30 March 2017
Full Circle
Should the EU go for a fighting retreat?
By Robert Kilconner
Just occasionally absentmindedness can be a good thing, particularly if the result is that you forget to go to the bookshop. “No thriller this week” you think glumly. None of those Booker shortlisters will be gracing your bedside table. The only answer is to go on a foraging expedition around the house and see what you can find on the shelves. That often means reading something way out of your normal range.
That is how I came to be reading Full Circle, the autobiography of the post-war prime minister Sir Anthony Eden. It is a long and detailed account of his involvement in the politics of the 1950s, first as Churchill’s foreign secretary and then, following the retirement of the great man, as prime minister himself. It ends with the disaster of Suez, ill health and resignation.
As is often the case in self-justificatory accounts, he gives a little too much detail and too little of an overview. All tactics and not enough strategy, the military might say. Still, he was a decent man who, faced with the collapse of the Imperial world order, tried to make sure that withdrawal was properly carried through and left robust structures in place. To him and his American, French and German colleagues must go credit for the recovery of Germany and laying the foundations on which that now flourishing democracy has been so successfully built. A huge achievement, surely, but elsewhere the picture is less rosy, and reading his account of imperial withdrawal, not a lot turned out as he would have hoped, many of the compromises which he helped to broker ultimately collapsing. Indochina, Cyprus, Iraq, Malta, all these were to go wrong in due course.
Reading Eden’s account one cannot help but feel that this was a man working hard at yesterday’s game. The European powers were withdrawing from Empire. That was a given, but his assumption that he would receive the support of a coalition of the willing headed by the US turned out to be naive. The reality was that British power was ebbing so fast that we would not be able to command American support in the face of anti-colonial sentiments among their electorate. He didn’t see this and that is why he was surprised by the hostility of the US during Suez. That is why, in the end, he needed to be replaced by the far more modern and realistic McMillan.
When you get to the decision to halt the invasion of Suez with the job half done, the clarity of Eden’s narrative disappears. He lists the various pressures to which we were subject, in particular the financial pressure exerted by the US, but he does not put his decision to halt operations down to the need to give way to them. Instead he talks about the objects of the expedition being partly met in that fighting between the Egyptians and the Israelis had stopped and feeling that enough had been achieved. It comes across as a huge loss of nerve but you wouldn’t expect him to say that in his autobiography, would you?
When I picked the book up I thought that I was in for a history lesson on the end of Empire. That turned out to be true but there is plenty in Sir Anthony’s experiences that is relevant today. In particular, two things stood out. The first arose in the context of a proposal to create a European army, the idea being that a separate German military force might be used in the wrong way. In the event it came to nothing but it is interesting to note that, although the UK was in favour of the proposal, we always refused to take part. Why was that? Well, Eden argued, and it seems to have been generally accepted, that the European army would be a step on the path to a united Europe and that, because the UK was a pragmatic country, it would not fit in with the more theoretically inclined continentals. Plus ca change some 60 years on.
The second thing is more subtle. Withdrawal from Empire was a retreat, and retreats are harder to handle than advances. It is so in the military theatre where a successful fighting retreat is regarded as one of the highest achievements (remember the lines: “Not a drum was heard, not a funeral note…”, composed as a tribute to Sir John Moore who died in conducting the successful retreat to Corunna). It is so in politics too. Now apply that principle to what is happening in the EU at present. Britain, of course, is leaving but that probably has about equal elements of the advance and retreat about it. From the EU’s point of view, though, there is much more of a choice. They can batten down the hatches and, if the French and German electorates allow them to do so, ignore their current pressures and push on as before. That might look like an advance but in reality the drive towards centralism has lost momentum and it would be putting up barriers to protect the status quo. Alternatively, they could move to the front foot with a plan for reforms designed to remove the financial tensions between Germany and the south, to tackle the discontent among the Eastern members and to allow those who do not want to lose political independence to participate on a more à la carte basis. Which way should they go? Retreat into old ideas or advance into new? The first may sound safer but I am not sure about that. Unless you have leadership of the highest quality and a good measure of unity to boot, fighting retreats are very very difficult.
If you enjoyed this article please share it using the buttons above.
Please click here if you would like a weekly email on publication of the ShawSheet
