1 Anglo-Saxon Attitudes

‘Geography is about maps, History about chaps’ runs the adage. Making sense of British and French responses to European unity starts with the consequences of history and geography.

History, as much as geography, defined attitudes on both sides of the channel. War united Britain and the United States, overriding old rifts, establishing a model for post-war alliance; it separated Britain and France, leaving misunderstandings over the appeasement of Hitler, conduct of the war in 1939–40, treatment of de Gaulle’s Free French movement, and France’s exclusion from wartime summits. War appeared to confirm Britain’s place in the world, leaving France stripped of rank, reputation and independence. Dogfights between Free French leader General de Gaulle, British prime minister Winston Churchill and US President Franklin Delano Roosevelt left the French leader with a permanent Anglo-Saxon complex.

The war in Europe ended officially on 8 May 1945. A myth-mongering Churchill claimed that VE Day provoked ‘the greatest outburst of rejoicing in the history of humanity’.1 The Daily Mirror undressed its comic strip heroine Jane but temperatures and shortage of alcohol discouraged followers. The muted mood contrasted with the saturnalias of Armistice Day November 1918.

Britain, a world power in 1939, now rode on Uncle Sam’s coattails. ‘Big Three (or 2 and a half) at 4’, quipped an adviser at the Potsdam summit in July 1945.2 Germany’s defeat shattered the European states system. Going to war in 1939–40 the European great powers took their last fully independent decisions. The United States and the Soviet Union divided and occupied Europe. Loss of power reflected the price of war, and secular trends. Britain’s share of world trade fell steadily from 1860. By VE Day the cupboard was bare: export markets lost; overseas portfolios sold; four million homes destroyed or damaged; 28 per cent of the merchant fleet sunk; obsolete industrial equipment. Losing 25 per cent of national wealth left Britannia, in Churchill’s words, ‘the world’s greatest debtor’. In the first nine months of 1945 exports barely reached 42 per cent of pre-war levels. External debt swelled from £476 million in 1939 to £3,355 million in 1945, including debts to sterling area countries like India and Egypt whose wealth had paid for troops and supplies. These debts, together with a large American loan in 1946, contributed to recurrent balance of payments crises. Peace yielded no savings since money had to be found for occupation forces in Germany, Austria and Italy. Policed on the cheap between the wars, the empire now required large garrisons in Palestine, Egypt and India. The onset of the Cold War from 1947 kept the armed forces at almost one million.

Britons mostly had a good war – six years of struggle against Nazism during which the country and empire had for a while fought single-handedly. A London bus conductor greeted the news of the fall of France: ‘Well, thank God we’re playing the final on the home ground.’ A genius for turning defeats into victories transmuted the evacuation of British and French troops at Dunkirk in May 1940, assisted by an armada of small craft from southern ports, into a triumph of island virtues of self-help and grit.

Grandeur was a given in 1945. Discussion focused on relations with the new superpowers and the definition of a specifically socialist foreign policy. Possession of the largest empire and Big Three membership made great power rank seem self-evident. Six years of struggle set the seal on perceived national values. Abdicating world power status would have seemed a denial of the purpose and sacrifices of the conflict. Nevertheless, a sense of foreboding clouded the horizon. ‘I wish I felt as much confidence about the future as I did at this time last year – when Victory was clearly in sight – and one did not look much beyond it,’ confessed politician and diarist Violet Bonham Carter at the end of 1945: ‘Now we are facing forces far more incalculable and uncontrollable than the Germans alas!’5

Gender, ethnicity, class, religion and region compartmentalized society, inhibiting a national conversation. Not two nations but many. Film-maker Terence Davies’s The Long Day Closes (1992) captured the conformity of Liverpudlian working-class life in the 1950s. London and the home counties viewed the rest of the country as terra incognita. ‘To me, reared on the soft slopes of Salisbury Plain and gently watered at Eton and Oxford,’ recalled a visitor to northern England, ‘this was a new world … It is hard to exaggerate how deeply dim and unfashionable anything to do with provincial England had become … The Manchester Guardian had fled to London out of sheer social embarrassment’.6

Huge inequalities fractured the nation. A scholarship winner to Jesus College, Cambridge University, remembered the shock of his working-class parents on seeing the checklist of items to bring, including two damask tablecloths and a china dinner service for twelve.

Labour’s landslide victory in the general election of 1945 alarmed Americans. ‘You’ve had a revolution’, US President Harry S. Truman greeted King George VI. ‘Oh no’, replied the King. ‘We don’t have those here’.8 The ‘golden triangle’ of London and the ancient universities ran the country. Public school and Oxbridge-educated males dominated government, Westminster and Whitehall. Between 1949 and 1952 Oxbridge supplied 74 per cent of successful entrants to the higher levels of the civil service. ‘I get the impression of being liked by the little man [Attlee] The truth is – our old school tie is a very strong link … Years and years of working-class contacts make him feel entitled to this strong, secret loyalty to Haileybury and Oxford’, remarked a colleague.9 The Foreign Office, apart from one or two token grammar-school entrants, remained an old Etonian playground, for which a sound British name was a prerequisite. Foreign secretary Anthony Eden advised a prospective candidate that without a change of name he would never get anywhere in the diplomatic service.10 Diplomats looked after their own, covering up the alcoholism and anti-social behaviour of defectors Guy Burgess and Donald MacLean.

Being a Socialist required justification; being a Tory was normal.

Conformity, hierarchy and understatement ranked as cardinal virtues. An American awarded a Nobel Prize while on sabbatical at Oxford University found that, instead of the warm congratulations he would have got at home, British colleagues hardly mentioned it. Family loyalties and deference to age overrode dissent. FO permanent secretary Sir Alexander Cadogan shrank from any remark that might seem critical of his elder brother, having been drilled as a child: ‘don’t contradict your brother for he is older than you.’14 The public schools embodied ‘classical conservative values … questioning, criticism and dissent were tolerated in only the most anodyne of forms, and were otherwise taboo’.15 Not everyone kowtowed. Oxford don and former MI5 agent J.C. Masterman, after conforming all his life, finally rebelled in old age against a system that would not allow him to publish the story of how he turned captured German spies into double agents in the Second World War.

Most people knuckled under, however. ‘The working-man always feels himself the slave of a more or less mysterious authority’, wrote Orwell, noting how when he went to Sheffield Town Hall to ask for some information, two of his local miner friends, ‘both of them people of much more forcible character than myself – were nervous, would not come into the office with me, and assumed that the Town Clerk would refuse information. They said: “he might give it to you, but he wouldn’t to us”.’16 Thick-skinned Communists succumbed to the culture of deference. In 1950 lone Communist MP Willie Gallagher stood up to address the House with thumbs hooked in the pockets of unpressed trousers. As Gallagher reached the climax of his speech, Churchill growled sotto voce yet audibly enough: ‘Take your hands out of your pockets, man.’ Gallagher instantly complied.17

The received pronunciation of BBC announcers mimicked the posh tone of the establishment, the voice of officers addressing other ranks, of them talking to us. This was the waxworks era of plummy voices, double-breasted pinstripes, bowing to royals, bishops and politicians. At a BBC job interview a producer described the dress code of 1954: ‘In features they wear sports jackets, and I have to admit that in drama they even wear corduroys. But, as I say, in Talks we like suits.’18 The golden rule was to say nothing that might be construed as criticism of Crown and Church. People joked that the BBC’s idea of a safe lead story on television news would begin: ‘The Queen Mother yesterday …’. Those who spoke their mind got short shrift. In 1957 the BBC – popularly known as Auntie – banned writer and broadcaster Malcolm Muggeridge from the prime-time television news programme Panorama for criticizing the Queen in the American press.

Belief in a common destiny bridged disparate constituencies. Monarchy, church and empire bonded rulers and ruled. Eating spam and being bombed helped restore the monarchy’s popularity – dented by the 1936 Abdication Crisis. Cinema and theatre audiences stood respectfully (mostly) for the playing of the national anthem – staying seated became a gesture of teenage rebellion. ‘How is the empire?’ asked George V on his deathbed. Not everyone’s last thoughts were of empire, nevertheless it was a source of pride. Republicans and anti-imperialists were almost invisible. In the countryside the parish church lay at the heart of the community. The Anglicanism of the established Church of England represented for many a happy compromise between the extremes of Catholicism and continental Protestantism. The rescue at Dunkirk in May 1940 of the British Expeditionary Force was ‘speedily converted … into an auspicious deliverance … civic exertion among miscellaneous and humble Britons had, under Providence, won out against a powerful and malignant enemy’.19

A wartime call from The Times for a ‘revival of national self-confidence’ sparked an upsurge of patriotism.20 Fighter ace Richard Hillary’s best-seller The Last Enemy (1942), though scathing of traditional patriotism, affirmed Britain’s leadership of a crusade for universal values. Lawrence Olivier’s Henry V, premiered in November 1944, captured the triumphalist mood. Skilful editing deleted inconvenient textual references to domestic strife, massacre of French prisoners and usurpation. The production ‘supported the mythical idea of a wholly integrated British literary culture in which Shakespeare was as meaningful to the masses as the songs of Vera Lynn’.21

Historians did their bit for victory. ‘In these times of dictatorship abroad, we thank God that we are not as other men are,’ pontificated Tudor specialist Professor Sir John Neale. His Ford Lectures in 1942 on the Elizabethan parliaments ‘helped to consolidate highbrow national identity’.22 The runaway success of G.M. Trevelyan’s English Social History (1944) both reflected and reinforced the sense of the essential soundness and stability of British society. ‘Tout va tres bien, Madame l’Angleterre’, quipped one French reviewer.23 The film Way to the Stars (1945), in which John Mills played a schoolmaster who joins the RAF, popularized the myth of an inclusive people’s war. Churchill loved this nationalist mood, minuting the Foreign Office on St George’s Day 1945: ‘I do not consider that names that have been familiar for generations in England should be altered to study the whims of foreigners living in those parts … Constantinople should never be abandoned, though for stupid people Istanbul may be written in brackets after it … Foreign names were made for Englishmen, not Englishmen for foreign names.’24

Attlee repeatedly referred to Britain having ‘stood alone in defence of freedom and civilization’.25 Bevin praised RAF hero Guy Gibson’s Enemy Coast Ahead (1945), requesting extra supplies of tightly rationed paper to give it the widest circulation. The Times underscored the significance of the victory. Britain and its Empire-Commonwealth had defended civilization alone and for longer than its allies. In resisting tyranny the nation had recovered its traditional grandeur, confirming the values of democracy, patriotism and discipline. God protected his people. The leader writer cited a foreigner who had sought refuge in England: ‘You must never forget that you saved civilization and you must never forget that you have not been an occupied country.’26 Parliamentary democracy, empire, industrial leadership and victory over Nazism gave a sense of uniqueness and superiority. Britons took pride in being the only Allied country which had gone through both world wars from beginning to end. In this perspective the retreats of the 1930s became aberrations, the consequence of the machinations of the appeasers pilloried in the pamphlet Guilty Men (1940). The perception of the Second World War as an endorsement of national values survived in the baggage of the neo-liberal Thatcher revolution of the 1980s.

A singular vision of the state distanced Britons from continental Europe. The grand narrative of British history – the Whig interpretation – traced the evolution of institutions from Magna Carta onwards as a teleological progression towards parliamentary democracy and personal freedoms. Churchill’s Humble Address to the Sovereign congratulating him on the conclusion of the war in Europe expressed its essence: ‘the wisdom of our ancestors has led us to an envied and enviable situation. We have the strongest Parliament in the world. We have the oldest, the most famous, the most secure, and the most serviceable monarchy in the world. King and Parliament both rest safely and solidly upon the will of the people expressed by free and fair election on the basis of universal suffrage … this system has long worked harmoniously, both in peace and war.’27 The model assumed a reactive state whose role should not be codified in advance but left to empirical judgement based on particular needs and circumstances. The guiding assumption was one of informal understandings in which a political class acquired the mysteries of statecraft and practised the art of the possible, responding cautiously to changing conditions. The model prized prudence and gradualism over the continental experience of revolution and constitution making.

Distrust of ideology led the British to underestimate the force of continental creeds. Appeasers in the 1930s played down totalitarian pronouncements; policy-makers in the 1950s misjudged the dynamism of the continent’s search for unity. The ‘White’ conservative emigrants from central and eastern Europe, like historian Sir Lewis Namier, viewed England ‘as a land built on instinct and custom, free from the ruinous contagion’ of ideologies: ‘the less man clogs the free play of his mind with political doctrine and dogma the better for his thinking.’28 Namier’s most influential work, The Structure of Politics at the Accession of George III (1929), prioritized power struggles over ideas in eighteenth-century politics.

Britons assumed a God-given right to lord it over the world – ‘Natives begin at Calais’. The Thanksgiving Service at St Paul’s on VE Day included the rarely sung second verse of God Save the King: ‘Confound their politics. Frustrate their knavish tricks.’ Hungarian exile George Mikes poked fun at British solipsism. His British girlfriend asked him to marry her. ‘No’, he replied, ‘I will not. My mother would never agree to my marrying a foreigner’. ‘I a foreigner? What a silly thing to say. I am English, you are the foreigner, and your mother too’.29 Victory and empire a huge and thriving concern even after the loss of the Indian subcontinent – brought comfort in the immediate post-war years. Maps and media buttressed a sense of specialness. World maps featured ‘red for the empire and dull brown for the rest, with Australia and Canada vastly exaggerated in size by Mercator’s projection. The Greenwich meridian placed London at the centre of the world’. The influence of H.E. Marshall’s Our Island Story (1905), mocked by W.C. Sellars and R.J. Yateman in 1066 and All That (1930), survived into mid-century. The sense of a unique English dream endured. ‘What I wish to emphasize most is the universal validity of this our vision’, wrote anarchist and avant-garde critic Herbert Read. ‘Alone of national ideals, the English ideal transcends nationality’.30 At a deeper level, the self-image rested on a perception of England as quintessentially Arcadian, untouched by war and revolution. The evocation of an ‘over the hills and far away bird tweeting land’ guaranteed the popularity of Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows (1908). For an interwar generation, H.V. Morton’s In Search of England (1927) recycled the bucolic image. It gained a new lease of life as a summation of Englishness in J.R.R. Tolkien’s celebration of the inns and gardens of the Shire and hobbits in The Lord of the Rings (1954–5).

A smug self-satisfaction with all things British reigned. ‘Both my parents … together with most of our friends and relations took it for granted that the British middle class of the early twentieth century was the triumphant end product of human evolution’, recalled a distinguished academic.31 Attlee attended a conference in France – ‘mostly distinguished by the inability to be relevant by all save the Anglo-Saxons’. He closed his autobiography, ‘a very happy and fortunate man in having lived so long in the greatest country in the world’.32 The British, despite knowing little or nothing of others, considered themselves morally superior. Ignorance fuelled stereotypes. A Second World War officer was appalled by his fellow officers’ ‘lack of curiosity, their complete lack of interest in the people of the countries in which they were stationed’.33 Historian E.H. Carr remembered his middle-class childhood as ‘wholly insular, and uninterested in foreign countries’.34

Books and films pandered to insularity and superiority. Film makers released nostalgia-drenched war films, verging on the narcissistic. In The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957), a box-office triumph, the perseverance, courage and discipline of Colonel Nicolson [Alec Guinness] conquers the Japanese. The Italian Job (1969), released shortly after the failure of the UK’s second EEC entry bid, depicted a British gang using a fleet of the then latest Mini Cooper Ss to carry out a successful gold bullion raid on the Turin HQ of automaker Fiat. Clever driving tricks and smart escape manoeuvres showcased the new model – leaving the Italians and, by implication, all continentals looking silly. Thanks to the Cold War, spy fiction topped bestseller lists. The instant success of Ian Fleming’s James Bond stories owed much to the updating of the heroic, imperialistic adventure tales of Buchan, Henty, Rider Haggard and Kipling. Bond’s world is one in which the British lion calls the shots, outsmarting friends and foes alike. In Casino Royale (1953) 007 gets help from ‘our French friends’ and ‘our American colleagues’ in his bid to expose the Communist trade unionist, Le Chiffre, a potentially dangerous fifth columnist in France ‘in the event of a war with Redland’. In Bondland foreigners are distrusted and scorned: Bulgarians are ‘stupid but obedient’, Russians ‘cold, dedicated and chess playing’, Koreans ‘the cruelest, most ruthless people on earth’.35

The political class took superiority as a given. ‘Foreign policy would be OK but for the bloody foreigners’, grumbled Labour foreign secretary Herbert Morrison.36 ‘The Arabs’, advised Sir John Glubb, British commander of the Transjordanian Arab Legion, ‘show all the instability and emotionalism of the adolescent … Like children they will sometimes be rude, and sometimes plunged in despair … when things go badly they like to feel that their father [the British] is … available to be appealed to’.37 Amid negotiations for EEC membership in December 1962 a former Oxfordshire High Sheriff fired off a broadside of prejudices: France ‘the whorehouse of the world’, the Dutch ‘duller than ditchwater’, the Italians ‘rather greasy little men … scum of the earth’.38 A minister leading the British delegation at a UNESCO international conference, writes Richard Hoggart called in at the conference office to put his name down as a speaker at the opening plenary session. The official in charge told him that he would be the third speaker: ‘Third. Who are the others? Mexico and Senegal … do you mean that the UK is expected to come after those two? He turned to me “We can’t have that, can we Hoggart?”’39

Britons lived under a state apparatus almost as closed as that of Stalinist Europe. A fetishistic secrecy about anything that might remotely concern national security prevailed. Americans had ‘a much looser attitude towards official secrecy’, noted an envious British academic, ‘a climate we cannot hope to achieve in this country where the trend is all in the opposite direction’.40 The nearest Britain got to open government was in 1954 when an astonished taxi driver driving down Whitehall heard a cabinet meeting broadcast live over his cab radio. Engineers had revamped the electrics at No. 10 to cope with Churchill’s increasing deafness. Today the headquarters of Her Majesty’s Secret Intelligence Service (SIS/MI6) is a well-known landmark on the Thames and sports a public website. Transparency has outwardly triumphed over an agency that in the past denied its own existence. Until the 1990s government disclaimed any intelligence activity. Humour trumped secrecy. When MI5 was temporarily headquartered at Wormwood Scrubs in 1939 bus conductors shouted, ‘All change for MI5’.

One of the best-kept secrets of the war was the success of Bletchley Park code-breakers in reading Germany’s top-level signals intelligence. The state kept the several-thousand-strong operation under wraps until the early 1970s. Ultra staff were forbidden to talk or write about it. Equally hush hush was the post-war development of Britain’s atomic bomb. During the war the subject was taboo even within the small War Cabinet – Attlee, deputy prime minister, Service ministers and chiefs of staff knew practically nothing. Once in the know, however, Attlee personified secrecy – excluding the cabinet from atomic energy decision-making. ‘A small ring of senior ministers took decisions in a confusing number of ad hoc committees with science fiction titles, which never reported to the Cabinet’.41

Bletchley Park was British democracy’s dark side. ‘Circus dogs’, observed Orwell, ‘jump when the trainer cracks his whip, but the really well-trained dog is the one that turns his somersault when there is no whip’. Self-censorship worked so well that when a former member of Air Intelligence spilt the beans about Bletchley Park, a wartime colleague was shocked to the point of refusing to read the book. In the Suez affair of 1956 a conservative backbencher responding to accusations of Britain’s collusion with France and Israel asked how anyone ‘could doubt the veracity of Ministers’, since collusion was ‘inconceivable’.42 Uncritical, obsessive secrecy proved a snare and delusion. Spies had the last laugh – Guy Burgess, Donald MacLean, Kim Philby, Anthony Blunt and others betrayed top-secret information and got away with it. M.R.D. Foot, the first historian allowed access to wartime Special Operations Executive (SOE) files, found MI6 archives ‘in a fearsome muddle’.43 After the usual pantomime of vowing not to tell his wife or pet parrot what he was doing, Foot escaped positive vetting because of a turf war between MI6 – which held the SOE files – and MI5 responsible for vetting. The establishment closed ranks against potential challengers. After The Sunday Times published the Philby story in 1967 critics accused it of ‘undermining the concept of the English gentleman’.44 Curiously, the five-volume official history of British Intelligence in the Second World War does not mention Philby.

Mid-century Britons knew little about Europe’s politics and recent history. Contacts were limited, partly because of post-war austerity, and partly because of insularity. In the 1940s British universities had no posts in the history of ideas and the dismissal of sociology as a non-subject contributed to the impoverishment of related disciplines like history. Academics nowadays live in the ‘small world’ described by novelist David Lodge – globetrotting from one conference to the next. Before the 1970s they travelled infrequently and knew little about one another. To be sure, specialists kept abreast of international scholarship, but the ever-burgeoning cyberspace networks of research institutes, conferences, colloquia, workshops and journals did not exist.

The academy cold-shouldered contemporary history as too journalistic and contentious for scholarly study. Before the Public Records Act of 1958 introduced a fifty-year access rule, all government files were closed indefinitely. Colleagues excoriated historian A.J.P. Taylor for appearing on TV and writing in the tabloids. Until contemporary historians banded together in 1986 to create the Institute for Contemporary British History (ICBH) they lacked a collective voice. Russianist E.H. Carr claimed that the ‘serious study of Soviet history and institutions’ was almost entirely neglected. International history privileged First World War origins, sidestepping Munich and appeasement.

The British experience was not read in a global frame. The packaging of the past into ‘British’, ‘European’ and ‘World History’ made it difficult to connect the dots. ‘The deeply ingrained and undiminished segregation of “British” – in reality English – history from European history’, wrote one critic, created ‘a narrowness of vision’ and ‘a powerfully constricting cultural factor’.45 Marxist academic Perry Anderson observed that in the 1960s ‘there was little sustained literature on the general development of the United Kingdom as a distinct state and society in the twentieth century’.46 At Oxford University history officially stopped in 1914, barely acknowledging the world beyond Europe except under the rubric ‘Expansion of Europe’. After 1945 the university reinstated the humanities curricula of the 1930s ‘virtually without revision’. An initiative for a ‘European Greats’ degree mixing modern history, philosophy, literature and European languages quickly got shot down.47 Oxford had to wait until the 1970s to establish itself as a leading centre for the study of international relations.

From the 1970s British historians engaged with the histories of the continent and its countries – Richard Cobb on France, Raymond Carr on Spain and Denis Mack Smith on Italy. Their contribution was unique and profound; unique because continental colleagues mostly stayed with their national narrative, profound because UK Europeanists decisively shaped the historiography of their chosen countries. But the renaissance of scholarship on late modern Europe came too late to influence mid-century debates on Britain’s European policy. A conservative rearguard struck back. John Kenyon’s The History Men (1983) denigrated the work of Europeanists, insisting on English political and constitutional history as a core degree requirement.

The new discipline of international politics stayed in its bailiwick. Its intellectual engine, the British Committee on International Relations, founded by historian Herbert Butterfield, targeted specialists, not a wider public. Workshops and publications neglected European integration and Britain’s role in the world. The group had the mafia-like features of academia at its worst – ignoring prestigious centres like the London School of Economics and St Antony’s College, Oxford, and blackballing leading figures – historian E.H. Carr, physicist and Nobel laureate Patrick Blackett, and historian A.J.P. Taylor ‘with his leanings towards the world of journalism’.48

A deep schism opened up among philosophers. British philosophers disdained the ideas of continental colleagues. In the 1960s much of Antonio Gramsci, Gregor Lukacs and Karl Marx was unavailable in English. As leaders of the analytic or ordinary language movement, Oxford philosophers marginalized top continental thinkers Jean-Paul Sartre and Gabriel Marcel, and caricatured existentialists as Resistance left-overs. Despite several years of teaching philosophy at Oxford, Mary Warnock had not read Sartre. The first English account of his philosophy – Iris Murdoch’s Sartre: Romantic Rationalist (1953), seriously misrepresented it. Philosophers, like historians, frowned on efforts to engage lay readers. Warnock’s talks on the BBC’s Third Programme incurred peer disapproval – ‘the very idea of popularizing one’s academic subject was anathema’.49

Geographical separation nurtured belief in a special destiny – English exceptionalism. Historians Arthur Bryant, G.M. Trevelyan, A.L. Rowse, poet John Betjeman and political scientist Ernest Barker, deliberately distanced the country from the continent. Bryant and fellow ‘non-intellectual’ writers presented English identity as ‘timeless, homogeneous and unique’.50 The hermetic, self-sufficient ambience of intellectual life left little appetite for continental delicacies. The intellectual tone was not so much anti-European as ambivalent. Continental culture attracted and repelled Herbert Hart, professor of jurisprudence at Oxford, a shaper of legal theory in the 1950s. He and others suspected that ‘continental philosophy had in some way contributed to the rise of fascism’.51

Received ideas went unexamined because public intellectuals – an endangered species in Britain – were slow to lead. A British thinker wistfully noted, ‘France remained … a country where ideas count and are seriously debated, not merely by a small intellectual elite, but by great bodies of quite ordinary men and women.’52 Heavyweights like economist G.D.H. Cole, political theorist Harold J. Laski, philosopher Bertrand Russell and historian R.H. Tawney engaged with public concerns, but they were the exceptions. An act of defiance highlighted the decade’s passivity. In 1956 Oxford philosopher Elizabeth Anscombe challenged the University’s decision to award an honorary degree to former US President Harry S. Truman, arguing that his authorization of the use of atomic bombs against Hiroshima and Nagasaki made him a mass murderer and unsuitable for an honorary degree. Truman got his degree, of course, but Anscombe’s protest signalled a change of climate.

As the 1950s closed the creation of CND, together with scientist and novelist C.P. Snow’s 1959 Rede Lecture, published as The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution, rekindled debate. Supported by Russell, CND’s annual protest marches to the Atomic Weapons Research Establishment at Aldermaston in Berkshire started in 1958 and caught world attention. To label the decade, in Perry Anderson’s words, as ‘parochial and quietist’, is to ignore post-Suez debate and ferment; Snow’s Rede Lecture began life as a New Statesman article in 1956. That said, the dull conformity of much of the decade remains striking. Victory over fascism, full employment, and the welfare state removed the great causes of the 1930s. Unlike France and Italy, no powerful Communist party threatened the status quo.

A class-bound society discouraged dialogue. Martin Pargiter in Virginia Woolf’s novel The Years ‘hated talking to servants, it always made him feel insecure’.53 In the ancient universities communication stalled at times. Dons drawled through the stem of their pipes or affected a cryptic, Delphic style, intimidating all but the most confident undergraduates. The establishment encouraged conformity by annexing leading thinkers. Though giants like Russell and Tawney contested orthodoxy, philosopher Isaiah Berlin truckled to grandees. Marxist and left-wing sympathizers had difficulty finding academic jobs – Berlin successfully opposed the appointment of Marxist Isaac Deutscher to a university chair in Soviet Studies. Intellectuals took for granted the country’s moral lead over an unstable France, guilty Germany, fascist Iberia and Communist eastern Europe. ‘Great Britain on the whole … seems to the British intellectual of the mid-1950s to be fundamentally all right’, remarked American sociologist Edward Shils; ‘… never has an intellectual class found its society and its culture so much to its satisfaction’.54

Cultural insularity stifled new ideas. Sixteen years after the death of French philosopher Simone Weil in London in 1943 the British journal The Twentieth Century published a translation of Weil’s essay ‘Human Personality’. An apologetic editorial acknowledged that the essay ‘involves heavy going for some readers’. American critic Susan Sontag commented, ‘It certainly speaks volumes about the philistine level of English intellectual life, if even as good a magazine as the Twentieth Century cannot muster an enthusiastic, grateful audience for such a piece’.55 In a collective letter to The Times a group of writers declared their indifference towards Europeanism, asserting that intellectuals should be aloof from a ‘blatant commercial arrangement’ like the Treaty of Rome.56

‘It can be fairly said,’ Bevin assured the Commons in 1945, ‘that we held the fort and preserved the soul of mankind’.57 The assumption of superior wisdom enshrined in a British way of doing things made it hard to empathize with fellow Europeans. Introducing the National Health Service in 1948, health minister Aneurin Bevan declared, ‘there is only one hope for mankind and that hope still remains in this little island’.58 Philosophers lauded linguistic analysis as a unique British discourse, distinct from continental metaphysics and Marxism; literary critics led by F.R. Leavis in The Great Tradition (1948) proclaimed the study of English literature to be the source of life-affirming values, and a supremely civilizing influence; lawyers affirmed British law to be best; political scientists agreed on a ‘British’ tradition grounded in the belief that the country had ‘the wisdom and experience to consider international life with due distance and according to the right principles’.59

Persecution, violence and show trials in Communist eastern Europe deepened believe in a separate path. British left wingers criticized the EEC as ‘a rich man’s club’ which would compromise Labour’s ideals of waging global war on want. Economist John Vaizey, counting himself ‘a good European’, warned Labour party leader Hugh Gaitskell, ‘the more I hear the more scared I get that it [EEC] becomes a great white plot against Asia and Africa. This I can only feel is both immoral and foolish’.60 As Labour warmed to the European project in the mid-1960s pro-Europe ministers like foreign secretary George Brown sounded increasingly condescending. ‘It is our business’, he affirmed, ‘to provide political leadership, to provide the stability that for so long has eluded the democracies of the mainland of Europe … I don’t see where else leadership can come from other than from this country’.61

And the balance sheet? ‘However strong one’s native conviction that foreigners are queer’, wrote poet and civil servant C.H. Sisson, ‘a glance at Europe makes it plain that it is we who are odd’.62 When in June 1955 the six ECSC states met at Messina in Sicily to discuss extending European integration, Chancellor of the Exchequer R.A. Butler contemptuously dismissed the discussions as ‘archaeological excavations’.63 The political elite found it hard to reimagine Europe. Belgian foreign minister Paul Henri Spaak tried in vain to persuade Butler to support the relaunch of Europe. Afterwards, Spaak asked a British aide, ‘Have I been obscene?’ ‘Why obscene, sir?’ ‘Well, I don’t think I could have shocked him more when I tried to appeal to his imagination than I would have done if I had taken off my trousers.’64