Conclusion

Endgame

Everybody has won and all must have prizes.

Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

Historical landscapes soon get taken for granted. Overviews reinforce the familiar.

A small handful of individuals can make a decisive difference. In the early 1950s French anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss revisited Brazil. ‘In thinking about Europe as it then was [1930s] and as it is today … and in watching these young Brazilians in the space of a few years bridge an intellectual gap that one might have expected to hold up development for decades,’ he observed, ‘I have come … to realize that those great historical upheavals, which, when one reads about them in the text books appear to be the outcome of anonymous forces … can also … be brought about by the vigorous determination of a handful of talented young people’.2 Franco–British leaders could have crafted a strong partnership. The post-1945 shake-up of the international system unzipped alternatives: customs unions, federations – even a Latin union of Catholic Mediterranean states.

Partnership promised London and Paris a global footprint. Obstacles were surmountable. The technological cool of the supersonic passenger aircraft Concorde demonstrated the viability of close cooperation. Writer J.R.R. Tolkien perversely refused to pay taxes for it, writing across his tax cheque ‘Not a penny for Concorde’.3 A penny for the thoughts of British decision-makers. They refused to woo France. More’s the pity. The synergy of association could have delivered far more than a parochial bilateral trade-off. It had the potential to retune the Pax Americana, reinserting Western Europe in world politics, with NATO under a four-power directory of Britain, France, West Germany and the United States. Upgrading the Paris–Bonn pact of January 1963 into a Paris–Bonn–London triangle would have assuaged anxieties about a resurgent West Germany.

Britain emerged from a six-year life and death struggle in much better fettle than its continental neighbours. Admission in October 1952 to a nuclear club of three, backed by a robust economic performance into the mid-1950s, confirmed pole position in Western Europe. ‘With the possible exception of Sweden,’ crowed Labour guru Tony Crosland in 1956, ‘industrial productivity has risen more in Britain since before the war than in any other European country; while the rise since the war has been almost exactly the same as in the United States … We stand … on the threshold of mass abundance’.4 Macmillan’s ‘our people never had it so good’ stated a self-evident truth. Decolonization proved less traumatic for Britain than for France – conflicts in Cyprus, Kenya, Malawi, Malaysia and Palestine lacked the intensity of protracted back-to-back wars in Indo-China and Algeria.

Why the misfire? Britannia’s rule was less secure than it seemed. Flawed assumptions snookered the country’s prospects. Periodically a notice appeared in the FO entrance lobby: ‘Security Notice: Window Cleaning Today’. Staff locked away papers from the sight of putative KGB agents posing as window cleaners.

The peculiarities of British policy-making marred responses to geopolitical challenges. Allergic to think tanks, brainstorming and outsiders, the governing elite lived in the Westminster–Whitehall bubble. Tory grandee R.A. Butler likened the civil service to a Rolls-Royce, ‘You know it’s the best machine in the world’.6 In the event, the new supercharged Citroën DS upstaged the mid-century Silver Cloud. Mandarins and machine ran on empty. A culture of overwork became an alibi for dodging reflection. Without the capacity for regular appraisal the engine struggled to deliver critical ad hoc reviews like Macmillan’s Future Policy Study of 1959–60. Though the idea of national economic planning caught on in the early 1960s – National Economic Development Council (NEDC) and Wilson’s National Plan – effective policy units were delayed until the 1970s.

Things were ordered differently in France. ‘In its insistence on conducting a global policy by its own lights France stood in growing contrast to … Great Britain,’ observed former American secretary of state Henry Kissinger, ‘with every passing year they [British leaders] acted less as if their decisions mattered.

France, the ‘sick woman of Europe’, recovered. A massive one-time shift of rural population into urban industry, fired by decolonization and a rising birth rate, released energies and resources. Self-promotion as the most civilized and sophisticated country on earth infused confidence; smart statecraft found strength in weakness. ‘Power’, in the words of economic historian Alan Milward, ‘lay not with the mighty in Washington but with the weak in Paris.’8 De Gaulle saw off threats of civil war, ended the Algerian conflict and asserted leadership of the European Community. The Fifth Republic’s international success energized domestic support for Gaullist grandeur.

Enarques outwitted Treasury knights. France’s ENA provided a training ‘far superior to anything available in Britain’.9 The verbal skills of graduates dazzled British officials.10 Alpha ministerial cabinets authored and coordinated policy initiatives. Talent and ideas flowed between civil service, politics and business, ensuring a more flexible and better resourced machine than Whitehall. Civil servant Wilfrid Baumgartner moved from governor of the Bank of France to finance minister to head of the RhÔne-Poulenc chemical giant. The suppleness of the French powerhouse enabled mavericks like Monnet to operate across organizational lines.

By contrast, Britain’s risk-averse political elite mismanaged bids for Community membership. Success hinged on deal-making with France. The general overcame a legendary reluctance to make the first move, and made friendly overtures. The two Harolds enthused about future cooperation and technological communities, but conceded nothing upfront.

The UK’s identity crisis hobbled overseas policy-making. ‘There is a temptation to sing and dance in rainbow pantaloons,’ confessed Yorkshireman Lord Feversham in a House of Lords debate, ‘to meditate, copulate and gargle with LSD. It would pass the time until the trustees come up with something to get us out of this grotesque hang-up’.11 Deep cuts to British Council budgets undermined the country’s image. Sixties counterculture drowned out the RP of British Council lecturers. Parsimony inhibited international contacts. When the Mayor of Calais expressed disappointment with youth exchanges between Calais and its twin, Southend-on-Sea, FO officials minuted: ‘The crux is money. The French and Germans give millions a year for their youth exchanges. We can with utmost difficulty squeeze £20,000 only from Treasury’.12

Mired in an American inspired Cold War propaganda offensive, Britons urgently needed their own act. Ministerial assurances that the country remained a great power with frontiers in the Himalayas exacerbated the crisis of confidence. In You Only Live Twice (1964), author Ian Fleming exploited the dissonance between official cheerleaders and post-Suez realities. Tiger Tanaka, head of the Japanese secret service, taunts James Bond about Britain’s ‘decline’: ‘we now see a vacuous, aimless horde of seekers after pleasure.’ In response, Agent 007 mimics ministerial platitudes: ‘but we still climb Everest and beat plenty of the world at sports, and win plenty of Nobel Prizes’.13

How to reenergize a country unsure of itself? Language was part of the problem.

The secrecy shrouding decision-making helped strangle a British vision. Lack of information and meaningful participation in policy-making prevented dialogue between government and people. The opacity of government corroded trust, and accelerated loss of nerve. Rulers operated double standards – allowing Eden privileged access to classified material for his Suez memoirs while hounding junior minister Anthony Nutting for exposing Franco–British–Israeli collusion. By narrowly limiting external inputs the SW1 bubble lowered the intellectual level of decision-making as well as impairing focus and the ability to reset goals. Spy and sex scandals, spiced with ministerial mendacity, tainted the close of the Macmillan era. ‘Britain is becoming more and more the land of the cover-up’, concluded a contemporary analyst.15

A paternalist state sealed off external policy as too arcane for ordinary citizens. Foreign secretary Eden’s warning to cabinet colleagues in 1952 that the country was in dire straits epitomized paternalism in action. The British people ‘faced a difficult choice’ between giving up a high standard of living or seeing their country become a second-class power.16 Facing ‘a difficult choice’ was a purely rhetorical device – Eden would not have dreamt of consulting the people. Being economical with the truth characterized the governments of the day and still has defenders. ‘Telling the whole truth can be… counterproductive’, wrote historian Brian Harrison, ‘only political bystanders felt free in the 1950s and 1960s to emphasize the UK’s stark choices’.17

France took the lead in economic growth and prestige, but the couple missed their main targets. ‘It’s because we are no longer a great power that we need a great policy’, the general declared; ‘without a great policy we’ll be nothing’.18 Alas, the greatness brand – imperial vintage – was obsolete. Posturing as a global shaker and mover amounted to little more than a virtuoso conjuring trick. France, like Britain, squandered moral capital. Atrocities in Algeria, the Charonne massacre of Algerian demonstrators by Paris police in 1961, supplying arms to prop up South Africa’s apartheid regime, and sending troops to support the dictatorship of President Leon M’Ba of Gabon, all belied the 1789 revolutionary tradition. Shouting ‘Vive Le Quebec libre!’ in French Canada made little sense when the Republic denied autonomy to Breton and Basque minorities. Under an American nuclear shield de Gaulle, noted one of his advisers, poached ‘on the edges of the Soviet–American confrontation’.19

Gaullist grandeur, like Wilsonian bravado about Himalayan frontiers, had a short shelf life. The Community’s rejection of the Fouchet Plan for a French-managed European political union ended the honeymoon years. De Gaulle’s opposition to supranational initiatives led to temporary withdrawal from Community affairs – the ‘empty chair crisis’ of 1965–6. The Community survived, but could not advance. The blackballing of Britain for over a decade soured relations between France and the Five. Deadlock on widening and deepening stifled Europe’s voice. France blamed the Five for affirming supranational ideals while encouraging UK entry, despite London’s preference for a confederal model. The real contradiction, as a French aide conceded, lay with France because it refused both British entry and supranationalism.

An old man in a hurry overreached himself. Comeuppance came in Paris May 1968 and the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia in August. Events exposed the perils of East–West detente and the brittleness of the Paris–Bonn axis. Bonn became the preferred partner for Washington and Moscow. Germany’s mending of relations with Moscow eased the way for Chancellor Willy Brandt’s Ostpolitik after October 1969. Germans flexed their economic muscle – attempting to dictate a devaluation of the French franc in November 1968. Cold war ringmasters kept the whip hand. NATO emerged strengthened from the crisis caused by France’s departure from the military command in March 1966. Moscow would only work with Paris to the extent that it weakened NATO. From 1969 Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev looked to West Germany, not France. De Gaulle failed to achieve his goals of NATO reform and a European Europe. Whitehall’s apoplectic reactions to the Soames affair of February 1969 underscored the seven-year London–Paris impasse.

Britain’s quest for European primacy and world distinction earned a double whammy: exclusion from the Community; contraction of influence and economic muscle. Gaullist missteps and Whitehall cack-handedness stalemated negotiations. De Gaulle’s olive branch of secret talks on Europe’s future miscarried, partly because Wilson and Stewart suspected a snare, partly because the Francophobe FO declared payback time. Fans have lauded Wilson as a ‘prime minister who mastered the European question’. Leaving the second application ‘on the table’ in 1967 ensured that after the general’s departure ‘it had only to be picked up and dusted off and Labour went into the 1970 election still committed to negotiate, but this time with a real prospect of success’.20 In reality, the failed bid cost Labour the 1970 election.

Wilson’s opportunism diluted popular interest in joining Europe, and put British policy in a bind. Peaking at 70 per cent approval in August 1966, polls plummeted to 22 per cent by March 1970. Government tactics contributed substantially to the downturn. Leaving the application on the table cut both ways. Announcing that Britain would not go away confirmed to voters the government’s failure to deliver. Both Harolds played a weak hand weakly – initiating applications without first squaring the doorkeeper. French resistance prompted thinly veiled threats of reprisals, notably Lord Chalfont’s bungled press briefing of October 1967. The minister admitted he had ‘made a mess of it’ – a suitable epitaph for the second Labour government’s European policy.21 To launch bids without first catching the general represented a costly lapse of judgement, a staggering diversion of resources for a country on the skids.

The dragon’s departure in April 1969 did not automatically lower the drawbridge. President Pompidou insisted on tight control of timing and conditions – the finalizing of definitive CAP funding arrangements before UK entry. The Elysee warned the Wilson government against repeating its old tactics of egging on the Five against France. A panicky French adviser urged the admission of Spain and Portugal to counter the admission of Britain’s Scandinavian and Irish hangers-on. In London, France’s ambassador, Courcel, ‘as usual … put the maximum emphasis on difficulties’ and ‘was quite emotional about the need for France to “achieve” the Common Market before the next step could be taken’.22 In December 1969 the Hague summit of the Six announced its priorities – completion, enlargement, deepening.

The Piaf-like ‘nothing to regret’ verdicts on Wilson’s handling of the second entry bid skate over the cumulative cost of Britain’s European strategy. The missteps of the two Harolds confirmed continental perceptions of Britain as Europe’s awkward squad. The UK negotiating team of 1970–2 noted how ‘the massive burden’ of the previous two decades weighed on negotiators.23 True, Conservative premier Edward Heath after his election victory in June 1970 picked up on talks with the Six already arranged by the outgoing administration, but in practice his decision amounted to a separate bid. Whitehall’s internal history of the entry negotiation echoed the Heath government’s self-congratulatory mood – patience, perseverance and pragmatism paid off – ‘under a lucky star’.24 In fact, the only good fortune was the premier’s friendship with Elysee secretary general Michel Jobert – the result of a chance meeting at a Costa del Sol holiday resort in 1964. Personal chemistry helped, but was no magic wand – obsessive attention to dress codes betrayed extreme nervousness on both sides about outcomes. Heath was put out when Jobert, holidaying in Kent, turned up ‘in a dark brown suit’, despite being told that the prime minister ‘would be in seaside clothes’. Arriving at Heathrow ‘in a country suit’ Pompidou was ‘horrified’ to find his host in formal dress.25

The May 1971 Heath–Pompidou accord on entry failed to revive UK domestic support for membership. ‘There will be dancing in the streets, if Mr Heath feels himself unable to continue with the negotiations’, declared The Economist. ‘The British public does not … like the French’. Pompidou’s insistence on the use of the French language in the enlarged Community was ‘an assertion of typical French arrogance’.26 Massigli – a friend of the Entente through thick and thin – having urged Pompidou in January 1968 to push for British entry, now feared London would imperil the Community by turning the tables on Paris and remaking the rules.27

More haste, less speed. The race to reactivate the 1967 application played into the hands of the Six. The UK accepted stiff terms – twice renegotiated within a decade. In retrospect, 1973 seemed ‘more like a half-entry’.28 Gaffes punctuated the final approach to accession. On the eve of Pompidou’s first official visit to Britain in March 1972 officials sent immigration forms to the French embassy with instructions that they must be filled in by the president and staff. What looked suspiciously like an attempt to sabotage the visit turned out to be a colossal Whitehall balls-up.29 Pompidou dutifully completed his form, but Jobert jibbed and found consolation at Chequers. Taking tea, he discovered proof of British decadence – the magnificent porcelain teapot contained tea bags.30

Strictly no dancing. Ministers made only a token effort to sell the Community to the people. The high culture ‘Fanfare for Europe’ formal celebration fell flat. Unmoved by a personal plea from Heath, the French refused to lend the Mona Lisa – though she had travelled to the United States in 1963 – offering instead Georges de la Tour’s Le Tricheur, a picture of a man cheating at cards. The mood at the European Commission in Brussels was muted. Officials looked back wistfully on the golden pre-enlargement 1960s. The French struck a note of reconciliation, artfully suggesting the British had won the game. ‘Voila la vraie affaire Soames,’ quipped Pompidou during the decisive Paris summit of May 1971. Hosting a farewell lunch for Britain’s ambassador, the president praised him for overcoming ‘opposition’ to British entry: ‘You have won’.31 French fans stayed loyal to the Queen. At Heathrow a Frenchman came up to a taxi driver with a magnificent bouquet in his hand, promising to pay double if the driver would give it to the Queen. ‘Cor, I couldn’t let im and er down, so I just come from the bleeding Palace’.32

Everybody had won. But the prizes were unequal. Britain won a Pyrrhic victory at best – top price admission, interminable renegotiations looming and an awkward partner reputation. By contrast, France kept its hegemony, and finalized CAP for its own benefit. The Yaounde Agreements of 1961 and 1969 gave France’s former African colonies access to the whole Community. When formal entry talks opened on 30 June 1970 France rammed through an outline Common Fisheries Policy Agreement (CFP). ‘By keeping firm control over the timing of developments and the sequence in which solutions of individual problems were reached,’ noted Whitehall’s internal history, ‘the French were able to set up the final package which best suited them, and by doing so to oblige us to pay more on Community finance in return for getting what we wanted on New Zealand’.33

Entering the Berlaymont’s [the EC’s HQ] pearly gates, British officials found a French administration in command. The Commission’s French president, François-Xavier Ortoli, directed the ensemble. Jean-Marie Soutou, France’s permanent representative to the Community, worried lest ‘the extraordinary skill’ of the French team should invite retribution.34 Instructed to use French, British representatives kept their heads down in order to acclimatize. No grace period eased the transition. Brussels inflicted a total culture shock, partly because civil servants were underprepared, partly because many had not wanted to go to Brussels – wrongly assuming they would get less pay. Crash language courses could not deliver the oral and written fluency required for smooth enculturation. Occasionally, a visiting British official speaking French ‘of an almost Proustian quality’ would catch the French off guard.35 But these were small victories. French held its own as the Brussels lingua franca and Roy Jenkins’s lack of fluency seriously disadvantaged his presidency of the Commission in the late 1970s.36 Adapting to the jungle-like climate and ‘the deviousness and potential bad faith’ of co-negotiators took time.37 In making appointments to the Commission, Whitehall concentrated on inserting people at the top with too few down the line – a mistake which took years to correct.

That so little spadework for entry occurred in the late 1960s suggests Wilson kept options open all the way. Engaging a timely study of the Commission’s workings would have demonstrated commitment to the 1967 bid and fortified the 1970–2 talks. Mandarins admitted a ‘failure to exert ourselves sufficiently in the run-up to the opening of negotiations in June 1970’.38 The sixties marked a formative growth period for a Community under Franco–German management. In 1961 the Six were learning to walk, and the CAP was unformed. Early entry would have given London a say in rule-making. The absent, as the French say, are always wrong. The British had to put on off-the-peg clothes instead of the bespoke garments worn by France and Germany, and naturally complained about the fit. The vetoes of 1963 and 1967 consolidated France’s ascendancy.

Britain’s European diplomacy branded it an awkward partner – loath to accept the Community acquis. The UK’s response to continental integration initiatives since 1950, opined historian Robert Skidelsky, ‘might best be described as selective sabotage’.39 The third Wilson government’s re-negotiation of membership in 1974–5, followed by prime minister Margaret Thatcher’s rebate demand of 1979–84, ratchetted up mainland Europe’s distrust. ‘The most difficult of all nationalities to deal with were the British,’ declared a senior Whitehall-trained official, instancing ‘a certain lack of professionalism, i.e. actual knowledge of the treaties’.40 London’s long courtship of the Five backfired. Wilson’s reluctance to evangelize party and public in 1966–7 fuelled Euroscepticism, and eventually Brexit.

The ending of the golden age of the world economy exploded expectations of an entry bonanza. Entry did not equal entente, despite the choreographed cordiality of Heath–Pompidou encounters. The decisive Heath–Pompidou Paris summit in May 1971 neatly closed off alliance. Pompidou made it crystal clear that he envisaged the meeting ‘not as a question of creating a new entente cordiale. That had been directed against someone. Clearly France and Britain must have a cordial understanding but their purpose now was to cooperate with others in a common task’.41 Britain was a rookie in a French-led club. Unsurprisingly, the seven-year diplomatic war hardened both sides. Bickering became an end in itself. Heath criticized the FO’s ‘anti-French mutterings’.42 Policy-makers who had rubbished the France of the 1950s as sick and unreliable now warned of a partner too strong for comfort – forecasting GNP 50 per cent greater than that of Britain by 1980.

The war of words continued. The Spectator fulminated against French nuclear tests in the Pacific: ‘The reluctance or inability of French politicians to respond to moral arguments and imperatives is one of the few constants in international relations … many would think that they were born that way … The French hardly ever win. Their national genius is not to succeed, but to fool people that they used to succeed, will eventually succeed … The plain historical fact is that the French get things wrong’.43 Conservative prime minister Margaret Thatcher denounced the French for ‘trying to take her money and her fish and she would not let them have a penny piece … France was the kept woman of Europe.’44 Pot calling kettle black. The UK conducted many nuclear tests at Australian sites between 1952 and 1963. After forcibly evicting islanders from Indian Ocean island Diego Garcia in 1969, Britain leased it to the United States for the construction of a military base, and refused to allow islanders to return.

The failure of Franco–British partnership spoke to a cross-channel democratic deficit. Ruling elites marginalized cabinets, parliaments and public. ‘The calamity of the war, and the impoverishment of the world as a whole,’ remarked Orwell in 1945, ‘have not been fully brought home to the British people’.45 Journalist Malcolm Muggeridge was ‘struck once more by the essential unawareness of the ordinary person of what is going on’.46 In the Suez crisis, premier Eden, ‘a relative amateur’ in handling the mass media, ‘managed to fashion news and current affairs reporting … to a remarkable extent’.47 ‘The ability of British governments to ignore or manipulate public opinion’, acknowledged a former Labour minister and director of Chatham House, ‘has been at least partly responsible for some of Britain’s worst errors’.48 The radical protest of the sixties did not topple W.H. Auden’s unknown citizen who ‘held the proper opinions for the time of year; when there was peace, he was for peace; when there was war, he went’.49

Advances in communications technology and the acceleration of international affairs in the sixties vastly expanded news and information. Government responded with more sophisticated management, starving electorates of debate and analysis. On Europe the public waited in vain for a lead. An analysis of Wilson’s bid concluded, ‘The debate, such as it was, pointed out the key issues of membership without providing the public with the information it needed to evaluate them’.50 The political process acted like an anaesthetic. Television had a flattening effect, filling screens with pictures of ministers ‘getting on planes, getting off planes, speaking at length to seemingly admiring crowds, and making an allegedly triumphant return’.51 Grandees sedated voters: ‘Lord Elton [Rhodes Trust Secretary] … gave us … sugary dissertation on the “British achievement” … a hymn to the Empire of unadulterated praise, sprinkled freely with allusions to cricket, not a shadow on the picture, not the most indirect allusion to present-day events in Africa’.52 For the political class, the information explosion proved a blessing in disguise. ‘A surfeit of data,’ remarked philosopher and sociologist Jacques Ellul, ‘far from permitting people to make judgments and form opinions, prevents them from doing so and actually paralyzes them’.53 Excluded from supposedly arcane matters about the national interest, the passengers on the proverbial Clapham omnibus were stoical, not apathetic.

Barely a handful of the cognoscenti protested the secret state. In a 1961 essay – rejected by the BBC – Marxist historian E.P. Thompson flagged the increasing difficulty of expressing radical dissent. Heterodoxy had an easier time in the Victorian age and formal democratic procedures were ‘becoming more and more empty of real content, public life more enervated, and controversy more muffled’.54 From the conservative end of the spectrum Max Beloff, Gladstone professor of government at Oxford University, demanded ‘a new style of politics appropriate to the kind of issues that now fall to be resolved’. He excoriated politicians ‘in a country which professes to be a democracy’ for reaching the decision to apply for European Community membership ‘without full public debate … nor is this the only instance … of a seeming unwillingness to take the public into the confidence of the Government where important issues of foreign policy are concerned’.55

In May 1968 Labour technology minister Tony Benn, the only prominent politician to champion the empowering of voters, warned: ‘It would be foolish to assume that people will be satisfied for much longer with a system which confines their national political role to the marking of a ballot with a single cross once every five years’.56 In a valedictory dispatch, Britain’s Paris ambassador Nicholas Henderson called on ministers to explain the Community ‘rather than making it the scapegoat for our ills’ and to give the public a better sense of Britain’s relative economic position in Europe.57 Did voters want a say in policy-making? No one asked. Poet and writer G.K. Chesterton summed up the relationship pithily: ‘Smile at us, pay us, pass us; but do not quite forget. For we are the people of England, that never have spoken yet’.58