achieve collective goals, and of the British state using its sovereignty to produce positive outcomes for its citizens and neighbours.
Now Britain has its sovereignty “back”, all to itself alone, ready for an independent future, to what practical end will it be deployed? As I write, the media had spent several days questioning why a bust of Winston Churchill had been moved from the White House and asking whether a photo of Boris Johnson’s first phone call with President Biden had been doctored.
Matthew O'Toole is an SDLP MLA for Belfast South. He was chief press officer for Europe and economic affairs in the British prime minister's office from September 2015 to August 2017
