The Labour Party, Nationalism and Internationalism, 1939-51 (Cass Series--British Foreign and Colonial Policy)

The Labour Party, Nationalism and Internationalism, 1939–1951

BRITISH FOREIGN AND COLONIAL POLICY Series Editor: PETER CATTERALL

This series provides insights into both the background influences on and the course of policymaking towards Britain’s extensive overseas interests during the past 200 years. Whitehall and the Suez Crisis, edited by Saul Kelly and Anthony Gorst Liberals, International Relations and Appeasement: The Liberal Party, 1919–1939, Richard S. Grayson British Government Policy and Decolonisation, 1945–1963: Scrutinising the Official Mind, Frank Heinlein Harold Wilson and European Integration: Britain’s Second Application to Join the EEC, edited by Oliver Daddow Britain, Israel and the United States, 1955–1958: Beyond Suez, Orna Almog The British Political Elite and the Soviet Union, 1937–1939, Louise Grace Shaw Britain, Nasser and the Balance of Power in the Middle East, 1952–1967: From the Egyptian Revolution to the Six Day War, Robert McNamara British Foreign Secretaries Since 1974, edited by Kevin Theakston The Labour Party, Nationalism and Internationalism, 1939–1951, R.M. Douglas

The Labour Party, Nationalism and Internationalism, 1939–1951

R.M. Douglas Department of History, Colgate University

First published in 2004 in Great Britain by Routledge 11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2004. Copyright © 2004 R.M. Douglas British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data ISBN 0-203-50578-6 Master e-book ISBN

ISBN 0-203-58236-5 (Adobe eReader Format) ISBN 0-714-65523-6 (Print Edition) Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Douglas, R.M., 1963– The Labour Party, nationalism and internationalism, 1939–1951: a new world order / R.M. Douglas. p. cm. – (Cass series – British foreign and colonial policy, ISSN 1467-5013) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-7146-5523-6 (cloth) 1. Great Britain – Foreign relations – 1936–1945. 2. Great Britain – Foreign relations – 1945–1964. 3. Labour Party (Great Britain). 4. Internationalism. 5. Great Britain – Politics and government – 1936–1945. 6. Great Britain – Politics and government – 1945–1964. I. Title. II. Series. DA566.7.D674 2004 324.24107′09′04–dc22

2003062608

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher of this book.

Don t-Ollamh L.P. Curtis, Jr – aite agus cara

Contents

Series Editor’s Preface

viii

Acknowledgements

xi

Abbreviations

xii

Introduction

1

1. ‘Half a League Onward’: The Labour Critique of the Nation-State, 1900–39

14

2. Dictatorship of the Secretariat: Transport House and the Rise of ‘Muscular’ Internationalism

50

3. Internationalism or Anti-Nationalism?: Backbench and Backroom Visions of World Order, 1939–45

72

4. Trustees for Humanity: Ministerial Planning for International Government, 1940–45 97 5. Utopia Deferred: The Attlee Administration and the United Nations, 1945–51

141

6. An Offer They Couldn’t Refuse: Labour Internationalism and Colonial Trusteeship

173

7. Socialism in One Country: The Failure of Labour Europeanism

214

Conclusion

266

Bibliography

272

Index

293

Series Editor’s Preface

In a ground-breaking book some 30 years ago, Martin Ceadel used the bitter experience of diplomacy in the 1930s as the context in which to explore the process whereby pacifism in Britain ceased to be an idea with wide, if somewhat vague, appeal. Faced with the stark realities of that decade, it ceased to be in any sense a policy option and instead became, as Ceadel put it, an article of faith for a small minority. Many in the Labour Party were, of course, never pacifists. But at the high tide of optimism about the League of Nations and the prospects for the World Disarmament Conference of 1932–34, the distinctions could easily be blurred. Those who opposed all war, in any circumstances, could join with those who felt that the slide to war in 1914 reflected, among other things, the dangers of nationalism and the failings of international organisation. It was only as choices had to be made, in the face of the renewed slide to war in the 1930s, that the chasm opened up between these two positions. Pacifism may have been consigned to the fringes of the left by the experience of those years, with many erstwhile pacifists recanting their former faith. John Wilmot, elected on a pacifist ticket at the famous 1933 Fulham by-election, for instance, was by the late 1940s, as Minister of Supply in the Attlee government, involved in the creation of Britain’s atomic bomb. It is the contention of this book, however, that internationalism was not similarly undermined during the 1930s. Indeed, R.M. Douglas argues that internationalism was reinvigorated, but also changed, by the Second World War. Internationalism was not, of course, confined to the Labour Party. As Richard Grayson has recently argued in this series (Liberals, International Relations and Appeasement: The Liberal Party, 1919–1939), it was also a distinctive creed of the inter-war Liberal Party. Unlike the Liberals, however, who tended to focus upon the idea of the interdependence of states, Labour emphasised the ideal of international government. Liberal internationalism was thus in many ways a development from liberal nationalism. The latter doctrine held that a

Series Editor’s Preface

ix

shift towards popularly controlled ‘nation-states’ in the nineteenth century would also ensure the termination of the aggressive habits of territorially (rather than nationally) based ancien régime states. Liberal enthusiasm for the League of Nations, for instance, was thus as an arena in which states could pacifically co-operate in their mutual interest. Socialist internationalism, by contrast, tended to emphasise class solidarities across the artificial borders of national frontiers. As Douglas shows, this survived the mobilisation of the European working classes into their various national causes after 1914, at least as a reflex. It may not have meant a great deal to the generally conventionally patriotic masses of Labour voters. Nevertheless, as late as the early 1930s, the Labour Party Conference was still calling for a general strike in the event of war, even when it had become clear, if further proof were needed, that the prospects of sympathetic action by workers elsewhere was nil. This did not, however, undermine internationalism in the Labour Party. Enjoying the luxury of opposition, they could use the failure to use the League of Nations as an instrument of collective security as a stick with which to beat the Tory-dominated National government, while continuing to hold, in some teleological sense, to the idea of a future world government. After 1940, however, Labour was no longer in opposition. As Douglas shows, some of the explanations offered in the past for the apparent shifts in the party’s doctrines that ensued are little more than unsophisticated variants on the theme of ‘Labour men and Tory measures’. Not least as regards the party leader, Clement Attlee, whose enthusiasm for the idea of world government was still being preached to President Kennedy long after his retirement from office, this clearly fails to do justice to the position. Douglas instead seeks to show that what the party sought to do was find new ways of expressing traditional international beliefs in the challenging circumstances of the 1940s. Internationalism, in other words, remained the bedrock on which foreign policy was formulated. By the time Labour left office in 1951, however, internationalism was seemingly in tatters. The former French Prime Minister, Paul Reynaud, taunted Labour and the German SPD (Social Democratic Party) at the Council of Europe in May that year that, ‘The only thing they have successfully nationalised is socialism itself.’ This was, however, somewhat unfair. In so far as the European ideal Reynaud held to at that time articulated a clear and internationalist position, itself a debatable proposition, it was not one shared by Labour, with the exception of a small number of backbench enthusiasts. And it certainly did

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not cohere with the ‘muscular’ internationalism Douglas here shows the party had developed earlier in the 1940s. That this variant of internationalism in the end proved a cul-de-sac does not mean that the party had to default to some European alternative. Instead, by the 1950s, it was still there in party rhetoric and leaflets. It was clearly still there in Attlee’s mind in the 1960s. But, as the pamphleteers also pointed out, it was no longer seen as practical politics. Like Ceadel with pacifism in the 1930s, what Douglas is doing here is charting how, in the Labour Party, internationalism ceased to be a core ideology and instead became a faith. Peter Catterall London

Acknowledgements

The sheer number of creditors accumulated in the course of a project of this kind is too large to permit mention of more than a representative sample; but my thanks to those not identified here are nonetheless heartfelt. The place of honour goes, both on merit and as of right, to Professor L. Perry Curtis, Jr, in whom sagacity and sanity are combined to a higher degree than in anyone else of my acquaintance. My thanks are also due to Professors-Emeritus Stephen R. Graubard of Brown University, John F. Naylor of the State University of New York at Buffalo, and President-Emeritus Henry R. Winkler of the University of Cincinnati, whose perceptive comments have vastly improved the final product. Of the friends and colleagues who have patiently tolerated my unsolicited disquisitions upon the minutiae of Labour internationalism, Michael D. Callahan of Kettering University, G.W. Tremper of the Ohio State University, and Kevin F. White of the University of Portsmouth have suffered most. The research process involved in the preparation of this manuscript was facilitated greatly by the kindness and expertise of the archivists and librarians in Britain on whose guidance I depended. I would like especially to acknowledge the assistance, well beyond the call of duty, of Stephen Bird, National Museum of Labour History, Manchester; Colin Harris, Department of Western Manuscripts, Bodleian Library, Oxford; Beth Inglis, University of Sussex Library; Moira Mackay, Churchill College, Cambridge; Dr Angela Raspin and Mrs Sue Donnelly, British Library of Political and Economic Science, London School of Economics; Richard Temple, Modern Records Centre, Warwick University; J. R. Pinfold and Penny Brumfitt, Rhodes House Library, Oxford; and Eleanor Vallis, Nuffield College Library, Oxford. The timely completion of the project was made possible by the generous financial support of the Thomas J. Watson Institute for International Studies, Providence, RI, and the Colgate University Research Council.

Abbreviations

ACIQ ACImp.Q APW CAB CEIP CWG FCB FO FORD FRPS FSIB FU GA H.C. Deb. ILP LNU LPCR LPP NBKR NCL NEC PGWG PLP PMC PREM RIIA SC SL SVG TC TUC UDC UEM UNA

Advisory Committee on International Questions Advisory Committee on Imperial Questions Armistice and Post-War Committee Cabinet Office papers Carnegie Endowment for International Peace Crusade for World Government Fabian Colonial Bureau Foreign Office Foreign Office Research Department (formerly FRPS) Foreign Research and Press Service Fabian Society International Bureau Federal Union United Nations General Assembly Parliamentary Debates: House of Commons Independent Labour Party League of Nations Union Labour Party Conference Reports Labour Party papers Philip Noel-Baker papers National Council of Labour National Executive Committee Parliamentary Group for World Government Parliamentary Labour Party Permanent Mandates Commission Prime Minister’s Private Office papers Royal Institute of International Affairs United Nations Security Council Socialist League Socialist Vanguard Group United Nations Trusteeship Council Trades Union Congress Union of Democratic Control United Europe Movement United Nations Association

Introduction

For both major political parties in Britain, the outbreak of the Second World War constituted a public declaration of the bankruptcy of the foreign policies each had pursued during the previous two decades. In the Conservatives’ case, the war brutally exposed the inadequacy of the Tory-dominated National Government’s conduct of diplomatic and military affairs since 1931. Not only had Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain and his colleagues failed to avert the second major European conflict to occur within a generation – upon the prevention of which they had staked their careers and reputations – but their conduct of defence and foreign policy in the 1930s had brought about a situation in which, the war once having begun, Britain was all too likely to lose it. By the summer of 1940, less than two years after his ‘finest hour’ at Munich, Chamberlain had been driven from office; the country lay open to invasion after a disastrous Continental campaign, culminating at Dunkirk, had exposed the inability of the British Army to mount an effective resistance to the Wehrmacht; and the new coalition government headed by Winston Churchill, its defiant public pronouncements notwithstanding, had privately accepted the real possibility of a negotiated peace on terms favourable to the enemy.1 Discredited, divided and, ultimately, defeated at the polls largely as a result of the series of foreign policy calamities that overtook it in 1939–40, the Conservative Party spent the remainder of the decade attempting virtually to reinvent itself so as to restore its credibility with the electorate. Contemporary observers and historians alike, however, have overlooked the fact that for the British left the advent of war was in many respects even more ideologically disruptive than for the Tories. During the previous 20 years, the Labour Party had built up its foreign policy upon a firm foundation of internationalism, asserting that national sovereignty and nationalism itself were in the process of becoming extinct. The catastrophe that befell Europe between 1914 and 1918, the party maintained, had shown the suicidal futility of a

2

The Labour Party, Nationalism and Internationalism

system of mutually antagonistic nation-states and made clear the necessity of creating a ‘co-operative world Commonwealth’, or international government, of which the League of Nations was to be both precursor and prototype. Throughout the interwar years, Labour intellectuals cast nationalism in increasingly negative terms – as synonymous with ‘jingoism’ or mindless chauvinism – and national self-determination as a transitory stage along the path to a fully integrated global economic and political system. In its official propaganda, the party sought in the 1920s and 1930s to convince the British people that the transformation of the League into a worldwide ‘super-state’ was a historical inevitability and that this new global order in the making, rather than the Crown or the Empire, deserved first claim to their allegiance. As Labour’s deputy leader, Clement Attlee, declared in 1933, ‘You have got to put loyalty to the world organisation above loyalty to your country.’ The outbreak of a second world war and the collapse of the League shattered this optimistic socialist belief that humanity was evolving naturally beyond the nation-state. With the premises upon which its interwar foreign policy had been built in disarray, Labour was compelled to undertake an agonising reappraisal of its fundamental beliefs concerning the nature of international society, and of Britain’s place within it. Why had the League so conspicuously failed to achieve the most vital function for which it had been created – the prevention of war? What – if anything – could be salvaged from the wreckage of Labour’s internationalist vision of the 1920s and 1930s? How could the ideal of a socialist and democratic ‘new world order’ be brought into conformity with the contemporary reality of a Europe given over to ultra-nationalism, militarism and war? Were the peoples of the world truly growing together towards interdependence, or were the democratic and internationalist values Labour had once thought to be universal confined to a few morally ‘advanced’ societies? If so, how might they most effectively be inculcated in nations that were resistant to them? The Labour Party’s debate in the 1940s over these questions, and the answers at which they arrived, form the principal theme of this book. In light of the centrality of the doctrine of internationalism to Labour foreign policy between the wars, reflected in the works of such historians as Christine Collette, Kenneth Miller, John Naylor, Paul Ward and Henry Winkler,2 it is remarkable that scholars dealing with the wartime period and its aftermath should have devoted so little attention to the crisis that overtook the party in September 1939. In part, this omission is a consequence of the prominence which the debate over ‘socialist foreign policy’ in the 1940s assumed in studies

Introduction

3

of Labour foreign policy appearing during the two decades after 1945. The authors of these works, writing at the height of the Cold War, were most keenly interested in Britain’s intermediate geographical and ideological position in the confrontation between East and West: and in the consequent ‘Cold War model’ of history that emerged, the primary – and, not infrequently, exclusive – consideration underlying the actions of political leaders was thought to be the position of the ‘British between the superpowers’, to quote the title of one representative example of the genre.3 Such scholarship, as a result, was characterised by a focus upon the divisions within the party between the ‘philo-Soviet’ left and the ‘pro-American’ right to the exclusion of much else, and in many respects it represented the continuation of contemporary domestic political controversies by other means.4 More recent work on the foreign policy of the British democratic left in the 1940s, while broader in scope and far more extensively researched, has likewise tended to overlook the internationalist dimension of Labour’s ideology, although for quite different reasons. The pioneering studies of Trevor Burridge and Alan Bullock, for example, focused largely upon high politics to the comparative exclusion of backbench and grassroots opinion.5 Although models of their type and highly relevant to this day, both are examples of the still-dominant ‘Cabinet history’ genre of British political history, drawing largely from documents contained in the Public Record Office and often assuming – either implicitly or explicitly – that ministers (and their civil servants) were free to dispose of the country’s foreign policy very much as they pleased, without reference to the opinions of the electorate or even of their own parliamentary parties.6 The frame of reference adopted in the more recent ‘revisionist’ works of John Saville and Mark Curtis, on the other hand – self-consciously echoing the ‘New Left’ school of American diplomatic historians of the 1960s and 1970s – excludes consideration of nationalism and internationalism a priori, asserting as it does the primacy of economic factors in the foreign policy decisions of the Attlee administrations.7 By framing the question in these terms, however, both ‘traditionalist’ and ‘revisionist’ historians have joined hands in relegating to the margins the ideological elements of Labour foreign policymaking in the 1940s, and more especially during the postwar quinquennium. By depicting the Labour government’s policies as a series of pragmatic countermeasures against the threat of Communist aggression, traditionalists assumed that Labour’s approach to foreign affairs was largely responsive in character, the product of external constraints intensified by the residual economic effects of war. The first generation of revisionist historians erred similarly in supposing that most Labour

4

The Labour Party, Nationalism and Internationalism

MPs, once in government, simply abandoned their distinctive approach to foreign affairs and subscribed wholeheartedly and uncomplicatedly to a traditional imperialist policy reflecting above all the material interests of the British state.8 Not only does this ‘explanation’ for Labour’s actions while in government raise more questions than it answers – not least among them the precise mechanism by which leftwing politicians admitted to power undergo an ideological transformation to which their right-wing counterparts are, in similar circumstances, curiously immune – but it is inherently unpersuasive. The Attlee administration and its supporters were not mere ‘Conservatives in drag’, but – as an emerging school of ‘post-revisionist’ historians has begun to demonstrate – pursued agendas that, however flawed, were unmistakably of their own devising.9 This work, then, is intended in the first instance to refocus attention on the ideological component of foreign policymaking, without which the course of British history in the early Cold War era cannot adequately be understood. It analyses the controversy within Labour during the 1940s over the principles that ought to govern the postwar ‘new world order’, an exchange which gave rise to what may have been the most wide-ranging debate in the movement’s history on the interconnected problems of building a practical international system on the one hand, and upholding the meaning and uniqueness of British identity on the other. It seeks in particular to show that the long-held belief in the existence of a postwar ‘consensus’ between the two main British parties, now increasingly challenged by historians in the domestic sphere,10 is no more satisfactory or sustainable as an explanation of Labour’s approach to overseas problems. Contrary to the assertions of earlier scholars, the Labour Party in the 1940s was neither converted to a traditionalist foreign policy through an osmotic association with Conservatives in the wartime coalition, nor was it driven to adopt such a policy as a purely pragmatic response to Soviet expansionism after 1945. Rather, it sought to pursue its own ideological agenda, shaped in, and bearing the imprint of, the deeply traumatic experience of near-defeat at home and cataclysmic changes overseas during the Second World War. The transformation in attitudes brought about by this experience – which, in contrast to its impact on home affairs, has been neglected to a remarkable degree by historians of British foreign policy – deeply influenced the perceptions and, in turn, the policies of Labour’s leaders as they set about the task of redefining both the idea of the nation and the ideology of British internationalism after 1945. The aim of this book, therefore, is to demonstrate three core propositions. The first is that the British democratic left continued even after

Introduction

5

the breakdown of the League of Nations to promote the ideal of a structured international order superior to, and ultimately superseding, the individual sovereign state; and that this aspiration had an important and as yet unappreciated influence upon the foreign policies pursued by the Attlee government after 1945. The second is that, as a result of the wartime experience, the character of Labour internationalism was very different from the variant that had existed before 1939, being far more prescriptive, if not frankly coercive, than was the case during the interwar decades. The third is that it was largely the failure of the Labour government to translate this postwar vision of a new, interventionist world order into practical policy that led to the ultimate abandonment of internationalism as the distinctive ideological hallmark of the British left. As a political concept, ‘internationalism’ is susceptible to a variety of definitions and associations. In the context of Labour history, the term has been applied by scholars like Christine Collette to describe virtually any form of international contact or consciousness, through such bodies as the Labour and Socialist International, the Workers’ Travel Association or the Esperantist movement – although at least some of these relatively apolitical cross-border activities are perhaps better characterised as ‘sub-internationalism’. As understood by most Labour commentators in the 1940s, however, and as generally used in this book, ‘internationalism’ is the doctrine that in a civilised world relations between states require to be governed by international law. This, in turn, implies the existence of an international law-giving and law-enforcing body. Hence, in the words of Harold Laski, the internationalist ethos can be defined as ‘the spirit which, when expressed through institutions, sacrifices the sovereignty of any given nationstate to the wider interests of that civitas maxima which looks upon states as provinces in a world-order’.11 Within this broad framework a wide variety of international institutions are conceivable, ranging from the confederation or regional authority at one end of the spectrum to the unitary supranational world state at the other. But the common denominator of all of them is the belief that, as in domestic affairs, the interests of justice and equity on the international stage can be assured only by the establishment of political machinery to ensure that selfinterest shall not be permitted to operate to the detriment of the common good. Until the outbreak of the Second World War, Labour’s approach to foreign policy was in essence an elaboration of a Liberal model of international society that came to the fore in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This doctrine asserted that human beings were inherently pacific; that they shared a common set of interests;

6

The Labour Party, Nationalism and Internationalism

and that conflicts between nations were in consequence a violation of the ‘natural’ order. The fact that wars nevertheless took place was explained in terms of an external defect in the international system – secret diplomacy, capitalist rivalry, the private manufacture and sale of armaments, the scramble for colonies, or some combination of these factors – interfering with the normal harmonious pattern. To Liberals, the way to secure peace was merely to remove such impediments, following which the smooth functioning of international society would resume as normal.12 The first generation of Labour foreign policy theorists to appear on the scene after 1914, on the other hand, formulated their basic assumptions about the relationship between states during a period of profound crisis in the international order, which seemed to have broken down to such an extent as to defy the possibility of a return to a condition of ‘normality’. From the outset, therefore, they rejected the doctrine of laissez-faire in international affairs which had proceeded from the Liberal schema. Convinced by contemporary events that the international system was fundamentally unstable, they asserted the necessity of a system of law to create some sort of order in place of the chaotic free-for-all prevailing between competing sovereign states. The model of international society with which Labour emerged from the Great War is called here – with due apologies to the shade of Herbert Butterfield – ‘“Whig” internationalism’. Like the ‘Whig interpretation of history’, from which the term has been derived, ‘Whig’ internationalism derived its coherence from the emphasis of ‘certain principles of progress in the past’, so as to produce ‘a story which is the ratification if not the glorification of the present’.13 The focal point of that idealised present that Labour policymakers took as their organising principle in foreign policy was the contemporary British parliamentary system itself, in which their hopes for a domestic socialist revolution were already invested. To the architects of ‘Whig’ internationalism, the unregulated international arena differed in no significant respect from the condition of Britain before the establishment of a national government and the enforcement of a uniform code of law. In the same way that constitutionalism had gradually evolved to unite the peoples of Britain within a single polity to which all owed allegiance, so could – and must – a corresponding system be established among the nations of the world. A classic expression of this doctrine was offered by Prime Minister Attlee to the first session of the UN General Assembly in 1946: After the First World War, there was a tendency to regard the League of Nations as something outside the ordinary range of

Introduction

7

foreign policy. Governments continued on the old lines, pursuing individual aims and following the path of power politics, not understanding that the world had passed into a new epoch. In just such a spirit in times past in these islands great nobles and their retainers used to practise private war in disregard of the authority of the central government. The time came when private armies were abolished, when the rule of law was established throughout the length and breadth of this island. What has been done in Britain and in other countries on a small scale has now to be effected throughout the whole world.14 ‘Whig’ internationalism, reducing the complexities of international politics to familiar domestic analogies15 and incorporating a highly debatable interpretation of British history (the English Civil War, for example, did not feature prominently in these exegeses), carried obvious resonances for Labour supporters who saw in the ‘British road to socialism’, rooted in parliamentary politics, a model for the achievement of world government through the League of Nations. During the 1920s and 1930s, party spokesmen repeatedly depicted the Geneva Assembly as an embryonic ‘Parliament of Man’, and asserted that a ‘world loyalty’, separate from and superior to identification with individual nation-states, was being created. The transition from nationalism to supranationalism was thus portrayed as an evolutionary and almost imperceptible process, to which every recourse to the League or its subsidiary bodies was making a definite contribution. Through participation in an international organisation, it was argued, habits of co-operation and a corpus of international law and precedent were being formed, generating a virtuous cycle of international communitarianism whose impetus no individual country would be able to arrest. ‘Whig’ internationalism, the bedrock of Labour’s foreign policy for two decades, was shaken to its foundations by the collapse of the League in 1939. The ideological vacuum created by the exposure of the League’s impotence in the face of a renewed conflict, combined with the experience of total war against a Nazi-dominated Europe, brought about a fundamental shift in the Labour Party’s attitudes to Britain’s neighbours overseas, as well as the emergence of a species of ‘socialist chauvinism’. To a large number of activists on both wings of the party, the pattern of events since 1939 had demonstrated that ‘Whig’ internationalism and the Wilsonian principles with which it had been closely associated were fatally flawed. Together, these doctrines had seen national self-determination as a first stage by which peoples would proceed from independence to interdependence and

8

The Labour Party, Nationalism and Internationalism

ultimately to ‘the final Socialist objective – the establishment of a Co-operative World Commonwealth of Nations’.16 But the record of recent occurrences had belied this hopeful scenario. The new states created at Versailles in 1918 had not made significant strides towards interdependence and international co-operation, but rather the reverse. Just as importantly, they had not stopped Hitler. Even the best of these small countries had relied upon a selfish neutrality to save them, allowing the predatory states to devour them one by one. By the middle of the war, then, more and more Labour policymakers were arriving at the conclusion that the basic building-block of international society in the future was, and could only be, the Great Power. This confluence of internationalism and authoritarianism deeply influenced Labour activists’ attitude towards the new world organisation, the United Nations, in whose planning they played an unobtrusive but nonetheless vital rôle. In a variety of official and unofficial blueprints for the UN produced or endorsed by Labour policymakers during the war, the new body was envisaged as a far more powerful and obtrusive entity than the League had ever been, through which a social-democratic Britain, in virtue of its soi-disant status as ‘trustee for humanity’ and its enhanced global rôle as leader of a third ideological bloc positioned between the extremes of capitalism and Communism, would be able to compel the conformity of potential international troublemakers to specifically Anglocentric and socialdemocratic norms. The powers demanded for the organisation thus included the ability to eliminate troublesome national minorities by transferring (or, in today’s parlance, ‘ethnically cleansing’) entire populations; to decide which states were viable and which were no longer consistent with the interests of ‘civilisation’; to regulate and where necessary to override the domestic policies of national governments; and to determine what could or could not be broadcast on the radio or printed in schoolbooks. Within this ‘British–American world order’, the task of providing guidance and leadership to a European continent bankrupted physically and morally would fall naturally to Britain, which, according to the future Foreign Secretary, Herbert Morrison, combined greater political maturity than any other nation with the unique moral authority it had earned by its lone stand against Nazi dictatorship in 1940. The rise of what is here described as ‘muscular’ internationalism, however, was by no means unanimously welcomed within the party. The surviving ‘Whig’ internationalists – a diminishing but still significant number, of whom the foreign policy theorist and novelist Leonard Woolf was the most distinguished representative – were deeply disturbed by the prospect of a twentieth-century Holy

Introduction

9

Alliance, in which the Great Powers would maintain a permanent hegemony over smaller states in the guise of collective security. Throughout the war they fought a determined rearguard action in defence of Labour’s traditional ideals. But the failure of ‘muscular’ internationalism was not the result of opposition from within the party so much as the fact that, like its predecessor, its analysis of the international scene was flawed and its prescriptions unrealistic. In particular its inflated expectations of the rôle Britain would play within a world order based upon the military predominance of the great powers were quickly to be disappointed. From the new Labour government’s first days in office, when it was rescued from bankruptcy only by the grant of a large US loan obtained under humiliating conditions, it became increasingly evident that, quite apart from considerations of Great Power unity, the projection of British power abroad on anything resembling a prewar scale was beyond the country’s capabilities. Severely weakened economically and politically by the war, subject to an acute case of imperial overstretch, and outmanned and outweighed by the two superpowers, Britain simply no longer possessed the muscles to make ‘muscular’ internationalism a reality. Lacking this power-base, it was unable to derive the same advantages the United States did from the UN – to mobilise international support and provide legitimacy for what was, in effect, unilateral US action. Instead, the Labour government was more likely to find itself arraigned before those parts of the UN not paralysed by the great power veto, like the General Assembly and the Trusteeship Council, to answer before the bar of public opinion for its ‘exploitation’ of the colonial empire. For both these reasons, the government found itself, rather than urging the abolition of the veto so as to extend the authority of the world organisation, insisting on its retention lest the UN seek to impose its authority upon Britain against the latter’s will. In an ironic turnabout, by the time Labour left office in 1951 at least as many politicians and theorists in the party were working to restrain and circumscribe the world organisation as were seeking its further empowerment. The emergence of ‘muscular’ internationalism thus proved a cul-de-sac for Labour foreign policy. Little more successful in the 1940s, although arguably of greater long-term significance, were the efforts of a smaller group of Labour activists and MPs to bring about a synthesis of ‘Whig’ and ‘muscular’ doctrines, centred on the creation of a political organisation confined to western Europe. The failure of the League convinced a significant number of Labour opinion-formers that under existing circumstances a world organisation was too unwieldy and legalistic a structure either to preserve peace or to

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The Labour Party, Nationalism and Internationalism

appeal to the masses. A European federation including Britain, however, might be a powerful instrument for peace, in light of the fact that the major conflicts of the previous 70 years had all originated in Europe, and could provide a focus for emotional identification that more distant entities like the League had always lacked. During the war, a relatively small but active group of Labour Europeanists campaigned outside the party, concentrating on building up support around the country for the European cause. Only after Labour had won the 1945 election and formed a government did these activists make any serious attempt to convince their party colleagues of the necessity of a European federation. By that late date, however, most of the Labour Party were already committed to one or another form of universal organisation, and looked askance at a scheme that would require Britain to forsake that model in favour of one that would instead involve it in a series of open-ended commitments to the European continent from which it could not subsequently retreat. Furthermore, the Labour Europeanists failed to take account of the extent to which the experience of war had fuelled British exceptionalism on the left, especially among the party’s élite. As a result their political influence was small and their efforts to rally the party behind the Council of Europe, the first genuine European assembly, a humiliating failure. Whereas both varieties of Labour internationalism had for different reasons run into the sand by the time the party was voted out of office in 1951, the doctrine was nonetheless pivotal to the redefinition of foreign policy that took place in the 1940s. At least until 1947 in the case of the UN, and for the pro-Europeans still later, Labour policymakers remained dedicated to the attempt to orient the party’s approach to external affairs around the concept of international government, although they differed widely about the geographical area over which that government should extend and what it should do. But as Cold War tensions increased; as the international political organisations that had been set up disappointed their founders’ hopes; and as British particularist tendencies, reinforced by the war, asserted themselves ever more forcibly, more and more Labour policymakers tacitly abandoned the concept in favour of more limited expedients like the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) and the Organisation for European Economic Co-operation (OEEC) in which no potential sacrifice of sovereignty was involved. Although internationalism did not disappear altogether, it was no longer to be the unifying principle of the party’s foreign policy. Rather it became one increasingly beleaguered voice among many, drowned out by the succession of single-issue campaigns, ranging from nuclear disarmament to the

Introduction

11

struggle against apartheid, to which more and more Labour activists turned from the 1950s onwards. Its eclipse thus indicates the point at which Labour foreign policy ceased to articulate a single overarching theme and took on the fluctuating and ad hoc character that has marked the party’s approach to international policy during the last half-century.17 In what follows, I provide an analysis of the changing nature of Labour internationalism in the 1940s that, while broadly chronological in approach, attempts to tease apart policy discussions at ministerial level from the habitually neglected, but in many ways more significant, debate occurring simultaneously within the Labour movement’s official and unofficial ‘opinion-forming’ apparatus: Transport House committees, backbench discussion groups, Labour-affiliated journals, and leftist ginger-groups of all kinds. Chapter 1 surveys the theoretical and historical background of Labour internationalism from the first proposals for international government in 1915 until the collapse of the League at the beginning of the Second World War. In Chapters 2 and 3, I examine Labour policy planning for the ‘new world order’ at sub-Cabinet level between 1939 and 1945, focusing in particular on the critique of Wilsonianism on the left and the appearance of ‘antinationalist’ internationalism in its various forms. Chapter 4 assesses the significance of the contribution made by Labour ministers in the Churchill Coalition to British proposals for an international political organisation. Chapter 5 continues this discussion into the postwar period, concentrating on the Labour government’s UN policy and the debate over revision of the Charter. Chapter 6 deals with the chasm that arose between theory and practice in an area the Labour Party had traditionally regarded as particularly suitable for international government: colonial administration. Chapter 7 concludes with a detailed scrutiny of Labour attitudes with respect to the most important regionalist alternative to the UN, western European federation. The sheer range of issues on which a study of this type bears has necessitated some rigorous setting of boundaries. The whole area of economic internationalism, on which there is scope for another monograph entirely – if not several – is not addressed in any detail here. I have likewise excluded from my discussion Labour’s attitude towards the many specialised agencies that sprang up under the United Nations. Nor have I dealt, except when necessary to clarify the debate within the Labour movement itself, with the specific policies pursued by the Attlee administration at the UN or the Council of Europe.18 This is not a diplomatic history, or even one primarily concerned with Aussenpolitik in the narrowest sense of the word. My purpose in focusing upon Labour conceptions of the ‘new world order’ is rather

12

The Labour Party, Nationalism and Internationalism

to shed light upon the different ways in which British democratic socialists during a period of global crisis attempted to reimpose some type of structure upon a national and international scene whose familiar landmarks had been swept away before their eyes – a process less revealing of the international system that ultimately emerged, than of themselves.

NOTES 1. On 27 May, Churchill expressed willingness in principle to consider ‘peace on the terms of the restoration of German colonies and the [German] overlordship of Central Europe …’. He doubted, however, whether such favourable terms would be forthcoming, and believed that Britain had nothing to lose by fighting on. As he explained to the War Cabinet the following day, ‘The time might come when we felt that we had to put an end to the struggle, but the terms would not then be more mortal than those offered to us now.’ See D. Reynolds, ‘Churchill and the British “Decision” to Fight On in 1940: Right Policy, Wrong Reasons’, in R. Langhorne (ed.), Diplomacy and Intelligence during the Second World War: Essays in Honour of F.H. Hinsley (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985); J. Lukacs, Five Days in London: May 1940 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999). 2. C. Collette, The International Faith: Labour’s Attitudes to European Socialism, 1918–1939 (Brookfield, VT: Ashgate, 1998); K.E. Miller, Socialism and Foreign Policy: Theory and Practice in Britain to 1931 (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1967); J.F. Naylor, Labour’s International Policy: The Labour Party in the 1930s (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1969); H.R. Winkler, Paths Not Taken: British Labour and International Policy in the 1920s (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1994); P. Ward, Red Flag and Union Jack: Englishness, Patriotism, and the British Left, 1881–1924 (London: Royal Historical Society/Boydell & Brewer, 1998). 3. E. Barker, The British Between the Superpowers, 1945–50 (London: Macmillan, 1983). 4. See, e.g., M.A. Fitzsimons, The Foreign Policy of the British Labour Government 1945–1951 (South Bend, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1953); M.R. Gordon, Conflict and Consensus in Labour’s Foreign Policy 1914–1965 (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 1969); E.J. Meehan, The British Left Wing and Foreign Policy: A Study of the Influence of Ideology (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1960); R. Miliband, Parliamentary Socialism: A Study in the Politics of Labour (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1961); E. Windrich, British Labour’s Foreign Policy (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 1952). 5. T.D. Burridge, British Labour and Hitler’s War (London: André Deutsch, 1976); A. Bullock, The Life and Times of Ernest Bevin, Vol. III: Ernest Bevin Foreign Secretary (London: Heinemann, 1983). 6. As the US historian A.J. Rotter has cogently remarked of such approaches, ‘For too long have diplomatic historians behaved as if foreign policymakers shed their cultural assumptions like raincoats at the office door.’ 7. J. Saville, The Politics of Continuity: British Foreign Policy and the Labour Government 1945–46 (London: Verso, 1993); M. Curtis, The Ambiguities of Power: British Foreign Policy since 1945 (London: Zed, 1995). 8. More recently, a similar argument has also been proposed by David Russell, who suggests in a provocative and forcefully argued essay that ‘Labour’s foreign policy after 1945, far from being based on internationalism … was founded on a traditional concept of national self-interest’. However, Russell offers neither a discussion nor even a definition

Introduction

9.

10.

11. 12. 13. 14.

15. 16. 17.

18.

13

of ‘internationalism’, and his description of Ernest Bevin as ‘the formulator of Labour’s view of international affairs’ is much too lacking in nuance. See D. Russell, ‘“The Jolly Old Empire”: Labour, the Commonwealth and Europe, 1945–51’, in A. May (ed.), Britain, the Commonwealth and Europe: The Commonwealth and Britain’s Applications to Join the European Communities (Basingstoke, Palgrave, 2001). See, e.g., S. Greenwood, Britain and the Cold War 1945–91 (London: Macmillan, 2000); J.W. Young, Britain, France and the Unity of Europe 1945–51 (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1984). See, e.g., H. Jones and M. Kandiah (eds), The Myth of Consensus: New Views on British History, 1945–64 (Basingstoke, Hampshire: Macmillan, 1996); S. Brooke, Labour’s War: The Labour Party during the Second World War (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992). H.J. Laski, Socialism as Internationalism (Fabian Research Series No. 132) (London: Fabian Publications, 1949), p. 3. See M. Howard, War and the Liberal Conscience (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), pp. 53–5, 63–6. H. Butterfield, The Whig Interpretation of History (London: Bell, 1931), p. v. Speech to the General Assembly, 10 January 1946, quoted in R. Jenkins (ed.), Purpose and Policy: Selected Speeches by the Rt Hon. C.R. Attlee, C.H., M.P. (London: Hutchinson, 1946), p. 129. For an analysis of this fallacy, see H. Suganami, The Domestic Analogy and World Order Proposals (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). Labour Party, For Socialism and Peace: The Labour Party’s Programme of Action (London: Labour Party, 1935), p. 17. For a discussion of these ‘new modes of protest’ in international and domestic politics since the Second World War, see A. Lent, British Social Movements since 1945: Sex, Colour, Peace and Power (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001). For the UN, Geoffrey Goodwin’s Britain and the United Nations (London: Oxford University Press, 1957) remains the authoritative, though now badly dated, text. No adequate study of British policy at the Council of Europe exists; a useful general survey is A.H. Robertson’s The Council of Europe: Its Structure, Functions and Achievements (London: Stevens, 1956).

1

‘Half a League Onward’: The Labour Critique of the Nation-State, 1900–39

The Labour Party’s emergence in the aftermath of the Great War as Europe’s leading champion of internationalist doctrine was neither a necessary, nor even a likely, consequence of its self-identification as a movement of the democratic left. To the contrary, the socialist tradition out of which Labour emerged at the beginning of the twentieth century was marked by a strong element of British nationalism, if not outright chauvinism. Stung by accusations that socialism was an ‘alien’ import, associated with dictatorship and violence, Labour’s founders were at pains to emphasise both the indigenous roots of their ideology and their repudiation of all taint of ‘continental revolutionism’.1 Few members of the British democratic left, moreover, considered foreign affairs to be more than a diversion from the real business of improving living conditions for the proletariat, until the advent of a war that, by abruptly terminating the existence of several hundred thousand British workers, made such parochial attitudes no longer tenable. By the 1920s, the mainstream of the Labour movement had swung round in favour of the ideal of an international government as the ultimate aim of socialist foreign policy, and of the League of Nations as the preferred vehicle through which to achieve that objective. Such dissent as existed came from those who objected not to the League’s purposes, but to its methods. Accustomed as we are in retrospect to regard the League as an ineffectual talking shop, it is easy to forget that for most of its history the principal criticism levelled by the left against the new international organisation was that it was an instrument of coercion rather than conciliation. Despite these concerns, the Labour Party seemed by the end of the postwar decade to have found in the League an external analogue of the gradualist and pacific path to socialism that it was simultaneously pursuing in the domestic sphere.

‘Half a League Onward’

15

Such optimism, it soon became apparent, was misplaced. The series of crises that overtook the League in the 1930s brutally exposed the contradictions not only of the Wilsonian world order in which it had originated, but Labour’s equation of internationalism and historical inevitability. If the League, as its supporters believed, was truly the expression of a chastened humanity’s desire to turn away from the international system that had produced the horrors of the Great War, it was impossible to account for the rise of a succession of totalitarian régimes that repudiated everything for which it stood. If, on the other hand, the growth of totalitarianism proved that humanity had not yet learned its lesson, adherence to the League represented the continuation of a policy whose inadequacy had already been demonstrated by its failure to check the advance of ultra-nationalist and anti-communitarian doctrines in Europe and Asia. In the closing years of peace, therefore, the Labour Party found itself impaled on the horns of an ideological dilemma – one that could be resolved only by abandoning internationalism altogether, or reformulating it in such a way as to permit its achievement by other than co-operative and consensual means.

IDEOLOGICAL ORIGINS OF LABOUR INTERNATIONALISM It is only a small exaggeration to say that, until the Great War, the Labour Party considered foreign policy a luxury it could comfortably do without. Labour Members of Parliament were as a rule content to follow the lead of their counterparts on the Radical wing of the Liberal Party, a course which was all but dictated for them by the absence of any party machinery capable of giving guidance on external affairs. Although Labour did become a member of the Second International in 1907, it bore its obligations to universal socialist brotherhood lightly. In a report that attempted to justify its inactivity in this area, for example, James Ramsay MacDonald, Secretary of Labour’s Parliamentary Party, lamely protested that he and his colleagues ‘would have gladly raised various … matters of international importance in accordance with the advice issued by the International Bureau, but could not do so under the Rules and Standing Orders of the House of Commons’.2 Nor, in its internal arrangements, did Labour manifest any higher priority to the Second International than was suggested by its meagre parliamentary record on this question. The Secretary of the organisation’s British branch from 1912, Arthur Henderson – who combined this position with that of Secretary of the Labour Party itself – was undeterred from accepting the appointment by the fact that he ‘had few contacts in Europe, was appallingly ignorant of geography,

16

The Labour Party, Nationalism and Internationalism

and spoke no foreign languages’.3 It is hardly surprising, therefore, that in this period Labour thinking about foreign affairs was on the whole narrow and unsophisticated. Much of it, as the party’s future leader Clement Attlee was later to concede, was little more than a gloss upon long-established Liberal and Radical principles.4 From T.H. Green Labour inherited the conviction that the common people of the world constituted an international community whose interests were fundamentally compatible both within and between states.5 From Cobden and Bright it derived a belief in the immorality of state-directed force, and from Gladstone and Hobhouse a contradictory certitude that strong and free nations had a moral obligation to come to the rescue of weak and oppressed ones even at the risk of war. Overlying these core philosophies was a theory of international conflict as the external manifestation of domestic economic inequality which, again, had been appropriated from the work of a Left-Liberal collectivist, John A. Hobson. In a highly influential analysis of imperialism published in 1902, Hobson linked the drive towards overseas expansion with its attendant militarism, arms races, jingoism and periodic war scares to domestic over-production and the search for new markets, a theme that was amplified 12 years later by the Independent Labour Party (ILP) journalist H.N. Brailsford in The War of Steel and Gold.6 For both Hobson and Brailsford, international diplomacy was essentially a rarified form of commercial rivalry in which the interests of entire peoples were held hostage to those of a short-sighted capitalist élite: the solution to conflicts between nations, consequently, was to be sought at home rather than overseas. There was in addition a third variant of Liberal thought – Liberal Imperialism – represented in the Labour Party. Its clearest exposition was to be found in George Bernard Shaw’s pamphlet Fabianism and the Empire (1900) which held the ‘White Man’s Burden’ to be an inevitable, if sometimes regrettable, feature of modern life: the question for socialists was not whether Great Powers ought to possess empires, but whether these territories were being administered in a fashion consistent with the interests of worldwide ‘civilisation’.7 All of these doctrines, however, were of interest only to a relatively few middle-class Labour activists. Neither Hobson and Brailsford’s quasi-Marxist variant of traditional Radical Little-Englandism nor Shaw’s intriguing vision of the spread of collectivist paternalism at the point of a gun found much resonance among the party at large before the war, although both were to have a growing influence thereafter. For the moment, the Fabian-affiliated academic R.C.K. Ensor spoke for many when he doubted ‘whether any view of foreign policy could be so far deduced from the principles of Socialism that only

‘Half a League Onward’

17

Socialists could hold it’.8 Notwithstanding his own fervent commitment to the worldwide unity of interest among his class, James Keir Hardie, Labour’s chairman, could be more dismissive still in his attitude, reminding delegates at the 1907 Annual Conference that, while individual members had dealt with questions of foreign affairs on behalf of their colleagues, such issues were ‘merely incidental to the real work of the Party’.9 The outbreak of the Great War highlighted, although it initially did little to change, Labour’s sense of complacent insularity. With the partial exception of the ILP, the most internationally conscious of Labour’s three constituent societies, whose basic anti-war stance remained consistent throughout the conflict, the party – almost uniquely among European socialist movements – rallied unitedly and with little sense of inconsistency to the defence of the capitalist state to whose supersession it was nominally committed. The very abruptness of its volte-face – from a public call for ‘vast demonstrations against war in every industrial centre’ in the first week of August 1914, to nearly unanimous support for the government in the second – provided a further indication of the shallow roots of Labour’s approach to foreign affairs. Nor did defectors from the new consensus like Ramsay MacDonald, who had succeeded Hardie as party chairman in 1911, display significantly more doctrinal consistency than the acquiescent majority. MacDonald’s opposition to the war owed little to his sense of obligation to the International, and much to his disbelief in the probity of the Entente leaders and his erroneous conviction, fostered by the ‘scientific’ pacifism of authors like Norman Angell, that the conflict would prove economically ruinous to Britain and lead to bread riots within three months. Thus MacDonald found his natural home not in the principled internationalism of a Keir Hardie,10 but in the company of disaffected Left-Liberal politicians like Arthur Ponsonby, E.D. Morel and Charles Trevelyan, with whom he founded the Union of Democratic Control (UDC) as a vehicle to press for a liberal peace agreement and popular involvement in the formulation of foreign policy.11 That a distinctive Labour programme on international government did ultimately emerge was in large measure due to the independent effort of four remarkable individuals: Hobson and Brailsford from the ILP, and Sidney Webb and Leonard Woolf of the Fabian Society. Here too, however, it is necessary to acknowledge the extent to which they were indebted to the pioneering work of Liberal intellectuals. In the autumn of 1914, a number of Liberal foreign policy theorists began a study of how the war might have been prevented, concentrating especially upon the extension and reinforcement of the system of

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The Labour Party, Nationalism and Internationalism

international arbitration established by the First Hague Conference in 1900. As originally conceived, the Hague system possessed serious defects which a second conference, held in 1907, had failed to redress. Its core consisted of a Permanent Court of Arbitration which was ‘in truth neither permanent nor a court’12 but rather a panel of advisers to which disputes might be submitted by agreement between the contending parties. As such, it was equipped to deal only with ‘justiciable’ disputes, or those whose parameters had already been defined by treaty or otherwise by the disputants and hence were capable of being adjudicated in a court of law – that is to say, the very type of disagreement that was least likely to result in war. There was no obligation to submit even ‘justiciable’ matters to the Hague Court, or to accept its verdicts. Nevertheless, as the most widely established agency of international conciliation, the Hague system seemed to offer a model for a more comprehensive structure for the settlement of disputes, the urgent necessity for which the war was daily underlining. The first steps in this direction were taken by the Cambridge classicist, G. Lowes Dickinson, author of an outline scheme for a ‘League of Nations of Europe’ and future member of the Labour Party Advisory Committee on International Questions, and Richard Cross, business manager of the Nation and solicitor to the Rowntrees, a wealthy family of Quaker confectioners with a long-standing interest in pacifist causes. Dickinson and Cross were the leading lights of the Bryce Group, named after its most prominent member,13 composed of academics, journalists and politicians who shared an interest in international organisation. With the collaboration of Brailsford and Graham Wallas, its two most important contributors from the Labour Party, the Bryce Group drew up a set of ‘Proposals for the Avoidance of War’, drafted by Cross, in the winter of 1914–15. This document called for the creation of an international council of conciliation for ‘non-justiciable’ disputes, analogous to the Hague Court, which would enforce a ‘cooling-off’ period pending consideration of the question at issue and publication of a report.14 The Bryce proposals were neither startlingly original nor, in the short term, influential – to no small extent the consequence of Bryce’s reluctance to publicise the group’s work for fear that it would be attacked as a ‘stop-the-war’ society. Their true importance lies in the stimulus they provided for deeper and more intensive analysis of the problem. In December 1914, Beatrice Webb solicited a donation from Joseph Rowntree to enable the Fabian Society to pursue research into the means by which future wars might be prevented. Rowntree’s modest gift of £100 financed the creation of an ‘International Affairs Committee’ of the Fabian Research Department, to whose secretary,

‘Half a League Onward’

19

Leonard Woolf, a former member of the Ceylonese civil service, Mrs Webb delegated the project. Although Woolf and Sidney Webb were the only active members of the Committee, within a few months they had created the skeleton of what may have been the first practical proposal for a true League of Nations. Though Woolf maintained subsequently that the scheme originated with him, it appears that the key ideas were first set out in a letter by Webb in January 1915: Could we not move to a supersession of national conflicts on the same lines as those on which we have superseded personal and municipal conflicts, viz. by an overriding law, made by a superior authority, interpreted by a tribunal with power to fine, and enforced by the power of the Superior Authority? Why should not a Council of all the Powers not [sic] impose the Treaty of Peace on the world as a law, constitute a permanent tribunal to try all issues between nations … and pledge all the signatories to contribute their share towards the sanction enforcing the tribunal’s decision?15 Woolf and Webb published their proposals in a series of New Statesman articles six months later. The structure of their mooted international authority followed closely the pattern contained in the Bryce proposals, incorporating an international high court and an international council. Member states would be bound to submit all justiciable cases to the court, and all other disputes to the council, for enquiry, mediation and eventual report. The concept of a year-long ‘cooling-off’ period, too, was adopted in the new scheme. What was truly radical and original about the Fabian plan was its enforcement provision, which it described as ‘possibly the most essential of all these proposals’. By subscribing to the international organisation, member states would pledge themselves ‘to make common cause, even to the extent of war, against any constituent State which violates this fundamental agreement’.16 Although the Woolf–Webb scheme’s significance is more apparent in retrospect than it was to its contemporaries, virtually every Labour proposal for an international political authority during the next three years was in essence an elaboration of this basic formula. It contained, albeit in barest outline, what would later be recognisable as the characteristic attributes of Labour’s distinctive conception of international authority: supranationalism, the special responsibility of the Great Powers for the enforcement of peace, the principle of collective security, and the analogy with domestic legal institutions. It marked a decisive step away from Liberal notions of an organisation for pacific settlement of disputes modelled on the Concert of Europe and the Hague

20

The Labour Party, Nationalism and Internationalism

Court, in favour of more ambitious plans for a permanent organ of international government. The more systematic and sophisticated approach to international problems revealed in the Woolf–Webb proposal was matched organisationally by the launching, alongside the Bryce Group, of a League of Nations Society in May 1915, in which Woolf, Brailsford and Hobson were the most active participants. It was also visible in the broadened scope these three, in a series of supplemental publications, now began to assign to the proposed world organisation. In Towards International Government (1915), Hobson sketched out a scheme for a directly elected international council which would defuse nationalist conflict by functioning as the guarantor of local autonomy, and attack the underlying causes of war by regulating the international economy. Woolf’s International Government, published the following year, incorporated one of the first attempts to reconcile the idea of a world authority possessing universal responsibilities with the problem posed by small-scale, local disputes by positing a dualistic League, capable of functioning both as a regional organisation focusing on geographically limited conflicts, and as a worldwide institution. Brailsford expanded upon Hobson’s work, proposing in A League of Nations (1917) the adoption of two international charters, the upholding of which would be the business of a worldwide league, guaranteeing the religious and cultural rights of minorities and asserting the rights of all peoples to engage in trade and share the world’s natural resources.17 A question left unaddressed by all three authors, however, was the means by which their proposals were to be translated into practical policy. Impressive as this efflorescence of theoretical activity may have been, all of it had taken place outside the institutional framework of the Labour Party. Throughout nearly three years of war, the Labour Executive remained staunchly resistant both to the work of the foreign policy theorists and to demands for a debate on peace aims. The ILP, it is true, had taken a step in recognition of the new ideas, adopting in April 1915 a resolution for a ‘federation of the nations’ governed by an international council with functions limited to enforcement of arbitration and of the decisions of the court of international law. Even this, however, was considered a little too daring by the Labour Party. In January 1916, the Annual Conference rejected an ILP-sponsored resolution on international organisation on the ground that it would be interpreted as an implicit criticism of Allied war aims and hence of the British government.18 It was not until a year later that the party finally unbent towards the principle of a postwar organisation so far as to adopt a brief resolution endorsing President Wilson’s call for a league to enforce peace.

‘Half a League Onward’

21

Labour’s decision in the summer of 1917 to erect its peace proposals upon the foundation of a League of Nations came, therefore, as something of a surprise. It was to some extent the outcome of a confluence of favourable contingencies. Chief among these was the belated recognition by Labour’s wartime leader, Arthur Henderson, that the party, from the policy standpoint, could no longer afford to ignore the world outside Britain’s borders. This represented a significant turnabout on his part. Briefly a member of the UDC General Council, Henderson had resigned from that body upon his appointment to the Cabinet in May 1915. Thenceforward, his sole contribution to foreign policy issues had been confined to stalwart opposition to all suggestions from Labour members for a discussion of war aims, lest such a debate call into question the justice of the Allied cause. When the Kerensky government in Russia, under intense pressure from its opponents for an immediate end to the war, declared its support in April 1917 for a worldwide socialist conference at Stockholm to define peace aims, Henderson sponsored a resolution of the National Executive Committee (NEC) declaring that British Labour would not attend, and undertook a mission to St Petersburg to induce the Russians to drop their proposal in favour of an inter-allied congress to be held in London. So disturbed was he, however, by the evidence he discovered of the weakness and unpopularity of the Provisional government and the growing strength of Bolshevism, that he returned to Britain convinced of the necessity for a suitably progressive statement of aims to boost the régime’s domestic standing and avert its immediate collapse. Undaunted by the outrage of his colleagues in the War Cabinet over this sudden U-turn and his new-found willingness to parley with enemy politicians (which led to his resignation from the government shortly afterward), Henderson convened a special conference of the Labour Party at the Central Hall, Westminster, on 10 August 1917, to reverse the earlier decision not to attend the Stockholm Conference.19 Because the Labour delegation would need a statement of its own to bring to Stockholm, Henderson turned to Sidney Webb, as one of the party’s leading theorists of international organisation, to provide it. Although Henderson’s receptiveness to the Fabian scheme for international government was strongly influenced by the fact that it provided a convenient off-the-peg foreign policy for the party, it would be a mistake to view Labour’s adoption of the League idea solely as the product of fortuitous circumstances. As we have seen, the two most influential socialist societies, the Fabians and the ILP, were already converts, at least in principle, of more than two years’ standing. Moreover, the idea had made such headway among Liberals – to say

22

The Labour Party, Nationalism and Internationalism

nothing of the US President – that, for tactical reasons alone, Labour would have found it necessary to display a degree of friendliness to it. Even if the party’s acceptance of the principle were to some extent foreordained by the tide of opinion, however, it remained to be decided what sort of League should be supported from among the many options canvassed during the previous two years. Confronted with this choice, Webb opted for the middle ground. His ‘Draft Memorandum on War Aims’, drawn up with the assistance of Camille Huysmans, the Belgian secretary of the Second International, combined key elements of the Fabian plan with that of Brailsford, calling for a supranational authority of which all the belligerents at least would be members, and incorporating an international high court, a legislature with representatives drawn from the member-states, and a collective security pact against future aggression.20 The unanimous adoption of the Draft Memorandum by the Labour special conference did not, however, proceed without resistance from individual members. The pivotal year 1917 also saw the rise of a leftwing critique of the new ideology, the spokesman for which was Ramsay MacDonald. His appearance as tribune of the anti-League forces was in its way no less surprising than Henderson’s sudden acceptance of the League idea, for MacDonald as one of the founders of the UDC had given his backing in September 1914 to a statement of ‘Cardinal Points’ which included ‘the setting up of an International Council, whose deliberations and decisions shall be public, with such machinery for securing international agreement as shall be the guarantee of an abiding peace’. This proposal, however, more accurately represented the views of Lowes Dickinson than of MacDonald, who, during his years in the wilderness, had begun to form his own, increasingly influential, ideas on foreign policy. His resignation from the chairmanship of the party in 1914, moreover, had conferred an aura of martyrdom upon him in the eyes of what was in reality a diverse coalition of anti-war activists, ranging from absolute pacifists to Hobsonian ideologues preaching the indivisibility of capitalism and war – to neither of which doctrines MacDonald himself subscribed – and his dissent thus provided him with both a platform and an uncritical following for his views. In National Defence (1917), MacDonald poured cold water on what he inaccurately styled the ‘American’ notion of a League of Nations which, he argued, was likely to become a traditional Great Power concert or even, if it succeeded too well, a twentieth-century Holy Alliance. Whatever value such a system might have in the postwar world, it was extraneous to the most important task that would face working-class parties: how to secure popular control over the conduct of diplomacy.21

‘Half a League Onward’

23

Notwithstanding MacDonald’s growing stature on the left, his broadside came too late in the day to reverse the pro-League inclination of the party which, after initial reservations, was coming around to the idea. On 13 August, the NEC appointed a six-man sub-committee representing the Parliamentary Committee of the Trades Union Congress (TUC), as well as members of the Labour Executive, to turn the Draft Memorandum into a foreign policy programme for Labour. The resulting programme, which except on points of detail merely codified and clarified Webb’s original statement, was ratified on 28 December by a special party conference.22 The document was subsequently published under Henderson’s name in the policy compendium The Aims of Labour,23 and formed the basis of a statement by the Inter-Allied Labour and Socialist Conference in February 1918. This reinforced still further the party’s commitment to the League concept. It contained sweeping proposals for a fully supranational authority with power to enforce peace, frustrate the machinations of capitalists plotting an ‘economic war’ after the return of peacetime conditions, and impose democratic procedures and self-determination for minorities upon member states.24 The most remarkable feature of the conference, indeed, was the extent to which its recommendations advanced even beyond the position staked out by Henderson himself, who early in 1918 had belatedly plunged into the ideological mêlée by publishing a curious tract, The League of Nations and Labour, advocating a world federation conceived of, as it were, as a TUC among the nations.25 Nevertheless, by combining the maximal demands of those on the left who leaned towards the UDC’s apprehensions of postwar Weltpolitikas-usual, with those of the partisans of a ‘muscular’ League ready to stamp out any recrudescence of German militarism, Labour’s new international policy was one to which both wings of the party could readily give their assent. The new party constitution, drafted by Webb and adopted in February 1918, confirmed this new internationalist consensus. Alongside the famous commitment to secure ‘common ownership of the means of production’, Clause 4 (vii) asserted as one of the party’s principal objects, ‘to assist in organising a Federation of Nations for the maintenance of Freedom and Peace, for the establishment of suitable machinery for the adjustment and settlement of International Disputes by Conciliation or Judicial Arbitration, and for such International Legislation as may be practicable’. It will be observed that this formula, and still more the supranational proposals which preceded it, was a more ambitious concept than the version of the League then being espoused by the US administration. The last of President Wilson’s Fourteen Points of January 1918 had spoken only of an ‘association’ of nations with the single objective of

24

The Labour Party, Nationalism and Internationalism

preserving the ‘political independence and territorial integrity’ of its members, while at the end of the same year Prime Minister David Lloyd George learned that the President did not intend ‘anything in the nature of giving executive powers to the League of Nations’.26 In its overall conception, therefore, this relatively modest vision of the League as the guarantor of national frontiers ran counter to Labour’s internationalist agenda inasmuch as it proposed to perpetuate rather than transcend the existing division of the world into separate sovereign states. There was thus an element of incongruity in Labour’s demands during the last year of the war for a ‘Wilson Peace’ which in fact fell some distance short of its own aspirations. The party’s erroneous projection of its own League programme onto the person of the US President nevertheless indicates how thoroughly the idea had grasped the imagination of party members who, to no less a degree than Wilson himself, were identifying the creation of an effective international organisation as the sine quâ non of a genuinely ‘progressive’ peace settlement. MacDonald, the leading dissentient from this emerging consensus, did not openly oppose the onward march of Labour internationalism, but he continued to maintain that the League was less important than the abolition of ‘class diplomacy’, which was the only sure guarantee of peace. At the Berne Conference of the Second International in February 1919, he moved a successful amendment demanding that League delegates should be drawn from national parliaments and represent all national parties. His general air of scepticism of the intentions of the Great Powers seemed to be justified when the draft proposals for the League were published shortly afterwards. Although the structure described in the League of Nations Covenant corresponded quite closely to the objectives outlined in Wilson’s fourteenth point, Labour in general, and the ILP members who predominated on the party’s newly created Advisory Committee on International Questions (ACIQ) in particular, were appalled by the Allies’ apparent intention of using the League ‘as an instrument for riveting [the Versailles] Treaty on the necks of the defeated Powers’;27 the exclusion of the Central Powers and Russia from the international organisation; the likelihood that it would fail to prevent one-sided disarmament; and the danger that Article X of the Covenant – which bound members to respect the ‘territorial integrity’ of states represented in the League – would set in stone the international status quo while leaving untouched the underlying economic and social causes of wars. From all sides of the party there immediately arose a chorus of demands for revision of the Covenant to diminish the influence of the Great Powers and secure the early adhesion of Germany and the Soviet Union to the international organisation.

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25

It should be noted, however, that these protests were in the main aimed at the refinement of the League rather than its abolition. It is an overstatement to assert that ‘the repetition of demands for revision of the Covenant really implied – though this was seldom explicitly argued – its revision out of existence’.28 Even if enthusiasm for the Covenant was at first barely perceptible, outright rejectionism was short-lived at best. Hobson advocated that the party should accept it and try to work it notwithstanding its ‘terrible defects’. Woolf, too, held that the League, although flawed, was not as defective as the peace; hence ‘[t]he right policy … seems to us to be “Accept the League and reject the Treaty”’.29 A resolution of the Permanent Commission of the Labour and Socialist International in April 1919 left open the possibility of attaining the objects of the League through the agency of an additional ‘super-national authority’ established under either the Covenant or the peace treaty. Furthermore, the Covenant as it stood received at least a grudging endorsement from the Parliamentary Labour Party (PLP) when only a single member voted against the Treaty of Versailles in the House of Commons. The most important factor weighing in favour of Labour’s eventual acceptance of the League as it stood was the perception that it constituted the only organisation likely to be capable of redressing the shortcomings of the peace treaty as a whole, an objective upon which the entire Labour movement stood in virtual unanimity.30 In June 1919, the Annual Party Conference at Southport identified treaty revision as one of the first tasks the League should undertake, a call that was to be reiterated in one form or another every year until 1928. It is true that in the immediate postwar years there was a certain amount of confusion over whether modification of the Covenant or of the treaty should have first priority. At the 1920 Conference at Scarborough, a composite motion called for all the democracies to collaborate in a League of Peoples – a formula which usually connoted a directly elected international parliament – while a resolution the following year at Brighton simultaneously opposed a putative Anglo-French alliance as contrary to the spirit of the League, and asserted that the international organisation itself had been stultified by some of the provisions of the peace treaties. The turning-point in Labour’s attitude, the result of much patient work by Henderson, aided by some early success on the part of the League itself, seems to have been reached by 1922. Attached to the inevitable resolution demanding revision of the Treaty of Versailles, the Conference that year declared its conviction that ‘in the League of Nations and its international Labour Organisation, remodelled, strengthened, and democratised by the inclusion of all free peoples,

26

The Labour Party, Nationalism and Internationalism

exists the most hopeful official machinery for the preservation of international and social peace, and provide [sic] security for all the peoples of the world’. Henderson’s pamphlet Labour and Foreign Affairs, which appeared the same year, amplified and expanded this back-handed endorsement of the League, adroitly turning lingering left-wing discontent to the advantage of supporters of the international organisation. Conceding that the League ideal had been ‘perverted’ and ‘degraded into an instrument of Allied policy’, Henderson set out an ambitious programme which made revision of the Covenant, rather than the Treaty, Labour’s most pressing foreign policy objective. To diminish the influence of the Great Powers, an oft-reiterated complaint of the UDC, he proposed that the Assembly should become the sovereign authority of the League and the Council merely its executive organ. For the same reason the unanimity rule should be abolished, thus enabling the smaller powers to translate their numerical preponderance into real influence. Arbitration should be made compulsory in international disputes, and a League guarantee against aggression given to all members. ‘What Labour is striving after’, Henderson declared, ‘is to endow the League of Nations with the dynamic and the moral authority essential to the development of a real organ of international government. This conception of the League involves a revolution in diplomacy and the whole sphere of foreign policy.’31 Although this optimistic statement reflected more accurately Henderson’s personal priorities than those of the party as a whole at the time, his League reform agenda was thenceforward to constitute the basis of all Labour’s official pronouncements on foreign affairs until 1939. In essence Labour’s League policy thenceforward embodied three fundamental statements of principle. The first was an assertion of the indispensability of an agency of international government organised on the broadest and most inclusive lines. Second, the organisation must not merely respond to events, but seek out and attack the deeper causes of international instability at the level of peoples and classes as well as of governments. Third, the League as then constituted was not yet such an agency, but pointed the way forward to the cooperative world commonwealth of the future. As such, it afforded the means not merely of maintaining peace among nations in the short term, but of schooling humanity in the habits, practices and attitudes of international communitarianism. The flexibility of conception implicit in Henderson’s ingenious formula was at once the League idea’s greatest strength and gravest weakness as a basis of foreign policy for the Labour Party. Capable in ideal form, if not yet in reality, of uniting Fabian gradualists and

‘Half a League Onward’

27

agitators for an immediate international Parliament of Man, advocates of the punishment of aggressors and prophets of universal disarmament, proponents of supranational government and defenders of the international status quo, the League became for Labour a mirror that transmitted back to those who looked into it a faithful image of their own ideal of foreign policy. For this reason it came to constitute a rallying-point for members across the ideological spectrum, giving Labour’s foreign policy between the wars an apparent doctrinal consistency that the Conservatives conspicuously lacked, and a moral dimension calculated to attract floating Liberal voters.32 It was not until the early 1930s that the party was forced to confront the chasm that separated the ideal League of the future and the flawed League of the present, exposing contradictions between these incompatible models of internationalism that shattered the façade of Labour unity on foreign affairs.

THE EMERGENCE OF ‘WHIG’ INTERNATIONALISM Even in the 1920s, Labour divisions over the future rôle of the League showed how frail the party’s internationalist consensus remained. A major setback to the realisation of Henderson’s vision of the League as an activist agency in international affairs was the return of MacDonald to the party leadership in 1922, supported by a sizeable retinue of UDC-affiliated ex-Liberals elevated to Parliament in that year’s general election.33 Although MacDonald’s rhetoric had become more moderate than in 1919, when he had described the League as ‘the organ of the victors to dominate the world’, events were to show how widely separated were his priorities from those of Henderson, who now resumed the office of Party Secretary. In 1923, the League of Nations Union (LNU), the largest and most successful internationalist pressure group in Britain, put forward a Draft Treaty of Mutual Assistance with the aim of allaying France’s postwar security fears and thereby making possible all-round disarmament. Its key elements were a system of regional security pacts, and the provision of additional powers to the League Council to identify and punish aggressors. MacDonald liked neither the Draft Treaty nor its sponsor, with whose Liberal-dominated leaders he had been on terms of hostility since 1918. After gaining power as head of a minority government in January 1924, he spurned the LNU’s customary offer of its honorary presidency to the Prime Minister of the day.34 MacDonald’s attitude towards the Draft Treaty was nevertheless influenced by factors other than personal pique. Apprehensive of what he viewed as ‘the militarist spirit of

28

The Labour Party, Nationalism and Internationalism

France’ and suspicious of any course that might encourage it to pursue a harsher line towards Germany, MacDonald – who served as his own Foreign Secretary as a means of keeping Henderson out of the Foreign Office – informed the LNU president, Viscount Cecil of Chelwood, of his opposition to any scheme that would reinforce the hegemony of the Big Powers over the League Council.35 He was also vigorously opposed to the principles underlying the Draft Treaty, telling Norman Angell that ‘The thing for us to remember is that if all these guarantees to go to war are given in the end we shall go to war.’36 Similar arguments prevailed when the ACIQ, ‘stiff with old UDC hands’, narrowly voted down the Draft Treaty in February, arguing that its military conventions would harden into military alignments and perpetuate the system of Great Power alliances in a concealed form. But MacDonald was unable to pursue a frankly negative League policy without provoking opposition from Henderson and his entourage and exposing a flank to the Liberal Party. The result was confusion that at times approached farcical proportions. At the League Assembly in September, MacDonald and Henderson seemed to commit the British government to two different policies, the former attempting to divert the debate to the comparatively uncontroversial question of arbitration37 and the latter emphasising the necessity of acknowledging the responsibilities of collective security. After MacDonald returned to London mid-way through the meeting, his substitute Lord Parmoor, Lord President of the Council whose remit included responsibility for League affairs, did what he could to render the stance of the British delegation wholly incomprehensible by delivering before the Assembly a speech embodying the most rigorous pacifist sentiments. The withdrawal of the Prime Minister did at least leave the way open for Henderson to devote the second half of the Assembly to dispelling some of the mystification the Labour government had visited upon the conference during its first sessions. During intensive discussion with members of the other delegations and after much smoothing of ruffled diplomatic feathers, he helped to draft a compromise proposal, the Geneva Protocol, which attempted to meet the concerns of antimilitarists by providing for an elaborate system of arbitration in international disputes, the rejection of which by either party would attract military sanctions by the League. As a further safeguard, a clause was inserted to specify that the enforcement provisions of the Protocol would not come into effect until a disarmament conference, to be held in 1925, had successfully completed its work. The drafting of the Protocol was a personal triumph for Henderson, underlined by the Assembly’s unanimous recommendation of the document to member-states and the decision of 11 delegations to sign it before leaving Geneva. On the

‘Half a League Onward’

29

other hand, it placed MacDonald in a highly awkward position, advancing much further towards addressing France’s security concerns than he or the UDC element in the Cabinet wished to go.38 Four leading ministers – Snowden, Haldane, Wedgwood and Ponsonby – opposed ratifying the Protocol; only Parmoor and his assistant, the London School of Economics professor, Philip Noel-Baker, came out strongly in support of Henderson. Had the Prime Minister been forced to declare his own hand, he would have had to face the unenviable prospect of betraying his allies or risking open strife with the Hendersonian internationalists. The fall of his government in October 1924, a week after the adjournment of the Assembly, saved him from the consequences of having to make a decision. Safely in opposition once again, Labour found it possible to warm perceptibly towards the League. The rejection of the Protocol by the incoming Conservative administration provided an opportunity too tempting for even MacDonald to resist. In March 1925 he denounced Austen Chamberlain for turning his back on the chance to strengthen the League, and with little apparent sense of contradiction welcomed the Locarno Pact primarily on the basis that it had removed the last obstacle to the Protocol’s adoption.39 There is no need to attribute the motivation behind these interventions to other than strictly partisan considerations. As MacDonald confessed to a colleague, the main attraction for him of the Protocol was the opportunity it provided ‘of using once more our foreign policy as a well-shod battering ram to smash the Government …’.40 Inasmuch as he could discern any value at all to the League’s security system, it lay in the encouragement it provided to member states to be guided by the ‘spirit of Geneva’ rather than the Protocol itself. Hence, as he told the Commons in July 1926, Britain need not fear subscribing to a collective security treaty that was ‘as big and black as you like on paper’. Because arbitration, disarmament and the force of international public opinion had so diminished the risk of war, the likelihood of Britain being called upon to live up to these commitments was ‘practically nil’. The Protocol was thus no more than ‘a harmless drug to soothe nerves’.41 Remarkably, MacDonald’s implication that Labour leaders supported the Protocol only because they never expected to have to stand over it went unchallenged within the party. This silence is the more surprising in view of the fact that Henderson had stressed the need for compulsory arbitration as early as 1922, and unlike MacDonald had never attempted to evade the reality that military sanctions were an ‘inevitable corollary’ of arbitration and disarmament.42 The most plausible explanation is that the supporters of a strong League were only too well aware of the shallowness of MacDonald’s ‘conversion’

30

The Labour Party, Nationalism and Internationalism

and were anxious not to put the party’s fragile consensus to a test. Instead they seized the opportunity created by the fact that MacDonald’s and Henderson’s public statements on international organisation were for once in harmony to copper-fasten Labour’s commitment to the League. The manifesto Labour and the Nation, adopted at the 1928 Annual Conference, included the strongest statement on collective security made in any official policy document in the past decade and, equally significantly, for the first time failed to include a demand for the substantial revision of the Versailles Treaty. The Labour internationalists’ position received unintentional but welcome reinforcement from the lacklustre League policy of the Conservative government. The majority of Tory politicians, and nearly all the permanent officials of the Foreign Office,43 tended to regard the League at best, in Duff Cooper’s words, as ‘a new piece of nonsense, created by the politicians for their own purposes … to serve as a smoke-screen behind which the diplomatists … could conceal from the public the fact that they had no foreign policy at all’,44 and at worst as an instrument devised by foreigners to manipulate Great Britain into fighting their wars for them. Stanley Baldwin’s foreign policy between 1925 and 1929 gave ample evidence of the strength of these sentiments. The first act of the new Conservative administration was to veto the Geneva Protocol. Its most important foreign policy achievement, the Locarno Treaties, bypassed the principle of collective security altogether in favour of a pact guaranteed by the contracting parties themselves. It repeatedly refused to sign the so-called Optional Clause committing Britain to submit ‘justiciable’ disputes to the Permanent Court of International Justice for binding arbitration. In all these instances, the government opened itself up to criticism for undermining the League; and for many Labour politicians, the temptation to do so overrode whatever misgivings they themselves might have harboured about the organisation. The more sceptical the Tories’ attitude towards the League became, therefore, the more readily did Labour respond in support of, and become identified in the public mind with, a strong Geneva policy. After Labour returned to office in 1929, the Hendersonian high tide reached its fullest extent. Unable on this occasion to keep Henderson and his Cambridge-educated acolytes, Philip Noel-Baker and Hugh Dalton, away from the Foreign Office, MacDonald was in a far weaker position from which to resist a vigorous League policy than he had been five years earlier. While Henderson was compelled to recognise that the Geneva Protocol was beyond resuscitation, he pursued nonetheless an energetic pro-League agenda, reaching across party lines to appoint Cecil, who had resigned from the Conservative

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31

government in 1927 in protest at its lukewarm attitude to Geneva, as a Foreign Office adviser on League affairs. Within months of entering office, Henderson and Dalton had beaten down opposition from officials and the reservations of the Prime Minister to secure Britain’s adhesion to the Optional Clause. Another of their successes was the ratification of the General Act of Arbitration, Conciliation and Judicial Settlement, which rescued from oblivion some of the Protocol’s less controversial provisions. Before the government fell in 1931, they had also laid the basis for convening the long-delayed Disarmament Conference that had been promised in the Covenant. These were, to be sure, incremental steps towards the ideal of international government, rather than the great strides that had been envisaged in 1918. But Henderson’s steady, though cautious, pace minimised the likelihood of dissension within the party, and also probably represented the utmost that could be squeezed out of a reluctant Prime Minister and his allies in the Cabinet. On the whole, the Foreign Secretary’s strategy was remarkably successful: as Fred Leventhal has remarked, alone among Labour governments the 1929–31 ministry ‘commanded the virtually unanimous support of rank-and-file supporters for its international policies’.45 By the beginning of the 1930s, then, a broad measure of consensus prevailed within the Labour Party concerning foreign policy. With the exception of the pacifist and Marxist extremes, who arguably shared more in common with each other than with their colleagues in the centre, Labour had accommodated itself to the League as the expression of the party’s internationalist principles. This level of agreement, however, reflected the triumph not of internationalism per se, but of a peculiarly British and ‘Labourist’ variant of the doctrine. In other words, Labour’s approval of the League was the result not only of its members’ desire to build a structured international system but also the success with which the organisation had been presented to them as the international embodiment of values characteristic of Britain, and British democratic socialism, in particular. A clear illustration of this point is provided by Labour leaders’ frequent recourse to domestic analogies when discussing the League and its evolution. From 1915 onwards, theorists like Woolf and political leaders like Henderson, Noel-Baker and Attlee had maintained that there was no real difference between the governance of a single nation-state and of the community of nations; the principles and problems concerned were in both cases identical. In this formulation, the League, as the governing body of international society, had arisen in the same way and for the same purposes as had civil society in the domestic sphere.46 Hence Labour’s habitual references to the League

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The Labour Party, Nationalism and Internationalism

as a ‘world commonwealth in embryo’, to the Geneva Assembly as a ‘parliament’ of the nations, and to an ‘international police force’ rather than a League army. This essentially Lockean concept of internationalism, with its ideological basis in the ‘original compact’ between the nations represented by the Covenant, was overlain in the course of events with a more ethnocentric version which identified the history of the League specifically with that of Britain, suggesting that the former was following the pattern first established by the latter of peaceful evolution from anarchy to civilisation. The distinctively British values of freedom, tolerance and order that had enabled the Labour Party to come peacefully to power, it was argued, offered a model for other countries to adopt,47 both in their domestic arrangements and internationally through the League.48 Labour internationalism in its mature form, therefore, was a ‘Whig’ internationalism, a projection, mutatis mutandis, of the ‘Whig interpretation’ of British history onto the international arena. This helps to account for its considerable appeal to so many Labour supporters in the late 1920s and early 1930s, for whom the British road to socialism and the League road to world federation appeared as two sides of the same evolutionary coin.

INTERNATIONAL COMMUNITARIANISM UNDER FIRE The crisis-filled year 1931, however, brought the internationalist advance to an abrupt halt and marked a turning-point for both Labour and the League. The decision in August by MacDonald and several of his Cabinet colleagues to abandon the party and join a Tory-dominated National Government, ostensibly to protect the integrity of the currency, dealt a staggering blow to Labour, which in the ensuing general election went on to suffer the worst mauling it had ever experienced as an independent party. The damage done to internal unity and morale was perhaps greater still. Infuriated by their leaders’ ‘treachery’, grassroots activists, especially those from the constituency parties, commenced a campaign aimed at ensuring that Labour rededicate itself uncompromisingly to left-wing principles. A weakened Executive and a weary Henderson, thrust unwillingly for a second time into the leadership in the wake of a MacDonald defection, could do little to restrain the insurgents. At the 1932 Annual Conference the left forced through a resolution committing the party never to participate in government except in fulfilment of an uncompromising socialist programme, causing Henderson to throw up his hands in despair and step down as leader. His successor, George Lansbury, though held in deep affection by colleagues as an elder statesman and idealistic

‘Half a League Onward’

33

Christian pacifist, was even less effectual in resisting the radicalisation of the party. Surprisingly, this period witnessed an intensification of Labour support for the League that was only partly offset by the party’s sharp turn leftwards. An unanticipated consequence of the split was the separation from Labour of many of those who had been at best ambivalent towards the League, and at worst positively antagonistic. In MacDonald, Snowden and Thomas, in particular, Labour unburdened itself of three powerful and persistent sceptics of international government. The disproportionately severe losses sustained in the 1931 election by the ILP, whose parliamentary representation fell from 142 to 5, likewise removed from positions of influence a large number of those who had for years opposed the League on Marxist or pacifist grounds, a process that was completed by the ILP’s disaffiliation from the Labour Party in October 1932. By an unfortunate coincidence, at the precise moment when Labour was preoccupied with its internal tribulations, the League faced the first serious challenges to its authority. The Japanese invasion of Manchuria in August 1931 was in later years to form the first count in Labour’s lengthy indictment of the National Government for its ‘betrayal’ of the Covenant. Conservative ministers, Labour spokesmen alleged, were faced with the stark alternative of defending collective security or British interests, and cold-bloodedly chose the latter in full knowledge of the damage that would be done to the credibility of the League. However much, or little, accuracy there may have been in this assessment of the government’s motivations, its corollary – that Labour recognised the dangers of Japan’s confrontation of the League and warned against it, or that a Labour administration, had it continued in office, would have taken effective action against it – is difficult to sustain. Not until February 1932 – nearly six months after the Japanese seized the town of Mukden – did the party make its first official statement on the issue in the form of a National Joint Council manifesto advocating the imposition of ‘graduated measures of financial and economic constraint’ against Japan unless it ceased its aggressive behaviour towards China. Having issued this proclamation, the Labour movement as a whole proceeded virtually to ignore the Far East pending – and, as it turned out, for some time following – the completion of a League investigation by a commission under the chairmanship of Lord Lytton. Even though the 1932 Annual Party Conference took place only a few days after the publication of Lytton’s report, Manchuria was scarcely referred to in any of the debates. After another hiatus lasting nearly five more months, a joint meeting of the TUC General Council and the NEC finally adopted a resolution in

34

The Labour Party, Nationalism and Internationalism

February 1933 renewing the call for economic sanctions and supplementing it with a demand for the imposition of an arms embargo against both sides. This statement was very nearly the last positive recommendation to be offered by Labour on the matter, and gave little indication of the make-or-break implications for the future of the League that Labour spokesmen were later to discover in it. Despite much subsequent rhetoric, and the conscientious efforts of scholars like John Naylor to identify significant differences between the policies of the Opposition and the government,49 it is difficult to conclude that Labour’s leaders ever appreciated the magnitude of Japan’s defiance of the Covenant except with the benefit of hindsight. As the international situation further deteriorated in the wake of Hitler’s rise to power and the withdrawal of both Germany and Japan from the League, however, some of Labour’s most senior figures did begin to question whether a quicker and more direct route to the final goal of a unitary world state was not called for. One of the more radical alternatives was proposed by Clement Attlee, Labour’s deputy leader. The rise of fascism, he acknowledged in a letter to his brother in April 1933, had raised ‘most difficult problems of policy for our movement. How are we to frame a world plan for Socialism with these conditions on the Continent?’50 By the end of the year, Attlee indicated that his thinking had moved considerably ahead of the gradualist approach to international government epitomised by the League: I am being forced to the conclusion that nothing short of a world state will be really effective in preventing war … I want us to come out boldly for a real long range policy which will envisage the abolition of the conception of the individual sovereign state. It implies of course a revision of the Peace Treaties for the fundamental difficulty of the present situation is that the world is being asked to sit down permanently on a fantastic map of Europe … This may sound very visionary but I am convinced that unless we see the world we want it is vain to try to build a permanent habitation for Peace and that temporary structures will catch fire very soon if we wait any longer.51 Such was Attlee’s conviction that nothing short of a completely supranational system could arrest the slide toward another catastrophic war that in October 1934 he began to investigate the possibility of making a feature film to alert the masses to the urgency of proceeding without further delay toward the ultimate ideal of world government,52 the plot of which he had already sketched out:

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The general idea being the last war wherein two Balkanised despotisms simultaneously wipe out each other’s capitals to the horror of the civilised world. Extremely realist scenes of destruction to be filmed. War fomented by rival armaments groups who own the Press of the two countries. Son of chief armament monger sees wife & children killed, most unpleasantly. Repentance of chief armament monger who gives away story of the working of the ring to the D[aily] H[erald] 53 just in time to turn general election. Follows creation of international world State, abolition of armaments etc. with a postscript some years afterwards illustrating new world conditions by conversations of members of World air communications at H.Q. aerodrome in Vienna. Love interest etc. can be added if necessary. Incidentally there is the end of Nazism as a Hitlerite dictator intent on war is stopped after 48 hours consideration by threat of international interference follows [sic] collapse of Nazism. It is possible that such a theme well worked up might be acceptable to the lords of the film who mostly belong to the Chosen People … It might be quite valuable propaganda if done sufficiently crudely for the popular taste.54 Difficult though it may be to imagine how any additional crudity might possibly have been injected into this outline, Attlee’s excursion into the realm of Hollywood fantasy provided an indication of how seriously some of Labour’s leading internationalists were coming to view the plight in which the League was finding itself in the mid1930s. No less significant was the fact that Attlee’s supranationalist scheme envisaged the relegation of the League to the sidelines, at least for some time. ‘It may be’, he suggested to his brother, ‘that we shall have to look for a time more to a movement working on [the] lines of Western democracy in the British Empire and U.S.A.’55 A number of other Labour theorists had already arrived at a similar conclusion. H.N. Brailsford in particular had drawn the most pessimistic conclusions from the Manchurian crisis. Although disappointed by the decision of the framers of the Covenant to configure the League as an organisation of sovereign states rather than an international legislature as he had advocated, Brailsford had always ranged himself against the contention of some of his ILP colleagues that it constituted nothing more than an ‘international burglars’ union’ whose sole purpose was to provide justifications for Great Power imperialism and an inevitable capitalist war against the USSR. It was in part the extremism of such dogmas that had impelled him to decline to follow the ILP into the wilderness in 1932; instead, he had played a leading rôle in the formation of the Socialist League (SL) as a new left-wing

36

The Labour Party, Nationalism and Internationalism

ginger-group within the Labour Party56 to fill the vacuum left by the ILP’s departure. But his long-standing misgivings about the League in its current form were brought to a head by the Japanese action, which he correctly perceived as a critical test for collective security. Even before the Lytton Commission had submitted its report, Brailsford declared that the League had failed the test, and was now effectively moribund as a peace-keeping institution.57 Nor was its failure entirely to be lamented, inasmuch as ‘a League army to-day would be the picked police force of allied capitalism’. Although Brailsford did not go so far as to advocate the League’s outright abolition, it was essential in his view to ‘make it plain to ourselves and to our adherents that it cannot be the vehicle of a Socialist foreign policy’.58 During the following two years, he was to amplify these themes in his capacity as de facto foreign policy spokesman for the Socialist League, with the encouragement of its leader, Sir Stafford Cripps.59 Brailsford’s proclamation of the League of Nations’ descent to irrelevance, from which he appeared to derive a degree of morbid satisfaction, was vigorously contested. It is true that, at the 1933 Hastings Conference, the NEC allowed an SL resolution moved by Charles Trevelyan which apparently contradicted the principle of collective security to pass without opposition, rather than confront a mass of delegates in truculent mood.60 Yet the same conference went on to call for the creation of a League security force, while Trevelyan himself retreated from the implications of his own resolution two months later. Indeed, one of the party’s most stalwart leftists, Konni Zilliacus, a member of the League secretariat and a future Labour MP, contended in an argument strikingly similar to that of Attlee the previous year that any alternative socialist foreign policy must be based upon a recommitment to the undiluted ideal of world government – although, unlike the Deputy Leader, he was unwilling to relegate Geneva even temporarily to the background. He urged Cripps to issue on behalf of the SL ‘some fairly substantial pamphlet on Labour’s foreign policy, for, hitherto, it has produced nothing except some pretty thorough tripe by Brailsford …’: Everyone nowadays is for peace and almost everyone says he supports the League. Our crowd ought to say boldly that our ultimate aim in foreign policy is a Co-Operative World Commonwealth. Peace, like happiness, is essentially a by-product. Lincoln fought the civil war to preserve the Union; the abolition of slavery was an inevitable concomitant of preserving the Union, for, as Lincoln himself said, the United States could not continue half-slave and half-free.

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In the same way we, Socialists, should be willing to fight for world union against international anarchy because we know that an inevitable concomitant of world union will be the triumph of Socialism.61 The idea that the whole apparatus of the League, however badly flawed, could simply be set aside in favour of a new international organisation, Zilliacus argued, was both ‘woefully unreal and theoretical’, and politically suicidal in present circumstances: ‘Brailsford appears to see no difficulty about scrapping the lot and starting again with a brand-new and totally different programme one year before the election … a new League on the basis of the Kellogg Pact and without sanctions – c’est pas sérieux ça!’62 But neither Zilliacus’s radicalism, nor his uncharacteristic appeal to political pragmatism, succeeded in striking a chord with the leader of the SL. Rather, Cripps remained faithful to the old UDC doctrine that the League was merely the instrument of international capitalism and imperialism. ‘I should have thought’, he replied to Zilliacus, ‘that you would have agreed that the League of Nations composed of Capitalist Governments cannot end war … the fundamental necessity being an economic change in National Governments …’.63 In keeping with this outlook, the SL laid down amendments to the party policy statement War and Peace at the 1934 (Southport) Annual Conference renewing the call for a general strike against war and declaring the League to be ‘built on foundations … which render it impotent to achieve the purposes for which it was ostensibly created’.64 At an SL anti-war conference a year later, Cripps went further still, denouncing the League as a ‘sham’ to which encouragement ‘cannot and must not’ be given. Not only was Geneva little more in practical terms than a continuation of the wartime alliance, it was an ‘incontrovertible fact’ that ‘the League is being used as an instrument by the Imperialist Haves against the Imperialist Have-Nots to stabilise the present division of world resources and markets …’.65 As such it was wholly unworthy of socialist support. For several reasons, such views made little headway beyond the SL’s core constituency in the early 1930s. The first of these – and for the Labour left, the most significant – was the accession in September 1934 of the USSR to permanent membership of the League Council, a development which greatly enhanced the stature of the Genevan organisation in the eyes of many who had previously dismissed it as an anti-Bolshevik front. Second, few outside the left reposed confidence in the judgement of the SL’s leader who, notwithstanding his unquestioned intellectual ability, was regarded by Labour’s trade-union

38

The Labour Party, Nationalism and Internationalism

wing, in Francis Williams’s words, as ‘a political fool … naïve to the point of imbecility’.66 Third, the SL’s stance was in essence a counsel of despair: if international peace was unachievable until socialism had triumphed in every country, any activity aimed at preventing war between capitalist powers could be no more than an attempt to postpone the inevitable. But over and above these considerations was the conviction, shared by a growing body of Labour opinion, that the League alone held out the prospect of averting an anti-socialist alliance between the National Government and the Fascist states whose consequence would be to inflect domestic life in Britain with many of the appurtenances of Continental totalitarianism.67 Thus at the Southport Conference, the SL amendments were rejected and War and Peace, with its declaration of Labour support for military sanctions to enforce the Covenant, was approved by a three-to-one majority. Nevertheless, the manifesto for the forthcoming general election, For Socialism and Peace, which Conference adopted by a similar margin, contrived to find a certain amount of common ground with the SL in its assertion of the mutual dependence of socialism both ‘national’ and ‘international’. The League of Nations, it declared, ‘can succeed only in proportion as it develops in the direction of world government’. On the other hand,‘planning and control in international life both postulate and follow from national plannning and socialised control of our national life. A foreign policy directed to establishing a Co-Operative World Commonwealth of Nations is the inevitable corollary to a home policy which actively works for the establishment of the Socialist State.’ If the Executive’s hope in making this statement was to conciliate the SL and thereby defuse its criticism of the League, the results were disappointing. Displaying an impressive degree of doctrinal consistency in the face of the increasingly prominent rôle played by the Soviet Union in the League’s affairs, Cripps continued to inveigh against the organisation as the instrument of ‘international competitive interests’ and ‘a body the main attraction of which is its name’,68 in the course of a leftward progression that culminated in the proscription of the SL in 1937 and the eventual expulsion of Cripps himself from the party. Long before then, however, Labour and the League had become embroiled in a fresh crisis, the effect of which was to destroy the latter as a significant factor in world affairs and compel the former to confront the reduction to meaninglessness of the fundamental principle upon which all its postwar external policy had been constructed.

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CRISIS OF THE LEAGUE The irony of the Abyssinian crisis was that, in unmaking the League, it provided Labour with the basis of what would ultimately prove to be a devastating critique of the Conservative record on foreign affairs. Yet the events of the summer of 1935, in the short term, were politically little short of disastrous for Labour. Mussolini’s threats against a small and defenceless country, newly admitted to membership of the League, provoked widespread anger and dismay throughout Britain, and gave rise to calls from across the political spectrum for the imposition of sanctions against Italy in the event of it invading Abyssinia. The country as a whole seemed ready to support strong measures in defence of collective security. By a happy coincidence, the League of Nations Union carried out the most extensive survey conducted in Britain since the Domesday Book on precisely this question while the crisis was nearing its height. Of more than 11 million respondents to the LNU’s so-called ‘Peace Ballot’, nearly 90 per cent endorsed the use of economic sanctions as a means of restraining international aggression, a finding to which far more publicity was accorded than the fact that fewer than six in ten of those polled were also willing to back military measures if necessary. Nevertheless, the message of the Peace Ballot was sufficiently clear to impel the Conservatives to pledge ‘steady and collective resistance to all acts of unprovoked aggression’69 and to launch their general election campaign on a straightforward programme of support for the League. Not only, then, did both major parties contest the 1935 election with similar foreign policies, depriving Labour of one of the most potent weapons in its electoral arsenal, but the way was clear for the Tories to exploit Labour’s support for unilateral disarmament for the purpose of portraying themselves as the more enthusiastic defenders of the League’s authority. This, though, turned out to be the least of Labour’s troubles. As the foundations of its foreign policy shifted under its feet, the party lurched from one contradictory statement to another in its attempts simultaneously to maintain a united front, support the League and differentiate itself from the government. In July, the National Council of Labour (NCL)70 demanded that the Cabinet make clear the government’s determination to discharge its obligations under the Covenant, the effect of which Lansbury immediately vitiated by suggesting in a Commons debate that Britain should unilaterally place its weapons upon ‘the altar of international service’ at a disarmament conference.71 Shortly before the Annual Conference at Brighton, Cripps resigned from the NEC rather than ‘be led under the banner of the League to another imperialist war’, while Attlee insisted that the League should

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work for disarmament simultaneously with its coercion of Italy.72 Worse was to come at the Conference itself. Indifferent both to the mood of the party and to the policy adopted at Southport the previous year, Lansbury announced his repudiation on pacifist grounds of military action under any circumstances whatever and was denounced in an unprecedentedly vitriolic speech by Ernest Bevin, who accused him of ‘taking [his] conscience round from body to body asking to be told what [he] ought to do with it’.73 Although Bevin’s demolition of the pacifists contributed to the Conference’s endorsement by a massive majority of a resolution committing Labour to a policy of coercion against Italy even at the risk of war, Lansbury’s position was clearly untenable and he resigned, leaving the party to face a general election the following month under the leadership of the hitherto-anonymous Attlee. The loss of the election under such circumstances was inevitable. The final ignominy, however, was yet to come when the triumphant Conservative government, whose victory owed a good deal to its having stolen Labour’s clothes over the League, was revealed through the publication of the Hoare–Laval Pact in December to be willing to acquiesce in Mussolini’s seizure of approximately half of Abyssinia’s territory. The revelation was at once seized upon by Cripps as evidence that the SL’s attitude towards the League had been justified after all, an argument that recent events had made difficult to refute. The Abyssinian débâcle represented the point at which, for a substantial proportion of Labour opinion, the League ceased to represent the means as well as the end in foreign policy. As late as the summer of 1935, so hawkish and Germanophobic a figure as Hugh Dalton could believe that the international system might yet be kept afloat if Hitler could be persuaded to annul his notification of withdrawal from Geneva and given every encouragement to seek peaceful change under Article XIX of the Covenant. While there was nothing original about Dalton’s proposal, which differed less than he may have wished to acknowledge from the policy of the National Government,74 his adherence to the League and his faith in the viability of its machinery was an indication of the extent to which the international organisation had continued to embody the belief of a majority of the party in the possibility of a harmonious world order. By 1936 little basis for that confidence remained; and once again, Brailsford was quick to remind his Labour colleagues that he had told them so. In a series of New Statesman articles later reprinted in pamphlet form, he tolled the passing bell on the Genevan experiment. It had been ‘a superfluity, a functionless fifth wheel on the chariot of history that spun ineffective in the air’, whose sole achievement was the entrenchment of the international status quo. While the League’s failure

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stemmed in part from the defects of the Covenant, no international organisation that represented governments alone could hope to succeed. Brailsford therefore pressed once again the idea of an international legislature, with a strong executive responsible to it. Rather than proceed directly to the creation of such a body, he proposed that Britain, France and the USSR should take the lead as the three Powers most sympathetic towards socialism. Together, they could form an ‘inner League … a League within the League’ to co-ordinate their economic and security policies, dismantle imperialism, and pursue the problems of peaceful change that the existing League had conspicuously failed to tackle. Once the three Powers had taken the initiative in this manner, their example would suffice to rally to their side a sufficient number of smaller countries to outweigh decisively any combination of hostile states and enable agencies of international government to evolve. ‘As [the inner League’s] members learn to co-operate, and test each other’s sincerity and goodwill, the actual Federal institutions may come into being.’75 The measure of Labour intellectuals’ declining confidence in the League was the extent to which, in contrast to two years earlier, Brailsford’s analysis was echoed by the party’s leading internationalists. Leonard Woolf conceded in the summer of 1936 that the League in its current form was done for; nobody could continue to believe that the British – or any other – government had the least intention of working to make collective security a reality.76 Although agreeing that a defensive alliance between Britain, France and the USSR offered the only chance of averting war, Woolf struck an even more pessimistic note than Brailsford had done, rejecting the notion that a resurrected League could possibly emerge from such an arrangement. So deeply had the faith in collective security of the smaller powers been shaken that the re-constitution of the League would require a long and painful process of confidence-building, even if the sincerity of the Great Powers could be taken for granted. The task of restoring the international organisation would be far more difficult than most Labour members realised, and it was inconceivable that Britain could play any useful part in it as long as the National Government remained in power.77 It was one thing for unelected theoreticians to reach a consensus that support for the League no longer constituted a viable foreign policy for the Labour Party. It was to prove a great deal more difficult to impress that conclusion upon Labour’s leaders, and still more so to derive from it an alternative policy. The only member of the front bench to respond publicly to Brailsford’s proposals was Herbert Morrison, who in a speech at Geneva in August 1936 called not only for ‘an inner ring of States’ to be formed under Article XXI of the Covenant but a ‘central consultative parliament’ representative of the

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legislatures of its members.78 Notwithstanding Attlee’s assertion that Baldwin’s government had ‘destroyed the League as an effective instrument for peace’, an accusation to be endlessly reiterated from Labour platforms in the following years, both he and the majority of his colleagues remained remarkably resistant to the logic of their own arguments. In a paper prepared for the ACIQ in December 1936, Woolf and Ivor Thomas warned that the leadership’s refusal to confront forthrightly the consequences of the League’s failure would cause the party to lose touch with the electorate. ‘To pretend that … the Governments and peoples of this and other countries can still rely on the League for security’, they stated bluntly, ‘is to ignore irrefutable facts. The task before the Labour Party is nothing less than a revision of its whole peace policy.’ The Woolf–Thomas paper, though seemingly unanswerable, evoked only opposition and indifference from its intended audience. Charles Roden Buxton, chairman of the ACIQ, rejected its assumption that the dictatorships were implacable and called once again for revision of the Versailles Treaty.79 The League’s leading supporter on the Labour front bench, Philip Noel-Baker, condemned the document as illinformed, and threatened to resign without the ‘slightest hesitation’ from the Commons and the party if it were adopted as policy. The NEC gave the paper a reading but took no immediate decision. Instead it directed the International Secretary at Transport House, William Gillies, to draw up a memorandum assessing the implications of recent international events. At Bevin and Dalton’s urging this paper, ‘Foreign Policy and Defence’, was published substantially unaltered by the NCL in July 1937 with the title International Policy and Defence. After surveying the history of international relations since 1919, the document made the seemingly important concession that ‘the League of Nations, for the time being, has been rendered ineffective’ and that, in consequence, a Labour government coming to power in the immediate future ‘would be unable to reverse the present programme of Rearmament’. It would thus seem at first glance that the NCL statement, which went on to reverse Labour’s long-standing and controversial policy of voting against all defence estimates other than those specifically required for collective security under the League, had endorsed the ACIQ’s call for a fundamental review of foreign policy. But appearances are, in this case, deceiving. No sooner had the Labour leadership momentarily acknowledged the League’s impotence than it began to retreat from the implications of that fact. British policy above all, the NCL went on to assert, was responsible for the calamitous state of affairs that had arisen. The League could be made strong again ‘provided that a British

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Government soon comes to power which will base its policies on the declarations of the British Labour Movement’. The document recommended revising the Covenant to enable the League to deal with disputed frontiers, forging a new international economic settlement on the basis of equal access to colonial resources, and confining the benefits of co-operation to those who were prepared loyally to accept the obligations of all-in arbitration and collective security. The net effect of Woolf and Thomas’s clarion-call of December 1936, then, seemed to have been to rally the leadership behind Woolf’s proposals circa 1934. Once again various inducements were held out to the Fascist states to rejoin the League; once again it was suggested that all that was needed to restore the international organisation to full vigour was a change of government in London. For all its apparent recognition of harsh reality, the constructive suggestions of International Policy and Defence had a distinctly antique flavour. In other respects, too, Labour found it difficult to break the mental habits of a political lifetime. Long after the futility of such efforts had become obvious, Noel-Baker devoted himself to the organisation of the International Peace Campaign, a last-ditch effort launched in September 1936 by a discordant coalition of European societies to revive public support for the League, to the neglect of his duties as a member of the NEC and chairman of the ACIQ.80 During the debate in the House of Commons on the Munich crisis in 1938, Attlee expressed the hope that Hitler would rejoin the League inasmuch as he could now do so on a basis of equality with other members, an aspiration that, as John Naylor rightly observes, ‘verged on the ridiculous’.81 The official foreign policy resolution submitted by the NEC to the 1939 Annual Conference demanded, for what would be the last time, the rebuilding of the League and ‘organised international co-operation to eliminate the fundamental causes of war and to raise the standard of living in all lands’. The incongruity of these reiterations of support for an agency which to all intents and purposes no longer functioned in the realms of politics or security was not lost on members of the ACIQ, who continued to view the scene with a detachment of which the leadership was seemingly incapable. In a March 1939 memorandum, they pointed out that a dichotomy had arisen between Labour’s long-term objectives and its immediate policy, that the party was failing to address: Throughout the last 20 years the Party has based its international policy on the League of Nations … This policy of the Party remains today the only sane long-term policy which gives a chance of establishing a stable peace. But …

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the very fact that the National Government has consistently rejected it and thereby created a state of international anarchy in which the democracies are threatened by militant and aggressive dictators tends to make a mere restatement of the Party’s old policy sound academic, unreal, and utopian … Labour’s real and fundamental policy of law, justice, collective security, peaceful change, and disarmament sinks into the background and it has become easy to misrepresent the Party to the less thoughtful electors as … differing from [the government] only in being bellicose where Mr. Chamberlain is pacific.82 The dilemma described by the ACIQ was in fact an insoluble one, for the very reason they themselves had identified. The basis of Labour’s distinctive foreign policy was that real security could be found only through ever closer co-operation within international institutions, and that policies based on traditional notions of self-interest led only to ruin. So long as there existed a viable international organisation through which to pursue such co-operation, it was possible for the party to make clear the differences in philosophy that divided it from the Conservatives. Once the League had ceased to maintain its credibility as an effective agency of international government, however, Labour found that it lacked a vocabulary to respond to the approach of war in ways that were relevant to the situation. Like the League itself, Labour’s internationalist approach was geared towards the avoidance of crises rather than their effective management; while it could point out the errors of the past, it had little to say about what must be done in the immediate future. Thus during the last three years of peace the party found itself trapped in a rhetorical paradox, in which the ideal of internationalism could be asserted only through the language of national self-interest to which it was fundamentally opposed. Labour’s predicament was tellingly encapsulated in an exchange between Dalton and Churchill, when the two met to try to draft a motion critical of the government during the Munich debate. ‘Several possible drafts, centring about collective security, were discussed. To one that referred to “national unity and strength”, Dalton retorted, “That is not our jargon.” Churchill … replied that it was jargon they might all have to learn.’83

NOTES 1. Ward, Red Flag and Union Jack, chs 1–3 passim.

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2. Labour Party, Report to the International Congress, Copenhagen, 1910 (London: Labour Party, 1910). 3. F.M. Leventhal, Arthur Henderson (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1989), p. 49. 4. C.R. Attlee, The Labour Party in Perspective (London: Victor Gollancz, 1937), p. 200. 5. ‘There is no such thing as an inevitable conflict between states … The more perfectly each one of them attains its proper object of giving free scope to the capacities of all persons living on a certain range of territory, the easier it is for others to do so; and in proportion as they all do so the danger of conflict disappears.’ T.H. Green, Lectures on the Principles of Political Obligation, quoted in Howard, War and the Liberal Conscience, pp. 58–60. See also D. Boucher, ‘British Idealism, the State, and International Relations’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 55, 4 (October 1994). 6. J.A. Hobson, Imperialism: A Study (New York: Pott, 1902); H.N. Brailsford, The War of Steel and Gold: A Study of the Armed Peace (London: G. Bell, 1914). 7. G.B. Shaw, Fabianism and the Empire (London: Fabian Society, 1900), p. 23. 8. Fabian News, 24, 12 (November 1913), p. 81. 9. Report of the Seventh Annual Conference of the Labour Party [hereafter cited as 7 LPCR] (Letchworth: Garden City Press, 1907), p. 38. 10. In the last days of peace Hardie campaigned desperately against British involvement in the conflict. His genuine horror of war did not, however, lead him actively to oppose his country’s cause thereafter: merely to refrain from supporting it. As Geoffrey Foote concludes, ‘His sympathies remained with the British working class, even if this meant ignoring the interests of the international workers’ movement.’ G. Foote, The Labour Party’s Political Thought: A History (London: Croom Helm, 1985), p. 65, emphasis in original. 11. M.R. Swartz, The Union of Democratic Control in British Politics during the First World War (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971), pp. 11–21. 12. F.P. Walters, A History of the League of Nations, vol. I (London: Oxford University Press, 1952), p. 13. 13. James, 1st Viscount Bryce (1838–1922), Professor of International Law at Oxford University and former British Ambassador to Washington. He was noted for assisting President W.H. Taft in the latter’s – ultimately unsuccessful – attempt to conclude a treaty of arbitration between the United States and Britain in 1909. 14. G.W. Egerton, Great Britain and the Creation of the League of Nations: Strategy, Politics, and International Organization, 1914–1919 (London: Scolar, 1979), ch. 1. 15. Sidney Webb to Woolf, 21 January 1915, N. MacKenzie (ed.), The Letters of Sidney and Beatrice Webb, vol. III: Pilgrimage, 1912–1947 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), p. 47; emphases in original. For Woolf’s claim to have been the sole author of the scheme, see L.S. Woolf, Beginning Again: An Autobiography of the Years 1911–1918 (London: Hogarth Press, 1964), p. 186. While Woolf’s contribution to the theory of international government was by any measure of great significance, he consistently underplayed the extent of his indebtedness to others. 16. Fabian Research Department, International Affairs Committee, ‘Suggestions for the Prevention of War’, New Statesman and Nation, 17 July 1915, p. 2, emphasis in original. 17. J.A. Hobson, Towards International Government (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1915); L.S. Woolf, International Government (London: Fabian Society/George Allen & Unwin, 1916); H.N. Brailsford, A League of Nations (London: Headley, 1917). See also F.M. Leventhal, The Last Dissenter: H.N. Brailsford and his World (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985), pp. 136–9. 18. A notable, though isolated, dissentient from this arm’s-length attitude was the Labour junior minister George Barnes, who became chairman in May 1916 of the small League to Abolish War, a body which advocated the creation of a postwar league and an inter-

46

19.

20.

21. 22.

23.

24.

25. 26. 27. 28.

29. 30.

31. 32.

33.

34.

The Labour Party, Nationalism and Internationalism national police force. M. Ceadel, Semi-Detached Idealists: The British Peace Movement and International Relations, 1854–1945 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 225–6. For a detailed discussion of Labour’s involvement in the Stockholm episode, see S.R. Graubard, British Labour and the Russian Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1956), pp. 16–36. H.R. Winkler, The League of Nations Movement in Great Britain (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1952), pp. 110–12; P. Pugh, Educate, Agitate, Organise: 100 Years of Fabian Socialism (London: Methuen, 1984), pp. 137–8. J.R. MacDonald, National Defence (London: G. Allen, 1917). Labour Party and Trades Union Congress, Memorandum on War Aims to be Presented to the Special Conference of the Labour Movement at the Central Hall, Westminster, London, S.W., on Friday, December 28th, 1917 (London: Co-operative Printing Society, 1917). As Barbara Wootton, who worked at the TUC and Labour Joint Research Department in the early 1920s, observed, it was all too common an occurrence for Labour notables to commit themselves to print without ‘the faintest grasp of the meaning’ of what appeared under their names. ‘Once I remember [Walter] Milne-Bailey suggesting in cynical mood that, at the annual fair organised by the London Labour Party, all the books on sale should be autographed by their real authors.’ B. Wootton, In a World I Never Made (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1967), p. 69. Inter-Allied Labour and Socialist Conference, Memorandum on War Aims Agreed Upon at the Central Hall, Westminster, London, S.W., on February 20th to 24th, 1918 (London: Co-operative Printing Society, 1918). A. Henderson, The League of Nations and Labour (New York: Oxford University Press, 1918). Imperial War Cabinet minutes, 30 December 1918, quoted in Egerton, Great Britain and the Creation of the League of Nations, p. 106. M.A. Hamilton, Arthur Henderson: A Biography (London: Heinemann, 1938), p. 209. H.R. Winkler, ‘The Emergence of a Labor Foreign Policy in Great Britain, 1918–1929’, Journal of Modern History, 28, 3 (September 1956), p. 252. In his most recent work on the subject, Professor Winkler has intimated that this attitude was more characteristic of the ILP than of the Labour Party as a whole. See Paths Not Taken, pp. 82–3. ‘Gird Up Thy Loins’, International Review, July 1919, quoted in D. Wilson, Leonard Woolf: A Political Biography (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1978), p. 137. Even before the formal signing ceremony at Versailles, Henderson had uncompromisingly declared: ‘The Peace Treaty is not our treaty, and we shall never accept it. We shall never rest satisfied until it has been fundamentally restructured.’ Quoted in C. Wrigley, Arthur Henderson (Cardiff: GPC Books, 1990), p. 130. A. Henderson, Labour and Foreign Affairs (London: Labour Party, 1922), pp. 9–10. The Liberal Party had also been a conspicuous supporter of the League since its inception, although the ideal of the ‘world state’ occupied a far less prominent place in its propaganda than in that of the Labour Party. The disunity and maladroitness of the party leadership both before and after formal reunification in 1923, however, cost the Liberals much of the political dividend they might have expected to gain from this stance, and led to a continuous haemorrhage of middle-class support to Labour. For a discussion of Liberal internationalism between the wars, see R.S. Grayson, Liberals, International Relations and Appeasement: The Liberal Party, 1919–1939 (London: Frank Cass, 2001). According to E.D. Morel (who himself ousted Winston Churchill in Dundee), the 1922 Parliament included 30 UDC members. Swartz, Union of Democratic Control in British Politics, p. 220. MacDonald’s quarrel with the LNU was apparently related to the fact that he had not been invited to join its executive at the time of its formation. R.W. Lyman, The First Labour Government 1924 (London: Chapman & Hall, 1957), p. 169.

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35. K. Robbins, ‘Labour Foreign Policy and International Socialism: MacDonald and the League of Nations’, in K. Robbins (ed.), Politicians, Diplomacy and War in Modern British History (London: Hambledon, 1994), p. 260. 36. N. Angell, After All (London: Hamish Hamilston, 1951), p. 242. Emphasis in original. 37. Even MacDonald’s admirers, F.P. Walters noted, ‘could not ask but why … if he believed so profoundly in arbitration, he had refrained from taking the obvious and expected step of signing the Optional Clause’ that committed signatories to accept the jurisdiction of the Permanent Court of International Justice. Walters, History of the League of Nations, vol. I, p. 269. 38. MacDonald’s Cabinet included no fewer than nine UDC members; another six held lesser positions in the government. 39. D. Marquand, Ramsay MacDonald (London: Jonathan Cape, 1977), pp. 418, 467. 40. Ibid., p. 469. 41. Ibid., p. 512. MacDonald elaborated on this optimistic view of the Protocol: ‘So soon as it has been worked once or twice it will be impossible for a nation to defy it – impossible not owing to the menace of force but to habit and other psychological and moral reasons … The era of peace will have come at last.’ J.R. MacDonald, ‘Protocol or Pact?’, International Conciliation, 212 (April, 1925), p 39. 42. Leventhal, Arthur Henderson, p. 181. Henderson’s call for compulsory arbitration had been made at the World Peace Congress, where he proposed that the Covenant should be amended to compel states to submit non-justiciable disputes to the Permanent Court of International Justice, or some other League agency. 43. Parmoor recorded that with the exception of Alexander Cadogan, head of the League of Nations Department, and Sir Cecil Hurst, the Legal Adviser, his reception at the FO in 1924 ‘was not cordial. I soon found that I was regarded as a cuckoo in the nest, or as a strange animal who had found his way within a sacred enclosure.’ C.A. Cripps (Baron Parmoor), A Retrospect (London: Heinemann, 1936), p. 197. 44. D. Cooper, Old Men Forget (London: R. Hart-Davies, 1953), p. 157. 45. Leventhal, Arthur Henderson, p. 178. It has been suggested that ‘Labour was so rent with controversy over everything else between 1929 and 1931 that it had neither time nor energy for dispute over foreign affairs.’ A.J.P. Taylor, The Trouble Makers: Dissent over Foreign Policy, 1792–1939 (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1958), p. 168. But this does insufficient justice both to Henderson’s achievements and to the Labour Party’s capacity and enthusiasm for internecine warfare. 46. For a general discussion of this philosophy, see Suganami, Domestic Analogy, esp. ch. 5. 47. Attlee, The Labour Party in Perspective, p. 276. 48. ‘The British Commonwealth of Nations’, Attlee declared in a statement that the leaders of the Indian National Congress, among others, would no doubt have found startling, ‘is to-day a League of Nations in miniature.’ C.R. Attlee, The Will and the Way to Socialism (London: Methuen, 1935), p. 88. 49. Naylor, Labour’s International Policy. 50. C.R. Attlee to Tom Attlee, 3 April 1933, Ms. Eng. c. 4792, f. 57, Attlee papers, Bodleian Library, Oxford. 51. C.R. Attlee to Tom Attlee, letter dated ‘January 1, 1933’ [recte 1934], Ms. Eng. c. 4792, f. 52, Attlee papers. 52. Having discussed the idea with Kingsley Martin, editor of the New Statesman, who considered it had ‘possibilities’, Attlee despatched his private secretary, John Dugdale (Minister of State for the Colonies, 1950–51), to gain the assistance of the journalist Beverley Nicholls ‘who is well in with films in addition to being antiwar’ in promoting his scheme. It is unclear whether the initiative proceeded any further. 53. The Labour Party’s daily newspaper. 54. C.R. Attlee to Tom Attlee, 18 October 1934, Ms. Eng. c. 4792, f. 65, Attlee papers. 55. C.R. Attlee to Tom Attlee, 3 April 1933, Ms. Eng. c. 4792, f. 65, Attlee papers.

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56. Or, as its critics alleged, a party-within-the-party. See P. Seyd, ‘Factionalism within the Labour Party: The Socialist League 1932–1937’, in A. Briggs and J. Saville (eds), Essays in Labour History 1918–1939 (London: Croom Helm, 1977). 57. New Leader, July 1932. 58. H.N. Brailsford, ‘A Socialist Foreign Policy’, in C. Addison et al., Problems of a Socialist Government (London: Victor Gollancz, 1933), pp. 263, 285. Brailsford was equally dismissive of calls, like those of Attlee, for an immediate ‘great leap forward’ towards world federation. ‘International Socialism is passing through an hour of defeat and retreat. We have tasks more urgent than the mapping of Utopia.’ Ibid., p. 286. 59. Ironically, Cripps was Lord Parmoor’s son: though a lawyer and a devout Anglican like his father, he inherited none of the latter’s pacifism or reverence for international institutions. 60. Trevelyan’s resolution demanded a general strike in the event of war, making no distinction between those arising from observance of collective security obligations and any other conflict. ‘The League of Nations’, he declared, ‘is worked by feeble and sceptical Governments like our own, or by Governments that openly deride world peace, like Italy and Germany.’ Quoted in M. Pugh, ‘Pacifism and Politics in Britain, 1931–1935,’ Historical Journal, 23, 3 (September 1980), p. 648. 61. Zilliacus to Cripps, 4 April 1934, Mss. Cripps 515, R.S. Cripps papers, Nuffield College, Oxford. 62. Zilliacus to Cripps, 16 May 1934, Mss. Cripps 515, Cripps papers. 63. Cripps to Zilliacus, 4 September 1934, Mss. Cripps 515, Cripps papers. Wars arose, the SL leader proclaimed, ‘essentially from economic conditions and not, as is so widely assumed, from merely political, racial, or religious differences’. R.S. Cripps, ‘The Political Realities of Rearmament’, in B. Russell et al., Dare We Look Ahead? (New York: Macmillan, 1938), p. 96. 64. It was in vain that Zilliacus pointed out that such a policy compelled the working class to take action ‘against any British capitalist government that went to war, whether or not it was acting in conformity with its obligations under the Covenant’. Zilliacus to Cripps, 10 September 1934, Mss. Cripps 515, Cripps papers. Emphasis in original. 65. Speech by Cripps to Socialist League Anti-War Conference, 14 September 1935, Mss. Cripps 458. 66. F. Williams, Nothing So Strange (London: Cassell, 1970), p. 136. Williams may have borrowed this pithy phraseology from Dalton, who had earlier described Cripps as ‘naïve, often to the point of sheer imbecility’. Dalton to Kingsley Martin, 24 September 1935, quoted in B.K. Martin, Editor: A Second Volume of Autobiography 1931–45 (London: Hutchinson, 1968), p. 173. 67. See, e.g., Attlee, The Labour Party in Perspective, p. 158; G.D.H. Cole, ‘In England – Now’, n.d., Cole papers, A1/70/7/5, Nuffield College, Oxford. 68. R.S. Cripps with M. Foot, The Struggle for Peace (London: Victor Gollancz, 1936), pp. 53, 56. Cripps’s stance was, however, actively contested from within by the SL’s fellow-travelling contingent. See P. Corthorn, ‘The Labour Party and the League of Nations: The Socialist League’s Rôle in the Sanctions Crisis of 1935’, Twentieth Century British History, 13, 1 (March 2002). 69. Speech by Sir Samuel Hoare to the League Assembly, 11 September 1935. The Times, 12 September 1935. 70. The NCL was created on Ernest Bevin’s initiative in 1931 to strengthen the voice of the unions within the party. It consisted of seven representatives from the TUC General Council, three from the NEC and three from the Executive of the Parliamentary Labour Party. To maximise its influence over the NEC, its monthly meetings were held on the day before those of the Executive. The NCL was highly successful in this regard; throughout the 1930s, it carried more weight within the party than any other standing organisation.

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71. 304 H.C. Deb. 5s., c. 2894 (1 August 1935). 72. Naylor, Labour’s International Policy, pp. 93, 96. 73. The word ‘taking’ was recorded in the official Conference report; elsewhere Bevin was reported as having said ‘hawking’, ‘dragging’ or ‘trailing’. What is not in doubt, however, is the extent to which Lansbury’s pacifism caused him to lose touch with the sentiment of his own party, and indeed with reality. As late as 1938, he could write of Hitler that ‘In spite of the past, it seemed to me that … Christianity in its purest sense might have a chance with him.’ G. Lansbury, My Pilgrimage for Peace (New York: Henry Holt, 1938), pp. 120–1. 74. ‘Think what we may of him and his régime – and we need join no Innocents’ Clubs – we must try to come to terms with Hitler … We should try our hardest to overcome the very natural reluctance of other European States to respond to his positive proposals.’ H. Dalton, ‘The Present International Situation’, Political Quarterly, 6, 3 (July–September 1935), p. 348. Nor was Hitler the only dictator with whom Dalton was prepared to deal: many years later, he admitted having spent the summer of 1935 ‘canvassing privately within the Labour Party for support of the Stresa Front’. C.R. Rose, ‘The Relation of Socialist Principles to British Labour Foreign Policy, 1945–51’, unpublished D. Phil. dissertation, Oxford University, 1959, p. 47, n. 1. 75. H.N. Brailsford, Towards a New League (London: New Statesman and Nation, 1936). 76. L.S. Woolf, ‘The Ideal of the League Remains’, Political Quarterly, 7, 3 (July–September 1936), p. 339. Woolf continued to downplay the bellicosity of the Fascist powers in favour of a structural critique of the international system: ‘I do not believe that the governments of Hitler and Mussolini “want” war any more than did those of the Kaiser, the Tsar, and poor old Francis-Joseph. Nor is it any good blaming it on the wickedness of Nazis, Fascists, or the cat. Nazis and Fascists are no wickeder than our own Cabinet, the members of the Labour Party Executive, or the most pacific socialist.’ 77. L. Woolf, ‘The Resurrection of the League’, Political Quarterly, 8, 3 (July–September 1937), pp. 336–52. 78. Morrison speech, ‘A New Start with the League of Nations’, delivered to the Geneva Institute of International Relations, 21 August 1936, ID/INT/3/1, National Museum of Labour History, Manchester. 79. Wilson, Leonard Woolf, p. 191. 80. D.K. Whittaker, Fighter for Peace: Philip Noel-Baker 1889–1982 (York: William Sessions, 1989), p. 144. For a concise summary of the International Peace Campaign’s activities, see Ceadel, Semi-Detached Idealists, pp. 348–58, 370–5. 81. 339 H.C. Deb. 5s., c. 357 (4 October 1938); Naylor, Labour’s International Policy, p. 252. 82. Advisory Committee on International Questions No. 502A. ‘The Labour Party’s International Policy’, March 1939. 83. Naylor, Labour’s International Policy, p. 253.

2

Dictatorship of the Secretariat: Transport House and the Rise of ‘Muscular’ Internationalism

The abruptness with which the League of Nations was dethroned from its position as the hub of the post-Versailles international system left the Labour Party without a focal point for its foreign policy. In the nine months following the outbreak of the Second World War, party spokesmen offered little to the debate on the breakdown of the international system beyond the heaping of recrimination upon those deemed responsible. During the period of the ‘Phoney War’, Labour speakers throughout the country furiously castigated the National Government for its ‘sabotage’ of the League and its ‘betrayal’ of collective security. There is no reason to doubt the genuineness of their anger, or the sincerity of their convictions about Tory culpability. But beneath this chorus of denunciation – and fuelling it to no small degree – was an awareness that Labour’s distinctive appeal in foreign affairs had itself become part of the collateral damage of the League’s collapse. In terms of the party’s political credibility alone this was serious enough, for, if an effective international organisation no longer existed, an external policy wholly predicated upon its support could hardly be persisted with. The ideological difficulty for Labour, however, ran deeper still. Not only had the Genevan experiment itself conspicuously failed, but the pattern of overseas events since 1931 seemed fundamentally to have contradicted the Whig-internationalist assumption that the process of political evolution was leading inexorably in the direction of the ‘co-operative world Commonwealth’ to which the party aspired. The deficit, in other words, embraced the realm of theory as well as policy. Much of the determinedly retrospective character of Labour statements on overseas affairs during the first months of the war proceeded from consciousness of the magnitude of the task ahead: one that required, as Leonard Woolf and Ivor Thomas

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had pointed out three years earlier, nothing less than the re-examination and re-conceptualisation of the most basic assumptions that had underpinned the party’s foreign policy for the previous 20 years. The first attempt to respond to this challenge came from Labour’s official policymaking apparatus – the National Executive Committee (NEC) and its subsidiary and advisory bodies. Within days of the expiration of Britain’s ultimatum to Germany, Labour’s inner councils had set about the business of articulating their vision of the postwar international system. The sense of urgency with which they approached this task was impelled not merely by a desire to avoid a repetition of the hurried and haphazard process of policy formulation that had occurred at the end of the Great War. Rather, to many leading Labour figures the development of a new and inspiring set of principles which might prove attractive even to the enemy – one of the earliest initiatives in the field of ‘political warfare’ – offered the last remaining hope of arresting the conflict before fighting began in earnest. Little of this initial momentum, however, was sustained beyond the first year of war. The speed and scale of Hitler’s victory in the west in 1940 rendered futile any further hope of appealing to the German people over the heads of their leaders. With the need for an immediate statement of peace aims having apparently evaporated, responsibility for the task was shuffled between a variety of party committees and subsidiary bodies, none of which dealt with the problem long enough to address it in a sustained or systematic manner. Even after it became clear that an Allied victory was certain, Labour headquarters’ deliberations on the shape of the new world order continued to exhibit a high degree of organisational and conceptual incoherence. Lacking the drive of an internationalist ‘true believer’ like Arthur Henderson, who died in 1935, Transport House’s second major review of foreign policy in two decades was accomplished without any influential figure coming forward to give impetus and direction to the party’s deliberations. The only credible candidate for that position, Henderson’s erstwhile lieutenant Hugh Dalton, effectively abdicated the rôle by his determination not to commit himself, or permit the party to be committed, to any statement of objectives that might be overtaken by events or by the decisions of the Great Powers. For their part, the surviving ‘Whig’ internationalists within Labour’s decisionmaking circles devoted more effort to vindicating the record of the League, and fighting a determined rearguard action in defence of Genevan principles, than to plotting a new course for the future. The manifesto that emerged in 1944 as representing the sum total of five years of ‘official’ Labour’s work on foreign policy, The International

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Post-War Settlement, was thus in many respects not much more than a statement of the lowest common denominator of the party’s policymaking élite. In place of the comprehensive, if painful, examination of the lessons of the previous two decades that the situation appeared to demand, Labour’s inner circles during the war opted for the path of least resistance.

PEACE AIMS AS WAR WEAPONS Two striking contrasts are apparent between the Labour Party’s approach to foreign policy at the beginning of the Second World War and its demeanour during the First. One was the alacrity with which Transport House seized the initiative in considering and formulating war aims, recognising that it was better to do so than permit every Labour backbencher to adopt the rôle of self-appointed shadow Foreign Secretary. The other was its readiness to consider and even to embrace the prospect of a negotiated settlement, something the Labour leadership until the latter days of the Great War had regarded as tantamount to defeatism. Both of these changes in attitude were visible in the immediate response by the party’s International Secretary, William Gillies, to the outbreak of the conflict. A ‘cantankerous Scot who distrusted foreigners and hated all Germans’,1 Gillies nevertheless was among the first to give voice to what would become the conventional wisdom of the party as a whole in the following months. Ten days after the declaration of war, he wrote to Leonard Woolf, Secretary of the Advisory Committee on International Questions, to suggest reconstituting the ACIQ as a ‘select and competent group’ to undertake ‘an intensive study of war aims’. In Gillies’s view, this would involve the achievement of ‘such an agreement in mind between ourselves and the German people that a negotiated peace will be practicable. To promote a revolution in Germany to this end and with a view of shortening the war is an essential part of this aim … there must be a negotiated peace.’2 Gillies was echoed by the influential former editor of the Daily Herald, Francis Williams. The Allies, he argued, had made a historic blunder at Paris in 1919 when the German delegates to the peace conference had been ostracised after the overthrow of the Kaiserreich. ‘They came as the leaders of a new democracy and they were treated as war criminals.’ This time, every effort must be made to assure the German people that the representatives of ‘the new Germany’ would be ‘received as equals in determining a negotiated peace which shall establish a happier and saner Europe’.3 So great, indeed, was the level

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of anxiety within the party somehow to avoid a repetition of the protracted fighting and appalling casualties of the Great War that some members, dismayed by the rapidity of Hitler’s victory in Poland, were prepared to dispense even with Gillies’s and Williams’s precondition of a democratic revolution in Germany before proceeding to negotiations. Emrys Hughes, for example, writing in the Manchester Guardian in October 1939, called upon the Labour leadership to rally behind Lloyd George’s demand for an immediate peace conference with the Nazis. ‘I do not see how the Labour party can now advocate the prolongation of the war in the hope that the status quo in Poland shall be restored.’4 The NEC, for its part, held a lengthy discussion of the issue on 15 September ‘in which a variety of views was expressed and where there was a good deal of talk about doing anything “premature”’. A draft peace aims document circulated to the meeting by Noel-Baker, however, laid as much stress as Gillies and Williams had done on appealing ‘to the democratic Germany on which we must rely for the necessary revolution’. This insight aside, the document covered much the same ground as previous Labour statements, and it is hard to see why Noel-Baker should have thought it might achieve a better response once the fighting had actually commenced. In exchange for the German people’s repudiation of Nazism; restoration of Poland, Czechoslovakia and Austria; and acceptance of a League system of security with full and automatic sanctions, an international air force and compulsory arbitration, Noel-Baker offered the prospect of an exchange of minority populations and an assurance by Britain that the follies of Versailles would not be repeated.5 The supposition that an improved international order would induce the German people to come to the conference table, presumably by offering them by peaceful means what their existing régime could obtain for them only through force, was also evident in a statement of peace aims drawn up by Richard Stokes and signed by 20 Labour backbenchers in November. Though less specific than Noel-Baker’s plan, it envisaged the sacrifice of national sovereignty to a new European system as the basis for a negotiated peace. ‘In forming such a European system no existing frontier can be excluded from review, the aim being to secure for every people full national and economic freedom.’6 The first real initiative to emerge from within the party’s formal policymaking machinery came at a meeting of the International SubCommittee on 29 September 1939, to which Harold Laski, the London School of Economics professor and Labour éminence rouge, presented a memorandum advocating the abolition of national sovereignty and the creation of a European army. The sub-committee assigned Dalton

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the task of fashioning a draft statement out of Noel-Baker’s and Laski’s memoranda in the light of members’ comments in time for the forthcoming Annual Conference. The resulting document, a four-page typescript entitled ‘Labour and the War’, was strongly internationalist in tone. Reiterating the belief that an offer of ‘an honourable peace under fair conditions … might contribute to a shortening of the War’, Dalton asserted the necessity for ‘a new association of states’ whose authority would ‘transcend, over a proper sphere, the sovereign rights of separate states …’. The qualification was not defined, leaving it unclear whether the proposed international authority would seek to impose a specified minimum of political and economic democracy upon its members, or would merely restrict membership to those states which satisfied its criteria in this regard. Nevertheless, Dalton’s draft enumerated functions and responsibilities for the new organisation which clearly went far beyond the League’s purview. It insisted that the party’s long-standing objective of a co-operative world commonwealth could not be achieved ‘if the peoples remain divided internally into two nations … Lasting peace depends on social justice within states no less than on political justice between states.’ There must therefore be an international authority to carry out great public works, possessing ‘a budget and powers far greater than the League of Nations ever had’. Similarly, freedom of opinion, speech and religion should be guaranteed by a ‘world-wide Declaration of the Rights of Man’. The new organisation should have its nucleus in the wartime AngloFrench political and economic alliance, and be ‘open and advantageous to all nations …’. Dalton concluded by rebutting suggestions that the League’s failure cast doubt upon the viability of the proposed world organisation. The fault, he claimed, lay less with the Genevan machinery as such than with a lack of commitment and good faith on the part of the League’s principal members. ‘The British Government, in particular’, he maintained, ‘has a heavy share of responsibility for the League’s collapse.’7 The NEC proceeded slowly with Dalton’s memorandum, some members apparently fearing that a premature statement of war aims might prejudice any later statement that the party or Conference might decide to make on the question.8 Instead Attlee was authorised to make a speech on the subject early in November. This decision did not prevent individual members from adapting some of Dalton’s ideas for their own purposes. Laski, for example, concurring that ‘international justice without depends upon social justice within’, wedded this insight to what was by now a Labour commonplace that Britain’s task, if it were to hope to win the war, was ‘to provoke a revolution’. This, he concluded, meant first of all a revolution of social

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equality within Britain itself. ‘If we want the winds of democratic doctrine to blow through Europe, we must first set them in play in this country.’9 Unlike Noel-Baker, Laski accorded the League a secondary status, suggesting that the creation of a new social and political order within the British Empire would itself suffice to spread the seeds of revolution among the Axis and its conquered territories. ‘I do not underestimate the importance of [international] machinery; but machinery is far less important than the basis upon which it rests.’10 Other voices on the left, however, insisted upon the primacy of the international dimension. A Tribune editorial in February 1940 declared that, to carry conviction with the German people, any scheme for world government should ‘be embodied in a full-sized working model, such as a Treaty laying the foundations for an Anglo-French union … The starting point for Left foreign policy today is AngloFrench relations.’11 Richard Crossman, deputy editor of the New Statesman, concurred. Posing the question ‘What Can We Offer Germany?’, he argued for the foundation of ‘a genuine international democracy’ on the basis of an Anglo-French union which would lead to ‘the creation of a Lebensraum for the peoples of Europe and our empires and the building of a Gemeinschaft der Völker’.12 This combination of wishful thinking and fundamental ignorance of the realities of Nazism is perhaps understandable in one who only two years earlier had declared that ‘We shall not go far wrong in deciding to frame our policy towards Germany on the assumption that we have here the problem of Ireland magnified to a world scale.’13 More difficult to explain is why so few within Labour were willing to consider the possibility of the German revolution failing to occur. The Fabian economist G.D.H. Cole, who had already gone so far as to forswear military victory as a desirable Allied objective on the ground that it ‘might lead to a second Versailles and a second Hitler’, confessed that given such an eventuality he found it ‘exceedingly difficult to formulate war aims at all’.14 To a considerable extent Labour’s preoccupation with this optimistic scenario derived from the conventional wisdom that a war of movement in the West was impossible, and from a corresponding over-concentration upon the precedent of Germany’s internal collapse in 1918. Few paid much attention to the four years of slaughter that had preceded and precipitated that collapse, preferring to believe that a revolution could be ‘helped, though it cannot be made, from outside Germany …’.15 Nor was there any recognition that the only surviving German institution with the power to overthrow Hitler was the Wehrmacht, and that evidence of its leaders’ enthusiasm for the ideal of democratic international government was less than overwhelming.

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The hope that peace aims could serve as ‘war weapons’, then, represented a final desperate appeal to the Whig-internationalist doctrines to which Labour had remained committed in the face of increasing evidence of their inapplicability during the 1930s. Unable entirely to credit that the German people, if not the German government, were truly willing to face a repetition of the horrors of the Great War, Transport House clung to the illusion that a more radical programme of international communitarianism might somehow strike a responsive chord from across the North Sea. Understandable as this impulse may have been, rooted as it was in an all-too-prescient recognition of the toll a renewed European conflict would take on both sides, it is difficult to see the offer of a new international order to secure for Germany by peaceable means what Hitler promised it by warlike ones as differing in kind from the appeasement strategy pursued in vain by the National Government. In both these senses, therefore, ‘official’ Labour’s initial response to the war represented not so much a new departure in foreign policy, as an attempt to contain old wine in older wineskins.

THE MACHINERY OF FOREIGN POLICYMAKING Reliance upon an internal upheaval in Germany, resting as it did on the belief that the war could not be won by either side, was rapidly overtaken by the course of events at the front. As one Allied military setback followed another, faith in the revolutionary potential of the ideal of a global social democracy began to ebb away. One anonymous Labour activist poured scorn on the idea that pronouncements of a new world order, however progressive, could substitute for success on the battlefield: Those who believe that Mein Pamph will overthrow Mein Kampf are permitting their humanitarian sentiments to destroy their common sense. After five years of bloodless victories and a spectacular military success in Poland, the German people will not be tempted by any promises that, if Hitler is overthrown, they shall be received back into a new League of Nations or an even newer Federal Union … Propaganda never won a war until blockade and military defeat had undermined the morale of one side.16 Among the Labour leadership, realisation of this fact came soonest to Clement Attlee. Although as late as March 1940 some members of the NEC were continuing to insist that ‘Labour did not believe in a blind

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fight to the finish’, and to advocate the opening of negotiations as soon as it was ‘reasonably certain’ that Nazi aggression had come to an end,17 by that point Attlee no longer seriously believed in the possibility of a German democratic revolution.18 Indeed, it is probable that even earlier than this he had concluded that exhortations to the Germans to throw off the Nazi yoke were a waste of time. In the speech on war aims that he made on 8 November 1939 in response to the NEC’s mandate, and which stood as the most authoritative statement of Labour’s position until the publication of the interim report The Old World and the New Society in 1942, there was no mention of a possible German revolution and no direct appeal to the German people. Some parts of Attlee’s address contained from this perspective a distinctly uncompromising tone, such as his refusal to ‘redraw the map of Europe’ as part of the peace settlement. Instead he suggested that the task of a peace conference would be ‘nothing less than the establishment of a New World Order’ based upon the acceptance of six key principles including minority rights, outlawry of aggression, and recognition of an international authority superior to individual states.19 Although he declared that this authority must not be ‘autocratic’ and should not subordinate the world or Europe to the dominance of four or five big states – this would ‘merely be an Imperialism in commission’ – Attlee made it clear that it must possess sufficient power to enforce its will upon any recalcitrant nation and play a leading rôle in economic as well as in political life. Neither this speech nor Dalton’s October 1939 memorandum, which eventually saw the light of day only after all agreed that it should not be considered a binding statement of war aims,20 was intended to do more than impose a temporary restraint upon the party’s wilder members by setting out a broad line of action carrying the imprimatur of the leadership. Not until September 1941, more than a year after joining the Churchill Coalition, did Labour turn once again to the task of attempting to draft postwar party policy in detail. Under the aegis of the party’s newly formed Central Committee on Reconstruction Problems chaired by Emmanuel Shinwell, the Executive voted to create an International Relations Sub-Committee with George Dallas as chairman and Woolf and Noel-Baker as joint secretaries, its membership broadly representative of the former ACIQ, the NEC and Transport House.21 This body quickly ran into difficulties over fundamental issues. After three meetings, the sub-committee could agree only that Big Three co-operation should be maintained and that the postwar transition period ‘should pass into a permanent international peace system’. Its members remained divided over whether an attempt should be made to reconstruct an international authority ‘at an early

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date’ or whether political international reconstruction should be accomplished through regional federations. Nor was there any agreement over what part, if any, the smaller states should have in the general international settlement.22 Following several more unfruitful meetings, the sub-committee decided to appoint two additional subcommittees to draft reports on political and economic reconstruction respectively. Unfortunately, the lack of consensus that bedevilled the parent committee extended also to these subsidiary bodies. At the end of 1941, the tide of opinion seemed to be flowing with the League sceptics, who argued that the postwar world would be divided to such an extent both politically and economically that it would be unreasonable to expect agreement on an international organisation with universal security obligations. While this was still desirable as an ultimate objective, a more practical alternative was ‘to obtain regional agreements by a limited number of states to use their national armaments in support of a victim of aggression. Every effort should be made to encourage and develop regional agreements of this kind.’23 The pro-Leaguers counterattacked a few months later, contending that peace, and by extension ‘all the major reforms in the Party’s programme’, could only be achieved by the establishment of ‘international law, order and justice …’. This would require ‘an active and vigilant international organisation and International Authority’, which must ‘make the law and see that international disputes are settled peacefully in accordance with the law, but it must also provide means and machinery for changing … even the basic relations of nations and peoples when justice and changing circumstances require … In a sense it would be a reconstruction of the League system in the light of the League’s experiences.’24 The sub-committee owed its downfall not to its internal divisions, however, but to the NEC’s decision in July 1943 to wind up the Central Committee on Reconstruction Problems and transfer its subsidiary agencies to the Policy Sub-Committee. That body, in turn, resolved to dissolve the International Relationships Sub-Committee, noting that its work was being duplicated by the Executive’s own International Sub-Committee which had recently added new members, and that its efficiency left a good deal to be desired.25 These organisational changes were of great significance, enabling Dalton, the chairman of both the Policy and International Sub-Committees, effectively to impose his own agenda upon the formulation of foreign policy. Woolf protested these innovations vigorously to the General Secretary, James Middleton, pointing out that, at a time when it was most important that policy questions should be examined from every possible angle, the Executive had chosen to deny itself any ‘individual or corporate body except

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Gillies which can give it any information or advice on foreign affairs’. He was unmollified by Middleton’s reminder that both the NEC International Sub-Committee and the Group of Inter-Allied Socialists still remained, noting that the former was ‘in itself the Executive or a subcommittee of it’, and that the latter, whatever its merits, was not a party organisation.26 In the wake of the NEC action and the Moscow Declaration of October 1943, in which the leaders of the Big Three made their first agreed statement on the form of the postwar world authority,27 a high priority of the League-oriented internationalists was therefore to find some vehicle through which they could once again influence party policy. At the end of December 1943, Noel-Baker proposed to Woolf that they try to revive the ACIQ, which had been in abeyance since the beginning of the war.28 He believed that he could secure the Executive’s agreement provided a practical programme of work was put forward. Noel-Baker offered four key problems as an interim agenda: the relation of functional agencies to the main international political organisation, the international control of armaments, the regulation of drug production, and the future of the Permanent Court of International Justice.29 His confidence was justified: on 15 February 1944, the International Sub-Committee voted unanimously to recommend the reconstitution of the ACIQ to the NEC. Woolf likewise approved of Noel-Baker’s agenda, which he considered ‘almost sufficient to go on with’. In the short term, however, he considered that there were two or three subjects ‘of the most vital importance to the Party at the moment … and that their international policy is in the air unless they consider them with an open mind and then make up their minds (if they have any)’. One of these vital issues, Woolf asserted, was the structure of the international authority.30 The relaunch of the ACIQ, while enabling the pro-League element within the party to make its voice heard, came too late in the day to enable it to exercise more than a marginal influence on Transport House’s review of foreign policy. The effect of three and a half years of delay, drift and organisational in-fighting was that ‘official’ Labour’s attempts to define war aims were constantly in danger of being overtaken by external events. As will be shown below, moreover, the division of foreign policy responsibilities between the NEC, the ACIQ and the variety of short-lived sub-committees to which the problem was temporarily assigned virtually foreordained that, for the party hierarchy, the most compelling aspect of any statement that finally emerged would be its propensity to divide Labour least.

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STIRRINGS OF ‘MUSCULAR’ INTERNATIONALISM So deeply entrenched was Transport House’s institutional inertia with respect to foreign policy that, as the opening of the Second Front approached, fears arose that a sudden collapse of the Axis might find Labour without any postwar programme at all. The publication in December 1942 of The Old World and the New Society, an interim report on ‘the problems of war and peace reconstruction’, offered little more than a statement of broad principles and a warning of the difficulties ahead; it was neither suited for, nor intended to be, a detailed manifesto of peace aims. By the spring of 1943, some of the more thoughtful representatives of the rising generation of Labour activists were becoming increasingly anxious over the NEC’s failure to address the matter with any sense of urgency. In April Dalton’s protégé, Evan Durbin, sent him a wide-ranging and carefully-argued memorandum intended to prod the party’s policymaking machinery into action. There were, he suggested, only three possible courses for Britain to take in foreign affairs – imperial isolation, alliance with another Great Power or the creation of a new League. While it would be better ‘to pursue any one of these policies consistently – even the worst of them – than to hesitate and argue until the opportunity to pursue any policy at all has slipped away from us’, Durbin considered that the disadvantages accruing to the first two options, especially the opposition of the small powers to anything smacking of Great Power dictatorship, ‘led by inevitable steps, to the reconstitution of the Council of the League’.31 Dalton, however, remained impervious to such arguments. In May 1943, per contra Durbin and the Whig-internationalist faction, he insisted that Great Power unity was not merely essential to, but effectively the measure of, any new League: The most vital need … in the immediate post-war world is that we – by which I mean the United Kingdom plus as much of the British Commonwealth and Empire as can be persuaded to pursue a common international policy with us – the United States and the Soviet Union should remain in the closest possible co-operation, and should keep firmly together on all important international issues … Therefore, such questions as ‘What sort of an international organisation should we set up?’ cannot be answered, except in the vaguest terms, until we know what the Americans and the Russians can be persuaded to agree to. Besides these two great powers, the little powers are not worth a row of beans.32 That Dalton was giving expression to a growing mood within the party organisation in favour of a more assertive or ‘muscular’ form of

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internationalism, based on the military strength of the wartime allies, was indicated by a revealing reply from Gillies to a request by Thomas Reid, the future MP for Swindon, in 1943 for official guidance on Labour’s vision of the postwar international organisation. The overriding priorities for Transport House, according to Gillies, were now the achievement of security and the punishment of aggressors. ‘We have returned to the doctrine of Foch and Clemenceau, whose warnings were unheeded – by General Smuts, Lloyd George and others.’33 This remarkable invocation of the principal architects of the Versailles Treaty – whose insistence on a punitive peace and a ‘League of Victors’ had provided the theme for innumerable Labour denunciations between the wars – as apostles of the future world organisation revealed how deep an impression the experience of total war had left upon the Labour secretariat’s outlook on foreign affairs. But Gillies spoke for Labour’s right wing rather than the movement as a whole, and his statement foreshadowed an escalation of the conflict between ‘muscular’ and traditional Whig internationalists over the principles to be embodied in the party’s planning. The issue loomed larger in the autumn of 1943, when the International Sub-Committee assigned Dalton the task of preparing a statement on ‘The International Post-War Settlement’. His first draft, submitted to the sub-committee in November, was a distinctly Russophile document which described the Anglo-Soviet Treaty of Alliance as ‘our main sheet anchor for the next twenty years’ in the event of a resurgence of US isolationism and called for Britain and the USSR to become ‘the twin pillars of security, east and west, in Europe’. This was less objectionable to Whig internationalists in the subcommittee than the trenchant animadversions scattered throughout the memorandum against the German people as distinct from the Nazi régime, and its dismissal in three sentences of the nature of the international political organisation as a question to be determined by whatever the Great Powers could agree upon.34 Characteristically, Dalton affected not to notice the controversy he aroused: The most critical of all my colleagues, and the only one who really argues back against some points in my paper, is Phil [Noel-Baker]. He is a terrible old Genevan Tory. He bothers on for a reference to Mandates, but gets no support for this.35 In fact, opposition within the sub-committee to the tone and content of Dalton’s paper was more widespread than he was prepared to admit. Both Harold Clay, the NEC spokesman on education, and Harold Laski

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pressed Dalton to include a definite statement in favour of a universal political authority. Remarking of the draft that ‘the more I read it, the more unhappy I am’, Laski exhorted Dalton to ‘come out boldly’ for a world organisation, inasmuch as on his own admission nothing less would be useful.36 Clay and Noel-Baker for their part were willing to yield to a degree on this point, conceding that within an overall framework of universalism a useful rôle for regional bodies could also be found. Noel-Baker, however, was no less insistent than Laski that Labour make a definite statement on the form of the international authority. He reminded Dalton that the NEC had already decided to discuss under this rubric the future of functional agencies, and that it would be impossible to avoid saying anything about the political organisation charged with their oversight without looking ‘absurd’. On the critical point of universalism, furthermore, Dalton’s main criterion of Big Three agreement had already been satisfied by the Moscow Declaration issued by the Allies the previous autumn. It was important, Noel-Baker observed sardonically, that the British Labour Party should at all events ‘appear to be at least as definite and well advanced in our thinking as [Cordell] Hull and company’.37 The extent of NEC dissension over the draft dictated a number of tactical concessions on Dalton’s part. He agreed to insert Noel-Baker’s amendments on the international political organisation ‘with very little change’, and made a number of detailed modifications to accommodate some of Laski’s objections. As it turned out, these were barely sufficient to prevent the document being referred back when it came before the NEC in April 1944, passing only by a vote of 9–7. Nor did Dalton succeed in preventing the Policy Sub-Committee from dividing the resolution recommending ‘The International Post-War Settlement’ to the Annual Conference into three separate sections, to facilitate the removal of his more robust denunciations of the German people. Many of these were restored, however, when the NEC directed the two sub-committees to produce a joint resolution, and it was found that Dalton alone had prepared one, at a meeting from which Clay was absent and Laski took no part.38 If Dalton was justified in congratulating himself on having got his way in all essentials, it is equally true that the section of his document on the postwar political organisation, which was low on his list of priorities, represented the sharpest departure from his own agenda. Reflecting the modifications it had undergone in successive drafts, this part of the paper contained little internal consistency; rather, each of Dalton’s original pronouncements was followed by a qualification in deference either to Noel-Baker or to the Moscow Declaration. The final version presented to the 1944 Conference and published as The

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International Post-War Settlement, while much more extensive than Dalton’s initial paper of the same title, was still somewhat threadbare. Its starting point, as before, was the overriding need ‘to continue the closest possible Anglo-American-Russian co-operation. If we three hold together, all will be well; if we fall apart, all will be dark and uncertain’. As the Moscow Declaration had made clear, this unity was to be expressed in ‘a General International Organisation,’ which ‘in due course’ would include all the nations of the world. ‘The Labour Party are resolved that British foreign policy shall be directed to ensuring that this Organisation shall succeed.’ So far as the actual form and function of its proposed world order was concerned, however, the statement attempted to ride all available horses at once. It asserted the need for a solution, ‘both just and realistic’, to the problem of the power imbalance between great and small states, an issue over which the ambiguous Moscow formula of ‘sovereign equality’ had cast a great deal of confusion. On this point the NEC effectively sat on the fence. On the one hand, ‘all States cannot hope to have equal influence or equal power, and it is only building a theorist’s house of cards to pretend they can … This fact must be reflected in the constitution and working of the Society.’ On the other, Big Three pre-eminence ‘must not lead to an exclusive group, nor be an instrument of domination over the rest of the world’. The statement was silent on how to reconcile these conflicting goals. In like fashion, when recommending that the proceedings of the new society be held in public in all but exceptional cases, it declared that ‘the whole International Political Organisation, must depend on the consent, or rather, on the active support of the peoples of the world’. Yet in its demand that ‘those who lead the Organisation shall have both the will and the power to check any disloyal preparations for aggression in their earliest stages’ and its affirmation that ‘it is better to have too much armed force than too little’, the document clearly envisaged an international organisation that derived its authority in the last resort from the armed force of the Great Powers rather than the consent of the governed.39 Nor did it clarify the respective spheres of regional bodies and the world organisation. It envisaged the creation of regional functional agencies like a ‘European Transport Authority’, on all of which, however, it was essential that both Britain and the USSR be represented. On civil aviation too it was unable to make up its mind, proposing a worldwide agreement to ensure the peaceful use of aeroplanes and ‘even closer international organisation and operation’ in some of the regions. It is therefore hard not to conclude that the significance of the NEC report so far as its vision of the world organisation was concerned lay

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more in what was left out than what was included. Much of its rhetoric, to be sure, was in the mainstream of Labour internationalist thought. It avowed the primacy of the rule of international law, recommending the creation of machinery to develop and amend legislation and the establishment of a reinvigorated World Court of International Justice. It paid due regard to ‘all the useful experience of the League of Nations’, endorsed the pooling of armed forces and recognised the equal rights of all nations to ‘Peace, Freedom, and Security’. But nearly every significant question related to international organisation that had been raised during the previous four years was either hedged or evaded entirely. The International Post-War Settlement had nothing to say, for example, about how far the world authority should seek to represent peoples rather than governments and, if the latter, how to prevent the organisation from becoming hamstrung as had the League by purely national interests. It offered no guidance on either the nature or scope of the authority’s functions as an autonomous agency of international government. It left unclear the question of whether there should be regional political bodies as well as functional ones, and their relationship, if any, to the larger organisation. To a significant degree, this hesitancy and vagueness was a consequence of Dalton’s belief that the preservation of close and cordial relations between the Big Three was a sufficient as well as a necessary condition of the success of any new world organisation, as well as of the NEC’s reluctance to anticipate or cut across the discussions being conducted between the Allies at governmental level. But it was also a reflection of the lack of consensus within the Labour policymaking élite itself over the most basic and inescapable questions regarding the shape of the postwar world. In other respects, The International Post-War Settlement represented a marked philosophical shift away from the approach taken by The Old World and the New Society two years earlier. The most conspicuous change was its emphasis upon the coercive powers to be wielded by the international authority which, by dint of reiteration, were identified as the latter’s primary raison d’être. There was no attempt to disguise the fact that the armed forces of the authority would be in all significant respects coterminous with those of ‘the three outstanding Great Powers, great both in military and industrial resources of all kinds’. No longer did the NEC demand that ‘the obligation of economic sanctions against an aggressor must be assumed by all states’ or attempt to link the principle of collective security – a term which did not appear anywhere in the 1944 document – to that of the ‘interdependence’ of nations. Nor did it insist, as it had in 1942, that ‘the new international institutions … be founded upon the full application

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of democratic principles’.40 In place of the earlier call for pooled sovereignty, it now resignedly concluded that ‘We can only pool our ideas and hopes, and seek the widest possible measure of agreement.’ An additional disturbing feature, although one that evoked remarkably little protest or even comment at the time, was The International PostWar Settlement’s endorsement of forcible transfers of population so as to make the ethnological boundaries of the postwar world compatible with political ones – an early manifestation of the principle of ‘ethnic cleansing’ of which more will be said in the next chapter. A final divergence from previous policy was the report’s deemphasis of socialism as either an objective or a prerequisite of international organisation. The Old World and the New Society had been unambiguous on this question, linking the war and the failure of the League directly to ‘the unregulated operation of our economic system’. It envisaged ‘the destruction of the social and economic relationships which made possible the alliance between military castes and economic privilege’ as a necessary precedent to the establishment of a new international system.41 The International Post-War Settlement reversed this formula. Instead of peace depending upon socialism, socialism was now seen as dependent upon the securing of peace: So long as they live under the constant threat of War, the nations cannot plan for peaceful international co-operation, nor can they work together for their common economic prosperity; each of them must strive to increase its potential military power, and to promote, so far as possible, its national economic self-sufficiency. On the surface, this seeming assertion of the primacy of an international peace system might be thought a victory for the proponents of a new League-style organisation. The argument that worldwide socialism was the only sure guarantee of peace had been the basis of opposition by groups like the Socialist League in the 1930s to earlier forms of international organisation. Ever since 1917, Labour internationalists had taken it for granted that international socialism implied international government and vice versa. Thus the pro-Leaguers of the International Relations Sub-Committee maintained in April 1942 that the problem of peace involved the creation of global prosperity as well as the rule of law: ‘If we fail to do both we shall fail to do either, for in practice you cannot separate politics and economics.’42 Nevertheless, it was precisely this separation that The International Post-War Settlement seemed to take as its organising principle.

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REACTIONS TO THE INTERNATIONAL POST-WAR SETTLEMENT For this reason above all, the publication of Dalton’s paper touched off a storm of criticism from internationalists and economic ‘functionalists’ alike. The New Statesman, expressing ‘incredulity’ at the declaration’s omission of any mention of ‘the underlying battle on the Continent’ (i.e. the struggle the journal believed to be in progress between a Fascist-dominated ancien régime and the new social order embodied in the European resistance movements), alleged that the NEC had fallen into the trap of recognising only ‘the surface struggle between governments’ in its anxiety not to expose itself to charges of utopianism.43 From the other end of the ideological spectrum, Socialist Commentary, the journal of the idiosyncratic but influential Socialist Vanguard Group whose views on foreign policy were usually supportive of the Labour leadership, decried the concessions made by the paper to Great Power dominance as ‘a mockery of League principles, not an advance’, and lamented the tendency of official Labour statements to encourage ‘the belief that the unity of the Big Three constitutes a policy’.44 Rarely, it noted, had any party document ‘received such all-round condemnation, partly for its evasive and unimaginative character, partly for its grossly mistaken policies’.45 A still more determined assault against The International Post-War Settlement was launched by Woolf, in a Fabian Society pamphlet which contested all of Dalton’s main points. It was untrue, Woolf declared, that the League had lacked sufficient force to face down the dictatorships in the 1930s; what was lacking was the will to do so on the part of ‘the Tory capitalist government of Britain and its opposite number in France …’. It was equally misguided to assume that the existing Great Power alliance could be relied upon to provide a stable foundation for the world organisation: The reason why Russia, the U S A, and ourselves have remained united in the war, despite divergent interests and profound differences in our institutions, traditions, and even some of our aims, is that we have had a clearly defined common purpose which transcends all of our differences – the defeat of Nazi Germany. Unless after the war we have as clear and compelling a common purpose, there is little chance of our remaining united … The history of the peace of Versailles will repeat itself unless the three Great Powers agree upon the strategy of peace just as they agreed upon the strategy of war.46

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It was therefore all the more deplorable that The International PostWar Settlement seemed to have burked the question of what the world organisation should do, beyond hold Germany down. ‘The peace aim which dominates all others, it cannot too often be repeated, is the establishment of international peace and prosperity. The treatment of Germany, like all other secondary aims, must be subordinated to and determined by this.’ It was essential to spell out in much greater detail than the NEC had done the political and economic competence of the international authority, and no less necessary that this be founded ‘uncompromisingly on Socialist principles’. While nobody believed that ‘we can move straight from economic anarchy to a fully developed system of international government of the world’s production and consumption’, this objective would be unattainable unless states were prepared to yield at the outset a measure of political and economic sovereignty. The NEC’s policy, on the other hand, compromised the ideal of international socialism with ‘an apologetic socialism which assures the world that it is just as “realist” and “strong” as Tory Nationalism and not really very different from it’. It was doubtless in response to such criticisms as these that Attlee, moving the resolution in favour of The International Post-War Settlement at the December 1944 Annual Conference, adopted a markedly more emollient tone. Reaffirming the viability of the League and its principles, he declared that the future world organisation was in the process of becoming an accomplished fact. Certainly the three Great Powers, because of their strength, would have the greatest responsibility for preserving the peace; and so long ‘as there is a danger of wolves the sheep dog must have strong teeth’. But all states, not only the Big Three, should contribute their share through the medium of a security council controlling an international force with its own staff. ‘Only so can the burden of armaments be lifted, just as the maintenance of a police force in a city saves the citizens from the cost and burden of private arms.’ In several other respects, Attlee went well beyond the recommendations of the NEC document. Referring to France, on which the report had been silent, he promised that once it had recovered from its ‘misfortunes’ it would join the Big Three as ‘the rallying point for all the peace-loving nations’. He also pledged that the international political organisation would ‘find its complement’ in an international economic organisation. On the question of international government, although couching his remarks in generalities, Attlee seemed to go farthest of all:

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The chief of the principles is that there must be an authority armed with power that transcends the will of the individual State. It is time that Europe that for so long has carried the torch of civilisation should cease to be an anarchic welter of States periodically affected by devastating wars. It is time that the nations of Europe should settle down as good citizens in a world of States. We have already in the British Commonwealth shown how freedom is compatible with unity. I believe that the ordinary men and women throughout the world and especially in Europe are beginning to realise that if peace is to be preserved there must be some cession of sovereignty and that membership of a larger organisation does not conflict with the reasonable claims of nations to live their own lives.47 Two points in this passage are especially noteworthy. The first was Attlee’s evocation of the Commonwealth as a potential model of international government that might have particular relevance to postwar Europe. The proposition that the self-governing nations of the British Empire afforded an example of a harmonious international community in action appealed to delegates’ national pride, and was all the more timely in the wake of the successful Conference of British and Dominion Labour Parties in September. Unfortunately, it was one that made little sense, as Attlee himself had acknowledged two years earlier when, in his capacity as Dominions Secretary, he had found it necessary to remind his Cabinet colleagues that there was ‘no such organ of government as the “British Commonwealth”’, and to point out the unlikelihood of the Dominions consenting to a common postwar foreign policy.48 The second significant aspect of Attlee’s speech was that it gave the appearance of support to the most influential schools of thought within the Labour Party, containing as it did shades of Daltonian ‘realism’, European federalism, universalism and national self-determination. As it stood, then, Attlee’s statement offered something to all of the major interest groups without committing the party to any one of them or even acknowledging the mutual incompatibility of their programmes. His immediate achievement was to ensure, with the aid of the trade union block vote, Conference’s adoption of The International Post-War Settlement ‘by an overwhelming majority’,49 although at the cost of deferring any real decision on the principles which should guide Labour’s foreign policy and, in the process, inflating the expectations of each of the contending parties. It was neither the first nor the last time that leading Labour spokesmen were to exploit – or fall victim to – a similar confusion.

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One important consequence nevertheless resulted from the fact that Transport House’s planning for the postwar world order had largely been compressed into the last 18 months of the war. Notwithstanding Attlee’s attempt to depict The International Post-War Settlement as a natural progression from prewar Labour doctrines, the document appeared at a time when the war’s essential character as a conflict between the five surviving Great Powers had never been more clearly evident. Its publication also coincided with the last winter of the war, a period during which the mood of the Labour movement – like that of the country as a whole – was at its most uncompromising, hardened as it had been by the experience of more than four years of bitter struggle and with final victory not yet in sight. Had a statement of peace aims, or even a sustained attempt to produce one, been in evidence at an early stage of the war, considerably more attention would have had to be paid to the necessity of securing public support in the neutral states for the proposed arrangements. It is thus probable that the theme of Great Power interventionism as the chief ingredient of international stability would have occupied far less prominent a place in Labour’s blueprint for the new world organisation. In the event, the environment in which the document emerged was highly conducive to the spread of ‘muscular’ internationalism, and to the belief that the victorious Great Powers had both the duty and the right to remake the postwar international system according to their own specifications. And outside the confines of Transport House, a surprisingly broad cross-section of Labour intellectuals and opinion-formers were showing themselves receptive to the same ideas.

NOTES 1. D. Healey, The Time of My Life (London: Michael Joseph, 1989), p. 74. 2. Gillies to Woolf, 13 September 1939. Woolf papers, University of Sussex, part I, D.1a, 18. Emphasis in original. 3. Williams, ‘What Are We Fighting For?’, Daily Herald, 29 September 1940. 4. Manchester Guardian, 13 October 1939. 5. Noel-Baker to Cecil, 15 September 1939; Noel-Baker, ‘The Peace Aims of the Labour Party’, same date. Cecil of Chelwood papers, British Library, Add. Mss. 51109, fols 26, 27–9. 6. R.R. Stokes, ‘Memorandum on Peace Aims’, 10 November 1939, Mss. Cripps 522. 7. ‘Labour and the War’, n.d., Dalton papers, British Library of Political and Economic Science, Part IIA, 3/2. Emphases in original. 8. NEC minutes, 23 January 1940, Archives of the British Labour Party [hereafter LPP]. 9. H.J. Laski, Where Do We Go From Here? An Essay in Interpretation (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1940), p. 93. 10. Ibid., p. 125. 11. ‘Negotiated Peace or a Military Victory?’, Tribune, 23 February 1940.

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12. New Statesman and Nation, 17 February 1940. 13. R.H.S. Crossman, ‘Collective Security and Dictatorship’, in E.F.M. Durbin and G.E.G. Catlin (eds), War and Democracy: Essays on the Causes and Prevention of War (London: Kegan Paul, Trench & Trubner, 1938), p. 284. This suggestion was made in the context of an argument that Hitler and Éamon de Valera – who was serving at the time as President of the League Assembly – shared the same underlying conception of foreign policy. 14. The most likely outcome if the revolution did not take place would be Soviet hegemony over a devastated continent, ‘and I do not pretend even to guess what sort of a peace Stalin would be likely to dictate to an exhausted Europe’. ‘British War Aims’, n.d. [c. spring 1940]. G.D.H. Cole papers, A1/71/4, Nuffield College, Oxford. 15. Ibid. 16. ‘Politicus’, ‘Labour and the War’, Political Quarterly, 10, 4 (October–December 1939), pp. 483–4. 17. William Glenvil Hall, speech at Northampton, quoted in Daily Herald, 4 March 1940. 18. In this respect Attlee seems to have been in advance not only of opinion in his own party, but that of the British people generally. A Home Intelligence appreciation of September 1941 found that, even after the entry of the USSR in the war, most people believed that victory would ultimately be achieved by anti-German revolutions in the occupied countries. T. Burridge, Clement Attlee: A Political Biography (London: Jonathan Cape, 1985), p. 163; Ministry of Information ‘Weekly Report by Home Intelligence – No. 48’, 27 August–3 October 1941, PRO INF 1/292. 19. C.R. Attlee, Labour’s Peace Aims: A Speech Delivered to Labour MPs and Candidates on November 8, 1939 (London: Peace Book Co., 1940). 20. Labour Party. National Executive Committee, Labour, The War, and the Peace: A Declaration of Policy by the National Executive of the British Labour Party, February 9, 1940 (London: Labour Party, 1940). 21. 41 LPCR (1942), p. 23. The body was originally named the International Organisations Sub-Committee. Its other members were Will Arnold Forster, Thomas Balogh, Hugh Dalton, Alf Dobbs, Miss P. Friedman, William Gillies, Harold Laski, George Lathan, R.W.G. Mackay, James Middleton, Morgan Phillips, John Price, Emmanuel Shinwell and James Walker. 22. International Relations Sub-Committee. Minutes of third meeting, 3 November 1941, Woolf papers, Part I, D.1c. 23. I.R. Sub-Committee, R.D.R. 47/December, 1941, ‘Note Summarising the “Second Reading” Discussion on Section IV of Memo R.D.R. 7 Restraint of Aggression’, Woolf papers, Part I, D.1c. 24. I.R. Sub-Committee, R.D.R. 84/April, 1942, ‘Foundations of Peace’, Woolf papers, Part I, D.1c. 25. In the discussion over the International Relationships Sub-Committee’s future, Morgan Phillips, secretary of the Policy Committee, reported that its members had not got around to considering a number of documents that had been submitted to them. Policy Committee minutes, 21 July 1943, LPP. 26. Woolf to Middleton, 24 November 1943; Middleton to Woolf, 25 November; Woolf to Middleton, 27 November, Woolf papers. 27. This laid down that the organisation was to be based on ‘the principle of the sovereign equality of all peace-loving states’, a formula that occasioned much confusion both then and afterwards. 28. Clearly the ACIQ had not figured prominently in Noel-Baker’s thoughts in the meantime. ‘Am I wrong in thinking that you are still Secretary of that body’, he asked Woolf, ‘and can you remember whether or not I was the Chairman?’ Noel-Baker to Woolf, 28 December 1943, Woolf papers. 29. Ibid.

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30. Woolf to Noel-Baker, 22 February 1944, Woolf papers. 31. E.F.M. Durbin, ‘British Foreign Policy after the War’, 1 April 1943, Dalton papers, Part IIB, 7/10. Emphasis in original. 32. ‘Post-War Aims of the British Labour Party’, May 1943, Dalton papers, Part IIB, 7/10/30. 33. Gillies to Reid, 9 December 1943, LP/JSM (INT), Box 11, Middleton papers, LPP. 34. L.S. Woolf, The International Post-War Settlement (Fabian Research Series No. 85) (London: Fabian Publications, 1944), p. 39. 35. Dalton diary, 16 November 1943. B. Pimlott (ed.), The Second World War Diaries of Hugh Dalton 1940–45 (London: Jonathan Cape, 1986), p. 673. 36. Laski to Dalton, 27 March 1944, Dalton papers, Part IIB, 7/10/69. 37. Noel-Baker to Dalton, 8 April 1944, Dalton papers, Part IIB, 7/1072-3. 38. J.T. Grantham, ‘Hugh Dalton and “The International Post-War Settlement”: Labour Party Foreign Policy Formulation, 1943–44,’ Journal of Contemporary History, 14, 4 (October 1979). 39. As Richard Rose points out, however, the document was less than clear on this question: after stressing the need for armed strength, it went on to identify disarmament as one of the primary functions of the future international authority. C.R. Rose, ‘The Relation of Socialist Principles to British Labour Foreign Policy, 1945–51’, p. 76. 40. Labour Party, National Executive Committee, The Old World and the New Society: A Report on the Problems of War and Peace Reconstruction (London: Labour Party, 1942), pp. 24–5. 41. Ibid., pp. 10, 24. 42. I.R. Sub-Committee, R.D.R. 84/April, 1942, ‘Foundations of Peace’, Woolf papers, Part I, D.1c. 43. ‘Labour and the Old Social Order’, New Statesman and Nation, 6 May 1944. 44. For a discussion of the Socialist Vanguard Group and its ideology, see R.M. Douglas, ‘No Friend of Democracy: The Socialist Vanguard Group, 1941–1950’, Contemporary British History, 16, 4 (Winter 2002). 45. ‘Labour and the Post-War Settlement’, Socialist Commentary, June 1944; M. Saran, ‘What Hope from San Francisco?’, Socialist Commentary, May, 1945. 46. Woolf, The International Post-War Settlement, p. 12. 47. Morning session, 12 December, 43 LPCR (1944), pp. 132–3. 48. C.R. Attlee, ‘The United Nations Plan’, 28 January 1943, CAB 66/33, W.P. (43) 44. 49. 43 LPCR (1944), p. 140. Perhaps not by coincidence, the actual vote was not recorded in the Report.

3

Internationalism or AntiNationalism?: Backbench and Backroom Visions of World Order, 1939–45

If Labour’s leaders were unenthusiastic about confronting the implications of the war for the party’s internationalist stance, the same cannot be said of the ‘public intellectuals’ of the British democratic left – the constellation of journalists, academics, members of Labouraffiliated think tanks and backbench MPs that constituted the movement’s ‘loyal opposition’ and was responsible for most of its original thinking. One of the most remarkable aspects of the party’s wartime history was the extent to which Labour opinion-formers were prepared to modify, and often entirely to discard, their previous convictions regarding foreign policy. The radicalism of this revisionist current has gone largely unrecognised, principally because some of the new doctrines which it generated appear little different at first sight from the ‘pragmatic’ approach favoured by many mainstream Tories. To view this ideological transformation as evidence of a shift in the direction of moderate Conservatism would, however, be a mistake. Even when Labour intellectuals espoused foreign policies similar to those advocated by the right, it was seldom for the same reasons or to serve the same purposes. Indeed, many of the most vehement advocates of a postwar world order founded upon the preponderance of the Great Powers continued to insist that the principal rationale of such a system was to restrain the excesses of global capitalism – of which Fascism was but the most recent and extreme manifestation – and that there could be no common ground in foreign policy between the representatives of the privileged classes and those of British Labour. Nevertheless, no more than their counterparts on the right, these individuals were far from immune to the influences of their own

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times. Labour backbench MPs, foreign relations theorists and advisory bodies were taking up the question of what future agencies of international government there ought to be not in an environment of dispassionate reflection, but in the midst of a period of unprecedented crisis. At no previous time in British history had the danger of national extinction been so acute; official and unofficial patriotic propaganda more ubiquitous and persuasive; and the distinction between the war zone and the home front less clearly marked. It was inevitable in such an atmosphere that the debate on the party’s foreign policy should have been coloured, to a greater or lesser extent, by the powerful stimulus given to national chauvinism and British exceptionalism arising from the experience of war. The amalgam of socialism and rediscovered – or repressed – patriotism that appeared in the aftermath of Dunkirk provided a rich growth medium for the spread of ‘muscular’ internationalism in ‘unofficial’ Labour circles. Even before Hugh Dalton had declared Great Power unity to be Transport House’s sine quâ non for the new world order, a number of important Labour theorists had called into question not merely the rôle of the small state, but its very existence. In several respects, though, the rise of ‘muscular’ internationalism touched off a debate that was even more heated and divisive in Labour backbench and backroom circles than among the party’s policymaking élite. Unrepentant ‘Whig’ internationalists fiercely defended their traditional allegiances, accusing their opponents of seeking to call into existence a body that would replicate all the League’s weaknesses while alienating the popular support that represented its only true strength. Critics of the entire League idea, in either its co-operative or authoritarian forms, advocated the creation of a functional rather than a political agency of world government, which they declared to have proven in the 1930s its irrelevance to modern conditions. Thus by the end of the war, among the Labour intelligentsia internationalism had fractured into distinct and antagonistic schools of thought, united only by their determination to avoid any return to the discredited ‘liberal’ Wilsonian ideas of the prewar world.

THE LEFT, THE WAR AND THE NATION In his 1941 celebration of British ethnocentricity, The Lion and the Unicorn, George Orwell complained that ‘England is perhaps the only great country whose intellectuals are ashamed of their own nationality. In left-wing circles it is always felt that there is something slightly disgraceful in being an Englishman and that it is a duty to snigger at

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every English institution, from horse-racing to suet puddings.’1 Whatever truth there may have been in this accusation so far as Communists or pacifists were concerned, it could hardly have reflected less accurately the mood of Labour opinion-formers at the time it was levelled. To the contrary, the experience of total war had a profound impact upon Labour activists’ attitude to their own country. As Michael Foot has recently recalled, All of us who lived through those times had a special instruction in the meaning of patriotism. The sense of the community in which we had been born and bred suffused all else, made everything else subordinate or trivial. And one essential element in the exhilaration was the knowledge that the shameful Chamberlain era had at last been brought to an end, and that English people could look into each other’s eyes with recovered pride and courage.2 Nor was Foot alone. In the aftermath of the fall of France, one ‘leftwing intellectual’ after another stepped forward to confess, in tones ranging from nationalist bombast to unconcealed bewilderment, the influence of the war in rekindling a sense of national allegiance and reconciling them to ‘the integrity of British national feeling’.3 The reaction of Francis Williams, the former editor of the Daily Herald, was typical: I had always thought of myself as an internationalist. I was not aware of any strong sense of patriotism. A man, I thought, should have loyalties wider and deeper than to the spot of earth where he happened to be born. Even my concern that Britain should stand up to Hitler had been due, or so I thought, more to a devotion to certain principles of humanity and civilization than to national feeling. And then suddenly the war exploded and I found that what I most cared about was England. England in its most tangible form. The soil of England, the fields and hills and lanes of England, the English sky. My feeling for England was as strong a physical emotion as falling in love. But like real love it was more than physical. It commanded the whole commonwealth of my being: mind and spirit and heart as well as body. I was astonished at the strength of my feelings for they seemed to deny many of the things in which I had formerly thought I believed. But I neither could nor wished to gainsay them.4 The reasons for this transformation – which, in contrast to the eruptions of left-wing patriotic fervour that had occurred in 1899 and

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1914, persisted long after the fighting had come to an end – are, no doubt, numerous and complex. One significant factor, however, was that the outbreak of war enabled Labour supporters to resolve the internal conflict engendered by their opposition to appeasement on the one hand, and on the other their equally strong desire, shared with the despised Chamberlain government, to avoid war almost at any cost.5 The declaration of hostilities thus dispelled the deep sense of shame many Labour members had experienced over the successive ‘betrayals’ of Manchuria, Abyssinia, Spain and Czechoslovakia. By virtue of its participation in the conflict Britain had undergone, in Foot’s words, a ‘cleansing liberation’ that served to expiate a multitude of past political sins, from imperial exploitation in Africa and Asia to cynical opportunism in Europe. In a single collective act, the more commendable inasmuch as no domestic or imperial interest had been directly affected by Hitler’s attack upon Poland, the British people had regained their national honour and associated the cause of their country with that of human progress.6 As even the rigorously leftist Harold Laski proclaimed in the summer of 1941, ‘no one who has seen Britain at war, above all since the fall of France, can doubt that there has taken place something like a spiritual regeneration of her people’.7 The outbreak of the war and, almost as importantly, Labour’s participation in the Churchill Coalition in May 1940, thus made it possible for party supporters of all complexions, after nearly a decade of intense opposition to the internal and external policies of the National Government, once again to identify wholeheartedly with their country and its political leadership. This was a psychological turning-point of immense importance, whose significance has largely gone unappreciated by historians of the British left. With the exception of a minority of determined contrarians, chiefly on Labour’s Marxist margins, rebelliousness did not come naturally either to the Parliamentary Party or to the younger generation of opinion-formers whose contributions through such organisations as the Fabian Society were beginning to have a considerable impact upon official Labour policy. Throughout the 1930s, and to an increasing degree as the international climate darkened, party activists had been highly discomfited by Tory taunts that their foreign and defence policies were unpatriotic, exemplified in the Conservative parody of Labour’s stance during the Spanish Civil War: ‘Arms for Spain, But No Arms for Britain’. The declaration of war and the concomitant demand for national unity, ultimately symbolised in the formation of the coalition government, enabled such individuals at last to relieve themselves of the psychological burden of constant opposition and give tangible proof, in ways that were no longer susceptible to misinterpretation, of the consistency

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of their dedication to the national cause. As an essay by Richard Crossman shortly before the fall of France asserted, the war also marked the moment, in his view, at which Labour would find itself compelled decisively to repudiate the left’s traditional ‘animus against patriotism’ and to acknowledge that, in its prewar form of ‘inverted’ nationalism, ‘the cult of “Internationalism” in progressive circles in Britain … ha[d] been, on the whole, disastrous’.8

‘SELF-DETERMINATION’ ASSAILED From its earliest days, and with only a few dissentients,9 a consistent element in the Labour Party’s attitude to the world had been its sympathy for small and weak nations, especially those menaced by a more powerful neighbour. As H.N. Brailsford declared a few weeks before the outbreak of the Great War, ‘The right of every nationality to defend its liberty and its identity against conquest, is a right which Socialism has always been the first to respect, and will be the last to abandon.’10 In this, as in so much else, the party followed in the tracks of late nineteenth-century Radicalism with its popular crusades against the oppression of Armenians, Cretans and Macedonians.11 Thus it was Germany’s invasion of neutral Belgium in 1914, more than any other factor, that had brought the broad masses of Labour around in support of British involvement in the Great War. Between the wars, the nations which aroused Labour’s warmest sentiments can be identified merely by compiling a list of the leading underdogs of the day: Russia, Ireland and Germany in the 1920s; Abyssinia, Spain, Czechoslovakia and Finland in the 1930s. The undoubted strength and fervour of Labour campaigns within and outside Parliament on behalf of weaker countries should not necessarily be taken as evidence of genuine identification with the political or social values for which these countries stood. In the case of revolutionary Russia, republican Spain and to a degree Czechoslovakia, some such affinity did indeed exist. But just as often, Labour’s support for persecuted small nations was conditioned primarily by the party’s attitude to the persecutor. The left’s Germanophilia in the 1920s, for example, stemmed much more from hostility towards French policy than fellow-feeling with the German race or admiration of the Weimar constitution. Similarly, the arguments used by party spokesmen to vindicate Abyssinia’s independence rested upon the threat posed by aggressive Fascism to the League and collective security rather than the blessings conferred upon the Abyssinian people by Haile Selassie’s variant of theocratic tribalism. Nevertheless, until the end of 1939 Labour remained faithful to the

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proposition that every people willing and able to govern itself had an unfettered right to national independence.12 This consensus eroded significantly after 1940. The collapse of one European state after another before the German onslaught focused renewed attention on the deficiencies of the Wilsonian division of the continent in 1919 and the principle of national self-determination on which it had been based. Many students of international politics concluded that recent events had decisively discredited Wilsonianism before the tribunal of history. Twice within a generation, they recalled, the Allies had been dragged into war in defence of small nations whose recent behaviour might at the least be characterised as imprudent and whose net contribution to the sum of human happiness was exiguous. Even those small states which had been caught up in the conflict through no fault of their own – Norway, Denmark and the Low Countries – had to some extent invited their fate by seeking refuge in an impossible neutrality and allowing themselves to be picked off one by one at minimal cost to the aggressor, instead of co-ordinating and pooling their defences.13 To this indictment, upon which commentators of all political shades rang the changes after Belgium’s sudden capitulation in May 1940, Labour theorists added some distinctive features of their own. Whatever judgement might ultimately be reached regarding the viability of the small Western democracies, they argued, the eastern European states whose borders were drawn at Versailles had proven to be spectacular failures as political and economic entities. On the political side, lacking democratic traditions or stable institutions, each of them had traversed the same dreary path, commencing as corrupt and turbulent oligarchies and concluding as dictatorships professing either a species of peasant Fascism or a rabid nationalism only superficially distinguishable from it.14 Their economic record was, if possible, worse. Clinging tenaciously to frontiers whose only discernible logic was linguistic and which cut off ports, cities and trading centres from their natural hinterlands, the eastern European countries had resorted to autarkic, beggar-myneighbour policies that served only to impoverish the entire region and inflame national antagonisms still further. The result had been the creation of a strategic and economic vacuum that constituted a standing temptation to aggressive neighbours such as Germany.15 Only in the case of Czechoslovakia might this critique not apply, but its very uniqueness marked it as the exception that proved the rule. After the German victory in the west, many theorists on the political left took a stony-faced look at the justification for the continued existence of the small state. No longer constrained by the necessity not to give offence to actual or potential allies, a growing number of Labour

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activists now felt free to argue that the political map of Europe had changed irreversibly and that British war aims should recognise that reality. Among the first to make the point was Aneurin Bevan in October 1940: We all fervently hope the British proposals will not take too much account of the claims of the various governments-without-portfolio whose national anthems form such a long prelude to the news on Sunday nights. Not all the king’s horses and all the king’s men can set those empty kingdoms up again … When we give hospitality to defeated governments it is to wave a flag of inspiration to their peoples, and not to cumber our own feet.16 To others within the party, this observation extended not merely to the deposed régimes, but to the states they represented as well. Francis Williams asserted in the autumn of 1940 that the confluence of nationalism and democratic activism responsible for bringing such states as Greece, Belgium and Serbia – as well as Germany and Italy – into being in the nineteenth century, had become ‘a reactionary idea’ in the twentieth: Small absolutely independent states have no place in the modern world. They have gone down before Nazism because they have in fact ceased to possess the power to survive; they have outlived their function … Their existence has become an incitement to wars of conquest by the powerful and unscrupulous. To restore them, even if it were possible, would be to rebuild with enormous pain and effort a system which must inevitably again lead directly to fresh crisis and war within a few years.17 The proposition that small nation-states had become atavistic anachronisms, left in the dust by the impact of modernity, strongly implied that the nationalist impulse itself must be in the process of being rendered obsolete by the same ineluctable historical process. The following year, the Aberystwyth international relations theorist and leader-writer for The Times, Edward Hallett Carr, proceeded to this further conclusion. To avoid repeating the errors of Versailles, he contended, ‘we must discard the nineteenth-century assumption that nation and state should normally coincide’. Rather, it was important to see the nation as a cultural community whose interests could adequately be served outside the framework of an independent political entity. Thus far, Carr’s approach was broadly in line with that of Harold Laski, who had suggested a decade previously that nationalism

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could ‘be fully satisfied without flowing into the channels of sovereignty. What it seeks is freedom from an alien control like that of Austria over Italy, of Turkey over Bulgaria, of Russia over Poland’.18 In Carr’s view, however, national identity itself was a formulation that, in some parts of the world at least, need no longer be taken into consideration. If a peasant from ‘what used to be the eastern marches of Poland’, Carr claimed, was to be asked what ‘self-determination’ meant to him, he would no doubt interpret it in terms of his freedom to retain his language, customs and religion. At the very most he might, ‘if he were capable of so daring a flight of imagination’, express the desire to own his own land. ‘It is highly improbable that membership of a Polish or a Russian national state would enter into his calculations at all.’19 Neither Carr’s choice of Poland as an example, his employment of the words ‘used to be’ in reference to the part of the country invaded and seized by Stalin in 1939, nor his overall tone of lip-curling condescension was accidental. As one of Britain’s most outspoken apologists for Soviet Communism, Carr was anxious to provide justification for the Kremlin’s expansionist policy.20 But his paradoxical attempt to uphold the USSR’s credentials as a model multinational polity21 and his denunciation of the nation-state as outmoded and anachronistic found an answering echo from Labour in the aftermath of Germany’s attack upon the Soviet Union. As the Daily Herald argued in 1942 in an editorial responding to the government’s announcement that it no longer regarded itself bound by the Munich agreement, such a declaration ought not to mean that ‘we aim at a mere setting back of the clock, a rigid restoration of frontiers as they were between the wars’. Just as a Georgian was ‘no less free for being a citizen of the Soviet Union’ nor a Dutch-speaking South African for being a member of a linguistic minority within the British Commonwealth, so the peoples of Europe must learn to decouple ethnic identity from political sovereignty.22 Elaborating on this theme, the economist and one-time guru of Guild Socialism, G.D.H. Cole, pressed the argument still further by arguing that, however wicked the Nazi new order might be, it was in some ways preferable to the ‘impracticable’ system of sovereign states that had preceded it. In economic terms at least, he contended, it was arguable that ‘it would be better to let Hitler conquer all Europe short of the Soviet Union, and thereafter exploit it ruthlessly in the Nazi interest, than to go back to the pre-war order of independent Nation States with frontiers drawn so as to cut right across the natural units of production and exchange’.23 The essential point was not that borders were impediments to the efficient passage of goods and services – Cobden had said

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as much – but that the nation-state had been nothing more than the political analogue of the capitalist economic system; the supersession of the one was essential to the destruction of the other. I would much sooner see the Soviet Union, even with its policy unchanged, dominant over all Europe, including Great Britain, than see an attempt to restore the pre-war States to their futile and uncreative independence and their petty economic nationalism under capitalist domination. Much better be ruled by Stalin than by the destructive and monopolistic cliques which dominate Western capitalism. Nay more: much better be ruled by Stalin than by a pack of half-hearted and half-witted Social Democrats who do not believe in Socialism, but do still believe in the ‘independence’ of their separate, obsolete national States. For it would be much better to live within a system, however barbaric in some of its features, that has in it some creative force making for the liberation of mankind from class-oppression and primary poverty than to be thrust back under the dead hand of a decaying capitalism utterly incapable of fresh, creative effort.24 While few went as far as Cole – or were as willing to pursue the argument to its logical conclusion by including Britain in the ‘antinationalist’ critique – the proposition that the Hitlerite Gleichschaltung of western Europe, in the words of another Fabian internationalist, Barbara Ward, had ‘scrambled the eggs so completely that they could not be unscrambled’25 gained considerable ground within the party. The New Statesman, for example, denounced the third point of the Atlantic Charter – which contained an aspiration to restore sovereign rights and self-government to the invaded countries – as ‘an intention once again to Balkanise Europe …’.26 At the 1942 Annual Conference, Noel-Baker on behalf of the NEC was forced by Ivor Thomas to disavow any intention ‘that all the old sovereign rights and all the old frontiers of pre-war Europe should be restored’.27 The NEC interim report The Old World and the New Society, published at the same time, likewise cautioned that the re-establishment of security and independence after the war would not ‘imply any nation’s right to sovereignty in the sense that this was claimed and exercised by states in the inter-war years’.28 By the mid-point of the war, then, Labour’s intelligentsia had come to accept if not with enthusiasm, then at all events with commendable fortitude, the irreversibility of at least one key element of the Nazi new order.

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A EUROPEAN CIVIL WAR? It was, of course, a long step from asserting the obsolescence of the European nation-state system to securing its dissolution. Even those who believed that the task had to all intents and purposes already been accomplished recognised that the effect might not prove to be permanent after Germany was defeated. The danger remained that the nationalist and capitalist ‘old order’ might take advantage of the inevitable chaos following the Allies’ victory to re-establish itself; or worse, that the unreconstructed régimes of Washington and Westminster themselves might seek to have ‘the exiled Governments put back precariously and held in office by British and American main force’.29 As the war progressed, therefore, the leading advocates of ‘anti-nationalism’ became increasingly preoccupied with the problem of ensuring that Europe would not slip back into separatism once victory had been achieved. They found a natural complement to their doctrines in the concept of the war as a revolutionary struggle. As we have seen, during the initial stages of the war Labour had pinned its hopes on an anti-Nazi revolution taking place as soon as the German people came to realise the futility of the struggle, a prospect that had receded into the distance in the aftermath of Dunkirk. A minority, however, taking as their watchword the Marxist dictum that ‘war is the locomotive of revolution’, never wavered in their belief that a popular uprising would come but merely looked elsewhere for potential revolutionaries. To Richard Crossman and Kingsley Martin, for example, the astonishing ease with which the German armies had swept across Europe in 1940 could be explained only by the existence of a vast Nazi Fifth Column in France, Belgium and the Netherlands, which they held responsible for undermining the morale of the Continental peoples and rendering the actual military assault little more than a mopping-up operation. ‘The mass of mankind not only in Germany, but everywhere, was discontented with the status quo; it was therefore comparatively easy for Dr. Goebbels to exploit all the different discontents in order to disintegrate the capitalist world of sovereign states.’30 Its effectiveness thus apparently having been demonstrated, the ‘revolutionists’ urged that the same weapons of physical and political subversion now be turned by the British government against its German pioneers. The beginnings of organised resistance to Nazi occupation in Europe, in which Socialists (and, after June 1941, Communists) were especially prominent, encouraged them in the assumption that the conflict was assuming the character of a continent-wide class struggle, with the battle lines clearly drawn between Fascists and their collaborationist allies on the one hand, and

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the ‘progressive’ and internationalist forces on the other. It followed that Britain should aim to encourage these infant insurgencies by setting before the peoples of the occupied countries a more inspiring vision of European and world order than the Germans were able to offer.31 It hardly needs to be said that this was a thoroughly erroneous reading of the motivations of European resistance movements which, so far from sharing a common social and political programme, were divided amongst themselves on almost every issue except the nationalist imperative of expelling the invaders and restoring their respective countries to full independence. Some Continental Europeans like the historian Johan Huizinga, who spent the war in London at the press office of the Dutch government-in-exile, said as much, although to little avail.32 Instead several Labour programmes of varying degrees of sophistication were put forward aimed at stimulating an international working-class uprising. The most ambitious synthesis of ‘anti-nationalism’ and revolutionism came in March 1943 with the publication of Labour and Europe by the Fabian Society International Authority Group, which included Austin Albu, John Parker, Doreen Warriner and Paul Yates among its leading figures. Rejecting the ‘Liberal’ and ‘pacifist’ dogma that had produced the League of Nations, the group called for ‘a new internationalism altogether’ that would make it a primary task of the Allied armies to facilitate socialist revolution as they advanced into Europe. Inevitably, these forces would become ‘a factor in the revolutions we expect … this will not be a choice between intervention and non-intervention, but between Socialist intervention and reactionary intervention’.33 Hence the Labour Party must ‘face the fact of the necessity for the use of force and seriously consider how it is to be used …’.34 But as the invading armies assumed responsibility for the administration of the liberated areas, they would also be in a position to create a continent-wide authority with broad powers over the European economy and to ‘build up our friends into power’ by giving them positions of responsibility within it. ‘If we can do that, the creation of an international authority will not mean the imposition of a new dictatorship: it will arise as a means of supporting the constructive forces inside Europe itself.’ Other than the hard-faced men and women of the International Authority Group itself, relatively few Labour opinion-formers were attracted to proposals like these, although a notable exception was Labour’s future International Secretary, Major Denis Healey, who delivered a fire-breathing speech in much the same sense to the 1945 Annual Conference.35 They lacked realism on the one hand, ignoring the fact that the invasion would take place under the direction of a

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Conservative-dominated coalition for whom the fomenting of left-wing revolution would hardly be a priority, and were too cold-blooded to appeal to traditional internationalists on the other. Nonetheless, the impatience of Labour activists with the Wilsonian agenda that had preoccupied the previous generation of foreign policy theorists – selfdetermination, the status of national minorities, adjustment of frontiers – became increasingly pronounced as the war continued. Over time, many of them demonstrated a growing readiness to deal with these seemingly intractable questions either by proposing solutions to be imposed by fiat, or by redefining such problems out of existence. Both of these tendencies were apparent in the work of the Fabian Society International Bureau (FSIB), the most important left-wing agency for the systematic development of foreign policy to operate independently of Transport House during the war. The FSIB was formed in March 1941 in response to complaints by Fabians of a ‘lack of attention and organisation’ in the Society to international questions and a corresponding failure to exert pressure on the government in support of socialist objectives.36 The Bureau’s first honorary secretary was Doreen Warriner, but its work was directed by a six-member ‘Guiding Committee’, meeting weekly, and a larger ‘Advisory Committee’, chaired by Philip Noel-Baker, which convened at approximately bimonthly intervals.37 A panel of about a dozen MPs was created whose members agreed to accept FSIB materials and raise questions provided by the Bureau in Parliament. That there was a strong demand for such an organisation was indicated by the FSIB’s membership rolls, which by 1944 contained some 400 fee-paying subscribers and another 450 members co-opted from the Fabian Society. Unfortunately, the constructive work of the FSIB was hampered to an even greater degree by the same obstacles that had beset the Labour Party’s foreign policy planning: frequent changes in personnel and lack of consensus upon fundamental objectives. In 1942 the Bureau lost both its chairman and honorary secretary with the resignation of Noel-Baker, who obtained a ministerial appointment, and Warriner, who had more pressing responsibilities elsewhere in the Society. Leonard Woolf, who already was to a large extent keeping the FSIB afloat by his financial contributions, took over as acting chairman in July. This change in leadership was accompanied by a change in direction for the organisation. Setting aside the ‘propaganda bias’ with which it had started out, the FSIB now identified research on postwar problems as its highest priority, noting in particular the ‘urgent need for study into future political authority …’.38 But although Woolf set up a ‘responsible and authoritative group’ under his leadership to carry out research on this question, work proceeded at a snail’s pace because

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of the difficulty of finding secretarial staff. By July 1944, with the Dumbarton Oaks conference barely a month away, Woolf’s International Political Authority Group had completed only about a third of its programme. The rate of progress picked up somewhat during the autumn, but at the end of the year the Group had once again ground to a halt. As a result the publication of the Dumbarton Oaks proposals found the FSIB without any programme of its own to offer, and the Fabian Society was forced to ask Woolf’s group, to which it added for the purpose G.D.H. Cole, Allan Flanders of the SVG and Harold Wilson, to set aside its work and turn out a statement on the proposals suitable for immediate publication. Thus the only visible fruit of nearly four years of study and debate was a single pamphlet, Dumbarton Oaks: A Fabian Commentary, which was rushed into print in the spring of 1945.39 Even though its work remained incomplete, the FSIB’s wartime research into what it conceived to be the essential principles of international organisation gave evidence of the growth of a mentality among the rising generation of Labour activists which comprehended internationalism in terms of repression, rather than supersession, of national sovereignty. In a September 1941 paper, for example, John Parker warned that ‘nationalism is the strongest political force at the present time and … the chief of the factors making for revolution against Hitler in Europe’. This meant that socialists could not simply ignore its existence as a factor in the new world order: the problem was how to ‘attack and expose the crudity of unthinking nationalism’ while attempting to ‘satisfy national demands and ambitions as fairly as possible’ through the mechanism of a federal international world state. Parker’s solution was a ‘systematic exchange of populations’ – voluntarily if possible and forcibly where necessary – in disputed border areas to prevent any recurrence of the exploitation of discontented minority sentiment practised by Germany and other expansionist states before the war.40 Once such a ‘concession’ to national sentiment had been made, short shrift would be given to any individual or movement seeking to disturb the status quo. The world organisation would enforce upon its member states ‘[s]ome kind of agreed educational code ruling out the worst forms of nationalist bias, particularly in the field of history’ and create an international inspectorate with the power of ‘banning undesirably biased books and of blacklisting incorrigible teachers’. As for any remaining national minorities, these ‘must in general recognise a greater loyalty to their country of habitation than to that of their language’; those who were unable to do so would have to ‘migrate to the country for which they feel greater affection’. Majority populations in multinational states, likewise, would

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be justified in adopting preventive measures against minorities – ‘it will only be natural for most states in future to take special precautions against having disloyal elements in their midst’ – although cultural and linguistic freedoms should be respected. Thus the international authority would commence with the advantage, which the League had never enjoyed, of having neutralised the demands of dissatisfied nationalities while deriving legitimacy from a postwar settlement stable enough to induce its supporters to take the risk of war to defend it against aggression.41 Additional evidence that Parker’s conception of the international authority as arbiter of national destiny represented a genuine shift in attitudes within the extra-parliamentary party is provided by the similarity of the arguments put forward even by those members most closely associated with Wilsonianism. One of those who found Parker’s ideas persuasive was Noel-Baker, who agreed that, ‘in spite of the great suffering involved, an exchange of population was in certain cases well worth while’, as long as it was carried out under the auspices of the international authority.42 Another was Harold Laski, who warned ominously in 1941 that those nations which in the future were to be ‘permitted the luxury of self-determination’ would have to ‘subordinate the making of military, political and economic decisions’ to the requirements of the larger world order.43 The Labour elder statesman and future Secretary of State for India, Frederick PethickLawrence, spoke in a similar vein when declaring that ‘The form of government in each nation can no longer be regarded as a matter for the domestic decision of that nation alone.’44 Will Arnold-Forster, a former ACIQ member and one of the most energetic defenders of the League within the party during the 1920s and 1930s, likewise asserted in the spring of 1942 that the new international organisation must have much more extensive powers of coercion than the League. ‘[S]ecurity against anti-social behaviour must cut across frontiers; it must penetrate more and more into fields which have hitherto been reserved as “domestic”.’45 In such a spirit, Arnold-Forster proceeded to offer a radical re-interpretation of the second point of the Atlantic Charter by which the signatories had forsworn any territorial changes without the consent of the peoples concerned. While this commitment recognised the reality of nationalism, it could not, he believed, be applied without qualification – both to prevent unreasonably small nation-states re-emerging and, seemingly, because the wishes of some peoples were lacking in moral justification. Thus if the Sudeten Germans, for example, should vote for incorporation with Germany after the war, the only acceptable response on the part of the international authority would be to transfer the entire Sudeten population

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into Germany proper. ‘The world will have to create a body which has the greatest moral and intellectual authority and which is backed by the most irresistible power. Only such a body will be in a position to decide what should be the composition of the groups which are to be free to “express their wishes” about their territorial allegiance.’46

BEYOND ‘NATIONALISM’ AND ‘INTERNATIONALISM’ A rather more sophisticated alternative to what might be termed the love-it-or-leave-it school of Fabian internationalism, albeit one that shared its determination to cut the Gordian knot of nationalist allegiance once and for all, was taken up and propagated by the FSIB in the second half of the war. This was the doctrine of functionalism. David Mitrany, its chief expositor and populariser, had been a member of the Advisory Committee on International Questions during the tenure of the prewar Labour governments, but had severed his connections with the party before leaving Britain in 1933 to take up a fellowship in political science at the newly formed Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton. Although throughout his career Mitrany was to remain in close contact with Labour-affiliated theorists of internationalism like Woolf, Angell and Brailsford, his approach to the question of international government was a reaction against what he saw as their over-concentration upon ideal political structures that served only to replicate on a larger scale the inherent weaknesses and antagonisms of the nation-state. In turn, he was himself to be accused by his Labour critics of making the political dimension of international life disappear from view simply by refusing to acknowledge it as a reality. Functionalist theory was heavily influenced by Mitrany’s own background and experiences. A Romanian-born scholar educated in Germany, England and the United States who moved easily within an international intellectual community extending from North America to South Asia, his cosmopolitanism led him early to a belief that nationality was an essentially cultural force whose connection to political structures was accidental rather than organic. Mitrany’s conviction that national identity was becoming less and less relevant in an increasingly complex and interdependent world was reinforced when he went to work for the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace (CEIP) in the early 1920s. As assistant European editor of the series of volumes on wartime administration commissioned by the CEIP, Mitrany was struck by the marked likeness of the collectivist measures adopted under the stress of war by the governments of all the belligerent states, regardless of wide divergences in their political,

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social and economic systems. Later, from his vantage point at Princeton throughout the period of the New Deal, he observed at first hand how a nation possessing a governmental system of Byzantine complexity and an entrenched suspicion of centralising tendencies had overcome its sectional particularities when subjected to the similar stresses of the Depression. When he returned to Britain in 1939 to join the Foreign Research and Press Service, a unit of foreign policy researchers and analysts under the direction of Arnold Toynbee, that had been set up to provide expert advice to the Foreign Office, Mitrany distilled from these observations a distinctive theory of international organisation in a series of papers on the postwar settlement. This body of work formed the basis of the book by which he is best known, A Working Peace System, which was published in 1943. Functionalism, in common with traditional Labour internationalism, proceeded from the assumption that human beings were naturally pacific and shared a set of common social and economic interests. ‘Give people a moderate sufficiency of what they need and ought to have and they will keep the peace: this has been proved time and again nationally but it has not yet been tried internationally.’47 The rise of aggressive nationalism in the 1930s was thus in large measure a response to the failure of international society to meet basic human needs and, in Mitrany’s view, marked a profound shift from earlier manifestations of national consciousness: On a broad comparison, the nationalism of the early 19th century was a liberal nationalism, the new is a socialistic nationalism. The first had the negative purpose of checking autocracy and found expression in written constitutions; the second wants to satisfy social needs and is apt to be scornful of all written or unwritten rights … As a consequence, the 20th century national state is utterly different from the 19th century national state … The ‘police’ state has become a ‘service’ state, and all the dictatorial régimes, whatever their brand, are ‘service’ dictatorships … [A]ny international experiment will have a chance only by linking up with that demand for social action. It cannot check it, but it can put it on a broader basis. And it has a good chance of doing so, for while in the 19th century nationalism and internationalism belonged to two different political categories, the two are now in the same category and differ only in dimensions.48 The error made by internationalists of the League of Nations variety, Mitrany argued, was that they had approached the problem from the

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wrong end. Instead of tackling common problems through improvisation and allowing the goals of international organisation to determine the structures appropriate to each case, they had begun by drawing up elaborate ideal constitutions every clause of which had to be agreed by all participants before any action could be taken. In reality, ‘almost all political invention starts from the practical end in view, and tailors the constitutional arrangements and the institutions to fit that end’.49 As evidence he cited the experience of the United States during the New Deal, when the powers of the federal government had been vastly increased vis-à-vis those of the states without any reference to the Constitution, by creating agencies to carry out specific, limited functions. ‘People have gladly accepted the service when they might have questioned the theory. The one attempt at direct constitutional revision, to increase and liberalise the membership of the Supreme Court, was bitterly disputed and defeated.’50 It was thus counterproductive to seek to create a vast international political authority on League lines at the end of the war, which would only maximise the differences between member-states rather than remind them of their commonalities. No less futile were federations or territorial unions, even if these could overcome their centrifugal tendencies, since they would bind together interests which were not necessarily congruent while severing others already in place between members of a federation and their non-participating neighbours. ‘The only way to avoid that twice arbitrary surgery is to proceed by a natural organic selection, binding together those interests which are common, where they are common, and to the extent to which they are common.’51 This did not mean that functional agencies would always operate only by the principle of unanimity, or that coercive measures against wrongdoers would never be required. Indeed, one of the beauties of the arrangement was that a fully developed functional system could ‘apply sanctions more effectively to any State which misbehaved itself in a much more effective way than any political government can do … because it can do so as part of its regular task and therefore could not be inhibited as the representative of some foreign government’. Similarly, functional agencies need make ‘no nonsensical concessions to the notion of the equality of sovereign nations’, but could accord to each country the actual influence that its place in the world economy demanded. Mitrany’s ideas were not wholly original. Ever since the publication of Woolf’s International Government in 1916, and even before, most theorists in the field had noted the importance of ‘peaceful change’ and enumerated with varying degrees of exhaustiveness the positive functions any international authority must undertake. Where Mitrany

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differed from his predecessors was in his insistence that these were the only appropriate fields of activity, and that the political authority around which other plans were constructed was a positive impediment to the future organisation of the world. As he asserted at an FSIB conference in January 1944, traditional questions of security and protection of the rights of nations or individuals were no longer as meaningful as the concrete problem of peaceful change. ‘Surely the interests of the particular national or sectional group is not simply in waving flags, but in seeing that its conditions of life are the best possible under given circumstances.’52 Mitrany’s wholesale dismissal of the political dimension in world affairs led to functionalism receiving a rough reception from those Labour internationalists who had been most closely associated with the League. Replying to Mitrany’s paper at the FSIB conference, Brailsford wondered whether functionalism was not being put forward as an alternative ‘largely because we despair of solving the more difficult problem of power’.53 It was, he argued, difficult to conceive of functional agencies succeeding without some recourse to legislative authority, if only because favourably situated states would otherwise be able to bargain their control of strategic positions or natural resources to secure unfair advantages from the world community. Noel-Baker was another who derided the notion that functionalism would not eventually become a political football whenever it impinged upon the vital interests of particular states.54 The émigré economist Tommy Balogh, though not himself a League enthusiast, took issue with Mitrany’s fundamental presupposition that ‘there is a harmony of interests within each country and between all countries irrespective of size and constitution’, a notion he described as ‘completely futile’.55 Other branches of the Labour movement, notably the Socialist Vanguard Group, likewise heavily criticised Mitrany’s ‘escape from politics’ as likely only ‘to make the world safe for monopolists’.56 Elsewhere in Labour circles, though, functionalism did gain a significant following. While virtually no one was prepared, at least to the extent that Mitrany apparently was, to relegate to the background the idea of an international political authority with particular responsibility for preserving the peace, Labour politicians readily accepted the suggestion that the closer nations were bound together by common activities and agencies, the less prevalent wars would become. The appearance of A Working Peace System, which enjoyed a considerable success and was translated into half a dozen languages, made Mitrany’s doctrines accessible to a wide audience. Among those paying close attention were Harold Laski, for whom functionalism became a useful buttress of the Marxist economic doctrines he had long professed; and

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Stafford Cripps, whose Private Parliamentary Secretary, David Owen, sent him Mitrany’s FRPS papers in the aftermath of the book’s publication.57 Ernest Bevin, another recipient of Mitrany’s FRPS memoranda, also expressed enthusiasm for functionalism at the end of 1942. But it was the hard-line anti-nationalists Cole and Carr who found functionalist theory most useful as an adjunct to their own ideas. Professing to discern a difference between what ‘most people who are moved by the spirit of nationality’ really wanted as opposed to ‘nationalist politicians, who are all partly mad’, Cole suggested in February 1944 that the most promising way to satisfy these popular aspirations lay ‘along functional rather than political lines’. The same argument was made shortly afterwards by Carr, who predicted that ‘the inadequacy of the national unit on the one hand and … a single comprehensive world unit on the other’ would compel the adoption of functional methods, although in a departure from pure functionalism both men also envisaged a rôle for voluntary federal associations.58 Somewhat ironically in light of these early uses of the doctrine, functionalism after the war would assume great importance as the principal theoretical crutch upon which Labour members seeking to defend British sovereignty against the emergence of a European federation were to lean. Notwithstanding this ‘conservative use of original ingredients’ of which more will be said in Chapter 7, the general trend of Fabian and extra-parliamentary Labour thought, as well as that of the party’s policymaking machinery, is clearly discernible. As the smaller European countries demonstrated their political and military impotence, as the war ever more clearly assumed the character of a contest between the Great Powers and as the conflict became more protracted and bitterly fought, Labour opinion became less and less patient with the kind of nineteenth-century liberal internationalism that had found its apotheosis in Wilson’s Fourteen Points. To a generation of theorists whose attitudes had been hardened by their experience of the collapse of the old order in the face of premeditated aggression and of a total war that recognised neither boundaries nor limitations, earlier concerns like the sanctity of treaties and the rights of small nations seemed abstractions from an earlier, more naïve age. While these new internationalists differed on the precise means to be employed, they were united in their determination that such outmoded political principles would not be allowed to stand in the way of the new world order, whatever form it should ultimately take. Thus for Mitrany, the primary objective of the postwar international system was to be ‘much more a matter of protection of life and livelihood than of rights’. Balogh, in spite of his objections to functionalism, likewise concurred that

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‘internationalism of the liberal type [which] resolves itself, as it has resolved itself between the wars, into agreeing with the highest common platitude of the most reactionary government’ had proven to be a dangerous illusion; that Labour should divorce itself from the ‘high falutin’ internationalism of the … League of Nations Union type’ was now essential. William Warbey noted that, in contrast to their counterparts of the Great War era, modern foreign policy intellectuals were becoming ‘hard-boiled realists’ for whom Wilsonian idealism had no place. Even representatives of the older generation like Laski, who deplored some aspects of this trend, recognised that a dramatic shift in fundamental attitudes had taken place. I cannot remember in my own lifetime a period when the small state has been regarded as so irrelevant, or so incapable of assisting in the making of its own life … Field-Marshal Smuts is only the most eminent of a growing band of thinkers who assume that the identity of right with power is a matter it is no longer legitimate to question.59 By the end of the war, then, the character of internationalism among the party intelligentsia had undergone a marked transformation. The liberal ideals that had deeply influenced Labour foreign policy from its beginnings, in whose defence the campaigns against the Versailles Treaty in the 1920s and appeasement in the 1930s had been waged, were now being forced back on the defensive. To the new Fabian-influenced internationalists, national self-determination was no longer a right but a privilege, to be conferred or withheld at the discretion of a Great Power-dominated international system according to its conception of the greater good. Nor was this school of left-wing thought deterred by the coercive measures, from euphemistically termed ‘population transfers’ (i.e. ‘ethnic cleansing’) to policing of schoolbooks, that would be required to give effect to their vision of the postwar world. Rather, these were seen as the price that must be paid in order to save the lesser nations from their manifest inability to govern themselves responsibly. At bottom, ‘anti-nationalism’ represented not so much a departure from as an inversion of the League-oriented approach Labour had pursued after the Great War. The supranational schemes of Woolf, Brailsford and Hobson had been devised primarily to ensure that unrepresentative, autocratic cliques in the chancelleries of Europe (the one in Whitehall not least among them) could never again lead the peoples of the world unwillingly into war. Whether incorporating an international parliament or not, these blueprints proposed to set in

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place structures enabling small, pacific, democratic nations – of which Belgium was the quintessential example – to be protected against the aggrandising and imperialist impulses which were believed to inhere in the governments of the capitalist Great Powers. By the end of the Second World War, advanced Labour opinion had come to stand this doctrine on its head. Whether as easy prey for aggressive neighbours or artificial impediment to economic development, it was now the small state that increasingly was viewed as a threat to international stability, and the Great Powers, with their combination of economic sophistication, cultural diversity and military self-sufficiency, as the natural guarantors of the new world order. Thus it was that Labour’s most frequently reiterated criticism of the Covenant, that it imposed upon the world a ‘League of Victors’, had a quarter of a century later become the single indispensable attribute required of by the League’s successor.

NOTES 1. G. Orwell, The Lion and the Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius (London: Secker & Warburg, 1941), p. 48. 2. M. Foot, ‘Preface to the Penguin Edition’, in ‘Cato’, Guilty Men (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1998), p. v. 3. G. Orwell, ‘Patriots and Revolutionaries’, in V. Gollancz (ed.), The Betrayal of the Left (London: Victor Gollancz, 1941). 4. Williams, Nothing So Strange, p. 157. 5. ‘When Chamberlain waved his bit of paper after Munich and prattled absurdly about “Peace in our time” both intellect and will rejected it. Yet there is no use pretending that emotion did not long to believe and even raised a muffled guilty cheer. It was not easy to avoid shame.’ Ibid., p. 146. 6. ‘Three years ago we took up arms against Hitler – woefully unprepared as we were. It was a question of principle and of our pledged word. We were not pushed into it either by words or by the bayonet of an enemy in our back.’ Speech by Herbert Morrison at Hackney, 29 October 1942, quoted in H.S. Morrison, Spearhead of Humanity (London: Labour Party, 1943). 7. H.J. Laski, The Strategy of Freedom: An Open Letter to American Youth (New York: Harper, 1941), p. 26. 8. R.H.S. Crossman, ‘Nationalism and Democratic Socialism’, in H.J. Laski et al., Where Stands Democracy? A Collection of Essays by Members of the Fabian Society (London: Macmillan, 1940), pp. 87, 89. 9. One of these was Sidney Webb, who, using terminology that clearly revealed the rationale underlying his attitude, derided ‘that Fenian abstraction, the “principle of nationality”’. S. Webb, ‘Lord Rosebery’s Escape From Houndsditch’, Nineteenth Century, 294 (September 1901), p. 371. 10. Brailsford, War of Steel and Gold, p. 185. 11. ‘A great part of the inspiration of Liberalism has been drawn from the struggles of the nations against Napoleon, of the Eastern Christians against Turkey, of the Poles against Russia, of the Italians against Austria, of the Irish against England.’ L.T. Hobhouse,

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12.

13.

14.

15. 16. 17. 18. 19.

20.

21.

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Democracy and Reaction (London: Unwin, 1904), p. 157. For Labour, however, there was an additional consideration, as Hugh Dalton explained: ‘History … shows that in many cases nationalities which have regained their freedom quickly become pacific.’ In this formulation, independence was seen as a step along the road to interdependence and ultimately to the co-operative world commonwealth to which Labour aspired. H. Dalton, Towards the Peace of Nations: A Study in International Politics (London: Routledge, 1928), p. 12. Small states like Poland and Czechoslovakia, Dalton proclaimed in the debate on the Address in November 1939, were ‘entitled to have just as much sovereignty in the future layout of Europe – although, let us hope, every one will have less than in the past – as the French or we claim for ourselves’. 355 H.C. Deb. 5s, c. 20 (30 November 1939). ‘When Hitler is defeated, as the last would-be invader of Britain was defeated, can the Low Countries return to their isolation, their dangerous neutrality, exposed to the caprice and the intrigues of another German aggression? Can Britain, in her own interests, remain indifferent while the Pistol [sic] is again pointed at England’s heart?’ Daily Herald, 3 February 1941. Thus Michael Foot’s, Peter Howard’s and Frank Owen’s 1940 description of prewar Poland as ‘a country ruled by a degenerate crew of landowners and old soldiers’; or Konni Zilliacus’s reference the same year to ‘the semi-fascist Polish State, whose foreign policy bore an unenviable responsibility for its own troubles …’. ‘Cato’, Guilty Men (1940), p. 68; K. Zilliacus, ‘War and Preparations for Peace’, in Laski et al., Where Stands Democracy?, p. 141. See, e.g., D. Warriner, Eastern Europe after Hitler (Fabian Research Series No. 50) (London: Victor Gollancz & Fabian Society, 1940). ‘War Aims Begin at Home’, Tribune, 4 October 1940. Bevan’s reference was to a weekly BBC broadcast of Allied national anthems which preceded the main evening news. F. Williams, War by Revolution (London: Routledge, 1940), pp. 136-7. H.J. Laski, Nationalism and the Future of Civilization (London: Watts, 1932), p. 31. E.H. Carr, The Future of Nations: Independence or Interdependence? (London: Kegan Paul, Trench & Trubner, 1941), pp. 49, 17. For a concise description of Carr’s life and work, see C. Jones, E.H. Carr and International Relations: A Duty to Lie (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). Nor was Carr alone on the left in his hostility toward Poland. Their detestation of Nazism notwithstanding, many Labour activists felt a sense of mild chagrin that to fight Hitler necessarily involved readiness to ‘die for Danzig’, the more so inasmuch as one of the party’s most cherished foreign policy achievements between the wars – the Jolly George episode of 1920 – had been to prevent the Lloyd George coalition from sending assistance to the Poles in their war against the Soviet Union. See also Brailsford’s description in 1933 of the Polish régime as being as ‘barbarous’ as those of Nazi Germany or Fascist Italy. H.N. Brailsford, ‘A Socialist Foreign Policy’, in C. Addison et al., Problems of a Socialist Government (London: Victor Gollancz, 1933), p. 266. ‘Soviet Russia, though she has raised the cry of self-determination when it served her purpose, has developed the theory and practice of the multi-national state bound together by a tie of loyalty independent of, and indeed opposed to, national feeling. “In no other country”, as M. Litvinov once remarked, “are all manifestations of race and national prejudice so resolutely put down and eradicated as in the Soviet Union”.’ Carr, The Future of Nations, pp. 25-6. The ironies abound: Carr’s obliviousness to ‘Great Russia’ chauvinism; his apparent belief in the sudden discovery by the Poles, Finns, Latvians, Lithuanians and Estonians – coincident with the arrival of the Red Army upon their territories – of their ‘loyalty’ to the USSR; his indifference to the methods by which national sentiment was, in Litvinov’s pregnant phrase, ‘put down’; and his espousal of multinationalism in defence of the aggressions perpetrated by the erstwhile Commissar of Nationalities.

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22. Daily Herald, 7 August 1942. The New Statesman, likewise, took up virtually word for word the gospel according to Carr: ‘Sooner or later the world must discover the quite simple truth that sovereign States which have chanced to emerge through centuries of religious and dynastic wars cannot solve the minority problems within their own artificial frontiers nor can any exchange of populations or redrawing of frontiers provide a remedy … The only solution is a federal system which permits of far more cultural and national units within a larger political and economic frame. Stalin did not invent those ideas, but they have first been exemplified in the U.S.S.R.’ New Statesman and Nation, 11 November 1944. 23. G.D.H. Cole, Europe, Russia and the Future (London: Victor Gollancz, 1941), p. 104. Four years earlier, Cripps had expressed a not dissimilar view in the correspondence columns of The Times: he could not agree that ‘it would be a bad thing for the British working class if Germany defeated us’. Quoted in Ceadel, Semi-Detached Idealists, p. 342. 24. Cole, Europe, Russia and the Future, p. 16. It should be noted, however, that by 1949 Cole’s attitude towards the Stalinist state and its methods had undergone a marked transformation: ‘we are determined to set about getting Socialism in a decent, democratic way and are not prepared to wade to it through seas of cruelty and dictatorship that would make a mockery of it, even if something miscalled Socialism could be established by such means’. G.D.H. Cole, Labour’s Second Term: A Comment on the Draft: ‘Labour Believes in Britain’ (Fabian Tract No. 273) (London: Fabian Publications, 1949), p. 17. 25. B. Ward, ‘Foundations of Foreign Policy’, 22 June 1942, Fabian Society International Bureau Bulletin, 3 (August 1942), J/57/1/26, Fabian Society papers. 26. New Statesman and Nation, 23 August 1941, p. 175. 27. 41 LPCR (1942), p. 156. 28. Labour Party, National Executive Committee, The Old World and the New Society, p. 25. 29. Cole, Europe, Russia and the Future, p. 20. 30. ‘Scipio’ [R.H.S. Crossman and B.K. Martin], 100,000,000 Allies – If We Choose (London: Victor Gollancz, 1940), p. 63. At the time of this book’s appearance, Crossman had just been appointed to the Political Warfare Executive, where he spent the war attempting unsuccessfully to stimulate anti-Nazi feeling within Germany. 31. ‘Hitler’s taunts are justified unless Britain, which cannot reconquer Europe by mere military force, intends to encourage popular revolt in Germany and in the enslaved countries, and offers instead of Nazi unity a new international order based on a determination to overcome national separatism by guaranteeing the economic prosperity of the common people of Europe and its colonies.’ New Statesman and Nation, 14 December 1940. 32. ‘To say that countries like Holland, for instance, will only be encouraged to resistance if they are provided with a hopeful alternative is to completely misread the true temper of its people … In their agony these countries feel no inclination towards new orders of any kind. They desire only one thing: return of the old order, that is, of freedom and independence; in short, they want their British Allies, in whom they have put all their hope, to win the war and win it quickly.’ J.H. Huizinga, letter in New Stateman and Nation, 7 December 1940. 33. Fabian Society, International Authority Group, Labour and Europe: The Need for a Socialist Strategy (Fabian Research Series No. 71) (London: Fabian Publications, 1943), pp. 23-4. 34. Ibid., p. 26. The manifesto offered the intriguing suggestion of supplying the invasion force with a cadre of commissars, although sadly without specifying from whence these would be drawn: ‘It is important that the army should fully understand its relations to the civil authorities … and particularly to those newly emerging democratic forces, both political and Trade Union, whose claim to diplomatic considerations will not, at first sight, be very clear. It will be important that civil attachés fully competent to recognise the real representatives of the masses accompany the armies into Europe.’ 35. See 44 LPCR (1945), p. 114.

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36. Memorandum by Doreen Warriner, 3 March 1941, J/57/1/5, Fabian Society papers. 37. The Guiding Committee’s members were John Parker (Fabian Society chairman), H.D. Hughes, Warriner, Yates, Zilliacus and a paid secretary, Miss D. Chitty. The Advisory Committee consisted of Brailsford, Margaret Cole, Laski, Kingsley Martin, Mackay, Parker, Rennie Smith, Francis Williams, Woolf, Barbara Wootton, Yates and Zilliacus. Unsigned memorandum, 12 July 1942, J/57/1/8, Fabian Society papers. 38. Unsigned memorandum (c. winter 1943), ‘Notes on Two Years’ Work of the Bureau’, J/57/1/27, Fabian Society papers. 39. See p. 130 below. 40. Parker returned to this theme a year later, demanding that ‘Germans outside the Reich [sic] should be sent back to Germany …’. News Chronicle, 19 December 1942. 41. Parker, ‘The International Order of the Future’, 5 September 1941, NBKR 2/57, NoelBaker papers. 42. FSIB minutes, 7 September 1941, NBKR 2/57, Noel-Baker papers. 43. Laski, The Strategy of Freedom, pp. 112-13. 44. Daily Herald, 12 September 1944. 45. W. Arnold-Forster, ‘The Atlantic Charter’, Political Quarterly, 13, 2 (April–June 1942), p. 149. 46. Ibid., p. 147. This marked a reversal of Arnold–Foster’s opinion early in the war, when he had maintained that ‘Sudeten Germans should be free to attach themselves to their own society.’ News Chronicle, 14 November 1939. 47. D. Mitrany, The Road to Security (Peace Aims Pamphlet No. 29) (London: National Peace Council, 1944), p. 15. 48. ‘Note on the New Nationalism – and the New Internationalism’, 3 October 1940, FRPS RR I/16, ‘Nationalism’ box-file, Mitrany papers, British Library of Political and Economic Science, London. 49. ‘Possible Forms of Post-War International Structure’, 10 May 1942, FRPS RR/I/74, ‘League of Nations Proposals’, box 1, file 3, Mitrany papers. 50. ‘Note on a Functional Basis of International Action with Special Reference to the United States,’ 3 October 1940, FRPS RR/I/74, ‘League of Nations Proposals’, box 1, file 3, Mitrany papers. This was a somewhat rose-coloured interpretation of the New Deal, many of the functional agencies involved eventually being struck down by the Supreme Court on precisely the constitutional grounds that Mitrany claimed were irrelevant. 51. ‘Territorial, Ideological, or Functional International Organisation?’, 2 January 1941, FRPS RR I/22/i, 6, Mitrany papers. 52. Report of FSIB Conference on International Security, Oxford, 8–10 January 1944, J/61/5, p. 52, Fabian Society papers. 53. Ibid., p. 55. 54. Noel-Baker to Harold Butler, FO, 24 August 1942, NBKR 4/500, Noel-Baker papers. 55. Fabian conference report, January 1944, p. 33, J/61/5, Fabian Society papers. 56. Writing in the SVG journal, Cynthia A. Rowland pointed out that ‘there is no reason why a public corporation should automatically work in the public interest. The citizen of any country has generally the protection of the law against actual or imagined [sic] encroachment on his rights by a public body. But there is no international law governing international corporations, and if there were, there would need to be authority behind it to make it effective.’ Socialist Commentary, February 1944, p. 179. 57. H.J. Laski, Reflections on the Revolution of Our Time (New York: Viking, 1943); Owen to Mitrany, 8 September 1943. Another prominent leftist who manifested an early interest in functionalism was the US Vice-President, Henry Wallace, who wrote to Mitrany seeking a copy of his work. 58. ‘Points from Speech on the Limits of Nationalism’, Kingsway Hall, London, 2 February 1944, A1/72/7, Cole papers; E.H. Carr, Nationalism and After (London: Macmillan, 1945), p. 47.

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59. Fabian conference report, January 1944, J/61/5, p. 59, Fabian Society papers. Laski’s reference was to a speech given by Smuts to the Empire Parliamentary Association six weeks earlier, in which he had spoken of the small European democracies as having ‘learned their lesson … that, standing by themselves on the Continent, dominated by one or other Great Power, as will be the future position, they are lost’, and forecast that their future would lie ‘with Great Britain and the next world-wide British system’. The Times, 3 December 1943.

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Trustees for Humanity: Ministerial Planning for International Government, 1940–45

The Labour Party’s decision to enter a coalition government under Winston Churchill in May 1940 was a response to an unprecedented national crisis, not an act of political calculation. Beyond staving off somehow the prospect of imminent defeat the Churchill Coalition had no agreed policy, far less a programme for government. It was true, as Attlee told the Annual Conference at Bournemouth in his speech seeking ratification of Labour’s participation in the coalition, that the war effort would require ‘application of the Socialist principle of service before private property’.1 Nevertheless, neither of the partners sought or obtained formal commitments of any kind from the other in return for its collaboration. For its part, the Labour leadership accepted Churchill’s guiding principle for the new government of ‘everything for the war, whether controversial or not, and nothing controversial that is not bona fide needed for the war’. Throughout the life of the coalition, Attlee and his colleagues consistently and for the most part successfully resisted the left’s demand to exploit state control over the economy for socialist objectives, even to the extent of precipitating a damaging and well-publicised rift within the PLP in February 1943 over wartime implementation of the Beveridge Report. But while Churchill’s formula may have sufficed as a rule of thumb for Labour ministers in domestic affairs – albeit at the cost of straining the relationship between the front bench and the rank and file almost to breaking point – it was of little assistance to them in determining the ideological balance to be struck in external policy. Decisions about the shape of the postwar world order were bound to be controversial, and by definition were irrelevant to the outcome of the conflict. But neither could they simply be deferred until the end of the war, inasmuch

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as the wartime policies of the British and Allied governments would strongly influence, if not predetermine, the structure of international society once peace was re-established. Labour ministers between 1940 and 1945 were therefore tugged now one way, now another, by the demands of three different constituencies: their own party whose mandates to the leadership were expressed in resolutions of the Annual Conference; their Conservative and Liberal ministerial colleagues with whom they shared collective responsibility for the coalition’s actions; and their counterparts in the governments of the Soviet Union and the United States. Although Labour’s leaders were forced to grapple with the problem of divided loyalties during the war, the policies they supported while in government might be expected to reflect to a considerable extent their own fundamental convictions about the form the postwar world should take. The vagueness of official party statements on this question which, as has been seen, reached a peak with the adoption of The International Post-War Settlement, provided Labour ministers with unprecedented freedom of action to apply the lessons they had learned during the long years of opposition in the 1930s. In the event, this latitude was more a hindrance to the Labour leadership than a help. Inhibited by the unwritten rules of coalition against pressing overtly partisan schemes upon their Conservative and Liberal partners; preoccupied by the heavy demands of the offices they held, the majority of which were in the domestic sphere; and shaken by the series of disasters which had overtaken first the League and then the European continent, Labour ministers initially were even less able to respond in a meaningful way to the challenge of redefining the party’s international policy than was Transport House. With the exception of Philip Noel-Baker – neither a member of the Cabinet nor even, until 1942, of the government2 – the Labour leadership displayed during its first days in office much uncertainty about the way in which internationalist principles could, or should, be given practical effect. Where Labour ministers did differ from the majority of their coalition partners, however, was in their insistence that this problem be addressed as a matter of urgency. From the very beginning, members of the Labour front bench applied sustained pressure upon their Conservative colleagues to begin work on the question of rebuilding a system of international government after the war. So much resistance did they encounter from the Prime Minister and other senior Tories that it is safe to conclude that little if any serious study would have been carried out before 1942 without their initiative. Hence, even though they may have lacked a coherent vision of their own, the Labour leadership nonetheless made a vital contribution by

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enlisting, and promoting the work of, a loose network of academics and civil servants to whom was entrusted the task of drawing up specifications for what would eventually become the United Nations Organisation. Although the Labour ministers functioned as facilitators rather than originators of British policy planning for the new world order, one ought not to conclude that they did little more than fall in passively with the proposals of the academics and officials under their patronage. It would be more accurate to say that the groundswell of support during the war for a world order in which a morally renewed Britain along with the other victorious Great Powers would take all important decisions in international affairs, exercised much the same influence upon the front bench as upon the extra-parliamentary party, and for much the same reasons. As was true of the latter, however, the conversion of the Labour leadership to a ‘muscular’ form of internationalism was neither uniform nor absolute. With Dalton, Bevin and Morrison this metamorphosis went furthest; less so with Cripps;3 and least of all in the case of Attlee. Nevertheless, the readiness of all of them to lend support to a scheme of world organisation differing radically from the communitarian model revealed how profoundly the Labour leadership’s attitude towards nationalism and internationalism had been affected by the experience of war.

BURYING THE LEAGUE For the Labour ministers who assumed office in the summer of 1940, a significant obstacle to the creation of a new international political authority was the fact that the one created in 1919 continued its existence. Although the declaration of hostilities had rendered the League of Nations irrelevant to the course of world affairs, the body retained its legal status and secretariat throughout the war. Not until 1946 would it be wound up and its remaining functions transferred to the United Nations Organisation. Its survival, even in a formal sense, created special problems for the Labour members of the coalition. To acknowledge that the League had been a failed experiment in international government and ought to be dissolved forthwith was to contradict the whole of the party’s foreign policy during the previous two decades. On the other hand, to assert – as Labour frontbenchers routinely did – that the fault lay not with the machinery of the League but rather the commitment of its member governments, and especially the National Government, would encourage the most Whiggish of the ‘Whig’ internationalists to seek to breathe fresh life into the Genevan corpse.

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For this reason, the Labour members of the Churchill Coalition preserved a discreet public silence with regard to the questions left unanswered by the League’s inconvenient survival. One senior Labour figure, however, was determined not to allow the government to evade this dilemma. Philip Noel-Baker, who had already taken the lead in seeking to stimulate Transport House debate on war aims, let no opportunity pass to impress upon Labour ministers the priority that ought to be assigned to the future international authority. The rebuilding of such a structure was, he believed, by far the most important, if not the only, war aim demanding the consideration of the government. ‘Unless this war is being fought for an international organisation that will stop future wars’, he remarked in a letter to his brother in October 1940, ‘it is certainly not worth while at all.’4 In his view, moreover, that organisation could be none other than the League itself, or some body so closely modelled upon it as to be a virtual reincarnation. In May 1941, he suggested that the simplest and most effective course of action at the end of the war would be ‘to summon the Assembly of 1942 to meet in Geneva in the ordinary way. After all, we are still paying our subscriptions … In any case, for anyone who wants future world organisation, to throw the Covenant and the Kellogg Pact out of the window is sheer lunacy’.5 Noel-Baker’s curious allusion to the Kellogg Pact, which most western European countries including his own were blithely violating, may have been no more than an expression of nostalgia for an age when the principle of pacta sunt servanda was not being honoured so spectacularly in the breach; he was not to refer to it again. But the Covenant, for him, remained a development of world-historical significance. Two months later, seemingly oblivious to the irony of echoing the apostle of the Prussian nation-state in defence of internationalism, Noel-Baker borrowed the rhetoric of Hegel to suggest in a lengthy FSIB memorandum that the League had been nothing less than an institutional expression of the grand scheme underpinning human evolution: The League of Nations was an attempt to provide governmental organisation for the universal society of mankind. It was thus the beginning of the final stage of the historical process by which order and unity have been brought to civilised human societies in every continent. The more closely its law and institutions are studied, the more plainly are they found to be applications of the broad general principles by which this order and unity have been established in national societies.

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In support of this thesis, Noel-Baker sought to exonerate the League of the accusations commonly laid at its door. The institutions of international government, he argued, whether political, judicial or economic, had never failed whenever they were used, and the rules of the Covenant had been ‘fully adequate to the needs of any situation which arose … up to and including Munich …’. Nor was it true that public opinion had opposed the League; on the contrary, all the evidence indicated that the overwhelming majority of citizens in all member countries both understood its principles and desired their full application. The present war, moreover, was powerful testimony to the correctness of the League’s emphasis upon all-round disarmament:’if there had been no submarines, tanks, heavy guns or military aviation, none of Hitler’s and Mussolini’s aggressions would have been successful’. Finally, the contention that the League had permitted the underlying causes of wars to flourish, by neglecting to bring about the peaceful change for which Article XIX of the Covenant had been intended, could not be sustained. No power had ever found itself driven to war in consequence of an unsuccessful appeal under Article XIX, and in any event no conceivable amount of peaceful change would have been sufficient to satisfy the aggressors. Noel-Baker concluded that the inability of the League to prevent the war, if viewed in its ‘true historical perspective’, had not been ‘the complete or final failure of a new and too ambitious and unrealistic experiment. On the contrary, it is only an unfortunate incident in the process by which international government will, in due course, be developed.’6 The explanation provided for this historical anomaly, however, raised as many problems as it disposed of. The logic of some of Noel-Baker’s arguments was inscrutable: while it was a truism that aggressive war would not be possible if aggressive weapons did not exist, it was far from obvious that the League had constituted the best machinery for securing their abolition. In the same way, the fact that Article XIX had never prevented peaceful change from taking place could be considered not so much a proof of its adequacy as an indication that the entire subject had been irrelevant to the specific causes of the Second World War. But above all these considerations was the inescapable reality that the situation whose recurrence the League had explicitly been designed to prevent had nevertheless come about, a state of affairs for which Noel-Baker, for all his efforts, could find no single or satisfactory explanation. In his memorandum, he indicated that the League’s ineffectiveness had been due primarily to the refusal of its members to carry out their plain obligations. Shortly afterwards he also assigned partial responsibility to ‘the fact that Socialists were slow to realise that international government was being created’.7

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Later still, he was to blame the apathy of the public, which, had it been better educated and more active, might have made a success of the League.8 The difficulty with these pleas in mitigation was that, while each might have carried some validity, they all begged the same question: whether an institution so vulnerable to bad faith or public indifference ought not, for that reason alone, to be considered inherently defective and unworthy of resuscitation. The League had, after all, been created in the first place precisely because not all men and all nations were wise, honest and far-sighted: if it could function, as Noel-Baker and other apologists seemed to suggest, only in a world in which governments adhered to their word and honoured their agreements, there would be little for it to do. In view of these considerations – to say nothing of the Herculean task that restoration of popular confidence in the League would have involved, the necessity for which he failed even to acknowledge – Noel-Baker’s colleagues gave him little encouragement in his efforts to salvage the skeletal hulk of the Genevan experiment from the depths of Lac Léman. From the party-political standpoint, however, it was inexpedient for Labour frontbenchers simply to write off the League as a well-intentioned but ineffectual organisation whose failure had been foredoomed from the beginning. The premise upon which Labour’s lengthy charge-sheet against the National Government for its appeasement policies was based – an indictment in respect of which the wartime electoral truce represented only a temporary adjournment – was that real support for collective security through the League in the early 1930s would have contained or overthrown the Fascist régimes before they had secured a position from which to threaten the peace of the world. To concede that the League system had promised more than it could deliver, then, was simultaneously to acquit the Tories of having acted in bad faith and to place the Labour leadership itself in the dock for having resisted for so long the government’s rearmament plans during the 1930s. Throughout the war there existed in consequence a somewhat schizophrenic quality about Labour ministers’ public attitude towards the League, an institution the effectiveness and viability of which was resolutely defended by all, but which nobody, Noel-Baker aside, wanted to see resurrected. When at the end of 1941, after discussion with Attlee, Noel-Baker gave Arthur Greenwood, the Minister without Portfolio, a memorandum proposing the appointment of a ‘Phillimore Committee’ to produce a plan for a postwar League,9 he was urged not to press the matter pending the government’s discussions with the US government about war aims. Noel-Baker, however, was not willing to see his suggestion relegated to the back burner. In the spring

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of 1942, having apparently despaired of his party colleagues, he made a direct approach to the Conservative Under-Secretary of State at the Foreign Office, Richard Law. Although Law and his Permanent UnderSecretary, Sir Alexander Cadogan, proved somewhat more receptive to the idea, the result fell far short of what Noel-Baker had hoped for. Instead of a high-level committee on the Phillimore model, the FO commissioned Arnold Toynbee’s Foreign Research and Press Service (FRPS) to conduct ‘an inquest on the failure of the League’, which it did not complete until January 1943. Bearing all the hallmarks of a pro forma exercise, the FRPS report, when it eventually appeared, came to the platitudinous conclusion that the League had failed because some of its members had acted in violation of the Covenant and the others had been unwilling or unable to stop them.10 The completion of this inquiry effectively closed the door on the issue so far as the government was concerned. Although Noel-Baker continued into the autumn of 1943 to urge the Foreign Office to adopt the League as a model for the new postwar authority,11 he was forced to divert his attention to the more urgent priority of mobilising opposition within the NEC to Dalton’s draft scheme committing the Labour Party to the support of a Great Power directorate. Moreover, by that time representatives of the Big Three had begun gathering at the first of the wartime conferences, at Moscow and Tehran, from which it soon became apparent that the international organisation of the future would conform in all essentials to the wishes of its most powerful members, Roosevelt’s so-called ‘Four Policemen’. By the end of 1943, therefore, the idea of reviving the League had effectively become moot. Reluctantly accepting this fact, Noel-Baker and the remaining handful of League loyalists within the party redirected their energies to ensuring that the new organisation would incorporate as many of its predecessor’s functions and procedures as possible. Thus passed the League of Nations, the centrepiece of Labour’s foreign policy for more than two decades, into the limbo of British politics, its expiration neither mourned nor even formally acknowledged.

ASKING THE EXPERTS: THE FOREIGN RESEARCH AND PRESS SERVICE While for sound tactical reasons Noel-Baker’s frontbench colleagues shared his reluctance to dwell on the League’s demise, they were no less conscious than he of the vacuum its breakdown had created in international politics. Furthermore it was they, rather than the Conservative members of the coalition, who were most anxious that

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the government address the problem of war aims as soon as possible, to avoid the charge that its policy was wholly negative and to preempt possible agitation for a negotiated peace. As early as November 1939, Hugh Dalton had publicly urged the Chamberlain government to avoid ‘delay in working out detailed schemes for building [the] world-after-the-war’,12 a call that was repeated with greater urgency after he and his colleagues took office. In response to pressure from Attlee and Greenwood, the two Labour members of the War Cabinet, Churchill grudgingly consented on 23 August 1940 to the formation of a Cabinet Committee on War Aims under the Labour leader’s chairmanship. Although this first endeavour to lay down the parameters of the postwar world order has been largely overlooked by historians,13 the activities of the War Aims Committee and the organisations associated with it established the basic pattern which the Foreign Office would follow when it took over the work two years later. For this reason the contribution made by the committee’s Labour members was of considerable significance, the more so because, with the exception of Lord Halifax, the Foreign Secretary, they were its most active contributors. In particular, the relationship forged between Attlee in his capacity as committee chairman and Arnold Toynbee of the FRPS was responsible for the production of a series of important memoranda whose influence is clearly visible in the blueprint produced by the FO for the establishment of a world security organisation in the summer of 1942. Unsurprisingly, in view of the fact that it was commencing its work while the Battle of Britain was under way and an autumn invasion still a possibility, the War Aims Committee initially conceived of a statement of postwar objectives chiefly as a tool of political warfare for immediate use against the Axis. Even before its establishment, Ernest Bevin, the Minister of Labour, had reminded the Foreign Secretary of the need to respond more imaginatively to Hitler’s propaganda. ‘It was suggested that talk about Nationalism, Liberty and Independence was not sufficient and was indeed almost Gladstonian in relation to the whirling pace at which thought is moving.’14 Duff Cooper, the Minister of Information, concurred, declaring in a memorandum at the beginning of October that the Allied war aims ‘must offer a better alternative to the German plans for Europe’.15 In Cooper’s opinion, the most appealing objective with which Britain could associate itself was ‘a durable international order’, for which the creation of an organisation with a narrower membership than the League but with greater powers seemed to offer the best prospects.16 Such a degree of specificity, however, was further than other Conservative members of

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the committee, especially Halifax, were prepared to go. In a memorandum to his colleagues, the Foreign Secretary emphasised that any statement of war aims should be couched in general terms, firstly because a detailed programme would be more vulnerable to attack from domestic and foreign critics; and secondly because the committee itself might not reach agreement on specific goals. Halifax’s unusually frank acknowledgment of the political divisions within the body was a reflection not only of the Prime Minister’s ambivalence towards the entire exercise but also the intense antagonism that had lately existed between Labour and the National Government over the conduct of foreign policy, and that undoubtedly would reassert itself at the end of the war. It was perhaps for this reason, as well as a reluctance to depend exclusively upon the recommendations of a cadre of civil servants whose recent accomplishments had included the Hoare–Laval Pact and the Munich agreement,17 that Attlee turned for expert advice to a source independent of both the government and the political parties – the Royal Institute of International Affairs at Chatham House (RIIA). A year earlier, Arnold Toynbee, its Director of Studies, had offered the services of the organisation, which constituted an unrivalled source of linguistic talent and detailed knowledge of conditions in foreign countries, to the Foreign Office for the duration of the war. The offer was accepted and the staff and archives of the RIIA transferred to Balliol College, Oxford, at the government’s expense, to form the nucleus of the Foreign Research and Press Service (renamed the Foreign Office Research Department in 1943). At its peak, Toynbee’s organisation employed no fewer than 177 specialists in foreign affairs, drawn from Oxford University and other non-governmental organisations as well as from Chatham House. Attlee’s decision to enlist the services of the FRPS to assist the War Aims Committee was a natural one. Although the RIIA was a nonpartisan body, the Labour Party had maintained a close relationship with it through William Gillies, the International Secretary, who had served on the committee of Chatham House since the early 1920s. In anticipation of such an approach, Toynbee had already created an FRPS Peace Aims section on his own initiative in the early days of the war.18 At the end of October 1939, Attlee arranged that the FRPS should commence work upon the international and political aspects of peace aims, the papers arising from such study to be submitted to the War Aims Committee after discussion with the secretariat of the Office of the War Cabinet.19 Initially, the FRPS’s ideas were little more detailed or specific than those of the committee itself. At the latter’s second meeting on 31 October, Toynbee’s contribution was exceeded in vagueness only

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by Attlee’s,20 although participants acknowledged the importance of ‘not allowing the initiative in rallying the forces of democracy to pass to the United States’.21 After two further inconclusive meetings, however, the committee agreed upon a paper, initially drafted by Toynbee and Halifax, that recommended that the British Commonwealth should ‘become the bridge of greater world unity’ between large and small powers. It was further resolved that Attlee should ask Churchill to use the document as the basis for a broadcast at Christmas or the New Year.22 The Prime Minister, however, rejected both the Toynbee– Halifax composite and the idea of making any public statement on war aims. Four-fifths of the committee’s paper, he complained to President Roosevelt’s personal envoy, Harry Hopkins, in January 1941, resembled ‘the Sermon on the Mount and the remainder an election address’.23 It seems that Churchill’s stance derived less from any specific defects he perceived in the War Aims Committee document than from a belated recognition that public discussion of the subject was likely to open a political Pandora’s Box.24 Whereas such a statement might have been thought desirable the previous August when the resolve of the British people to resist a German ‘peace offensive’ was still in question – as had been Churchill’s own status as Conservative Party leader – to make one now might trigger a divisive public debate as well as impede US intervention in the war. But in the face of the Prime Minister’s hostility to its raison d’être, there seemed little point in convening further meetings of the War Aims Committee. In January 1941, its terms of reference, slightly modified, became part of the remit of a newly formed Committee on Reconstruction Problems chaired by Arthur Greenwood. Although Attlee and Greenwood had hoped that this body would be in essence the War Aims Committee under a new title, most of the Conservative ministers stood down at this juncture, their place being taken by civil servants. Thus a powerful ministerial – and political – committee was replaced by a working committee mainly representative of departmental interests. All Attlee could do was urge Anthony Eden – who succeeded Halifax as Foreign Secretary in December and had also expressed his sympathy for a ‘positive’ official statement on the question of war aims – to continue to make use of the FRPS in drawing up plans for the postwar world order.25 The downgrading of the War Aims Committee may have been a manoeuvre on the Prime Minister’s part to sidetrack consideration of the larger, and politically explosive, questions of world organisation. With Attlee’s backing and encouragement, however, the FRPS continued the work it had begun. In the spring of 1941 it produced a remarkable series of documents drafted by Toynbee, with whose outlook the Labour leader was strongly in sympath. These broad surveys,

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written with the verve and ambition characteristic of their author, laid down the foundations of Britain’s United Nations policy and, in the process, helped to shape the radical internationalist agenda the Labour leadership was to pursue during and after the war. The fundamentals of the FRPS’s approach to the problem of world order were set out in three key memoranda issued above Toynbee’s signature early in April. Each accepted as axiomatic that as a result of the war a de facto unification of the world was in progress; the only question to be determined was what form it would take. In a paper on ‘The Continental versus the Oceanic Pattern of World Organisation’, issued on 5 April, Toynbee argued that what would emerge from the war would be a ‘continental’ world order, based on Nazi land power, or an ‘oceanic’ pattern based on sea power, which he described as the ‘Pax Americo-Britannica’.26 A second memorandum of the same date, ‘Prolegomena to Peace Aims’, amplified this theme. ‘The issues at stake are whether it is the Germans or the English-speaking peoples who are to be the principal agents of unification, and – following from this – whether the unified world of the future is to bear a Nazi or a democratic stamp.’ In this contest, Toynbee pointed out, the Germans had an advantage: they, after all, were actively seeking a unified world – albeit one under their domination – whereas the English-speaking nations were ‘unready to believe that the unification of the world is now near at hand, and are unwilling to serve as instruments for bringing this unification about’. The important question, though, was who could deliver first. ‘Rather than face a protraction of their present agony, the nations will opt for a tyrannical German world-empire now rather than for a democratic Anglo-American world-commonwealth at the Greek Kalends.’ Hence it was imperative to lay the foundation of the new world order at ‘high speed’, if necessary ‘by rather roughhanded methods’.27 In ‘The Structure of an American-British World Order’, circulated a week later, Toynbee attempted to provide an outline of what this alternative to Nazi supranationalism should be. While the international organisation of the future should be as egalitarian as was practicable, the paramount necessity of providing an effective alternative to the German world order will almost certainly involve the introduction into an Americo-British world order, of a considerable ingredient of authoritarianism and regimentation. Without a stiffening of this authoritarian alloy, the pure metal of democracy is likely to prove too soft to reduce to order a world that cannot afford to wait for order until it is spiritually as well as materially ripe for it.

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Accordingly, the ‘Americo-British’ system would have to adopt coercive as well as persuasive means to accomplish its goals, constituting itself as nothing less than a ‘world directorate’ of the United States and the British Commonwealth, although some of the European powers might also be associated with it. This entity would have to be as tightly bound together as any unitary state, though it would not in fact take such a form. On a wider scale, an ‘oceanic commonwealth’, including ‘practically the whole world except the Soviet Union’ would also be necessary. In such a system, neutrality or non-alignment would no longer be permissible. Recalcitrant states would, if necessary, be forced to join, as the secessionist American states had been compelled to accept their place within the Union after 1865. ‘The ultimate aim would be to convert such involuntary states members into willing states members … The difficulty lies, of course, in coercing and converting simultaneously.’28 In July 1941, these and other FRPS papers were brought together into a combined unsigned draft, ‘British–American World Order’, whose influence is plainly visible in the scheme for international government devised by the Foreign Office the following year. Inasmuch as Nazi Germany had proven world conquest by a single aggressive country to be all too real a possibility, it could only be prevented in the long term if the English-speaking peoples make use of the power and prestige which their victory in the present war will give them to take the lead in establishing a constitutional world-order, sufficiently strong and unified to be durable. In all probability, their opportunity will not last long. Nevertheless, world-hegemony will be temporarily in their hands; and it will be in their power, if they so desire, to overcome the obstacles which any project of world-unification is certain to encounter in the immediate post-war period. Toynbee and his co-authors were under no illusions that the world organisation, although ‘mainly based on British American moral leadership, armed power … and industrial resources’, would involve an equal partnership between its two principal sponsors. Under such an arrangement the United States would inevitably exercise the predominant influence, although the goodwill, if not the adhesion, of the USSR would in addition be required. Nevertheless, the FRPS foresaw that the organisation would have a dual structure. A ‘warrant or mandate’ would be given by it to the ‘English-speaking peoples, entrusting them jointly and separately with the task of maintaining worldpeace’. Armed with this authority, the Anglo-Saxons were to ‘organise

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and control the great bulk of the armed forces …’. Other international matters would fall under the remit of the organisation’s governing body. In the far distant future, additional states might be admitted to peace-enforcing status, and ultimately ‘the distinction between warrantholding members and other members’ might disappear.29 In the short term, no action was taken on the FRPS papers beyond their circulation within the FO: the influence of these papers was to become apparent only in the future. Despite the fact that Toynbee ‘had Attlee on his side’30 at the time they were written, it proved impossible for the Labour leadership in 1941 to overcome Conservative resistance to reopening discussion on war aims, even on terms that seemed so congenial to Tory sensibilities. An FRPS proposal in March for a series of BBC debates on such themes as ‘Should Peace Aims Be Discussed?’ and ‘A New World Order’, enthusiastically supported by Attlee and Greenwood, had to be abandoned ‘having regard to the Prime Minister’s present views’.31 Nor were officials any more amenable to the idea of postwar planning. As R.A. Butler informed Greenwood a month later, ‘The Foreign Office does not feel it right at the present time to put forward any plan or scheme of international reconstruction. We are so much in the thick of the battle that we should feel this too great a responsibility’.32 It therefore fell to individual Labour leaders to ensure that the pressure on the government was maintained. One of these, Stafford Cripps, taking advantage of his temporary exile from both the party and, as Ambassador to Moscow, from the country, sent the Tory grandee, Walter Monckton, a brief memorandum on the postwar order to be passed on to the Foreign Office in February 1941. The significance of the document, a vague and rambling manifesto composed in an excruciating pastiche of Churchillian rhetoric, lay less in its few specific proposals than its insistence that the brief window of opportunity afforded by Britain’s victory should be ‘utilised to its full for the construction of some better international organisation’.33 Ernest Bevin, whose interventions in foreign policy before 1945 were few and usually idiosyncratic, was another who expressed support for a renewed approach to the problem of war aims, declaring to the Transport and General Workers’ Union annual conference in August 1941 that ‘sovereignty, domination and all the things which have prevented a World Order, must go by the board’34 – although in what would become a characteristic pattern of public endorsement and private disavowal of Labour’s traditional internationalism, he was later to shoot down his own trial balloon in a paper circulated to his Cabinet colleagues.35 Whereas the Labour contingent in government could not, therefore, claim to have pursued an original or consistent foreign policy

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line of their own, they did nevertheless make two signal contributions during their first year of office whose significance would later become apparent. The first was simply to ensure that, in spite of Conservative efforts to sidetrack the issue, planning for a new world order would not be allowed to fall off the governmental agenda. The second, the commissioning of the FRPS papers, meant that when the time came for the problem to be seriously addressed, some basis for future work already existed. It is unlikely that Attlee, one of the least ‘muscular’ of Labour internationalists during the war, anticipated the extent to which Arnold Toynbee’s broad-brush outline of a ‘world directorate’ of the Great Powers in which the Anglo-Saxon countries would play a central part would ultimately influence the British government’s scheme for the postwar international authority. But, however grandiose in conception or vague in detail, the FRPS’s vision harmonised in many respects with the more assertive conceptions of world order that were gaining ground within both the Labour Party and, as it transpired, the government as a whole.

THE ‘FOUR-POWER PLAN’ The Labour leadership’s efforts to prod the Tories into action on the matter of war aims would have remained an uphill struggle were it not for the fact that from the early part of 1941 the United States government also began to evince a keen interest in the question. While President Roosevelt shared Churchill’s belief that the time was not yet ripe for detailed statements about the form the international system should take once the war was over, he was no less anxious than his predecessor Woodrow Wilson had been to seize the initiative before the presumably less enlightened schemes of Old World governments had an opportunity to crystallise and take hold. This was all the more important inasmuch as the President considered Britain, itself a leading practitioner of imperialism, self-interested diplomacy and restrictive trade practices, to be one of the most significant impediments to the sort of world he wished to see emerge after the war. The need to stake out a position before others, especially the British, did so, was a key factor in his State of the Union address on 6 January 1941, in which he identified ‘four essential human freedoms’ – of speech and expression, of worship, from fear and from want – as a ‘definite basis’ for a new international orders to be created ‘in our own time and generation’. Confirmation that one of the primary objectives of the Four Freedoms speech had been to warn off the British was provided shortly afterwards by Roosevelt’s emissary Harry Hopkins, when he advised His

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Majesty’s Government that before making any statement on war aims it should consult the President, who ‘on these questions was rather touchy as he regarded the post-war settlement so to speak as being his particular preserve’.36 The Soviet Union’s entry into the war in June 1941 imparted fresh urgency to the matter of ensuring that the United States and Britain spoke in unison on postwar objectives. Key officials in the State Department, notably Assistant Secretary Adolf Berle, were concerned that the British government might seek to gain Stalin’s co-operation with the sort of secret territorial commitments it had made to Russia during the Great War, and which had proved a serious embarrassment to Wilson in his efforts to secure US ratification of the League Covenant. To forestall any unilateral action on Britain’s part, Berle and others recommended that Roosevelt should seek Churchill’s adherence to a general statement of principles at the first opportunity. It was with this objective to the fore that the President travelled to Placentia Bay in August for his first face-to-face meeting with the Prime Minister. So anxious was Roosevelt to ensure that the joint declaration would conform in all essentials to his own agenda that he deliberately forbore to inform the British delegation in advance of his intentions, choosing instead to raise the matter at dinner on the first evening of the conference. Churchill, however, displayed no apparent resentment at this diplomatic ambush. Although he had vigorously resisted all similar initiatives from his own Cabinet colleagues for more than a year, he enthusiastically seized the opportunity to secure US involvement in the drafting of peace aims, believing that it would generate irresistible pressure from public opinion in favour of the United States’ formal participation in the war. The ensuing document, the ‘Atlantic Charter’, set out eight ‘common principles’ of postwar policy for the two governments. With the exception of economic liberalisation, the only point of contention in the drafting of the declaration concerned the establishment of a new international authority. Seeking to commit the United States to play a full part in restraining aggression after the war, the British draft, composed in haste by Cadogan on Churchill’s instructions, called for an ‘effective international organisation’ to maintain world peace. To this Roosevelt, acutely sensitive to Congressional opinion, would not agree. The final statement spoke only of the need for a ‘wider and permanent system of general security’ after the aggressors had been defeated and disarmed. The reaction of Labour ministers to the Atlantic Charter, in whose creation they had practically no involvement, was less than enthusiastic.37 Sharing the British public’s general sense of anticlimax that the prospect of US belligerency seemed no nearer than before,38

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they expressed disappointment at the vague and uninspiring terms of the declaration. Bevin was particularly critical of the document’s shortcomings,39 while Attlee in his public statements attempted to give it a more radical slant until flatly contradicted by the Prime Minister.40 But for all its limitations, the Atlantic Charter did have one salutary effect. Now that Churchill had put his name to a statement of war aims, however imprecise and unsatisfactory, it was no longer possible for him to maintain that discussion of the issue was premature. The manner in which the Charter had been sprung on them by the United States had also left a sour taste in the mouths of some ministers, and, as Anthony Eden’s Private Secretary pointed out, raised the prospect that, if the British continued to neglect the task of drawing up a detailed set of peace aims, ‘Roosevelt would produce one of his own out of his pocket like the Atlantic Charter.’41 Nevertheless it was not until June 1942 that the Foreign Secretary, encouraged by Cripps and Law, finally set up a body for the specific purpose of planning for the postwar world order, the Economic and Reconstruction Department of the Foreign Office. As its head Eden selected Gladwyn Jebb, an FO high-flyer with close links to Dalton42 whose remarkable combination of ability, cynicism and exquisitelyveiled arrogance bears comparison with that fictional incarnation of civil-service Machiavellianism, Sir Humphrey Appleby. Under his leadership the Economic and Reconstruction Department became, in the official arena at least, ‘the chief generator of British ideas for the post-war world’.43 On 9 September, Jebb submitted to Eden the first detailed framework for a new world organisation, a 24-page memorandum entitled ‘The Four-Power Plan’, which the Foreign Secretary circulated to the War Cabinet the following month. This document, whose assumptions coloured all subsequent British ministerial debates on the subject, merits detailed attention, both for its specific proposals and for the virtual parallelism of its approach to that of the FRPS’s paper ‘British–American World Order’ of the previous year, from which it had clearly been derived.44 ‘The Four-Power Plan’ commenced with an analysis of the US government’s ideas for a postwar international authority, so far as they had become known to the Foreign Office. The United States was understood to favour a scheme in which the four Great Powers – itself, Britain, the USSR and (in anticipation of its becoming the leading Asiatic power) China – would constitute a Supreme Council, with an Assembly to represent the smaller nations. France could perhaps be included on the Council at a later stage, should it manage to recover its independence, its unity and ‘a measure of [its] greatness …’. The world organisation might also include regional groupings, but each

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of these would be presided over by one of the great powers. Executive power was to be confined to the Supreme Council, whose members alone would enjoy the right to possess major armaments. The paper went on to consider whether a scheme of this kind was consistent with British interests and, if so, whether the country’s resources were sufficient to enable it to assume the responsibilities involved. Following Toynbee, Jebb argued that in the future Britain would have to play a substantial world rôle, whether an international organisation was created or not. Certainly, with its small population – and especially after its wartime economic losses – it could not expect to be the industrial equal of the United States, Germany, Japan or the USSR. But it would continue to possess a substantial air force and the means of maintaining one. It would be likely to benefit from Dominions support as these countries realised that their interests required the maintenance of general, rather than merely local, peace. And it would not have to face serious economic competition from Germany and Japan for a number of years. The most compelling argument in support of the scheme, however, was the fact that an isolationist policy was no longer a viable option for Britain, as it was for the USA and USSR. ‘In other words, we have no choice; we must, on the one hand, either have some powerful ally or allies, or cease to be a World Power, and, on the other hand, we cannot expect to have powerful allies unless we are powerful ourselves.’ The memorandum cautioned that the ‘Four-Power’ concept could only work if its real – as opposed to its declared – purpose was to restrain the Axis powers for as long as possible: ‘the whole point of the “Four Power Plan” is to keep Germany and Japan in permanent subjection’.45 As the greatest menaces to the system, they could never be admitted on terms of equality; any weakening in this area would be certain to alienate the Soviet Union and the United States, both of whom were hostile to ‘League of Nations’ or ‘World Concert’ ideas. Even then its success was not guaranteed. Any of a number of obstacles – renewed US isolationism, opposition by the Dominions and other small countries to Big Power tyranny, Soviet suspicion – could derail it. Nevertheless, from Britain’s point of view, there was no satisfactory alternative. Should either the United States or the Soviet Union refuse to participate in stabilising the postwar world, Britain would be obliged to ally itself with the other, a policy whose drawbacks, although perhaps unavoidable, were obvious. Should both reject the scheme, the only remaining recourse would be to try to organise Europe in opposition to a recrudescence of German or Italian aggression, or pursue the deeply unpromising alternative of ‘the lambs trying to “re-educate” the lions’. Britain enjoyed the advantage, however, that

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neither the USA nor the USSR wished it to form an exclusive alliance with the other; by playing both ends against the middle, it might succeed in creating ‘a real world balance of power’. The ‘Four-Power Plan’ might at first glance be regarded as a significant advance in official British recognition of the internationalist dimension of foreign policy. In contrast to 1918 when a single minister, Lord Robert Cecil, had been left to champion the League concept almost alone within official circles,46 Jebb’s paper acknowledged the creation of an active and powerful international organisation as a British interest of the first importance. Nevertheless, the closer the assumptions upon which the ‘Four-Power Plan’, and its FRPS predecessors, were based are scrutinised, the more clearly do they betray a very traditional conception of Britain’s rôle as a world power. The most important of these assumptions relates to the governing postulates of international society. Jebb conceived of the ‘Four-Power Plan’ as a decisive repudiation of the liberal-internationalist notions manifested in the League, which he rejected as naïve and utopian. The Four-Power formulation, in contrast, was unapologetically rooted in realpolitik and in the desire to build the world organisation upon the well-established balance-of-power principle that had underlain British foreign policy for well over a century. It therefore took for granted that in the foreseeable future Britain would continue to project overseas a level of power not significantly less than in the recent past. This prediction was based not on any detailed calculation of the country’s postwar capabilities, but in reaction to the grim fate that was believed to lie ahead of it should it fail to do so. A great deal of vaguely ‘Liberal’ opinion here is really directed to relieving this country of what, for the want of a better word, may be called her Imperial responsibilities and concentrating on nothing but the ‘improvement of standards of living’ at home … If one can make any broad generalisation it is to the effect that those who think in these terms seem to want us, if they are above a certain income level, to hand over the torch to the Americans, and if they are below it, to the Russians. Unless, therefore, we can find some rallying cry which will inspire such doubters with the belief in the necessity of fulfilling our world-wide mission it is possible that, whether we like it or not, we may sink to the level of a secondclass Power, with all that that implies. It is a process which might be painless and possibly even profitable in the short run, but it is quite probable that if it took place, we should sooner or later experience an agonising collapse, from which we should emerge as a European Soviet State, or the penurious outpost of an American

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pluto-democracy or a German Gau as forces might dictate … We must, therefore, hope that our great experience and good judgement as a nation will continue to generate the will to power which will alone save us from such disasters, and that we shall continue to be blessed with leaders who will give expression to that will.47 For a blueprint that prided itself on its realism, the ‘Four-Power Plan’ was remarkable in its belief that the exercise of power on a world scale required only the engendering of a Nietzschean ‘will to power’ resting upon nothing more tangible than ‘our great experience and good judgment as a nation …’. Indeed, one of the plan’s most striking features was the scant attention it accorded to economic realities in general. Addressing the likelihood that the United States might relapse into isolationism after the war, Jebb commented that such a contingency might arise not only if the Republicans were successful at the polls, but ‘if the New Dealers, so to speak, “went sour”, owing, perhaps, to disgust with Europeans for not accepting their “Tennessee Valley Authority” nostrums for the organisation of international society, which they tend to urge with missionary fervour’. As the ‘Four-Power Plan’ made clear, the FO had no time for such ideas, or for any approach to international organisation that gave economic recovery precedence over security considerations. ‘In other words, “freedom from fear” must precede “freedom from want”.’ Yet elsewhere in the paper, Jebb himself seemed unclear as to the relationship that ought to prevail between economic development and military strength. The Four-Power system envisaged Britain assuming the lead in a reconstructed western Europe, in which, he noted complacently, there was ‘a population almost equal in numbers and in intelligence far surpassing that of either the United States or the U.S.S.R.’ The idea that Europe under British ascendancy might become a power to rival its competitors East and West, however, sat uncomfortably with Jebb’s earlier prediction of Germany’s elimination as an industrial competitor with Britain for an indeterminate but significant period. If Germany, the locomotive of European prosperity for almost a century, was to remain impoverished, no development of the continent on the scale proposed could take place. The faster Germany recovered, on the other hand, the more quickly would Britain’s predominance in Europe ebb away. The ‘Four-Power Plan’ offered no suggestions on how to resolve this intractable equation. The problem of the relativities of power was to reappear elsewhere in the Plan, on a larger scale. As its author later confirmed, ‘hard-headed British self-interest’ was the benchmark against which all official proposals for world order were measured by civil servants and Cabinet

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ministers alike. ‘Maintaining our position as a world power was … the primary objective of British post-war planning.’48 But Jebb was sufficiently aware of the degree to which Britain had been weakened by the war to acknowledge that it was no longer capable of attaining to this status by its own unaided efforts; hence his admission that it must ‘cease to be a World Power’ without allies, which it could not obtain unless it was itself powerful. In this paradoxical formulation the ‘Four-Power Plan’ summed up the dilemma facing Britain, and also, unwittingly, pointed to the Achilles heel of the entire concept. The chief attraction of the international organisation envisaged by the Plan, from the FO’s perspective, was that it enabled Britain to continue to play the part of a world power without deploying the resources normally required for such a rôle. Its partners in the organisation would in consequence be required to contribute disproportionately to the maintenance of a world order advantageous to British interests, and apparently would be deterred from seeking any quid pro quo for this service by the display of just enough power to induce them to believe that it was not truly in need of it. That it could seriously have been thought that other countries would fail to see through so transparent a smokescreen is difficult to explain other than by the conclusion that Jebb’s mot concerning the intellectual inferiority of the nonEuropean peoples was regarded by its ministerial readers as nothing more than a simple statement of fact. At all events, the illusion that even the simulacrum of world-power status would lie within Britain’s capabilities was to be unceremoniously dispelled within days of the war’s end, when the abrupt cessation of Lend-Lease underscored painfully the costs as well as the benefits of the successful projection of an image of self-sufficiency. Notwithstanding its questionable assumptions and its decidedly undemocratic prescriptions, the ‘Four-Power Plan’ was welcomed by the Labour members of the government. Dalton in particular greeted with enthusiasm the work of his former protégé, writing to Eden on 19 November to declare wholehearted support and offer assistance in implementing its recommendations.49 Attlee too, as might have been predicted from his sponsorship of Toynbee’s preliminary drafts, warmly endorsed the Plan, remarking that he was ‘sure that the lines suggested are right’ and urging that the government should initiate much more detailed discussions on the subject with the USA and the USSR.50 This receptiveness on the part of Labour leaders to a scheme whose ‘Machiavellian’ provenance was frankly acknowledged by its author,51 in striking contrast both to the attitude of their predecessors during the Great War and their own professed policies three years earlier, indicates just how deeply the experience of a second and more

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brutal global conflict had undercut the Whig-internationalist convictions the party had upheld in the 1920s and 1930s. It demonstrates in particular a complete reversal of two related assumptions around which Labour’s interwar internationalism had taken shape – the untrustworthiness of the Great Powers, and the need for a world organisation to act as a restraint upon the deleterious influence which a British capitalist state must exert in international affairs. Evidence of this transformation can be seen in a series of public statements by members of Labour’s front bench. As early as August 1941, Bevin had declared that ‘the United States, Britain, Russia and China would play a role never before conceived in the future organisation of the world’.52 He was echoed by Greenwood, who remarked during an Empire broadcast in December that upon the English-speaking nations would fall ‘the principal task of [world] leadership, because of their deep rooted democratic traditions, experience and practice’.53 Six months later, in an even more frank address, Greenwood predicted that ‘after the war we and the United States and Russia are going to police the world. We shall be the dominating factor which will lay down the ruling principles.’54 Perhaps the most revealing manifestation of this new mood, however, was contained in a series of speeches by the Home Secretary, Herbert Morrison. In December 1941 he drew a line under the Wilsonian conceptions of the past, rejecting ‘Nineteenth-century Liberalism’ as an organising principle of international society.55 The stability of the new world, he stated six months later, would come about instead through the determination of the Great Powers to take all measures necessary ‘for the imposition of peace upon unruly and warlike nations until humanity had learned to behave itself’.56 Implicit in this formulation was a belief that the Big Three, and among them the United Kingdom in particular, were qualified to act as trustees for humanity by virtue of superior wisdom as well as superior power. The task of providing guidance and leadership in a ‘world political association’, Morrison suggested, fell naturally to Britain, which combined greater advancement in political development than any other nation with the unique moral authority it had earned by its lone stand against Nazi dictatorship in 1940. It had ‘enjoyed … in this war a moral bath’, reinvigorating it spiritually and politically. As the ‘oldest and politically the most experienced’ of the Great Powers which would ‘inevitably play the leading part in hammering out solutions’ to the world’s problems, it stood as an exemplar possessing both the right and the duty to reshape the future of other, less successful polities.57 The basic assumptions about Britain’s place in the world on which the ‘Four-Power Plan’ was founded, therefore, bore a marked similarity

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to some of the conclusions that Labour leaders had already reached on their own initiative. The only attempt on the Labour side to query Jebb’s proposed line of policy came, unexpectedly, from Ernest Bevin. Using arguments that mirrored functionalist ideas so closely as to suggest that the Minister of Labour had been paying close attention to the FRPS papers written by David Mitrany as well as those of Arnold Toynbee, Bevin complained that the ‘Four-Power Plan’ overemphasised the political dimension of world order at the expense of the economic. ‘The achievement of collective security is not solely or even primarily a political problem.’ The international organisation, he suggested, should concentrate instead upon providing ‘those common services which no state can afford to do without … It is by such means … that we will generate the necessary cohesive force between nations while leaving political independence and theories of sovereignty untouched.’58 Although cogent in many respects, Bevin’s critique was weakened in the eyes of his colleagues by his impractical suggestion that the international authority of the future might model itself upon the International Labour Office. The overall approach of his paper, furthermore, left Jebb distinctly unimpressed: [I]t is no good ‘looking forward’ to a rosy economic future if I ignore hard political realities. It was this Economic Man (Mill) Economic Interpretation of History (Marx) Economic Consequences of the Peace (Keynes) Weltanschauung that was largely responsible for our losing the last Peace.59 By the mid-point of the war, then, a virtual consensus had emerged between most Labour members of the government and the Foreign Office on the general outlines of the postwar world order. Contrary to the assumptions of many subsequent commentators, this meeting of minds was the result neither of Labour leaders having been ‘infected’ with Tory ideas, nor of an attempt by hidebound Whitehall bureaucrats to impose upon leftist ministers a more traditional foreign policy of their own devising. There was, in fact, no Conservative agenda on international organisation with which Labour politicians might have been contaminated, for the simple reason that Tory members of the coalition were opposed to the very idea of addressing the issue until the pace of US preparations threatened to take the initiative out of their hands. Likewise, Foreign Office mandarins like Jebb did not devise their own framework for world government and press it upon reluctant Labour leaders, but rather appropriated, without attribution, ideas which those same Labour ministers had solicited from the FRPS and for whose serious consideration by the government they were

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largely responsible. What emerged as coalition policy in this area from the end of 1942 was as much the product of Labour initiatives – and in tune with prevailing Labour sentiment – as many of the government’s wartime innovations in the domestic sphere.

THE REGIONALIST CRITIQUE Despite the apparent completeness of their victory, proponents of a ‘world directorate’ of the Great Powers were vulnerable to counterattack from those members of the government who had taken little part in the deliberations of the War Aims Committee or the FRPS and consequently did not regard themselves as committed to any proposals arising therefrom – a category, of course, that included the Prime Minister himself. As noted above, Ernest Bevin had already identified himself as one of the unpersuaded, although his failure to propose a credible alternative to the ‘Four-Power Plan’ blunted the edge of his challenge. A more formidable adversary, whose views could not be brushed aside by the FO with the same curt dismissiveness as those of a home front minister like Bevin with little background or expertise in foreign policy, was Sir Stafford Cripps. At the time of the FourPower Plan’s appearance, Cripps’s standing with the British public had reached an astonishingly high level, a position of strength that was magnified by the momentary unpopularity of the government.60 Much of his stature had been acquired as a result of his stint as Ambassador to Moscow at the time of Germany’s invasion of the USSR, when he was widely and inaccurately credited with having concluded the Anglo-Soviet treaty of alliance almost single-handedly in the teeth of opposition from an incompetent and reactionary Tory establishment. Returning to London in January 1942, Cripps capitalised so successfully upon his media-generated reputation as a modern, progressive and independent statesman, unbeholden to the discredited bureaucratic ‘old gang’ or the vested interests of either party, that an alarmed Churchill, under fire after a series of military reverses in Singapore, North Africa and the English Channel, found it necessary to placate him with a seat in the War Cabinet as Lord Privy Seal and Leader of the House. Although his acceptance of the poisoned chalice of a hopeless mission to India to try to secure the support of Congress for the war effort and his ill-timed resignation from his Cabinet post at the end of the year cost him a good deal of public support, Cripps remained a figure whose opinions had to be treated seriously. From his new base at the Ministry of Aircraft Production, Cripps quickly signalled his intention to pursue an independent line in foreign

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policy formulation. Broadcasting to the United States on 16 November 1942 on the theme of ‘United Nations in a Free World,’ he indicated the extent to which he too had been influenced by the prevailing tide of ‘anti-nationalism’ the British left. The existing system of ‘power groups with their client states’, he maintained, had ‘shown themselves a danger to the safety and happiness of their peoples’. Reminding his listeners that the US Secretary of State was able to speak on behalf of the entire Union, as could the Soviet Foreign Minister ‘for all the many Soviet republics’, Cripps observed ‘[h]ow much better [it would be] if fewer and stronger voices could speak for Europe’.61 In subsequent speeches he pursued the same theme, insisting that ‘we must not allow the selfish nationalism of any nation … to stand in the way’, and that in making a ‘machine of international organisation’ Britain ‘must not wait till we think everyone is ready to accept all we propose. We must give leadership to the world.’62 Within governmental circles, Cripps pressed his new line of thinking with an extended commentary on the ‘Four-Power Plan’ circulated to the War Cabinet which, although endorsing Jebb’s central thesis that ‘after the war the four Powers must take the lead in international affairs’, led to very different conclusions. In a manifesto containing 24 separate points, he argued that the question of world peace was primarily a European problem whose solution was to be found in a reduction of German economic power and an augmentation of that of its neighbours, to be achieved by bringing the ‘small client states’ together into ‘larger federal units’. Cripps’s main point of contention with Jebb’s paper, however, concerned the rôle of regional bodies in the new international authority. The ‘Four-Power Plan’ had briefly discussed the desirability of setting up such structures, so long as it was understood by all that the maintenance of peace in each region should not become the exclusive responsibility of the Great Power concerned. Cripps’s variation on this theme was to suggest that the regional bodies should themselves become the basis upon which the international authority was constructed. In addition to keeping order in their own areas, regional councils would oversee the task of postwar reconstruction. Cripps proposed the creation of five such councils, covering Europe, the Americas, the Far East, the British Commonwealth and (as it was already a multinational state) the Soviet Union. These five bodies would be represented on a ‘supreme world council’, charged with the coordination and supervision of the work of its subsidiaries.63 The Four-Power concept’s defenders responded to Cripps’s intervention with alarm. The most frequently advanced argument in favour of regionalism, which had persuaded Jebb to raise the subject in the first place, was that members of universal organisations were

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apt to treat with indifference problems far removed geographically from their own spheres of interest, as the Manchurian crisis of 1931 had demonstrated. Only those countries immediately affected could be expected to take prompt and effective action to ensure that local problems were dealt with before they grew to such an extent as to endanger the peace of the world, a task that regional bodies could facilitate. But as Jebb pointed out, Cripps’s version of the regionalist doctrine was attended with enormous practical difficulties. The proposal that ‘Europe’ should be represented on a world council, for example, was complicated by the fact that no such entity existed whose boundaries could conveniently be delineated. Nor were any clear lines of demarcation between the regional councils themselves provided in Cripps’s memorandum, raising the possibility that a country like Canada would require dual representation in both the Commonwealth group and the Pan-American group. Moreover, the proposal threw all the burden of peace-keeping upon individual Great Powers for the foreseeable future, for only if the regional associations were firmly established would there be any likelihood of the World Council being a success.64 It was precisely this outcome, especially disadvantageous to the British Empire with its dozens of virtually indefensible possessions scattered across the globe, that Jebb in his treatment of the issue had been most anxious to prevent. From the Tory side, the partisans of the ‘Four-Power Plan’ had also to contend with the opposition of the fervently imperialist Colonial Secretary, Leopold Amery. Declaring that the League’s failure had proven conclusively the impracticability of international authorities, Amery viewed sceptically Jebb’s assumption that Great Power unity would long outlast the war that had engendered it, and that the British people would be willing to divert attention from their own urgent problems to contribute to the policing of Europe for an indefinite period. Rather than expend its energies in the creation of over-ambitious and ineffective international agencies, Britain should ‘concentrate on furthering the unity, prosperity and security of our own particular “region”, namely, the British Commonwealth’, leaving the other nations of western Europe to form a loose confederal union among themselves.65 If anything, though, Amery’s proposal for an updated version of ‘splendid isolation’, which was treated with derision even by his own party colleagues,66 strengthened the hand of the FourPower advocates by enabling them to depict both his policy and Cripps’s as representing the extremes of right- and left-wing opinion, with their own in the moderate middle. Thus Jebb minuted that what was required was ‘something midway between Mr. Amery’s rather unrealistic realism and the totally unworkable “blueprints” of people

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like … Sir Stafford Cripps’.67 With this strategy in mind he had already redrafted ‘The Four-Power Plan’ to include some conciliatory though relatively inconsequential concessions to both Cripps and Bevin.68 The Minister for Aircraft Production was not to be shaken off so easily. Rejecting Jebb’s revised document as ‘not altogether suitable as a basis for Cabinet discussion’, he directed his Parliamentary Private Secretary, David Owen, to prepare a new draft including the points contained in his own paper in so far as they were not incompatible with ‘The Four-Power Plan’. Owen did so and then met with Jebb to try to reconcile the two documents.69 The result, retitled ‘The United Nations Plan’, was circulated to the Cabinet under Eden’s name on 16 January 1943. Like the product of most shotgun marriages, ‘The United Nations Plan’ reflected the underlying tension attending the circumstances of its creation in the tenuous relationship between its two constituent elements. On the points of maximum incompatibility, the document could do little more than take refuge in a studied vagueness. Regarding the pivotal issue of regionalism, it held that ‘[g]enerally speaking, regional groupings should be encouraged, subject always to the principle that there must not be a kind of “limited liability” system whereby one Power is responsible for keeping the peace in any given area’. As examples of possible confederations to which the FO was giving consideration, it mentioned ‘one centring round [sic] Czechoslovakia and Poland, and the other round Greece and Yugoslavia …’.70 Turning aside quickly from further discussion of these improbable alliances, the United Nations Plan addressed itself to the economic considerations raised earlier by Bevin. A ‘reconciliation’ was possible, it bravely asserted, between the power-doctrines underlying our conception of the rôle of the Four Great Powers and the economic interest of smaller States. If the Four Powers accept the responsibility of effective and overwhelming leadership for reasons of security, they should be very careful to allow economic affairs … to be handled by wider assemblies, whether on a world basis or on regional lines. Having made these concessions to the Four-Power Plan’s critics, the paper proceeded to recapitulate trenchantly the main points of the earlier document. It was impossible to say whether the League of Nations could ever be revived, or even if Britain would wish to see it revived in its previous form.

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In the meantime, we have the conception of the United Nations, a conception at once less ambitious and more practical than the conception of the League. Upon this idea of the United Nations we must build up the machinery of international cooperation. If there was to be any ‘Council of the World’ representing regional agencies, this could, in the early postwar period at any rate, ‘only consist of the representatives of the Four Powers and possibly also of France, who would represent in their turn all the United Nations’.71 In keeping with the usual pattern of FO ‘compromise’, then, ‘The United Nations Plan’ conceded to its regionalist critics considerably less than half a loaf. The firm line taken by Eden and Jebb was to a considerable extent made possible by the opposition voiced against regionalism by Labour ministers, especially Dalton, who fulminated against the ‘dogmatic’ nature of Cripps’s ideas, the ‘silliest’ of which he considered to be the postulation ‘in unreal detail [of] the future Government of the world in five major groupings, at least two of which are quite absurd …’.72 Attlee too, in his capacity as Dominions Secretary, drew attention to the inconsistencies contained in the regionalist position. ‘The United Nations Plan’, he pointed out, speaks of the United Kingdom as a member of the Four-Power Council. On the other hand, the Annex to it refers to the ‘British Commonwealth’ as a member of that Council … There is, of course, no such organ of government as the ‘British Commonwealth’, and there are formidable objections and difficulties about joint representation on an international body of all the Empire countries by any one of them.73 By the summer of 1943, then, the FO felt confident enough to revert to its uncompromising stance of a year earlier. The definitive version of the Four-Power concept, a Jebb-drafted document entitled ‘The United Nations Plan for Organizing Peace’, assigned regional institutions a decidedly secondary rôle, as bodies ‘it may be found convenient’ to create within the larger scheme of a Great Powerdominated world council. In words that might have been borrowed from a Fabian manifesto, it also declared that national independence ought no longer to be considered a natural right, but a ‘privilege’ to be accorded only to those states assuming the burden of maintaining ‘international well-being, security and peace’.74 It is probable that, in the face of opposition from the Labour ministers and obstruction from the FO, regionalism as a component of the new world organisation would have disappeared altogether

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from the agenda early in 1943 but for the intervention of the Prime Minister. Throughout the debate on the ‘Four-Power Plan’ Churchill had taken little part, expressing the belief at the end of 1942 that there would be sufficient time between the end of the war in Europe and victory in the Far East for the great powers to decide such questions. The turning of the tide on the battlefield at Stalingrad and El Alamein, however, raised the possibility that Germany might collapse sooner than anyone had dared to hope; and the Prime Minister, whose approach to postwar foreign policy alternated between brief episodes of manic creativity and extended periods of apathy, became inspired once again to address the problem of international organisation. On this subject his views had altered little since his ‘Arms and the Covenant’ speech of November 1933, in which he had argued that the proper function of the League of Nations was to keep the peace in Europe rather than attempt to police the world.75 For that reason, the League’s failure to act in Manchuria, for example, had dismayed Churchill far less than it did the Labour Party, and his expectations of the new entity that would take its place were correspondingly less ambitious. While a universal organisation was clearly a necessity, if only because the United States would certainly refuse to associate itself with anything less, the Prime Minister was convinced that regional bodies alone could muster the political will to deal with local problems as they arose. Churchill’s own ideas on postwar order were first set out in a communication to the Turkish government entitled ‘Morning Thoughts’, which he dictated early in February 1943 and, to the Foreign Office’s consternation, immediately communicated to Istanbul and Washington. Although setting out little more than a skeletal outline of policy, the paper contained an unqualified endorsement of the regional principle in terms not greatly different to those previously adumbrated by Cripps. The Prime Minister envisaged ‘an instrument of European Government’ which would ‘embody the spirit but not be subject to the weakness of the former League of Nations’. A similar instrument was to be created for the Far East, the whole being held together by the military preponderance of the Big Three.76 Three months later, at a meeting in Washington with Henry Wallace, the US Vice-President, and a number of senior US officials and politicians, Churchill expanded upon his vision of the future international organisation. In place of Cripps’s five subsidiary bodies, he suggested a structure taking the form of ‘a three-legged stool’, with a supreme world council resting atop three regional councils responsible for Europe, the American hemisphere and the Pacific. The European council, the only one he described in detail, would consist of a dozen or so

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European states or confederations, in which, for example, Greece might join with Turkey and Poland with the USSR. The European Regional Council might eventually become a sort of United States of Europe, although, as with the other two councils, the United States of America would enjoy the right of membership. In tandem with this arrangement, the Prime Minister envisaged the formalisation of ‘special friendships’ so long as these had no ‘sinister’ purpose. Thus the British Commonwealth and the United States of America might work together in a ‘fraternal association’ involving common citizenship and common defensive arrangements, while co-operating with others through the regional and world councils.77 Unsurprisingly, Cripps was highly gratified by Churchill’s report of his meeting with the US officials and politicians, sending him a message of congratulation which echoed Wallace’s comment that it had been ‘the most encouraging conversation in which he had taken part for the last two years’.78 The FO’s reaction to this initiative and the ‘Morning Thoughts’ paper, no less predictably, was one of irritation and dismay. ‘Having apparently convinced the Minister of Aircraft Production of the folly of his original view, it was rather disheartening to see this hoary old hare being let loose over Anatolia by Winston Churchill.’79 The picture was thrown further into confusion when Attlee, who had already endorsed both the ‘Four-Power Plan’ and the United Nations Plan for Organising Peace, now ‘welcome[d] the broad outline’ of Churchill’s rival scheme as well.80 Before long, however, the debate over regionalism was to move to a wider arena, in which the central pillar of the concept, the European council, came under sustained public and intergovernmental criticism. Inasmuch as proposals for closer ties with Europe were unlikely to make much appeal to Conservative opinion, Labour support, both inside and outside the Cabinet, was all the more important if regionalism was to become a reality. The Dominions governments would likewise have to give their assent, bearing in mind that increased European commitments for Britain would significantly tilt the geopolitical and ideological centre of gravity within the Commonwealth. Lastly, the scheme would have to be approved by the Soviet Union and the United States, whose interests in the European continent had traditionally been at opposite ends of the spectrum – the Soviet Union seeking to extend its influence over Europe, and the United States hoping to remain isolated from it. In all three spheres the Cripps–Churchill formulation failed to gather anything like the momentum necessary to get off the ground. The idea of a European council that excluded the USSR was repugnant to the Labour left, which saw in it the spectre of an anti-Communist

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bloc. On the other hand, as Brailsford pointed out, a council of which the Soviet Union was a member would extend ‘from Kerry to Kamchatka’, making a geographical nonsense of an agency designed specifically to deal with European problems: still more would this be the case if, as Churchill had implied, the United States was also to be represented.81 For their part, the Dominions governments looked askance at the suggestion that they should be represented on the executive body of the international organisation by Great Britain, as well as at their assignment to regional councils each of which would be dominated by a more powerful member.82 But the consideration that effectively sealed the fate of regionalism as the basis of the new world order was the entrenched opposition of the Soviet and US governments to the entire idea. From the first the Soviets suspected – with good reason – that one of the major purposes of any institution confined to western Europe would be to curtail their influence within its boundaries. At the Moscow Conference, Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov did not attempt to disguise his hostility to anything that smacked of a cordon sanitaire directed against the USSR, as well as to Churchill’s proposals for confederations of European states. Even before then, Roosevelt in a conversation with Eden had shown that his conception of the structure of the world organisation remained focused upon a Four-Power executive, while making clear that US public opinion would not look kindly upon any purely regional council.83 The world organisation, Roosevelt said, should consist of a general assembly, meeting once a year, ‘to enable representatives of all the smaller powers to blow off steam’; an executive council of the Big Four which would ‘take all the important decisions and wield police powers of the United Nations’; and an intermediate advisory council representing the Big Four and six to eight smaller powers elected on a regional basis, meeting occasionally ‘as might be required to settle any international questions that might be brought before it …’.84 At Tehran in December, the President made the same point to Stalin, remarking that ‘it would take a terrible crisis’ before Congress would ever agree to replace the concept of the Four Policemen with participation in a regional body. In the event Roosevelt’s advisory council was never to materialise, and the Allies’ final blueprint for the world organisation left no place for even a token regional component. Its absence was arguably a point of weakness in the overall scheme. In some respects, regionalism accorded a higher priority to long-term practicalities than had the ‘Four-Power Plan’. It acknowledged, as proponents of the latter did not, that popular support and not mere acquiescence was essential if the postwar world order was to endure, and that such support was more easily generated locally than globally. But Cripps and Churchill

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both erred in failing to see that regionalism was incompatible with the Four-Power concept, precisely because the logic of the regionalist position was the delineation of clear spheres of interest between the Great Powers. The ‘Four-Power Plan’, on the other hand, with its promise of shared responsibility but global influence, appeared to allow Britain to have it both ways – a prospect that, albeit for different reasons, was equally attractive to Labour and Tory members of the coalition. Even had Soviet and US opposition to the idea been less entrenched, therefore, it is difficult to imagine that regionalism could ever have succeeded in displacing the more seductive Four-Power concept.

‘HOLY ALLIANCE’ OR ‘DUMBARTON HOAX’? By early 1944, then, the basic character of the Churchill Coalition’s policy on international organisation had begun to emerge. In all essential respects, the world authority was to be constructed along the lines of the FRPS’s initial design – a universal agency under the direct unmediated control of the Great Powers, whose chief purpose would be to co-ordinate and ratify such actions as those states considered necessary to take for their own and the world’s security. During the first months of 1944, an interdepartmental Whitehall committee worked to translate this general framework into a series of detailed proposals which could be used as a basis for discussion with the United States and the Soviet Union. On 19 April it presented the results of its work, in the form of five memoranda elaborating Jebb’s ‘United Nations Plan for Organising Peace’, to the newly created Armistice and PostWar (APW) Committee, a body which, under Attlee’s chairmanship and including Bevin among its permanent members, became the nearest approximation to the official peace aims committee for which Labour ministers had been agitating since the beginning of 1941.85 With minimal changes, the APW Committee transmitted the memoranda to the War Cabinet for circulation to the Dominions Prime Ministers, who were to meet in London the following month, and to the US and Soviet governments, with whom a conference was planned at Dumbarton Oaks near Washington later in the summer.86 A number of key questions were left unresolved in the memoranda. Among the most important of these were whether the organisation should be peripatetic or have a permanent location; whether the executive council ought to be confined to the four Great Powers or should also include representatives of smaller states; and whether the unanimity rule that would normally apply to decisions of the Great

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Powers would also come into play if one of the Big Four were itself a party to a dispute. In July, Eden proposed and the APW Committee agreed that no decision need be taken immediately on the first of these questions; that, as the United States had also pointed out, it would be impractical to try to confine representation upon, as distinct from effective control of, the executive council to the Great Powers alone; and that parties to a dispute, whether Great Powers or not, ought not to be judges in their own cause.87 These decisions were transmitted as the final instructions to the British delegation to the much-postponed Dumbarton Oaks conference, which finally opened on 22 August. At the meeting, work proceeded rapidly on most questions, it being found that the approaches of British and US officials on the outstanding issues were virtually identical.88 The delegations soon reached agreement on the structure of the ‘General Assembly’ (GA); the principal functions and membership of the executive, or ‘Security Council’ (SC); and the form of the Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC). The Dumbarton Oaks plan provided that all member-states should have one vote in the General Assembly, which would meet annually to consider, discuss and make recommendations on all matters of international concern except questions relating to the maintenance of international peace and security which were being dealt with by the Security Council; that the SC should be composed of five permanent and six non-permanent members elected by the GA and have power ‘to take any measures necessary’ to maintain the peace ‘in accordance with the purposes and principles of the Organisation’; and that the Economic and Social Council should operate on its own initiative as well as carry out the recommendations of the GA. Additional provisions covered the establishment of an International Court of Justice, the relationship between the SC and any regional organisations that might be created, the structure of the Secretariat, and procedures for amendment of the Charter. On the matter of voting procedure in the Security Council, the British encountered opposition from both of the other delegations. The US delegation, out of concern for Congressional susceptibilities, and still more the Soviet delegation, were wedded to the proposition that the permanent members must retain a vote in all matters in which their own interests were affected. This question went to the heart of how the world organisation would function. Because all decisions of the Security Council required unanimity among the Great Powers, a negative vote would have the effect of a veto, enabling a single permanent member not only to hold up enforcement action against itself or one of its clients but even to prevent the SC from considering a situation presenting a threat to international peace and security. The British delegation

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argued forcefully that such a provision would stultify the organisation from the outset, and eventually persuaded their US counterparts tentatively to swing around in support of their position. The Soviets, however, proved immovable, refusing to be swayed even by a direct appeal from Roosevelt to Stalin. On 28 September, the main phase of the conference broke up with the question of voting procedure still unresolved. The publication of the Dumbarton Oaks proposals in Britain 11 days later nevertheless provided the Labour Party as a whole with its long-awaited first glimpse of the organisation that would take the place of the League and, it was expected, determine the pattern of world affairs for the foreseeable future. For much of the party, therefore, the fact that the Great Powers had failed to settle the world organisation’s voting procedure aroused less interest than the areas on which they were in agreement. Overall, reaction to the scheme was mixed. Traditional internationalists expressed the most disappointment, criticising the general conception as unimaginative, lacking in idealism and obsessed with power-politics. In some quarters, it was suggested that Dumbarton Oaks might better be called ‘Dumbarton Hoax’.89 To Woolf, who had been urging some kind of formal ‘renunciation by the state of its own claim to sovereignty and irresponsibility’, the proposals caused ‘considerable misgiving’.90 The restriction of membership to an ‘exclusive club of peaceloving states or “good boys” with all the incorrigibly “bad boys” outside the pale’ he considered an unreal conception, along with the document’s incongruous claim that the organisation had been based on the principle of the sovereign equality of peace-loving states. More importantly, so heavily biased was the scheme towards the security needs of the Big Four that, unless it were modified, there would be ‘little inducement for any state, other than the Great Powers, to join the Organisation at all’.91 Noel-Baker described some of the proceedings at Dumbarton Oaks as ‘dreadful nonsense’, and argued that the security provisions, which imposed no obligation on the organisation to defend its members’ territorial integrity or political independence, constituted ‘a serious retrogression from what we had in the Covenant. There, at least, we were definitely pledged to use our resources against an aggressor.’92 The criticisms of ‘Whig’ internationalists were echoed in broad terms by the Labour left, of which a typical though temporary representative, Denis Healey, dismissed the Dumbarton Oaks discussions as ‘nothing but a smoke-screen behind which all the nations were busy trying to secure bases for the next world war’.93 ‘Muscular’ internationalists, on the other hand, although scarcely enthusiastic, generally regarded the plan as an advance in realism over its Wilsonian predecessor, accepting that

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cynicism was the price to be paid for efficiency. The New Statesman, conceding that the world was ‘condemned for the time being to a form of Holy Alliance, whose existence depends on continued agreement between the main Allies’, nevertheless believed that the planners at Dumbarton Oaks had devised ‘in lumbering language … something that looks as if it might stand a few practical tests …’.94 So also the FSIB, while finding the scheme ‘unsatisfactory’ in certain respects, recommended it as affording a foundation ‘on which it is well worth the while of Socialists to attempt to build a more comprehensive structure’.95 The most detailed and thoughtful response from within the Labour ranks came, predictably, from the ACIQ, in a paper originally drafted by Ivor Thomas. The Advisory Committee gave the proposals a guarded welcome, while warning that several vital questions on which the organisation’s survival might depend remained to be settled. In some respects, the ACIQ considered the Dumbarton Oaks proposals to be a definite improvement on the League Covenant. They approved of the omission of an undertaking to defend members against aggression, considering that this left open ‘the possibility of making territorial and other adjustments which may prove to be necessary to preserve world peace’. They also commended the plan for a Security Council, especially the provisions for continuous operation and the reservation of permanent seats for the Great Powers. The enforcement machinery in general struck them as ‘realistic’. Finally, the outline for economic and social co-operation was endorsed. The outstanding problems in the scheme, in the ACIQ’s opinion, were the ambiguity of the ‘sovereign equality’ formula; the lack of clarity about a possible right of withdrawal; the imbalance between the powers of the Security Council and the General Assembly; and the unresolved question of the veto. The principle of sovereign equality, they cautioned, was likely to be interpreted in very different ways by the Great Powers and small states respectively, the former taking it as a declaration of untrammelled sovereignty and the latter claiming equal status with the Big Four. ‘It should be made clear that in accepting this phrase the Labour Party does not believe that the present division of the world into more than seventy States each claiming sovereign powers should be perpetuated for all time …’. So far as membership was concerned, the Advisory Committee considered it important that there should be no right of withdrawal, bearing in mind the manner in which certain states had manipulated the League by threatening to leave when their wishes were thwarted. To ensure that as many countries as possible joined, economic benefits ought to accrue to membership, and penalties to non-membership. As for the General

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Assembly, the Advisory Committee wished to see its powers increased ‘in the direction of making it approximate to a law-making body for the international community’. This in turn implied that voting in the Assembly should be weighted in proportion to population. All of these matters, however, were points of detail; the question that aroused the most concern was the veto. The Advisory Committee understood why the Soviet Union laid so much stress on the point: it had ‘certain aims with regard to the Baltic Republics and Poland … the Balkans and Persia, which are regarded by itself as quite legitimate but which might lead to charges of aggression from those countries or other Powers’. On these ‘legitimate aims’ the ACIQ took a ruthlessly pragmatic stance. ‘The Organisation must avoid being so tied down to the restraint of aggression in the abstract that it is unable to take the obviously sensible course in a particular case.’ They therefore recommended that the UN ought not to come into being until after the peace settlement, by which time the ‘frontier questions in which the Soviet Union is so interested will be arranged … and there will … be no question of invoking the machinery of the Organisation to undo that settlement’. But once the USSR had had its fill of its neighbours’ territories, there could be no question of exempting it or any other Great Power from the rule of the majority. The Organisation, it has been observed earlier, should be founded upon equality before the law, and this proposal creates a fundamental inequality. There is to be one law for the permanent members and another for the small Powers. The Advisory Committee does not believe that the Labour Party should endorse such a distinction which strikes at the root of all law.96 The attitude of Labour’s upper echelons, on the other hand, was less clear-cut. While the Dumbarton Oaks conference was still proceeding, Attlee, with the support of his Tory colleague in the government, Viscount Cranborne, had telegraphed to Eden to urge him not to accept any compromise: ‘we think both our parties would feel that it was wrong … We would prefer a show-down with the Russians to any attempt to gloss over real differences.’97 The issue was one on which the Labour leader felt strongly. Although, like the majority of his party, Attlee had set aside his earlier opposition to the idea of an international authority dominated by the Great Powers,98 he remained faithful to his long-held conviction, expressed in a Commons debate in November 1939, that, ‘if we are to lay down principles for a new world order, we must be prepared to apply them to ourselves as well as to ask others to accept them’.99 During a Commons debate in April

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1945 he returned once again to this point, arguing that, while the outstanding feature of the Dumbarton Oaks proposals had been to confer ‘overwhelming strength’ upon the Security Council, its power ‘must not be arbitrary’ but based on ‘principles which the whole body of States recognise’.100 In this matter, though, Attlee and the Advisory Committee overestimated the level of support within the party for their position. The counter-argument in favour of the veto – that if one Great Power were to be declared an aggressor by the others, ‘then the organisation is necessarily at an end and any effort to coerce the aggressor means in effect a Third World War’101 – carried a great deal of weight among Labour supporters. It was also vigorously advanced in government by Cripps, who contributed at Churchill’s request a paper on the subject which was circulated to the Cabinet in October 1944. Rejecting the familiar analogy between Parliament and the world organisation beloved of ‘Whig’ internationalists, Cripps observed that even in domestic life ‘no party can go too far in exerting its will on the opposing minority’. The Security Council was neither a legislature nor a judicial organ, but a political body. As such it was ‘perfectly natural that all those present should have the right to vote, and it is largely from that right to vote that the possibility of consent will come’.102 The most powerful factor weighing against Attlee’s position, however – as the historian Charles Webster, formerly of the FRPS and now Jebb’s assistant for UN affairs, reminded the Labour leader’s personal secretary – was simply that ‘there would be no W[orld] Or[ganisation] unless the Soviet Govt. joined …’.103 There was therefore little question of the British government forcing a ‘showdown’ on the issue. Even if it were disposed to do so, the immense importance attached by President Roosevelt to Soviet participation in the UN would have precluded any such course.104 Bowing to the inevitable, Attlee at the beginning of 1945 acquiesced in the APW Committee to a US-drafted compromise proposal in which permanent members would have the right to block action by the Security Council to resolve a dispute in which they were involved, but could not veto investigation by the Council or prevent it from offering recommendations towards a settlement.105 At the Yalta meeting in February, this formula was accepted by Stalin in exchange for the Soviet Union receiving three seats in the General Assembly,106 clearing the way for the issuing of invitations to a conference at San Francisco on 25 April to establish the world organisation. The remaining ‘Whig’ internationalists among the Labour leadership approached the foundation of the new world order in the spring of 1945 with a growing sense of foreboding. In a pseudonymous letter to The Times, Noel-Baker gloomily wondered what basis for

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international confidence could exist under an arrangement by which any permanent member of the Security Council could, in effect, ‘sanction the aggression of any power, great or small’. Even though the plan was the best that could then be obtained, it was surely necessary to insert a clause ‘providing for revision in five years time. By then, we should know whether Europe and world [sic] desire peace, or are preparing for another war.’107 Attlee, who was preparing to travel to San Francisco as a member of the British delegation and had earned the maledictions of the Labour left for agreeing to let the Foreign Secretary head it in preference to himself,108 also found it difficult to conceal his disquiet. At a meeting with other Labour ministers before his departure he attempted, without conspicuous success, to put the best face on events. Attlee told us he was leaving for San Francisco early next week. The practicable & the ideal would be very much in conflict. We were engaged in negotiations with two nations who were far from being swayed by idealism – Russia & the U.S.A. Both were very immature nations. The veto was a recognition of the practical … Russia & Liberia were both republics but there the similarity ended.109 His experience at San Francisco failed to restore his spirits. A pall was cast over the conference by the death of Roosevelt a fortnight before it opened, which the personalities of Attlee’s main negotiating partners, the intensely vain Arthur H. Vandenberg and the truculent Vyacheslav Molotov, did little to alleviate. The meeting itself nearly broke down over the Soviet Union’s unexpected demand that the Great Powers be given the right to veto discussions on disputes to which they were not parties, which was withdrawn only after President Truman took up the matter directly with Stalin. Even with the Yalta formula restored, 15 of the smaller states abstained on the vote over the veto, a display which reinforced Attlee’s belief that small nations had been accorded more power in the world organisation than was desirable.110 The Labour leader returned to Britain, according to R.A. Butler, ‘much perturbed by the San Francisco Conference’.111 His encounter with Molotov, the first meeting between the two men, had reinforced his belief that the Soviets would be difficult to deal with once the war was over. He was also disturbed by a growing impression that his Conservative colleagues, even before the UN had officially been founded, were already seeking ways to circumvent it. His concern was sparked by a Cabinet paper, drafted by Eden in April, which

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defined the Middle East as an area essential to British security against the USSR and asserted that the government could not permit the country’s position there ‘to be dependent on arrangements of an international character’. To Attlee, this suggestion recalled the discredited policies of the 1930s, when the League had been similarly marginalised. In a sharply worded reply, written after Labour had withdrawn from the Churchill Coalition, he told Eden that Britain ought to confront the Soviets ‘with the requirements of a world organisation for peace, not with the needs of the defence of the British Empire’. If the government really believed in and intended to operate such an organisation, ‘the only realistic policy is that of placing all these strategic interests under international control … of the United Nations’.112 The Attlee–Eden exchange drew the attention of Gladwyn Jebb, who as one of the principal British architects of the UN was well qualified to comment upon the issues it raised. The difference between these two views of the world organisation’s nature and purpose, he wrote, was ‘extraordinarily important’ to its future development. Jebb left no room for doubt as to where he himself stood. The body described in the Charter adopted at San Francisco was ‘undoubtedly based on the physical power of the major states’. Rather than abolishing power politics, it had in fact institutionalised them, a truth which only the USSR at that moment seemed fully to appreciate. The absence of a ‘clearly defined national policy’ in Britain and the United States, on the other hand, more than any other factor was ‘likely to give rise to misunderstandings and difficulties which, if they are allowed to continue, may darken the prospects of the World Organisation we are seeking to create’.113 So far as the UN was concerned, Jebb’s verdict appeared to settle the issue not only between Attlee and Eden, but also between ‘Whig’ and ‘muscular’ internationalists within the Labour Party. In the opinion of one of the principal authors of the world organisation, there was no longer any basis for the equivocation that had characterised the party’s attitude to the League. The UN had been designed not as a parliament of man, a formulary of international law or any of the other grandiose and misleading descriptions which had been applied to the League, but simply and solely as a forum within which the principal world powers would organise relations between themselves and the lesser nations for their own – and, it was to be hoped, the world’s – benefit. As such it could function only if those powers were prepared to decide in the first instance what it was that they wanted, rather than hope that the organisation itself would decide on their behalf. As noted above, this conception of the UN was founded on the expectation not so much of Great Power unity – which pragmatically

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had been assumed rather than presumed, on the basis that disunity would inevitably lead to a third and final world war – but the equally dubious propositions that Britain, its wartime losses notwithstanding, would possess the means to hold its own as a member of at least the ‘big two-and-a-half’, and that its right to moral leadership would be acknowledged and respected by great and small powers alike. Within the very near future, exposure of the falsity of those beliefs would permanently exclude the possibility of ‘muscular’ internationalism as a governing principle for British foreign policy. But all the self-delusion did not rest on one side. Labour’s traditional internationalists persisted in the hope that the UN might somehow evolve into the self-regulating system of world government for which they had been working since the end of the Great War. More egregiously still, and in spite of their own serious doubts about the organisation, they encouraged the public to believe the same. During the 1945 campaign, the party’s principal election broadcast on foreign affairs was delivered by Noel-Baker. In an address whose rhetoric harked back to Geneva’s glory days, he depicted the UN as merely the League redivivus, of whose success a sufficient guarantee was Labour’s dedication to the international communitarianism that was ‘part of our basic Socialist thinking’: The new World Organisation would be the foundation and the framework of the whole foreign policy a Labour Government would pursue … We promise that neither fear nor vacillation, nor the obstructive doubts of so-called ‘experts’, nor the power of vested interests, nor the subterfuges of diplomacy, shall stop us. Give us the power; and this time the Great Experiment shall not fail.114

NOTES 1. Attlee speech, 13 May 1940, 39 LPCR (1940), p. 124. 2. According to Dalton, Attlee decided against nominating Noel-Baker for ministerial office because he was ‘too unbalanced in his judgements’. Dalton diary, 18 May 1940, Hugh Dalton papers, British Library of Political and Economic Science. 3. Cripps was, of course, still in the wilderness, his membership of the Labour Party not formally restored until just before the 1945 Blackpool Conference. In view of his considerable following within the party during the war years and his subsequent career as a member of the Labour Cabinet, however, he is included in this discussion. 4. Philip to Alan Noel-Baker, 11 October 1940, NBKR 4/512, Philip Noel-Baker papers, Churchill College, Cambridge. 5. Noel-Baker to H. Lauterpacht, 12 May 1941, NBKR 4/380. 6. Untitled FSIB memorandum by Noel-Baker, 31 July 1941, NBKR 2/57. Emphasis in original.

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7. Noel-Baker, record of discussion of meeting of FSIB Committee of International Socialists, 7 August 1941, NBKR 2/57. 8. FSIB minutes, 7 September 1941, NBKR 2/57. 9. The Phillimore Committee, composed of historians and senior Foreign Office officials, was established in January 1918 to clarify the British government’s attitude to the various League proposals that had been put forward by non-governmental organisations. Its report, completed in March, had a major influence upon the approach taken by both the British and US delegations at Versailles to the subject. See Egerton, Great Britain and the Creation of the League of Nations, pp. 65–9, 116–17. 10. Noel-Baker to Law, 12 March 1942; same to F.P. Walters, 11 April 1942, NBKR 4/500, Noel-Baker papers; FRPS, ‘Memorandum on the Causes of the Failure of the League’, 17 January 1943, NBKR 4/719. 11. Noel-Baker to Cecil, 1 October 1943, Cecil of Chelwood papers, f. 115, British Library. 12. 355 H.C. Deb. 5s., c. 303 (30 November 1939). 13. The most useful overview of the constitution and agenda of the War Aims Committee is contained in C. Hill, Cabinet Decisions on Foreign Policy: The British Experience, October 1938–June 1941 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), ch. 7. 14. Halifax to Cooper, 30 July 1940, PRO INF 1/862. 15. ‘Committee on War Aims. Note by the Minister of Information’, 7 October 1940, CAB 21/1581, W.A. (40) 2, 273. 16. Ibid., 274–7. 17. For expressions of Labour leaders’ continued suspicion of the state bureaucracy, see B. Pimlott, Hugh Dalton (London: Jonathan Cape, 1985), p. 294; A. Bullock, The Life and Times of Ernest Bevin, vol. I: Trade Union Leader 1881–1940 (London: Heinemann, 1960), p. 650. 18. W.H. McNeill, Arnold J. Toynbee: A Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), pp. 182–4. 19. Francis Hemming, Office of the War Cabinet, to Attlee, 26 October 1940, CAB 21/1582. 20. Minutes of the War Aims Committee, W.A. (40) 2nd meeting, 31 October 1940, CAB 21/1581. 21. ‘Suggestions for a Statement on War Aims’, n.d. [c. October 1940], CAB 21/1581, W.A. (40) 6. 22. W.A. (40) 4th meeting, 11 December 1940, CAB 21/1581. 23. J. Colville, The Fringes of Power: 10, Downing Street Diaries 1939–1955 (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1985), p. 346 (26 January 1941). 24. Harold Nicolson summarised the Prime Minister’s views as being that a precise statement of aims ‘would be compromising, whereas vague principles would disappoint’. 25. Attlee to Eden, 6 January 1941, Avon papers, FO 954/22/1. 26. Toynbee, ‘The Continental versus the Oceanic Pattern of World Unification’, 5 April 1941, CAB 117/79. The paper was issued as an FRPS document, RR I/42/iv on 26 July. 27. ‘Prolegomena to Peace Aims’, 5 April 1941, CAB 117/79. 28. ‘The Structure of an American-British World Order’, 9 April 1941, CAB 117/79. 29. FRPS, ‘British–American World Order’, 8 July 1941, CAB 117/98, RB I/3/iii. 30. G. Jebb, The Memoirs of Lord Gladwyn (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1972), p. 119. 31. C.K. Webster, FRPS, to Cooper, 25 January 1941; Harold Nicholson, Ministry of Information, to Sir Richard Maconachie, BBC, 17 March 1941; Greenwood to Cooper, 19 March 1941. When the suggestion was revived in June, Greenwood once again replied that ‘The difficulty has been the objections entertained by the Prime Minister … My own view is that such talks are highly desirable …’ Greenwood to Webster, 1 July 1941, INF 1/177. 32. Butler to Greenwood, 10 April 1941, CAB 117/271. 33. Untitled document, covered by letter from Monckton to Eden, 14 February 1941, CAB 117/271, 3. The main point of Cripps’s submission was that the ‘true progress of humanity’ could best be assured by encouraging small states to group together so as to

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34. 35.

36.

37.

38.

39. 40. 41. 42.

43.

44. 45. 46. 47.

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constitute a less attractive target for potential aggressors. This would ‘facilitate an eventual, though no doubt still far distant, peaceful confederation of the peoples of the world’. In Eden’s absence, Cadogan contemptuously dismissed Cripps’s submission as the product of a Moscow-induced attack of ‘oratorical constipation … I dare say we ought to tell him, in reply, that we are deeply interested, so that he may continue this (comparatively harmless) form of laxative treatment.’ This was the second occasion on which Cripps had raised the question of the postwar settlement with the FO. The first, in August 1940, had met a similar fate from Churchill himself, who described Cripps’s ‘excursion’ as ‘far too airy and speculative to be useful at the present moment …’. Colville, The Fringes of Power, p. 215 (10 August 1940). E. Bevin, A Survey of Britain’s War Effort (London: Transport and General Workers’ Union, 1941), p. 3. In a December 1942 paper, Bevin flatly contradicted his earlier demand for curbs on national sovereignty, calling instead for functional organisations which would leave ‘political independence and theories of sovereignty untouched’. See n. 58 below. Quoted in D. Reynolds, The Creation of the Anglo-American Alliance 1937–1941: A Study in Competitive Co-operation (London: Europa, 1981), p. 254. For a comprehensive discussion of US planning for a postwar international organisation, see P.J. Hearden, Architects of Globalism: Building a New World Order during World War II (Fayetteville, AR: University of Arkansas Press, 2002). This, however, did not prevent Transport House from claiming in its published speakers’ notes, in a formulation of masterly ambiguity, that ‘the Labour Members of the War Cabinet … played their full part in the drawing up of the “Atlantic Charter” …’. Labour Party Press Department, Labour in the War Government: A Record of Things Done (London: Labour Party, 1943), p. 4. A Ministry of Information survey – admittedly, carried out more than a year later – found that the Charter ‘excites neither interest nor discussion. It is thought to be “too nebulous”, and in danger of becoming a catch phrase similar to the “Covenant of the League”.’ ‘Public Feeling on Post-War Reconstruction: A Report by Home Intelligence Division’, November 1942, p. 18, CAB 117/209. See also D. Reynolds, ‘The Atlantic “Flop”: British Foreign Policy and the Churchill–Roosevelt Meeting of August 1941’, in D. Brinkley and D.R. Facey-Crowther (eds), The Atlantic Charter (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1994). Oliver Harvey diary entry, 12 August 1941, in J. Harvey (ed.), The War Diaries of Oliver Harvey (London: Collins, 1978), p. 31. See pp. 184–5 below. Harvey diary, 6 October 1941, in Harvey (ed.), War Diaries of Oliver Harvey, p. 49. Jebb had served as Dalton’s Private Secretary at the FO during the 1929–31 Labour administration, and was rewarded through his master’s intervention with a prestige posting at the British Embassy in Rome. In July 1940, newly installed as Minister for Economic Warfare and head of the Special Operations Executive, Dalton recruited Jebb to be his Chief Executive Officer. In his autobiography, he described Jebb as one of ‘my favourite diplomats’. H. Dalton, High Tide and After: Memoirs 1945–1960 (London: Frederick Muller, 1962), p. 313. H.M.G. Jebb (Lord Gladwyn), ‘Founding the United Nations: Principles and Objects’, in E. Jensen and T. Fisher (eds), The United Kingdom – The United Nations (London: Macmillan, 1990), p. 24. Jebb received copies of the FRPS papers, which were not issued until they had been approved by the FO. Jebb, introduction to ‘The Four-Power Plan’, 9 September 1942, FO 371/31525, U/742/742/70. See Egerton, Great Britain and the Creation of the League of Nations, esp. ch. 4, ‘Cecil’s War’. ‘The Four-Power Plan’, 9 September 1942, FO 371/31525, U/742/742/70.

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48. Jebb, ‘Founding the United Nations’, p. 26. 49. Dalton to Eden, 19 November 1942, FO 371/31525, U 1796/742/70. 50. Dalton diary, 17 November 1942. Jebb had asked Dalton ‘to excite the interest of Attlee’ in his paper. 51. Jebb, ‘Founding the United Nations’, p. 28. 52. New York Times, 19 August 1941. 53. Transcript of broadcast, 17 December 1941, INF 1/177. 54. Manchester Guardian, 20 June 1942. 55. Daily Herald, 12 December 1941. 56. Manchester Guardian, 6 May 1942. 57. Manchester Guardian, 25 February 1943. 58. Bevin, ‘The Four-Power Plan’, 8 December 1942, FO 371/31525, U 1798/742/70. 59. Jebb minute, 16 December 1942, FO 371/31525, U 1798/742/70. Punctuation as in original. 60. In an April 1942 opinion poll for the News Chronicle, Cripps came second only to Eden as the preferred successor to Churchill, 34 per cent of respondents naming him as the figure they would most like to see take over should anything happen to the Prime Minister. The comparable figures for the Labour ‘Big Three’ were: Attlee, 2 per cent; Bevin, 2 per cent; and Morrison, 1 per cent. A separate poll taken a fortnight previously had found only 35 per cent of those questioned satisfied with the government’s conduct of the war. See P. Addison, The Road to 1945: British Politics and the Second World War (London: Jonathan Cape, 1975), pp. 200, 196. 61. Mss. Cripps 85, R.S. Cripps papers, Nuffield College, Oxford. 62. Speeches to the National Council of Women (London) and the Ilkeston (Derbyshire) Co-operative Society. Manchester Guardian, 9 October 1943; 18 September 1944. 63. Cripps, ‘The Four-Power Plan’, 19 November 1942, CAB 66/31, W.P. (42) 532. 64. Jebb minute, 28 December 1942, FO 371/31525, U 1933/742/70. 65. Amery, ‘Europe and the Post-War Settlement’, 12 November 1942, CAB 66/31, W.P. (42) 524; ‘The United Nations Plan’, 25 January 1943, W.P. (43) 39. Amery had first suggested this strategy two years earlier in a paper to Eden, ‘A Note on Post-War Reconstruction’, 29 October 1940, FO 371/28899, W 2311/426/49. 66. ‘Mr. Amery’s paper is a foolish production, by a kindly but confused old man.’ Eden minute, 10 February 1943, FO 371/35396, U 867/402/70. 67. Jebb minute, 4 February 1943, FO 371/35396, U 867/402/70. 68. See FO 371/31525, U 1805/742/70. 69. A.D.K. Owen to Jebb, 28 December 1943, FO 371/31525, U 1933/742/70. 70. While the Four-Power Plan also raised this possibility, it had envisaged these countries achieving a common military economic and political system ‘in collaboration with the U.S.S.R. …’. This important qualification was omitted from the United Nations Plan. 71. ‘The United Nations Plan’, 16 January 1943, FO 371/35396, U 2329/402/70, W.P. (43) 31. 72. Dalton diary, 10 January 1943, BLPES. 73. ‘The United Nations Plan’, 28 January 1943, CAB 66/33, W.P. (43) 44. 74. This final version originated as a memorandum, ‘Suggestions for a Peace Settlement’, 26 March 1943, drafted by Jebb in Washington. See FO 371/35396, U 1823/402/70. 75. W.S. Churchill, Arms and the Covenant (London: Harrap, 1938), p. 102. See also E.J. Hughes, ‘Winston Churchill and the Formation of the United Nations Organization’, Journal of Contemporary History, 9, 4 (October 1974). 76. ‘Morning Thoughts’, 1 February 1943, FO 371/35363, U 549/320/70. 77. Churchill, report of conversation, 22 May 1943, FO 954/22A, W.P. (43) 233. 78. Cripps to Churchill, 12 June 1943, PREM 4/30/3/124. 79. Jebb, Memoirs, p. 122. For the FO’s entertainingly apoplectic reaction, see Jebb’s minute, 3 February 1943, in FO 371/35363, U 549/320/70, and the entry in Harvey’s diary, 2 February, p. 216.

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80. Attlee memorandum, 19 July 1943, CAB 87/65, W.P. (43) 321. 81. Brailsford, ‘Mystery, Peril and Splendour’, New Statesman and Nation, 3 April 1943. 82. Jebb, ‘Founding the United Nations’, pp. 35–6; E.L. Woodward, British Foreign Policy in the Second World War, vol. IV (London: HMSO, 1976), p. 119. 83. Before the United States’ entry into the war, the State Department’s Subcommittee on Postwar Problems chaired by Under-Secretary Sumner Wells had itself seriously considered approaching the security problems of the postwar world on a regional basis. By March 1942, however, the subcommittee had swung round in favour of a world organisation headed by an executive committee of the four Great Powers, a conception endorsed by Roosevelt and Molotov at a meeting in Washington two months later. See Hearden, Architects of Globalism, pp. 19–23, 146–9. 84. A. Eden, The Eden Memoirs: The Reckoning (London: Cassell, 1965), p. 377. 85. The APW Committee grew out of an ad hoc body set up in 1943 to formulate armistice terms for Italy. Its purpose, in addition to carrying out the same function for Germany and Japan, was to advise the War Cabinet on ‘general political and military questions in the post-war period’. Its membership fluctuated according to the topic under discussion, but the Deputy Prime Minister, Foreign Secretary or his deputy, Dominions Secretary, Secretary of State for Air and Minister for Labour normally attended all meetings. 86. For the text of the memoranda, see Woodward, British Foreign Policy, vol. IV, pp. 93–115. 87. Minutes of 10th meeting, 20 July 1944, CAB 87/66. 88. For particulars of the United States’ draft entitled “Possible Plan for a General International Organization”, drawn up by State Department officials on 24 April 1944, see Hearden, Architects of Globalism, pp. 169–71. 89. George Catlin, 12 December 1944, 43 LPCR (1944), p. 138. 90. Woolf, The International Post-War Settlement. 91. The lack of democracy in the scheme also offended Woolf’s egalitarian instincts. ‘The [League Assembly] was intended to be, and was to some extent, an embryonic international parliament or legislature; the General Assembly of the United Nations will be nothing but a debating society.’ Woolf FSIB memorandum, ‘The United Nations’, n.d. [c. November 1944], NBKR 4/384, Noel-Baker papers. 92. Noel-Baker to Cecil, 6 September 1944, f. 145, Cecil of Chelwood papers; same to D.C.T. Bennett, 17 October 1944, NBKR 4/727. 93. Election address of Denis Healey, quoted in E. Pearce, Denis Healey: A Life in Our Time (London: Little, Brown, 2002), p. 60. 94. ‘World Organisation’, New Statesman and Nation, 14 October 1944. 95. Fabian Society, Dumbarton Oaks: A Fabian Commentary (Fabian Tract No. 261) (London: Fabian Society, 1944), p. 16. 96. ACIQ Memorandum No. 2B, ‘The Dumbarton Oaks Proposals’, November 1944, Labour Party papers. See also I. Thomas, ACIQ Memorandum No. 2, NBKR 4/384. 97. Attlee to Eden, 15 September 1944, CAB 123/237. 98. In 1933 he had declared that ‘Everywhere it has aroused great suspicion … the idea that the affairs of Europe, if not of the world, are going to be arranged by a group of great Powers and the rest of the world form a chorus, which is to accept what is laid down by these great Allies. We object altogether to the great Power conception as being entirely out of date in these days.’ Attlee’s ‘Peace Aims’ speech of 8 November 1939 reiterated the point. ‘A world or a Europe under the orders of four or five big States would not be free.’ 276 H.C. Deb. 5s., c. 2740 (13 April 1933); Attlee, Labour’s Peace Aims. 99. 355 H.C. Deb. 5s., c. 20 (30 November 1939). A decade earlier he had made the same argument in even more unambiguous terms. ‘We on this side cannot agree with the objection that … to make the work of the League effective is to build up a super-State, and that that cannot be contemplated. We think that you must come to a super-State.’ 284 H.C. Deb. 5s., c. 1174 (13 December 1933). 100. 410 H.C. Deb. 5s., cols 84–5 (17 April 1945).

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101. New Statesman and Nation, 14 October 1944. 102. Cripps, ‘Voting at World Organisation’, 7 October 1944, CAB 66/58, W.P. (44) 667. In an accompanying minute, Churchill noted ‘I am bound to say I do not see what answer can be made to these arguments.’ PREM 4/30/10/607. 103. Webster diary, 1 November 1944, P.A. Reynolds and E.J. Hughes (eds), The Historian as Diplomat: Charles Kingsley Webster and the United Nations 1939–1946 (London: Martin Robertson, 1976), p. 52. Webster had been recruited by Jebb early in 1943 ‘because he was fundamentally a “Great Power” man …’. Jebb, ‘Founding the United Nations’, p. 34. 104. As did Roosevelt’s anxiety not to traverse the same road with Congress as had Wilson over the Covenant. Thus Senator Arthur H. Vandenberg of Michigan, a powerful Republican and former isolationist, recorded how he was ‘deeply impressed (and surprised) to find [Secretary of State] Hull so carefully guarding our American veto in his scheme of things’. Vandenberg diary, 11 May 1944, quoted in G. Kolko, The Politics of War (New York: Random House, 1968), p. 271. 105. Attlee memorandum, 5 January 1945, W.P. (45) 12. 106. That is, for the Russian, Ukrainian and Byelorussian SSRs. This was a partial retreat from the Soviet position at Dumbarton Oaks, which had sought individual seats for all 16 republics. 107. Letter dated 9 March 1945, NBKR 4/727. 108. See Tribune, 2 March, 30 March 1945. 109. Ede diary, 10 April 1945. K. Jeffreys (ed.), Labour and the Wartime Coalition: From the Diary of James Chuter Ede, 1941–1945 (London: Historians’ Press, 1987), p. 211. 110. F. Williams, A Prime Minister Remembers (London: Heinemann, 1961), p. 61. 111. Ede diary, 24 May 1945. Jeffreys, Labour and the Wartime Coalition, p. 218. In retirement, Attlee recalled feeling ‘satisfied’ at its outcome. Williams, A Prime Minister Remembers, p. 60. 112. Eden, ‘Defence of the Middle East’, 13 April 1945, CAB 66/65, W.P. (45) 256; Attlee to Eden, 12 July 1945, FO 954/22/384. 113. Jebb memorandum, 29 July 1945, Document No. 459. R. Butler and M.E. Pelley (eds), Documents on British Policy Overseas, series I, vol. I (London: HMSO, 1984), p. 991. 114. Transcript of broadcast, 16 June 1945, NBKR 4/731. The term ‘the Great Experiment’, popularised by Lord Robert Cecil in the 1920s, was a coded reference to the League.

5

Utopia Deferred: The Attlee Administration and the United Nations, 1945–51

A favourite theme of Labour candidates during the 1945 general election campaign was the manner in which successive Conservative administrations had ‘betrayed’ the League of Nations and collective security in the 1920s and 1930s. Typical of the party’s attack on the Conservatives’ prewar record in foreign affairs was the broadside unleashed by the former League official, Konni Zilliacus, who was to record an emphatic victory at Gateshead. ‘The Second World War’, he charged in the spring of 1945, ‘is in a very real sense the price paid for the preservation of the capitalist economic system and almost uninterrupted Tory rule after the First World War.’1 British Conservatives, according to Zilliacus, from the beginning had deliberately subverted and undermined the League, seeing its promise of world government, colonial development and economic democracy as a threat to their class interests. At Manchuria, Abyssinia and Munich they had appeased the League’s enemies, regarding the extreme-right capitalist governments of the Axis powers as bulwarks against the westward spread of socialism. Only after they belatedly discovered that Fascism was no less a threat to the British Empire than to the international working class did they finally move to resist it, by which time the League had been destroyed and Britain was left to confront its enemies completely alone. ‘Instead of using the League to make the world safe for democracy, they weakened the League until it became safe for power politics and international anarchy, and so ultimately for Fascism, aggression, appeasement and world war.’2 Although Zilliacus was one of the party’s more rigorous Marxists who was to be expelled in 1949 for fellow-travelling sympathies, this was by no means solely a left-wing critique. During the 1941 Annual Conference, for example, Clement Attlee and Philip Noel-Baker had rehearsed the same theme in almost identical terms:

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We believe that this War could and should have been avoided. For eight years before it started we watched our rulers … undermining the morale and the morality of the League of Nations, discrediting its law, breaking up its institutions. We watched them making pacts with aggressors instead of against them. We watched them abandoning the sure defence of eternal principles for the momentary and the illusory advantage of opportunist gain.3 As an electoral weapon, Labour’s critique of the Conservatives’ record regarding the League was highly effective.4 The assertion that the League’s demise, and consequently the war itself, was attributable to the National Government’s bad faith had a popular appeal reinforced by the wartime clamour for exposure of the ‘Guilty Men’ responsible for Britain’s unpreparedness in 1939 and 1940. Throughout the campaign Labour spokesmen gleefully reminded the public of the Hoare–Laval Pact, Neville Chamberlain’s notorious description of League sanctions as ‘the very midsummer of madness’, and the many admiring tributes paid to Hitler and Mussolini by Tory politicians – including Churchill himself – in the interwar years,5 weaving around the National Government’s propensity to sacrifice the well-being of the League to its classbound conception of British interests an aura of disloyalty which the Conservatives’ feeble, though not wholly unjustified, rejoinder of tu quoque did little to dispel. But in other respects, Labour’s exegesis of the League’s breakdown had unfortunate consequences. By encouraging the British people to believe that the most important factor making for the success or failure of any international organisation was the attitude of the British government, the party effectively offered itself as a hostage to the fortunes of the United Nations. Furthermore, by suggesting as Noel-Baker had done in his June election broadcast that the UN was little more than a continuation of the League, differing only in its greater inclusiveness and efficiency, Labour elided the very real differences that existed between them. Of greater long-term significance, however, was the fact that deep divisions persisted within the party after 1945 over the viability of the UN as an effective instrument of British foreign policy. Within a few months after the end of the San Francisco Conference, growing doubts that the world organisation in its existing form could guarantee international peace led many members to press for a fundamental revision of the Charter to address such problems as the proliferation of atomic weapons and the paralysis of the Security Council. In some quarters, these doubts gave rise to demands for an entirely new organisation with powers far wider than those conceded to the UN. But as Cold War tensions mounted and Britain’s relative insignificance among the

Utopia Deferred

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Big Three became increasingly apparent, the Labour government’s posture with respect to the UN grew steadily more defensive and cautious. When the Security Council encountered its first serious challenge in the spring of 1946 over the continued Soviet presence in Iran, the new Foreign Secretary, Ernest Bevin, briefly contemplated modifying or supplementing the Charter to meet the difficulty. In the light of Britain’s moral and material weakness, however, he soon began to look upon the veto not merely as a source of the UN’s ineffectiveness, but also as an essential safeguard for Britain lest it suddenly become effective at Britain’s expense at a moment in history when the country’s power and influence were seriously depleted. As Bevin and his colleagues under the stimulus of the Cold War retreated further from internationalism in favour of traditional multilateral security arrangements, moreover, the prospect of an active and interventionist UN seemed more likely to impose constraints on British policy than to serve British interests. By the time it departed from power in October 1951, the Labour government had arrived at the paradoxical conclusion that the cure for the ailment crippling the world organisation was more dangerous than the disease.

INTERNATIONALISM, THE UN AND THE ATOM The scale of Labour’s victory in 1945 did much to lift the increasing sense of apprehension that many party activists had felt over the state of foreign affairs. During the final months of the European war, mounting tensions between the Western allies and the Soviet Union over Poland, and British support for ‘reactionary’ régimes in Italy and Greece, had been seen as ominous portents of a Churchillian reversion to the discredited ‘class diplomacy’ of the 1930s, against which the Labour left under Aneurin Bevan began to wage open warfare in the Commons in the winter of 1944–45.6 The Conservatives’ heavy defeat at the polls was therefore interpreted by many Labour supporters as signifying a decisive repudiation by the British people of the status quo in foreign no less than in domestic affairs, and fuelled expectations that the incoming administration would strike out in an entirely new direction. Grassroots opinion in the party looked forward to a sweeping purge of the Foreign Office, to be followed by the conclusion of a comprehensive agreement with the Soviet Union and other ‘progressive’ governments in Europe, the pursuit of a policy of revanche against Franco in Spain, and the turning over of world security responsibilities to an international police force under the UN.

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To carry out this ‘socialist foreign policy’, Labour supporters looked expectantly to those leaders most closely associated in the past with the international organisation. Hugh Dalton, whose internationalist credentials had been franked by his work under Henderson in the 1920s on behalf of the League, was considered a virtual certainty to be offered the post of Foreign Secretary; while Noel-Baker was widely expected to become ‘Sec[retary] of State for the new world organisation’.7 The first appointment by the new administration, however, failed to conform to the anticipated pattern. In place of Dalton, who became Chancellor of the Exchequer, Attlee chose Ernest Bevin as his Foreign Secretary, a last-minute decision which both at the time and subsequently provoked considerable debate.8 The explanation offered by the Prime Minister himself was that, if Bevin were to go to the Treasury, he would come into constant contact with Herbert Morrison, the Lord President, for whom he harboured a strong and fully reciprocated antipathy. Attlee played down the suggestion, made by the biographer of George VI, that the King’s stated opposition to Dalton during the meeting at which he asked the Labour leader to form a government had been the decisive factor.9 It has also been suggested that senior officials in the Foreign Office lobbied strongly against Dalton, who was regarded as being excessively independent-minded, or ‘viewy’, and whose contemptuous attitude toward his civil servants during the war had become common knowledge.10 Whatever the truth of this claim may be, there can be no doubt that in Bevin the Foreign Office obtained a Secretary of State less likely to challenge the existing institutional culture, and much more reliant upon his advisers, than Dalton would have been. A man with an active interest but no real experience in foreign affairs, a deep and abiding suspicion of intellectuals and theorising, and an unconcealed impatience with minority opinion, Bevin came to his new post with relatively few settled convictions, internationalist or otherwise, about how British diplomacy should be conducted. He nevertheless possessed an abundance of confidence in his own abilities, a massive egotism that was variously described as endearing or boorish, an unshakeable loyalty to persons (if not to policies) that was perhaps his most appealing quality, and a tendency to self-pity and petulance that was among his most unattractive. The allegation by left-wing critics that as Foreign Secretary he was merely the mouthpiece of his officials need not be taken seriously, for Bevin had too great a sense of his own importance to be anyone’s puppet. But his lack of background in the conduct of foreign affairs, his virtual inability to write,11 his ignorance of foreign languages and his frequent serious illnesses12 compelled him to draw more heavily upon the advice and experience of his subordinates than a more cosmopolitan

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and iconoclastic personality like Dalton, or even Attlee himself, would have done. Attlee’s other appointments gave little comfort to partisans of the world organisation. Instead of becoming the full-time Secretary of State for the UN for which a number of backbenchers had been pressing,13 Noel-Baker was assigned this responsibility as Bevin’s Minister of State, a position outside the Cabinet. Even then Bevin was persuaded to take on Noel-Baker only as a concession to backbench opinion.14 The relationship between the two was not close: as Roy Jenkins recorded, Noel-Baker ‘had the misfortune both to irritate Ernest Bevin and to be frightened of him’.15 The Prime Minister also disappointed many of his followers by sending to the UN as Britain’s Permanent Representative not a senior Labour politician but a career civil servant, the aloof and acidulous Sir Alexander Cadogan. This appointment did at least have the salutary effect of removing to a location where he could do relatively little harm an individual who harboured the gravest misgivings about the viability of any international political organisation, and who aired those doubts frequently in his dispatches to London.16 But Cadogan’s replacement as Permanent Under-Secretary at the Foreign Office could scarcely be considered an improvement from the internationalist point of view. Sir Orme Sargent, formerly Cadogan’s deputy, was if anything still more of a traditionalist, whose views were held by one knowledgeable observer to represent ‘the F[oreign] O[ffice] of say 1910 … He laughs at the United Nations as he did the League, and the Southern and Northern Departments, which with Reconstruction are the kernel of the F.O. take their lead from him.’17 Too narrow a focus on Attlee’s personnel decisions would nonetheless convey a misleading impression about the seriousness with which the Labour government in 1945 took the world organisation. Arguably the most committed supporter of the UN in the Cabinet, in fact, was the Prime Minister himself. In one of his first Cabinet papers as head of government, he indicated his readiness to contemplate a radical re-evaluation of the basic premises of British foreign policy in the light of the international authority’s creation. Contradicting the insistence of Bevin and George Hall, the Colonial Secretary, that Britain must obtain control over Italy’s North African colonies to reinforce the Middle East, Attlee declared: The British Empire can only be defended by its membership of the United Nations Organisation. If we do not accept this, we had better say so. If we do accept this we should seek to make it effective and not at the same time act on outworn conceptions. If

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the new organisation is a reality, it does not matter who holds Cyrenaica or Somalia or the Suez Canal. If it is not a reality we had better be thinking of the defence of England, for unless we can protect the home country no strategic positions elsewhere will avail.18 The Prime Minister’s argument was essentially a restatement of the position he had taken up in his exchange with Eden two months earlier. But the vehemence with which he pressed it upon his colleagues had been increased by what had occurred in the interim – the abrupt conclusion of the war in the Far East following the use of atomic weapons at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Nor was Attlee the only Cabinet minister to react to the advent of the atomic age in a like fashion. The use of the bomb made a deep impression upon many members of the Labour government, who as a group were much quicker to grasp the revolutionary implications of this new form of warfare than their counterparts in either the Soviet Union or the United States.19 At the end of September, Attlee wrote a private letter to Truman in which he confided his belief that the existence of nuclear weapons would make necessary ‘very far-reaching changes in the relationship between States’. The San Francisco Conference, he pointed out, had been a first step in devising a new global order, but it had taken place before the true nature of the problem was known. ‘Now it seems to us that the building, the framework of which was erected at San Francisco, must be carried much further if it is to be an effective shelter for humanity.’20 Bevin too was sufficiently chastened by the power of the new weapon to suggest momentarily that the secret of its manufacture should be shared with the USSR as a means of securing Stalin’s agreement to place control over atomic energy in the hands of the UN.21 In a speech at Newcastle at the same time the President of the Board of Trade, Stafford Cripps, went even further than his colleagues had done: We must all get out of our minds any idea that world organisation and world co-operation are Utopian ideas which are not practical. They are indeed the only really practical ideas in the light of the existence of the atomic bomb … World federation, or international federation or co-operation, has hitherto been looked upon as a very long term objective … But the atomic bomb has telescoped history and has made it impossible to await long years of acute danger of war, because from that war civilisation and mankind cannot survive. We must therefore approach the problem as if we had lived through that long preparatory stage and were now confronted with the ultimate solution.22

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The coming of the bomb had a still more profound impact on Labour backbenchers. In the Commons debate on ratification of the UN Charter on 22 and 23 August, one speaker after another rose to declare that many of the issues with which the San Francisco Conference had grappled were now irrelevant, and that the UN in its existing form was inadequate to deal with the perils confronting international society. A few MPs on the right of the party maintained that the situation had become so uncertain that ratification of the Charter ought at least to be postponed; but the majority felt that, on the contrary, the problem called for a far bolder approach than anyone had previously been willing to contemplate. Typical of these demands for encore de l’audace was the maiden speech of Benn Levy, MP for Slough, which called on the Foreign Secretary publicly to endorse the opinion, which I believe to be widespread, that much of the Charter is already obsolete and ripe for immediate revision … and that this country, for one, is readly [sic] to recognise the supremacy of an international authority, and to surrender, moreover, the requisite degree of her own sovereignty in consequence.23 In default of immediate world government, other speakers called for the abolition of the Security Council veto, the placing of all atomic weapons under international control, and the reconstitution of the General Assembly to represent political parties rather than governments. Although the debate concluded with the House ratifying the Charter nem. con., none of the dozen or so Labour members who participated expressed confidence in the UN’s ability to live up to its promises without major organic or surgical alterations. Not all Labour supporters, though, were as deeply disquieted by the arrival of the atomic age as was the PLP. In some circles, indeed, the existence of nuclear weapons gave rise to a paradoxical mood of optimism. The very dreadfulness of the bomb, it was suggested, created an unprecedented opportunity to harness absolute power to the cause of internationalism, providing the incentive as well as the means to compel the human race to take that final step towards world government from which it had hung back at San Francisco. Two days after Nagasaki, the New Statesman urged the Anglo-Saxon nations to use their control of atomic energy as leverage ‘to make a reality of the World Security Council. That can now be attempted far more hopefully than ever before, because for the first time the atomic bomb creates an effective form of international police.’ If the UN could gain control of the bomb and use it as a means to deter aggressors, then ‘war will really begin to look like a nightmare of the past …’.24 Likewise Tribune

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called upon the Anglo-Americans to create an international territory ‘if necessary on an island in the ocean’ as the sole research and production facility for atomic energy, and an international army and air force to protect it. Exploiting the ‘enormous bargaining power which the temporary exclusive possession of the atom secret bestows’, they should also reconvene the San Francisco Conference to abolish the veto, adopt ‘[a]ll other revisions deemed necessary to vest the Security Council with a real measure of world sovereignty’, and confer exclusive ownership of all raw materials essential to atomic fission upon the UN. ‘If it is possible to blackmail the world into sanity and international co-operation, let us do so. Power has never been used for a more legitimate purpose.’25 Labour activists’ hopes that the bomb might become the catalyst for a rapid revision of the Charter were heightened by the announcement in November that Attlee would travel to Washington to confer with Truman and the Canadian Prime Minister, Mackenzie King, about the future of atomic energy. In fact, Attlee himself had no such elevated expectations of his visit. His object in travelling to the United States, as he informed his Cabinet colleagues, was not to propose restrictions on the development of atomic energy by any country, inasmuch as complete international control was not possible.26 Rather, he intended to suggest that the bomb be used to restrain aggression through ‘the determination of all those who develop atomic energy to live up to the principles and purposes of the Charter … by using their atomic weapons against an aggressor if the need arises’.27 Attlee’s attitude to the threat of atomic warfare, then, in contrast to that of many Labour members, was idealistic rather than instrumental. Instead of seeking to use the bomb principally as a tool of atomic diplomacy, he looked to a new awareness on the part of the world’s peoples and governments of their mutual vulnerability to strengthen their determination to make a success of the UN in its existing form. ‘The only hope for the world’, he concluded, ‘is that we should all lay aside our nationalistic ideas, and strive without reservation to bring about an international relationship in which war is entirely ruled out.’28 To those who had assumed that Attlee had gone to the United States to put forward concrete proposals for an improved international system, however, the result of the Washington Conference induced a powerful sense of anticlimax. As the ‘poor relation’ among the three powers that had participated in the Manhattan Project, Britain was able to make little impression upon US ideas for the disposition of atomic energy, and the only visible fruit of the conference was a US-drafted declaration calling for the creation of a UN commission to investigate methods of controlling atomic energy and eliminating

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weapons of mass destruction.29 In the wake of this modest outcome, much of the early optimism about the UN evaporated. Instead a number of Labour supporters lapsed into a countervailing despondency about the world organisation’s prospects. Thus Leonard Woolf, staking his claim to consideration as one of the first British unilateralists, declared in the aftermath of the Washington Conference that as a result of the atomic bomb the six-month-old UN had become ‘antediluvian’. The concept of collective security was equally archaic, because an atomic-armed state, however small, could successfully defy any combination of opponents. International control was futile, inasmuch as all it would achieve would be to make the world safe for the use of scarcely less-destructive weapons; while the idea that the UN could banish aggression by raining down atomic destruction on tens of thousands of innocent civilians in an aggressor country was unreal. Civilisation and the system of armed sovereign national states had thus become incompatible, Woolf concluded gloomily, and the only remaining choice lay ‘between utopia and annihilation’.30 Deeply concerned as they were about the bomb and the shortcomings of the UN, relatively few Labour MPs took as pessimistic a view as Woolf. Regarding atomic weapons as neither a diplomatic deus ex machina nor an inevitable harbinger of global disaster, the majority looked to their political leaders to remove the danger of atomic conflict by making a reality of the party’s commitment to international government. Their confidence in the Foreign Secretary’s determination to work towards this goal received a boost from the Labour government’s first major Commons debate on foreign policy, a week after the Washington Conference. Early in the debate, the Conservative spokesman, Anthony Eden, had drawn cheers from the Labour backbenches when he called for the world to be made safe for the atomic age by transforming relations between the nations ‘as the relations between this country and Scotland and Wales have been transformed’.31 At the close of his lengthy reply, and departing from his official brief, Bevin took up Eden’s suggestion and outbid it: [W]e need a new study for the purpose of creating a world assembly elected directly from the peoples of the world, as a whole, to whom the Governments who form the United Nations are responsible and who, in fact, make the world law which they, the people, will then accept and be morally bound and willing to carry out … I am willing to sit with anybody, of any party, of any nation, to try to devise a franchise or a constitution for a world assembly, with a limited objective, the objective of peace.32

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The Foreign Secretary’s proposal was rapturously received by a broad spectrum of Labour opinion. To the growing number of party members who had begun to fear that Bevin was incapable of deviating from the narrow path of Foreign Office orthodoxy, the speech offered reassurance that the Labour government was ready to pursue a radical and independent course in foreign policy. Even so inveterate a critic as Kingsley Martin was now to declare that his initial faith in Bevin had after all been justified; while Sydney Silverman, later to become a thorn in the leadership’s flesh over its conduct of foreign affairs, rose at the 1946 Annual Conference to congratulate the Foreign Secretary in glowing terms upon the breadth of his vision.33 Bevin’s listeners thus took for granted – as have some recent scholars – that the proposal was a serious one and reflected his underlying support for an internationalist strategy in world affairs.34 In reality the speech connoted nothing of the kind. As the Foreign Secretary confessed in a private conversation eight months later with the chairman of the United Nations Association (UNA), Lord Lytton, his intention had been merely to ‘ventilate’ the subject in public. He told me that he had no very clear idea as to how the establishment of World Government could be brought about … It could not be achieved in his life-time, but he thought that the younger generation should begin to think about it. That was all he had in mind.35 In a subsequent, though inconspicuous, ‘clarification’, moreover, Hector McNeil, Minister of State at the Foreign Office, explained in a Fabian Society lecture that his interpretation of Bevin’s cession of sovereignty was that it was to be confined to ‘certain economic functions and some social functions which are closely allied’, under the umbrella of the UN Economic and Social Council.36 Not only, then, did Bevin’s ‘world government’ speech have little substance to it; but lost in the general chorus of acclaim for the Foreign Secretary’s internationalist sentiments was the fact that he was apparently willing to substitute an entirely new world authority for the UN as the principal instrument of the Labour government’s external policy, even before the General Assembly had gathered for its first meeting.37 The impulse underlying Bevin’s somewhat inconsequential attitude to the UN differed sharply from that of the Labour backbenchers who also had called for a further advance toward world government in the August debate. The Foreign Secretary’s outlook reflected his conception of politics, domestic and international alike, as inseparable from and largely synonymous with power-relations; and his conviction that

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Britain’s postwar difficulties were temporary and that it would soon resume its position as one of the leading voices in world affairs. His understanding of the UN’s rôle was thus in distinct contrast to that of Attlee or the ‘Whig’ internationalists. Rather than constituting a wholly new factor in relations between states, the world organisation in his view was best thought of as a forum of the Big Five – or, more realistically, the Big Three – within which the struggle for power and prestige would continue in the traditional manner. The Foreign Secretary gave early expression to this attitude towards the UN in the course of a Cabinet debate in the autumn of 1945 over where its headquarters ought to be located. A number of possible sites had already been canvassed, among which the leading candidates were San Francisco, the organisation’s birthplace, and Geneva, where the necessary amenities were already in existence in the shape of the premises formerly occupied by the League. In September Noel-Baker, as head of the British delegation to the UN Preparatory Commission, urged the Cabinet to support a European site, preferably Geneva. It was undesirable, he argued, for the new organisation to be located on the territory of any of the Great Powers, which might exercise excessive influence over its activities.38 This proposition was strongly opposed by Dalton, who responded that for that very reason the UN should be based in the United States, to guard against the possibility that its citizens might lose interest in it as they had the League.39 But it was the rationale contained within Bevin’s paper in support of his Minister of State that most accurately reflected the approach the Foreign Office would take in its approach to UN affairs. Britain and France, he declared, were ‘the trustees for Western Europe’, and if they wished to exercise world leadership must conduct themselves accordingly. There could be no criticism of our conduct if we press strongly in Preparatory Commission the desirability of a European site. On the contrary, if we do not do so, it will be considered that we have lost our power and our nerve. If we are beaten, we shall be in a strong position to urge concessions … If we tamely acquiesce, the influence of the United States and the Soviet Union on the United Nations will be considered by all so clearly to outweigh that of Britain and France that other States will cease to look to us for leadership.40 In the Foreign Secretary’s opinion, it was pointless to look to the UN itself as a means of redressing the temporary – as he believed – imbalance of power which was afflicting British diplomacy. That

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being so, the organisation was to occupy only a marginal place in his plans for the future. A week later, he made the point explicitly in an uncirculated personal memorandum. I should be willing to pursue the policy of working in with [sic] the U.N. Organisation on the ground that it gives the best hope for the world, if the facts of the situation allowed us to do it. But my colleagues must be made aware of the situation that has arisen … Instead of world co-operation we are rapidly drifting into spheres of influence or what can be better described as three great Monroes … It seems vital to me not to deceive the people of the world by leading them to believe that we are creating a United Nations Organisation which is to protect them from future wars … while we know, in fact, that nothing of the kind is happening.41 Two months before the opening of the UN’s first session, and three months before the first exercise of the veto, therefore, Bevin had already signalled unambiguously his lack of faith in the organisation as a significant constituent of the postwar world order. But there is no evidence to suggest that he communicated his conclusions to the other members of the Cabinet, far less to the party as a whole. Only three weeks earlier, Attlee had told the inaugural meeting of the United Nations Association that ‘it is the firm intention of His Majesty’s Government to make the success of the United Nations the primary object of their foreign policy’, a pledge he was to repeat at the opening session of the General Assembly in January 1946.42 Attlee was contradicted neither publicly nor privately by his Foreign Secretary, who, so far from ‘undeceiving’ public opinion about the UN’s prospects, himself assured the GA of his belief that ‘the functional instruments of the world state are coming into existence’.43 Within a very few months of the general election, nevertheless, a wide gap had opened up between the ‘Four-Power’ conception espoused by Labour ministers in the Churchill Coalition, and the UN policy pursued by the Foreign Secretary. The former had been predicated on the notion that the world organisation would function as the executive council of the Great Powers, ordering international affairs in the common interest. The latter viewed the UN less as an entity with a will of its own, albeit one that was identical with that of its five most powerful members, than as the arena within which, and according to whose rules and restraints, the competition for influence between the Great Powers would be waged. It can be argued that Bevin’s swift abandonment of the ‘Four-Power Plan’, of which he had always been

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sceptical, had at least the merit of realism: since the Yalta Conference, the precipitous deterioration in relations between East and West had given little reason for hope that the Great Powers could work harmoniously together. This is, however, to ignore the Foreign Secretary’s confidence that a mutually satisfactory modus vivendi with the Soviet Union could indeed be arrived at, as attested to by his continued efforts at the Council of Foreign Ministers and elsewhere to achieve it. There is no reason to doubt that these initiatives were sincere, or that Bevin did not wish to preserve as much as he could of the wartime alliance in the interests of global stability. But all the evidence indicates that, from the very beginning, he was prepared to assign no more than a peripheral rôle to the United Nations in sustaining it.

THE VETO: FATAL FLAW OR NECESSARY RESTRAINT? Although Bevin had made clear his reservations about the UN even before it faced its first meeting, far less its first test, events at the first meeting of the Security Council in January and February 1946 appeared to bear out his doubts about the world organisation. On 19 January, the Iranian government accused the USSR, whose forces were occupying the northern provinces of the country under the terms of a wartime Anglo-Soviet agreement, of interfering in its internal affairs. In retaliation, the head of the Soviet delegation, Andrei Vyshinsky, charged Britain two days later with endangering the peace by maintaining troops in Greece and Indonesia, apparently in the hope of inducing Bevin to agree that neither complaint should be proceeded with. The Labour government, however, decided to accept the challenge and proposed a four-power commission to investigate the allegations against it. Their bluff called, the Soviets rejected this offer, and the episode concluded with the Security Council, over Britain’s objections, noting the views expressed by both sides and declining to take further action. The Soviet conduct in this dispute – first levelling accusations at a fellow-member of the SC to divert attention from their own misdemeanours and then threatening the use of their veto to prevent the Council from finding that the charges were unsubstantiated44 – seriously disconcerted those within the Labour movement who had hoped that the UN, the defects of the Charter notwithstanding, might still become the cement of Big Three unity. Commenting upon its probable future trajectory, the New Statesman predicted that the organisation would either become ‘a new form of the anti-Communist Axis’ if the USSR withdrew from it, or would be rendered ‘farcical’ through repeated

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use of the veto if the USSR remained.45 In that eventuality it would be better if the organisation were wound up, since its ‘transformation into a bloc to which the U.S.S.R. is hostile and which is hostile to the U.S.S.R. would be inevitable’. Britain could not afford to participate in such a bloc, because the likely outcome would be atomic war.46 To some within the party, on the other hand, the same argument became even more forceful when turned upside down. Precisely because the catastrophic consequences of another war were so great, Britain had nothing to lose by using the UN not, as Bevin and Vyshinsky had done, as a more inclusive version of the Council of Foreign Ministers, but as a genuine agency of world government. On 11 February, Zilliacus argued the point in a lengthy memorandum, a copy of which he sent to Attlee. Socialist reconstruction at home and the cause of peace abroad, he suggested, were being endangered by the continuation of a Tory foreign policy necessitating the maintenance of vast overseas forces that the country could no longer afford. The recent Soviet action in the SC over Indonesia, while reprehensible on its face, begged the question of why the Labour government had not itself first referred the problem to the Council. The way to allay the permanent members’ fears about each other’s intentions was to give the SC real corporate responsibility, by placing disputed strategic areas under UN control. Only thus would they be able to relieve themselves of the burden of national defence, which in itself was a violation of the spirit if not the letter of the Charter. The plain truth is that we must either share … [military] commitments with others – which we could and should do in any case if they are genuine world peace commitments; that is what the United Nations is for – or else cut them out by acts of unilateral abandonment … Today, the permanent members of the Security Council … have certain collective obligations by the Charter to act through the Security Council as the world’s policeman … for the purposes of maintaining world law and order … Now obviously all these obligations and purposes are contradicted and negated if the Imperial Defence Committee and fighting services go on to plan our defence establishments … on the hypothesis of a possible war against the U.S.S.R., and the necessity for preparing against the danger of such a war.47 Many of Zilliacus’s points echoed those Attlee himself had made the previous year, including his call for internationalisation of strategic bases and his criticism of the level of defence spending, which the

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Prime Minister, only a month earlier, had criticised as excessive in view of the fact that ‘there was no one to fight’.48 In spite of this, he succeeded only in eliciting a famously dismissive response from Attlee,49 who throughout his tenure as Prime Minister repaid Bevin’s personal loyalty by refusing to receive advice on foreign policy from any other quarter.50 The same brusque rejection of backbench interference was once again in evidence when members of the left-wing Third Force movement51 moved an amendment to the Address in November calling on the government to provide a democratic socialist alternative to ‘an otherwise inevitable conflict between American capitalism and Soviet communism in which all hope of World Government would be destroyed’. In defence of the absent Foreign Secretary, Attlee expressed his resentment of criticism from those whose services to socialism, when weighed alongside those of Bevin, were ‘as dust in the balance’, and rebutted the suggestion that the government believed in any sort of bloc: ‘We stand for the United Nations.’ By personalising the debate and treating it as an issue of confidence in the world organisation, Attlee succeeded in routing his critics on the left, at least temporarily. But however rhetorically effective the Prime Minister’s profession of faith in the UN may have been, it left unanswered the question of how the government intended to set about making it ‘the overriding factor in foreign policy’.52 If the UN were neither to be abolished nor, as Zilliacus and some other Labour MPs had suggested, made the legatee of Britain’s defence commitments, the only practical alternative seemed to be to remove the stumbling-block of the veto. The obvious difficulty was that, under Article 108, any amendment to the UN Charter itself required the unanimous vote of the permanent members. Although the Soviet Union could be expected to veto any modification inimical to its interests, the raising of this issue also compelled the Labour government itself to consider how great a sacrifice of British sovereignty it was willing to make in the interest of an effective world organisation. During 1946 ministers explored various possible methods of circumventing the Soviet Union’s frequent recourse to the veto. The first suggestion was made by the Foreign Secretary in March. Instead of a direct assault on the Charter, he recommended that an attempt be made to reduce the number of occasions when the veto came into play by adopting a procedural rule providing for the definition of a ‘dispute’. If this term were to be interpreted to mean all occasions in which one state brought allegations against another before the SC and the accused state contested the charges, then neither of the two, as parties directly involved, would be able to veto recommendations made by the Council for the peaceful settlement of the dispute.53 The

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right to veto action by the SC would nevertheless remain unchanged. The rule-change, Bevin pointed out, would not require Britain to give up anything of significance, because it could not in any event ‘afford to stand out alone against a recommendation endorsed by seven members of the Security Council, including all the other four permanent members …’.54 His ingenious proposal, though, failed to get off the ground, as did a similar scheme to reform the UN without touching the Charter, put forward by the Attorney-General, Sir Hartley Shawcross, later in the year.55 Another way in which ministers attempted to work around the veto was to seek to isolate other organs of the UN from coming into contact with the Security Council. In September 1946, Noel-Baker raised the as yet unaddressed problem of non-military enforcement action, arguing for the creation of an ‘Economic Staff Committee’ analogous to the UN’s Military Staff Committee to co-ordinate the application of economic sanctions between the SC and the Economic and Social Council. The suggestion was successfully opposed by the First Lord of the Admiralty, A.V. Alexander, who deprecated any action that might expose ECOSOC to the risk of being contaminated with the ‘power politics’ that prevailed in the SC. ‘It is as though the Charity Organisation Society had an open link with Scotland Yard, and still hoped to retain the confidence of the Mile End Road.’56 The Foreign Secretary stepped up his policy of seeking to bypass the veto at the end of 1946. Although Bevin was unable to prevent the issue from being raised at the General Assembly, a forum he considered unsuitable for the purpose,57 he moved to apply additional pressure to the Soviet Union by initiating a propaganda campaign intended to shame Moscow into adopting a more amenable stance in the Security Council.58 By early 1947 he reported to the Cabinet that there was reason to hope that the strategy was bearing fruit. The Soviet government, he believed, was ‘not entirely indifferent to a general condemnation’ of the kind he had orchestrated, and the possibility therefore existed of a more harmonious working relationship between the five permanent members: It may well be that the most hopeful development will be the growth of an understanding, based on custom rather than formal rules, that a permanent member should abstain from voting rather than casting an adverse vote in cases where the proposal is not to his liking but vital interests are not affected.’59 Over the next year, however, this optimism rapidly dissipated. The steady deterioration of Anglo-Soviet relations over Germany, the

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Balkans and eastern Europe; the intensification of criticism in the General Assembly with regard to Britain’s handling of the Palestine mandate; and the attempts by non-administering states in the Trusteeship Council to extend the UN’s supervision of the British Empire, all combined to reduce further the Foreign Secretary’s already seriously depleted stock of enthusiasm for the world organisation. At the conclusion of the second session of the General Assembly in December 1947, he informed the Cabinet of his full agreement with the conclusion of his deputy, Hector McNeil, that no improvement of the UN could be expected ‘until the organisation develops a sense of perspective and of seemliness’.60 Three weeks later, Bevin expressed fears that the UN might fall under the control of the USSR should the Kremlin succeed in its efforts to subvert democracy and install Communist régimes in France and China, both holders of permanent seats in the SC. If even one of these countries fell to Communism, Bevin warned, it would no longer be possible to pass in the SC a resolution condemning the Soviet Union even if it were a direct party to a dispute. But the prospect was more worrying still if both were to come under Moscow’s control. In such circumstances, ‘the whole present alignment of forces in the United Nations would be disrupted’, and the Soviet Union might be able to count on gaining a permanent majority in the General Assembly. Should this occur, Britain might be ‘forced, together with the United States, into the position of having to make continual use of our veto in the Security Council’.61 The danger that Britain might have to defend itself against the encroachments of a Communist-dominated UN cast the question of amending the Charter in a disturbing new light. Thenceforward, the Foreign Secretary was to stand firmly against any proposal that might have the effect of subordinating British sovereignty to the world organisation, even if the rights of other permanent members would be similarly constrained thereby. The benefits of a more effective UN, he believed, were outweighed by the risk of increased Soviet influence, against which the veto might constitute Britain’s only defence. Hence, although a lengthy and splenetic memorandum he circulated to the Cabinet in March 1948 condemned the ‘crude’ and ‘reactionary’ refusal of the USSR ‘to surrender to the United Nations any sovereignty at all’, Bevin conspicuously refrained from recommending his colleagues to take a more positive stance.62 Instead, the Foreign Secretary gave an indication of where his priorities lay when he provided Attlee a few days later with a list of his objections to an initiative by Lord Robert Cecil on behalf of the UNA to launch a campaign for a supplementary convention to the Charter to restrain

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aggression, the principal one being the undesirability of seeking to coerce a Great Power.63 If the Foreign Secretary’s disenchantment with the UN was not representative of Labour backbench opinion, this was only because consensus on the subject no longer existed. As the proceedings of the Security Council ground to a halt after the spring of 1946, many Labour MPs’ initial sense of expectation gave way to irritation and indifference. Among the minority who continued to follow closely the fortunes of the world organisation after the squabbles over Greece and Indonesia, there was much disagreement over the cause of the UN’s problems, as well as the appropriate remedy. A few backbenchers, basing their conclusion on a strict reading of the Charter, denied that there was any cause for concern. Aidan Crawley, MP for Buckinghamshire, pointed out that all of the Soviet Union’s actions had been in conformity with the powers granted it under the Charter, and that in certain instances it had accepted the verdict of other nations. ‘That is one of the most encouraging things which could possibly have happened since the war ended. One might almost say that Russia has accepted the position of being the official opposition to the Assembly of the United Nations.’64 At the other end of the spectrum, some parliamentarians contended that the failure of the organisation was so obvious that it ought summarily to be wound up. In 1948 Christopher Shawcross, brother of the Attorney-General, echoed Bevin’s lament three years previously in arguing that the UN had become ‘worse than useless … The very existence of the United Nations organisation makes people think there is an effective organisation to prevent war, and it blinds them to the need for more urgent remedies.’65 A third group, composed exclusively of left-wing MPs, maintained that the failure of the UN and the outbreak of the Cold War were both attributable to the same cause: the refusal of the Western Allies to treat the Soviet Union as a genuine partner.66 The view of the ‘silent majority’ of Labour MPs, on the other hand, was probably not far from that expressed by the New Statesman in December 1948. That the Charter expressly prohibited one Great Power from attempting to use the enforcement mechanism of the UN against another was an advantage rather than a liability, for it prevented the antagonisms that existed being pressed to the point of war. It was foolish to hope that the Security Council or the General Assembly could give voice to a ‘non-existent corporate will’. Instead, the UN’s supporters should make ‘every effort … to preserve the framework established at San Francisco in the knowledge that it will work well enough as soon as the Great Powers want to work it’.67

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SUPRANATIONALISM REVIVED: THE PARLIAMENTARY GROUP FOR WORLD GOVERNMENT While most Labour MPs seemed ready to await the return of a spirit of Great Power co-operation, a small group of party backbenchers chose to confront in the most direct manner possible the deficiencies of the world organisation. This was the Parliamentary Group for World Government (PGWG), launched by the ex-pacifist MP from Birmingham, Henry Usborne, in 1946. Although nominally an all-party organisation which at its peak claimed over 100 adherents, the hard core of the PGWG consisted of a dozen or so Labour MPs whose defining characteristics were youth (nearly all had entered the Commons as part of the 1945 intake); a history of involvement with the Federal Union movement in the early 1940s;68 and, as soon became evident, a striking lack of political savoir-faire. Doctrinally, the members of the PGWG shared little in common beyond a belief in supranationalism and a conviction that the UN as then constituted could never evolve into that ‘co-operative world commonwealth’ which was the ultimate goal of Labour’s foreign policy. Usborne, in particular, had lost very little time in arriving at that conclusion. In September 1945 he wrote to the New Statesman: There is only one ultimate solution for humanity. It is the achievement of supra-state federal government, the function of which is the maintenance of peace and human dignity. The United Nations is a league of sovereign states; it is not government. On those points I conclude all are agreed.69 Having assumed a priori the inability of the UN to answer the world’s needs, it remained for the PGWG to decide how and by what it ought to be replaced. The first of these questions was easier to answer than the second. Usborne’s initial idea was to reconstitute the UN as an agency dedicated solely to the maintenance of international security. To this end he advocated that the United States should turn over its stockpile of atomic weapons and materials to the SC, a move which, he believed, would exert irresistible moral pressure upon the Soviet Union to do likewise. Once this exercise in good faith had been completed, the improved international situation would make it possible to create a UN police force and abolish the Security Council veto. The ground would then be prepared for the ratification by the General Assembly of a draft federal constitution of the world, uniting the peoples behind ‘the principles of a planned economy and free parliamentary democracy’.70 By the summer of 1947, however, Usborne

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had abandoned this programme in favour of a still more naïve and ambitious scheme. In June he founded the Crusade for World Government (CWG), headed by a British Parliamentary Committee of five Labour MPs,71 whose goal was the disbandment of the UN and its supersession by a directly elected world parliament to be established no later than 1955. To accomplish this objective, the CWG planned to convene a ‘People’s World Convention’ at Geneva in 1950, composed of representatives from all countries elected on the proportion of one delegate for every million inhabitants. The Convention was to ‘sit continuously until a Charter of World Government has been completed. The Conference may sit for six months or more, but by the Summer of 1951, at the latest, it is hoped that the Charter will be completed.’72 The various nations would then proceed to the ratification of the Charter, which would come into force when 50 per cent of the states of the world, or, alternatively, states containing 50 per cent of the world’s population, had given it their approval. The ‘election’ process devised by the CWG illustrated in microcosm the rudimentary level of political sophistication at which the Crusade operated. Usborne planned to register a million potential voters in England, each of whom would pay half a crown for the privilege of casting a ballot. The revenue generated thereby would finance the printing of 20 million ballot papers for distribution throughout the country. Each would contain the names of more than 100 candidates, of whom 38 would be elected to attend the People’s World Convention. Our candidates, during the election campaign, will not primarily be plugging their own candidatures; they will urge the public, first and foremost, to come and vote in the ballot in order to demonstrate support for World Government; only secondarily, and quite incidentally, is the ballot a method of selecting names from the list on the paper … It is not, therefore, so very important which 38 people are ultimately selected to go to Geneva.73 Notwithstanding these shambolic procedures, the CWG managed to generate a remarkable level of support from a wide variety of prominent figures. Among the most important of Usborne’s converts was Lord William Beveridge, who became a convention candidate in July 1947.74 The list of international sponsors of the People’s World Convention contained some even more impressive names, among them Albert Camus, Albert Einstein, Thomas Mann, Yehudi Menuhin, Sir John Boyd Orr, Léopold Sédar Senghor and John Steinbeck.75 Usborne’s ability to attract the signatures of the great and good, moreover, was matched by his skill in raising funds for the Crusade.76 His

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formidable talents in this direction – while employing techniques that occasionally skirted the ethical boundaries – were nonetheless not sufficient to make a success of his movement. Ignored by every figure of consequence within the Labour Party, at least during the lifetime of the government, the CWG never succeeded in translating its extraparliamentary support into political influence. Nor, except in the vaguest terms, did it have a genuine programme to offer, inasmuch as no decisions about the form the UN’s successor might take could be made in advance of the People’s World Convention. The only district in which elections for the assembly were ultimately held was the town of Chelmsford in Essex, an exercise which was conducted in 1949 with immense inefficiency and virtually bankrupted the British branch of the CWG.77 When Usborne and his fellow PGWG stalwarts Leslie Hale, Julian Snow and Tom Williams travelled to Geneva to meet with 500 largely self-selected delegates to the People’s World Convention in December 1950, they found that the assembly had been heavily infiltrated by Communists and fellow-travellers. ‘After a week of arduous, nearly continuous sessions, the conference broke up in total confusion.’78 The British delegates thereupon returned home, ‘much to the anger of the others who were vastly enjoying the squabbling’, and published a letter denouncing their own creation in the press.79 This setback dealt a mortal blow to the Crusade, which, despite clinging to a precarious existence in the United States, petered out within a few years. Notwithstanding its naïve idealism, amateurish methods and embarrassing dénouement, it would not do to be entirely dismissive of the Crusade for World Government.80 Its appearance was a testament both to the degree to which many Labour activists’ hopes of a real advance towards the ideal of a supranational world order had been raised by the conclusion of the Second World War, and to the depth of their anxiety over an accelerating superpower confrontation that the UN seemed powerless to avert. If their scheme for a new international organisation to avert the threat of atomic war was ill considered and impractical, as was undoubtedly the case, they had nonetheless raised the highly pertinent question of why the UN, in light of its failure to meet the expectations of its founders, ought not in fact to be revised.

‘INTERNATIONAL IRRELEVANCE’ OR ‘LEAST-WORST SOLUTION’? For its part, the Labour government was already working to sidestep the world organisation in favour of smaller and less ambitious entities.

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In the wake of Bevin’s assessment in March 1948 that ‘there was no hope of reaching a satisfactory settlement either by agreement among the four Great Powers or through the United Nations Organisation’,81 British policy was reoriented toward the conclusion of regional agreements on economic and security matters, which bore fruit in the form of the Brussels Treaty, the Organisation for European Economic Co-Operation and finally the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation. Notwithstanding this tacit abandonment of the UN, the government was careful to portray its new policy less as a deviation from universalism than as an alternative method of building up the world organisation through regional groupings. Bevin himself defended the NATO Treaty in these terms before the 1949 Annual Conference: We do not throw over the United Nations. We do not weaken it. We want to strengthen it … We feel that by bringing all this mass of people, their Governments, their institutions and everything together in an indivisible peace based on the principle of collective security and resistance to war, and based also on the spirit of economic co-operation wherever you can, is [sic] possibly the best road in the end to lead to the proper functioning of the United Nations.82 The most important reason for this distinct lack of candour was the approach of the general election of February 1950. Eighteen months before the contest, Morrison had pointed out to the party’s Policy and Publicity Committee that Labour’s victory in 1945 had been due in large measure to its internationalist foreign policy: ‘the Labour voters and the general body of Liberals, like us, attached importance to the vigorous development of the United Nations’. The UN’s lack of success, he cautioned, meant that the party would not be able to present its case on international affairs ‘in as simple a way as we did in 1945’.83 Transport House’s reluctance to relinquish the UN as a vote-generating issue was nonetheless clearly evident in Labour propaganda during the run-up to the election. The Speaker’s Handbook reaffirmed the party’s dedication to the principle that ‘the United Nations is the indispensable instrument for creating a world order’, conceding only that ‘Britain has had to recognise the need to strengthen it by other means’. The UN’s failure to make inroads upon national sovereignty, on the other hand, was attributed solely to Soviet intransigence. ‘But for the Soviet Veto we would now have international disarmament, international ownership and control of all atomic development, including the bomb, and an international police force.’84 Much like its domestic programme, then, the foreign policy Labour placed before the electors in

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1950 was defensive in tone, with little to offer for the future. This apologetic note no doubt accounts in part for the fact that international affairs, in contrast to the situation prevailing five years previously, were not a major issue in the campaign.85 The contest is nevertheless significant as the first in more than 30 years in which Labour’s support for international organisation was subordinated to multilateral security arrangements – an echo of the ‘Locarno diplomacy’ the party had so roundly condemned a quarter-century earlier. A few months after the election, however, the UN once again returned to the forefront of Labour concerns. The outbreak of the Korean War on 25 June 1950 was followed by a meeting of the Security Council, which the Soviet Union had been boycotting since January in protest at the continued representation of the Nationalist Chinese after Mao Zedong’s assumption of power in Beijing. Taking advantage of the USSR’s absence, the SC adopted two US-drafted resolutions condemning North Korea and calling upon members of the UN to come to the South’s assistance. Within 24 hours, both the British government and the Labour Party NEC had responded, associating themselves with the SC’s action and pledging full support for collective security. The leadership did not, on this occasion, speak for the party as a whole. In contrast to the various international crises in the 1930s in respect of which collective security had been invoked, the Korean War was a deeply contentious issue for Labour, whose internal divisions intensified as the conflict threatened to spread beyond the confines of the peninsula. One of the leading questions at issue was the legitimacy of the SC’s action, firstly in adopting a resolution relating to a threat to international peace and security in the USSR’s absence, and secondly in turning over command of UN forces to a serving officer in the United States armed forces, General Douglas MacArthur.86 The debate on this matter transcended the usual divide between left and right in the party. Thus while Seymour Cocks, the veteran left-wing MP for Broxtowe, recapitulated the NEC’s argument that the UN had no choice but to respond to an act of naked aggression against a territory still under the supervision of the international authority,87 H.N. Brailsford and G.D.H. Cole rejoined that the affair was both a civil war with which the UN had nothing to do and an excuse for improperly bending the organisation to the United States’ purposes in the Cold War. [It was] a sheer misuse of U.N. [sic] to take advantage of the Russians from the Security Council and of the presence of the wrong Chinese Government … to convert U.N. from what it was set up to be, an instrument of agreed policy among the Great Powers, into an agent of one half of the world against the other half.88

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Labour’s right-wing, for its part, was almost as deeply split. Bevin, agreeably surprised by the speed and scale of the SC action, told Attlee in October that the value and prestige of the UN had greatly increased as a result and that ‘H.M.G. should encourage the organisation whenever there was an opportunity.’89 Richard Stokes, the newly appointed Lord Privy Seal, argued on the other hand that ‘It was a mistaken policy, which we all ought to have spotted, to regard the Korean affair as one for the United Nations’, a view with which his immediate predecessor in office, Christopher Addison, expressed ‘a great deal of sympathy’.90 On balance, the war did more to weaken Labour’s allegiance to the UN than to strengthen it. Rhys Davies, one of the last survivors of the ILP-affiliated pacifist element of the 1920s, still spoke for many in the party and the country when he reminded the Executive at the 1950 Annual Conference that the triumph of collective security which the leadership had proclaimed the Korean ‘police action’ to be actually represented a failure of the UN as a peace-keeping institution, not a success. ‘Our people … are afraid of another war even in the name of collective security; and if the United Nations cannot keep the peace without waging war, then the people will begin to doubt the United Nations.’91 Furthermore, those within the Cabinet who derived most satisfaction from the UN’s actions did not carry their new-found enthusiasm so far as to contemplate any additional cession of authority to the organisation. When in August 1950 the United States put forward the euphemistically named ‘Uniting for Peace’ resolution at the General Assembly which sought to circumvent the veto by authorising the GA to make recommendations in cases in which the Security Council refused to carry out its functions,92 Bevin took the lead in opposing the initiative. Any weakening of the veto, he reminded the Cabinet, might imperil our own vital interests, since in the Assembly our voting power would be only one in fifty-nine and we should have no means of preventing the adoption of a resolution to which we were opposed … Moreover, the size of the Assembly makes it a less responsible organ than the Security Council and we could not countenance any change which would put us automatically at the mercy of Assembly recommendations in every possible case where a breach of the peace was thought to exist …93 At the end of his period in office, then, Bevin’s attitude to the UN remained substantially the same as when he had first been appointed. What is striking, however, is how much of the Labour Party was by now of one mind with him. That his successor as Foreign Secretary, Herbert Morrison, should have been even more antipathetic to the

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international authority came as no surprise.94 But the same is not true of those internationalists who in 1945 had exhorted the government to take risks for world government, and whose silence thereafter as the UN became a less and less important part of Labour’s foreign policy is more difficult to explain. There can certainly be little argument that Labour’s identification with the UN was to a significant extent a casualty of the Cold War. The exposure in the SC of the falsity of Bevin’s assertion at the 1945 Annual Conference that ‘Left understands Left’ (a proposition that was scarcely more true of Anglo-French relations, as he had actually meant, than of Anglo-Soviet relations, as he was widely understood to mean) greatly deflated the enthusiasm of traditional internationalists for the new body, in which the ‘spirit of Geneva’ from the very outset had been conspicuous by its absence. Furthermore, the breakdown of the wartime alliance, of which the USSR’s frequent exercise of the veto in the SC was a symptom rather than a cause, induced many Labour supporters to shift their focus from the world organisation to what seemed to be the underlying problem of antagonism between the superpowers. At first, internationalist opinion was prone to criticise impartially both East and West for failing to set aside their trivial quarrels in the interests of the UN.95 As the two great power-blocs became more polarised, however, Labour members came under increasing pressure to align themselves with the party’s right or left wings, squeezing out the centre which traditionally had been most strongly associated with the internationalist creed. The hardening of attitudes that led to the expulsion from the party of Konni Zilliacus, among others, for alleged pro-Soviet sympathies in 1949 left little space for the moderate middle to press for a foreign policy which appeared to be of questionable relevance to the leading ideological crisis of the day. But a still more important consideration must surely be the fact that, even before the Cold War assumed centre-stage, the UN had failed to answer to the requirements of either of the two internationalist wings in the party. To ‘Whig’ internationalists in 1945, the only positive recommendation of a world organisation based on the armed preponderance of the Great Powers had been that, ‘in a completely anarchic world, it is good that the most powerful anarchists should desire to work together’.96 That they should then prove unable to do so deprived the organisation of most of the – already severely limited – attraction it had possessed in their eyes. The UN, the New Statesman complained early in 1946, was even more ‘completely perverted’ by power-politics than the League had been, and would be remembered chiefly ‘for the spectacle of the representatives of a Socialist Republic

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and a Socialist Monarchy ranting the ancient rubbish about prestige and honour while the workers of the world were starving’.97 For ‘muscular’ internationalists, on the other hand, at least as grave a defect as the lack of great power agreement in the UN was Britain’s inability to impose itself effectively upon the organisation. This, moreover, would have remained the case even if the Cold War had never occurred. In a Cabinet paper of October 1949, Bevin firmly rejected the idea of getting around Soviet obstructionism by launching an alternative society of nations, similar to the UN, from which the Communist countries would be excluded. A ‘new United Nations organisation without the Soviet Union or its satellites’, he warned, would merely result in ‘an unwieldy bloc of countries with no organised leadership, in which the special interests of single countries or groups of countries would be liable to paralyse action by the organisation as a whole’.98 It is instructive to compare these attitudes with the argument put forward by Labour internationalists when the League of Nations had faced similar difficulties more than a decade previously. On that occasion, Brailsford and others had advocated the creation of an ‘inner League’ of those states most committed to the defence of collective security, as the only effective means of restoring confidence in the ideal of international government. With the exception of the PGWG, no voices within the Labour movement were raised before the Attlee administration’s departure from office in favour of a smaller, but perhaps more effective, alternative to the UN. For very different reasons, then, both ‘Whig’ and ‘muscular’ internationalists, while dissatisfied with the UN as it existed, recognised strong arguments against trying to change it, at least until certain preconditions had been satisfied. For the former, this was the reconciliation of the Great Powers through the creation of mutual trust; for the latter, the restoration of Britain to its former status as one of the international élite. The pursuit of these chimerical goals, intended to make an internationalist foreign policy possible, by the end of Labour’s tenure in office had become a substitute for it.

NOTES 1. ‘Diplomaticus’ [K. Zilliacus], Can the Tories Win the Peace? And How They Lost the Last One (London: Victor Gollancz, 1945), pp. 19–20. 2. Ibid., p. 22. 3. 40 LPCR (1941), p. 141. 4. R.B. McCallum and A. Readman, The British General Election of 1945 (London: Oxford University Press, 1947), pp. 234–6. 5. See, e.g., ‘Gracchus,’ Your M.P. (London: Victor Gollancz, 1944).

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6. On a motion of censure in the Commons in December 1944 over the use of British troops to suppress a rising by the Communist-dominated Greek resistance and shore up the monarchy in Athens, only 23 Labour MPs could be found to support the government, the remainder either voting against or abstaining. 7. Zilliacus to Noel-Baker, n.d., NBKR 4/727, Noel-Baker papers, Churchill College, Cambridge. Raising one of the more intriguing ‘might-have-beens’ of modern British politics, Zilliacus inquired of Noel-Baker, ‘If the latter comes off, will you take me on as your P.P.S. [Parliamentary Private Secretary]? (Or your Under-Sec., if the job runs to that.)’ 8. See, e.g., Dalton, High Tide and After, pp. 9–14; A. Bullock, The Life and Times of Ernest Bevin, vol. II: Minister of Labour 1940–1945 (London: Heinemann, 1967), pp. 381–5, 393–5; Pimlott, Hugh Dalton, pp. 410–15. 9. J.W. Wheeler-Bennett, King George VI: His Life and Reign (London: Macmillan, 1958), pp. 636–8; Attlee, ‘The Rôle of the Monarchy’, Observer, 23 August 1959. 10. Pimlott, Hugh Dalton, p. 413. 11. As Foreign Secretary, Bevin wrote hardly anything himself, and the few memoranda he did compose were rarely more than a single sentence long. Of the vast number of letters, minutes and papers which expressed his thoughts and went out over his name, therefore, nearly all were ‘filtered’ through the civil servants who translated his verbal instructions into written drafts. As John Parker points out, caution must also be exercised when dealing with official records of Bevin’s speeches in the House of Commons. ‘Bevin was never very happy in the House … Frequently he put his brief to one side, especially after he became Foreign Secretary, and poured out an ungrammatical torrent of words. Hansard usually recorded his prepared speech.’ J. Parker, Father of the House: Fifty Years in Politics (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1982), p. 82. 12. ‘Back in 1943, a doctor had declared that Bevin had not one sound organ in his body, apart from his feet.’ K.O. Morgan, ‘Ernest Bevin as Foreign Secretary’, in his Labour People: Leaders and Lieutenants, Hardie to Kinnock (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), p. 153. 13. For the moderate left, William Warbey urged in the Commons that, inasmuch as this position involved decisions of ‘an executive and policy-making character’, it properly belonged to a member of the party. The holder of this post, he suggested, ‘should be given the official status of a Minister of the Crown, Resident at the seat of UNO. If UNO is regarded – as the present Government appears to regard it – as an embryonic World Government, then the Security Council, which is the only organ of UNO which enjoys the power of enforcing its decisions, is an embryonic World Cabinet. Our Government should therefore have taken care to see that at least one of its members was a Democratic Socialist.’ New Statesman and Nation, 23 February 1946. 14. Bullock, Life and Times of Ernest Bevin, vol. III, p. 73. 15. R. Jenkins, A Life at the Centre: Memoirs of a Radical Reformer (London: Macmillan, 1991), p. 75. 16. The appointment – one of the most unimaginative the Attlee government ever made – came in spite of Bevin’s assurance to Lord Halifax, British Ambassador to Washington, that he had ‘very much in mind … the need for a “high powered” British representative on the United Nations Organisation’. Bevin to Halifax, 19 September 1945, FO 800/512, US/45/22/33. For a typical expression of Cadogan’s jaundiced attitude to the UN, see his personal telegram to Bevin, 19 May 1948, FO 800/510, UN/48/17. 17. Charles Kingsley Webster diary, quoted in P. Weiler, Ernest Bevin (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1993), p. 146. 18. Attlee, ‘Future of the Italian Colonies’, 1 September 1945, CAB 129/1, C.P. (45) 144. 19. See D. Holloway, Stalin and the Bomb: The Soviet Union and Atomic Energy 1939–1956 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1994), pp. 169–71; McGeorge Bundy, Danger and Survival: Choices about the Bomb in the First Fifty Years (New York: Random House, 1988), p. 133.

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20. Attlee to Truman, 25 September 1945. Quoted in M. Gowing, Independence and Deterrence: Britain and Atomic Energy, 1945–1952, vol. I: Policy Making (London: Macmillan, 1974), p. 80. 21. GEN 75, minutes of 4th meeting, 11 October 1945, CAB 130/2. The Foreign Secretary quickly retreated from this position, presumably after consultation with his advisers. 22. Cripps speech, Newcastle City Hall, 23 September 1945, Mss. Cripps 411, Cripps papers, Nuffield College, Oxford. 23. 413 H.C. Deb. 5s., c. 733 (22 August 1945). 24. New Statesman and Nation, 11 August 1945. 25. Tribune, 17 August 1945. 26. This opinion was shared by the Cabinet generally. As Cripps stated in a speech at the Albert Hall on 29 October, ‘we shall not be able to prevent [misuse of atomic energy] by any method of inspection and control any more than today we could prevent the use of the internal combustion engine in warfare, by attempting to control its use in peace’. Mss Attlee dep. 25, f. 148, Attlee papers, Department of Western Manuscripts, Bodleian Library, Oxford. 27. Attlee, ‘International Control of Atomic Energy’, 5 November 1945, PREM 8/116/30, C.P. (45) 272. 28. Ibid. This attitude, nevertheless, did not impede the inner Cabinet from launching Britain’s own secret atomic weapons programme in January 1947. 29. J.L. Gormly, ‘The Washington Declaration and the “Poor Relation”: Anglo-American Atomic Diplomacy, 1945–46’, Diplomatic History, 8, 2 (Spring 1984). 30. Woolf, ‘Britain in the Atomic Age’, Political Quarterly, 17, 1 (January–March 1946). ‘Utopia’ in this context meant placing all offensive weapons, not just atomic bombs, under international control. Woolf urged that Britain should set an example by offering to disarm unilaterally. A different dystopia, however, was suggested by George Orwell. The ‘likeliest development’, he argued, was not an atomic holocaust, but the Great Powers making ‘a tacit agreement never to use the bomb against one another’. Instead, they might well use it to perpetuate their domination over the non-nuclear states. ‘We may be heading not for general breakdown but for an epoch as horribly stable as the slave empires of antiquity.’ ‘You and the Atom Bomb’, Tribune, 19 October 1945. 31. 416 H.C. Deb. 5s., c. 613 (22 November 1945). 32. Ibid., cols 765–6 (23 November 1945). 33. ‘The World State’, New Statesman and Nation, 1 December 1945; Silverman, 45 LPCR (1946), p. 128. In his address, Silverman assured Bevin that he had ‘an excellent chance of becoming the greatest Foreign Secretary this country has ever known’. 34. Alan Bullock maintains that Bevin’s suggestion was made ‘with great earnestness’, and should not be seen as ‘simply trimming his sails to the party wind’. Deirdre Lavin, however, sees the speech as having been inspired in part by a meeting between Bevin and Lionel Curtis earlier the same month, in which the latter ‘expounded a scheme for an international assembly of Europe, which might later be joined by nations of the Commonwealth as the first step to a new world order for peace in the atomic age. Bevin replied that he was thinking along similar lines and intended to say so in Parliament.’ Bullock, Life and Times of Ernest Bevin, vol. III, pp. 197–8; D. Lavin, From Empire to International Commonwealth: A Biography of Lionel Curtis (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), pp. 301–2. 35. Memorandum of interview, 19 July 1946, Group 1/1/407, United Nations Association papers, British Library of Political and Economic Science. The UNA was the postwar successor of the League of Nations Union. 36. H. McNeil, ‘Our Plan and the World’, in H.S. Morrison, G.A. Isaacs et al., Forward From Victory! Labour’s Plan (London: Victor Gollancz, 1946), p. 84. 37. His proposal came, moreover, only a month after he had promised in the Commons on behalf of the government ‘to do all we can to make [the UN] the very centre of the world’s international affairs’. 413 H.C. Deb. 5s., c. 943 (23 August 1945).

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38. Noel-Baker, ‘Site of the United Nations Organisation’, 14 September 1945, CAB 129/2, C.P. (45) 171. 39. Cabinet minutes, 4 October 1945, CAB 128/1, C.M. 38 (45). 40. Bevin, ‘Site of the United Nations’, 29 October 1945, CAB 129/2, C.P. (45) 259. 41. Bevin, ‘The Foreign Situation’, 8 November 1945, FO 800/478, MIS/45/14. 42. 10 October 1945 (UNA); 10 January 1946 (GA), quoted in R. Jenkins (ed.), Purpose and Policy: Selected Speeches by the Rt. Hon. C.R. Attlee, C.H., M.P. (London: Hutchinson, 1946), pp. 117, 128. 43. Quoted in Bullock, Life and Times of Ernest Bevin, vol. III, p. 219. In the extravagance of his language Bevin was no more culpable, however, than his Under-Secretary, NoelBaker, who broadcast to Italy on the Voice of America network at the end of the session that ‘La stessa Assembléa ha fatto grandi progressi verso la sua trazformazione in quello che il Governo Laburista Inglese spera, un “Parlamento dell’ Umanita”.’ NBKR 4/719. 44. This was not the first use of the veto. At the end of January, the USSR intervened to block SC action in a dispute over the withdrawal of French troops from Syria and the Lebanon, a matter in which there appeared to be no direct Soviet interest. 45. ‘Can the “United Nations” Survive?’, New Statesman and Nation, 23 March 1946. 46. New Statesman and Nation, 13 April 1946. 47. ‘The Labour Government’s Foreign Policy’, 11 February 1946, Mss. Attlee dep. 31, fols 166–74, Bodleian Library, Oxford. 48. Defence Committee minutes, 21 January 1946, quoted in R. Smith and J. Zametica, ‘The Cold Warrior: Clement Attlee Reconsidered, 1945–7’, International Affairs, 61, 2 (Spring 1985), p. 245. Dalton and Morrison supported Attlee in his insistence that Britain’s defence commitments be scaled back. Bullock, Life and Times of Ernest Bevin, vol. III, p. 240. 49. ‘My dear Zilly, Thank you for sending me your memorandum which seems to me to be based on an astonishing lack of understanding of the facts. Yours ever, Clem.’ Attlee to Zilliacus, 17 February 1946, Mss. Attlee dep. 31, f. 242. 50. ‘Foreign Affairs are the province of the Foreign Secretary and it is, in my view, a mistake for a Prime Minister – save in exceptional circumstances – to intervene personally.’ C.R. Attlee, As It Happened (London: Heinemann, 1954), p. 169. 51. See pp. 228–9 below. 52. Attlee, speech to first session of the General Assembly, 30 January 1946, quoted in Purpose and Policy, p. 128. 53. Under the compromise reached between the Big Three at Yalta and enshrined in Article 27 (3) of the Charter, permanent members of the SC renounced the right to veto recommendations for the peaceful settlement of a dispute to which they themselves were parties. Within months of the convening of the UN, however, Britain, the United States and the USSR had effectively collaborated to make this provision a dead letter by denying that the international conflicts in which they were interested were in fact ‘disputes’. Inasmuch as the Charter provides no definition of a dispute, Article 27 (3) has become all but meaningless. 54. Bevin, ‘Use of the Veto in the Security Council’, 21 March 1946, CAB 129/8, C.P. (46) 119. In the Cabinet discussion of this paper, the Lord Chancellor, William Jowitt, raised certain legal objections, which the Cabinet invited him to discuss further with the Foreign Office. CAB 128/5, C.M. 27 (46), 25 March 1946. 55. Shawcross’s idea, numerous variants of which have appeared over the years, was to use Article 51, which asserts the inalienable right of individual and collective self-defence, to create ‘an Atlantic Pact writ large’ for mutual defence against aggression, which if enough members joined might become ‘in effect a kind of protocol to the Charter of the United Nations’. The Attorney-General tried to revive the suggestion in 1950, again without success. Shawcross, ‘Proposals for Promoting the Efficiency of the United Nations’, 9 September 1950, CAB 129/42, C.P. (50) 205.

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56. Noel-Baker, ‘The United Nations and Non-Military Enforcement Action’, 10 September 1946, CAB 129/12, C.P. (46) 341; Alexander, same title, 16 September ‘The United Nations and Non-Military Enforcement Action’, 1946, CAP 129/12, C.P. (46) 347. Aneurin Bevan shared Alexander’s view that functional organisations should be segregated from the ‘political’ side of the UN. Cabinet minutes, 22 July 1946, CAB 128/6, C.M. 71 (46). 57. Bevin seems to have been concerned that the Assembly might touch upon questions the British government preferred not to discuss, among them the privileged position of the Great Powers under the Charter. He preferred instead to bring up the subject in private at the Council of Foreign Ministers. CAB 128/6, C.M. 99 (46), 4 (21 November 1946). 58. Twice within a fortnight, the Foreign Secretary prevailed upon Attlee to condemn the Soviet attitude regarding the veto in major public speeches in the Commons and at the annual Lord Mayor’s dinner. See Bevin’s personal minute to Attlee, 22 October 1946, P.M./46/146; and his telegram of 7 November. Mss. Attlee dep. 42, fols 189–92; 44, fols 133–4. The British delegation at the General Assembly shortly afterward made a strong protest in the same vein. 59. ‘United Nations General Assembly: Report on Second Part of First Session’, 6 January 1947, CAB 129/16, C.P. (47) 16. Bevin felt sure that ‘it was wiser to allow such changes of procedure to come about by the evolution of a common practice than to press for immediate amendment of the Charter’. CAB 128/6, C.M. 2 (47), 6, same date. 60. McNeil, ‘Proceedings of the General Assembly of the United Nations, 1947’, with covering memorandum by Bevin, 17 December 1947, CAB 129/22, C.P. (47) 335. 61. ‘Review of Soviet Policy’, 5 January 1948, CAB 129/23, C.P. (48) 7. 62. ‘The Threat to Western Civilisation’, Annex II: ‘The Soviet Refusal to Co-operate in the United Nations’, 3 March 1948, CAB 129/25, C.P. (48) 72. 63. Attlee to Bevin, 12 March 1948; McNeil to Attlee, 16 March, FO 800/510, UN/48/5, 6. 64. 427 H.C. Deb. 5s., c. 1565 (22 October 1946). 65. 446 H.C. Deb. 5s., c. 490 (22 January 1948). For similar expressions of disillusionment, see the speeches of Seymour Cocks (Broxtowe), 446 H.C. Deb. 5s., ibid., c. 463; and Evelyn King (Penryn and Falmouth), 437 H.C. Deb. 5s., c. 1820 (15 May 1947). 66. See, e.g., Zilliacus’s speech to the Annual Conference, May 29, 46 LPCR (1947), pp. 160–1; Fred Peart (Workington), 416 H.C. Deb. 5s., cols 688–91 (22 November 1945); E.R. Millington (Chelmsford), 427 H.C. Deb. 5s., c. 1744 (23 October 1946). 67. ‘Is Uno Finished?’, New Statesman and Nation, 18 December 1948. 68. See Chapter 7 below. 69. Usborne to New Statesman and Nation, 25 September 1945, New Statesman archive, University of Sussex. The letter was not published. 70. H.C. Usborne, Towards World Government – The Rôle of Britain (London: National Peace Council, 1946). 71. That is, Gordon Lang (Chairman), Wilfred Vernon (Vice-Chairman), Usborne (General Secretary), Edith Wills (Financial Secretary) and Victor Collins (Press Officer). 72. Crusade for World Government, British Parliamentary Committee, Crusade for World Government: The Plan in Outline (London: The Committee, n.d. [1947]). 73. Crusade for World Government, British Parliamentary Committee, World Government by 1955 (n.p.d.). To assist those electors who had never heard of any of the candidates, a box was provided on the ballot paper which, if checked, authorised the Parliamentary Committee to choose candidates on the voter’s behalf. 74. Usborne was ruthless in exploiting this connection. A letter written by him to Beveridge in 1949, urging the latter to tour Canada on behalf of the Crusade, is typical of his modus operandi. ‘I gather that the Government officials in most places and the big shots everywhere are likely to put down the red carpet for you and provide hospitality. I have said that neither you nor I will have any qualms about asking for financial support wherever we see an opportunity, and I have told them particularly to put us on to the big

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75. 76.

77.

78. 79.

80.

81. 82. 83. 84. 85. 86.

87. 88.

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businessmen so that we can set about extracting their dough.’ In a postscript he added, ‘If you can give me the names of any rich or influential people you know in either Canada or the U.S. I would be glad … What we really need to know is a list of your admirers in the dollar areas who are wealthy enough to be tapped.’ Usborne to Beveridge, 16 February 1949, Part VII: 56, William Beveridge papers, British Library of Political and Economic Science. Ibid., Part VII: 68. The British branch of the CWG was financed almost exclusively by the American Foundation for World Government, which obtained a donation of $1,000,000 from the fabulously wealthy and equally eccentric Anita Blaine in 1948. Usborne received $50,000 from the Foundation for the British CWG; the generous Mrs Blaine, with whom he met in the course of a US lecture tour in the autumn of 1947, contributed another $5,000 to him directly. Usborne to Edith Wynner, 23 October 1990, Box 14, Henry Usborne papers, 705:731, BA 12, 246, Worcester Record Office (WRO). The Chelmsford pilot campaign, although costing more than £20,000, achieved a derisory participation rate of 2.5 per cent. In response to this débâcle, Usborne optimistically proposed that national governments might be persuaded ‘to nominate, on a party-strength basis’, the required number of parliamentarians to attend the People’s World Convention. In countries where elections were unknown, delegates might be ‘chosen according to local custom’. J.A. Doyle, ‘Getting Down to Brass Tacks’, October 1949, Box 5, Henry Usborne papers, WRO; H.C. Usborne, ‘Approaches to World Government: People’s Convention’, in N.J. Hart (ed.), Basis of Federalism: A Symposium (Paris: World Student Federalists, 1949), p. 45. H.C. Usborne, Prescription for Peace: The Case for a Minimal and Neutral Federation of Middle-World Nations (Evesham: Minifed Promotion Group, 1985), p. 104. H.C. Osborne, ‘A History of the British Parliamentary Group for World Government’, in A. Bosco (ed.), The Federal Idea: The History of Federalism from Enlightenment to 1945, vol. II (London: Lothian Foundation Press, 1992), p. 123; Usborne to Wynner, 23 October 1990, Box 14, Usborne papers, WRO. In fairness to Usborne and his associates, it should be noted that they were by no means alone in their utopianism at the end of the Second World War. A Gallup poll in August 1945 found a majority of British people in agreement with the proposition that ‘each country should abolish its armed forces, having them replaced by an international force under a world government’. Only 29 per cent expressed dissent. G.H. Gallup (ed.), The Gallup International Public Opinion Polls: Great Britain, 1937–1975, vol. 1: 1937–1964 (New York: Random House, 1976), p. 115. CAB 128/12, C.M. 19 (48), 5 March 1948. Morning session, 6 June, 48 LPCR (1949), p. 191. Morrison, ‘Some Considerations as to the next General Election’, October 1948, R.D. 173, LPP. Labour Party Research Department, Speaker’s Handbook 1949–50 (London: Labour Party, 1949), pp. 404, 406. Bullock, Life and Times of Ernest Bevin, vol. III, p. 756. An appointment whose contradictions were not lost on Labour ministers. In September 1950 Hartley Shawcross, heading the British UN delegation, drew attention to the idiosyncratic nature of a position that enabled MacArthur ‘apparently … to speak now on behalf of the United Nations, now for the United States and now on his own account!’ Shawcross, ‘Proposals for Promoting the Efficiency of the United Nations’, 9 September 1950, CAB 129/42, C.P. (50) 205. Letter to New Statesman and Nation, 15 July 1950. G.D.H. Cole, ‘As a Socialist Sees It’, New Statesman and Nation, 3 February 1951. Brailsford’s argument was similar: ‘If our purpose is to restore the reign of law in the world, it is even more important to re-constitute the Security Council than it is to drive

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89.

90. 91. 92.

93. 94.

95. 96. 97. 98.

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the North Koreans back to the 38th Parallel … The procedure of Uno has been misused by a packed Council to disguise the crude realities of power politics.’ Letter in New Statesman and Nation, 29 July 1950. Bevin to Attlee, 10 October 1950, FO 800/511, UN/50/14, 108. The Foreign Secretary was also the Cabinet’s strongest voice in favour of crossing the 38th Parallel to humiliate the USSR and convince the Kremlin of the West’s resolution. ‘If [UN forces] stop at the 38th Parallel and leave North Korea as an entity Russia will virtually have triumphed and the whole United Nations effort will have been in vain. I think we must make every effort to avoid this. Whatever happens to Korea in the end we must try to make sure now that just as in the case of the Berlin blockade the Russians are made to realise that they are up against it and to accept that fact.’ Bevin to Attlee, 25 September 1950, FO 800/511, UN/50/11, 104. Stokes to Addison, 7 May 1951; Addison to Stokes, same date, Box 137, Viscount Addison papers, Department of Western Manuscripts, Bodleian Library, Oxford. Morning session, 4 October, 49 LPCR (1950), p. 117. A scheme also known as the ‘Acheson Plan’. The resolution empowered the Assembly to meet at 24 hours’ notice if requested by any seven members of the SC or a majority of its own members; to act in cases where the SC, ‘because of lack of unanimity of the permanent members, fails to exercise its primary responsibility’; and to recommend the use of armed force. The legality of the ‘Uniting for Peace’ provisions is highly questionable, and to date it has never successfully been invoked. For a further discussion, see D. Bourantonis and K. Magliveras, ‘Anglo-American Differences over the UN during the Cold War: The Uniting for Peace Resolution’, Contemporary British History, 16, 2 (Summer 2002). ‘The United Nations and the Abuse of the Veto’, 31 August 1950, CAB 129/41, C.P. (50) 196. In the dispute that arose between the British and Iranian governments over the latter’s nationalisation of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, Morrison accused his Cabinet colleagues of being ‘too United Nations-y’, and resisted unsuccessfully Attlee’s decision to refer the question to the UN. Dalton diaries, 2 July 1951. See, e.g., H.J. Laski’s address from the chair, 10 June 1946, morning session, 45 LPCR (1946), pp. 106 ff.; ‘Abuse of the Veto’, Tribune, 5 July 1946. ‘San Francisco and the Future’, New Statesman and Nation, 10 March 1945. ‘The Unity of UNO’, New Statesman and Nation, 23 February 1946. ‘European Policy’, 18 October 1949, CAB 129/37, C.P. (49) 208.

6

An Offer They Couldn’t Refuse: Labour Internationalism and Colonial Trusteeship

Labour’s policy regarding UN oversight of the British colonies affords an instructive, and in some respects unique, perspective on the party’s attitudes toward internationalism in the 1940s. Not only was the colonial empire acknowledged during the war by a virtual consensus of Labour opinion, from hardest left to palest-pink right, as an area in which an international authority had a particularly important rôle to play, but the United Nations’ Trusteeship Council (TC), created in December 1946 to oversee the administration of non-self-governing territories, was the only principal agency of the UN in which, during a significant proportion of the time the Attlee administration was in office, the USSR did not participate. Furthermore, the relatively low level of pressure over colonial policy exerted on the government from the backbenches enabled the Cabinet to frame its policy at the UN in the knowledge that no significant domestic repercussions were likely to ensue. The TC can therefore be seen as a kind of ‘control’, offering some indication of how Labour’s UN policy as a whole might have been conducted had the Security Council veto never existed. The question of colonial internationalism has nevertheless been virtually ignored in the leading studies of Labour’s approach to Empire administration after 1945,1 an omission which has resulted in a partial and in some respects misleading picture of imperial and international policy during a critical period for both. In view of the unusual degree of freedom of action the Labour government enjoyed in this sphere, it is remarkable that it should so quickly and decisively have abandoned the internationalist approach to colonial administration upon which the party campaigned during the 1945 general election. It is true that the ‘dependent’ Empire did not figure prominently in that campaign – the Labour manifesto, Let

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Us Face the Future, failed to mention the colonies anywhere in its 12 pages – but on dozens of platforms and in its major colonial policy document during the war the party formally bound itself to establish a new relationship between Britain and the overseas possessions in which the world organisation would play an active if not decisive part. Nevertheless, it can reasonably be said that in no area did the Attlee administration make less effort to live up to the letter and the spirit of its commitments than with respect to international supervision of the colonies. Its failure to do so is not only a commentary upon the tension between British socialists’ dual identity as ‘proletarians’ at home and ‘pashas’ overseas, which half a century of experience in and out of government was unable to resolve, but also provides a revealing – and uncomfortable – perspective upon Labour’s adhesion to internationalist principles at the point where these and the country’s vital interests as a Great Power came most directly into conflict.

THE WHITE WORKINGMAN’S BURDEN Colonial policy was historically the Cinderella of the Labour Party. During the movement’s early years, virtually the only statement to address itself to colonial questions in other than a fleeting manner – although more than half its length was taken up with domestic problems ranging from housing to temperance – was George Bernard Shaw’s 1900 pamphlet, Fabianism and the Empire, written in response to a threatened split within the Society over Britain’s actions in the Boer War. In a classic exposition of Liberal-Imperial theory, this document subordinated all consideration of political issues to economics, arguing that the only question with which socialists ought to concern themselves was which belligerent would best administer the South African goldfields in the interests of international society. Shaw thus differentiated between ‘selfish’ imperialism, intended to enrich a single country at the expense of, and to the exclusion of, all others; and ‘progressive’ imperialism, which had as its aim the modernisation and material development of a backward region both in its own interest and in that of humankind at large. Political autonomy, in this formulation, was subordinated to the prior claims of civilisation, and was regarded as being for the foreseeable future impracticable in most territories and inconvenient in many others.2 The intense divisions among the Fabians over the South African War, which Shaw’s tract had the effect of aggravating rather than ameliorating, reached such a pitch as to spark the resignations, among others, of Ramsay MacDonald, George Barnes and Emmeline Pankhurst

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from the Society. Labour’s interest in imperial questions as such, however – as distinct from the rights and wrongs of Milner’s imperialist adventure – did not outlive the war itself, and within a matter of months the party had relapsed into its customary torpidity.3 As Violet Creech Jones later noted, annual reports of the Labour Representation Committee and the Labour Party during the first 18 years of the century dealt ‘entirely with internal affairs and for them colonies might not have existed’.4 It took the Great War to redirect the party’s attention to the Empire, although for many socialists the only issue of genuine interest was the part ‘colonial rivalries’ had allegedly played in precipitating the conflict. No serious effort, therefore, was made to define the party’s attitude to colonial affairs until 1917, as part of the general process of formulating Labour’s international policy. The first considered statement on the Empire, contained in the 10 August 1917 draft statement on war aims, called for the colonies of tropical Africa, as well as those of the former Ottoman Empire that were incapable of immediate selfgovernment, to be transferred to the international authority for ‘administration by an impartial Commission … with its own trained staff’. The December 1917 Memorandum on War Aims likewise asserted the need for external tutelage of ‘the various peoples’ of Africa and recommended the creation of a single African state under the auspices of the League of Nations, which would apply all revenue generated to the welfare of the inhabitants. Proceeding in accordance with what would become a characteristic pattern of ‘two steps forward, one step back’, however, the statement of the Inter-Allied Labour and Socialist Conference two months later promptly watered down this proviso, containing only a brief allusion to the need for the League to create a system of control for the colonies which, ‘whilst respecting National Sovereignty would … safeguard the rights of the natives under the best conditions possible for them …’.5 There were two principal reasons for this rapid retreat from the concept of international control to that of international supervision. The first was the need to strike a balance between concern for the interests of the colonial peoples and what a significant proportion of Labour members continued to regard as the legitimate economic claims of the Great Powers. The two were not thought in all circumstances to be mutually exclusive. As mentioned above, a significant proportion of the party believed competition for colonial resources and markets to have been a major causative factor of the Great War. If another such conflict was to be prevented, it was important that the impulse that had produced the scramble for colonies should be diverted into more co-operative channels. Because European prosperity and colonial

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development alike depended on the involvement of the Great Powers in the economic and social advancement of these areas, and because the powers were unlikely to expend their energies and resources unless there was a tangible reward for doing so, the maintenance of the ‘open door’ under international supervision appeared to offer a more practical solution than outright management by the world organisation.6 This less ambitious approach was further entrenched by the colonial policy adopted after the war by that section of Labour which had formerly been most outspoken in its condemnation of imperialism, namely the ILP. In the course of his criticism of the ‘punitive’ elements of the Versailles Treaty, the ILP’s most prominent foreign policy spokesman, E.D. Morel, complained bitterly of the victorious powers’ perfidy in stripping Germany of its colonies in violation of the Fourteen Points. Throughout the 1920s, the ILP’s demand that the Weimar Republic should be given the opportunity to act as a mandatory under the League became a hardy perennial at Labour gatherings up and down the country. Thus the left’s campaign against one of the Paris Peace Conference’s alleged shortcomings unintentionally reinforced another, by working to substitute for direct control by the League – an institution about whose general merits, furthermore, many ILP members by now harboured deep reservations – the continuance of colonial rule, albeit of an ‘enlightened’ character, by the European powers. The second and more important element in Labour’s retreat from a policy of unmediated League administration was the party’s own paternalistic attitude toward non-white peoples, implicit in and inseparable from the concept of ‘trusteeship’. In its most liberal manifestation this took the form of a moral commitment not to renounce responsibility for the colonies until the depredations wrought by predatory British imperialism had been repaired; at the opposite extreme, it shaded into outright racialism. More typically, elements of the two were combined, with racial stereotypes being employed to assert the responsibility of British socialists to rescue ‘childlike’ peoples from capitalist exploitation and neglect. This task, it was argued, could more effectively be achieved by sovereign governments with their long experience of colonial administration, than by an international political authority, which might permit these territories to become a happy hunting-ground for international finance capital or prematurely turn control over to a small indigenous élite whose oppression of their compatriots might well exceed that of the foreign colonisers.7 Labour’s conception of the international authority’s primary function in colonial affairs, therefore, was that it ought to prevent abuses rather than seek to promote development on its own initiative, a task

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which properly belonged to the administering power. This was especially true in the political sphere. Fabianism and the Empire was merely the first in a long series of Labour pièces justificatives to advance the proposition – from which, except in the case of India, few within the party were to dissent during the next half-century – that to grant representative political institutions to ‘backward’ peoples in the foreseeable future would not constitute liberation, but culpable neglect: ‘the democratic institutions that mean freedom in Australasia and Canada would mean slavery in … Soudan’.8 Even those, like Ramsay MacDonald, who had been in the pro-Boer minority during the South African war, firmly denied that ‘the end of our native administration must of necessity be the self-government of the people’. Rather, as MacDonald maintained, the universal law of morality required advanced countries to assume the responsibility of ‘something like guardian and teacher of the less developed countries’.9 The mature form of this synthesis of socialist benevolence and the ‘white man’s burden’ appeared in a New Statesman article of August 1913 by Sidney and Beatrice Webb which called for the ‘guardianship of the Non-Adult races of the world’ to be undertaken as a corporate duty by the Great Powers. The peoples of Africa, Asia and the Pacific Islands stood ‘virtually in the position of children in a universe of grown men’, and required to be protected from external exploitation, and from themselves, until such time as the ‘advancement’ of their respective civilisations permitted them to control their own destiny. In the case of many parts of the British Empire, ‘it would be idle to pretend that anything like effective self-government, even as regards strictly local affairs, can be introduced for many generations to come – in some cases, conceivably never’.10 These Fabian ideas of racial incapacity and socialist paternalism rapidly took hold, and deeply influenced Labour’s colonial policy from 1918 onwards. The party’s most important statement on the question between the wars, for example, was notable for embodying a tripartite hierarchy of racial and cultural development within the Empire, distinguishing between peoples of ‘European’ culture in the West Indies; those of an ‘Oriental’ type inhabiting Ceylon, Malaya and the Straits; and, at the bottom, the races of ‘primitive’ culture in Africa and the Pacific Islands.11 It was these last who were most in need of international supervision – not to assist them toward self-government, but to provide an impartial tribunal to which they could appeal.12 This, in a limited form, was what the Paris Peace Conference had already brought into existence in 1919, as the Permanent Mandates Commission (PMC) of the League. The concept of mandates originated as the brainchild of Alfred Zimmern – a Liberal civil servant in the Foreign Office’s Political

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Intelligence Department and member of the Round Table group – and was taken up by President Wilson, who hoped to build up the prestige of the League by enabling it to appoint mandatories to govern colonial territories at its initiative and expense.13 As reformulated at Paris, chiefly by Lloyd George and the South African Prime Minister Jan Christian Smuts, who attended as a member of the British Empire delegation, the version of the mandatory principle embodied in Article XXII of the Covenant called for captured ex-enemy colonies to be assigned to the tutelage of individual League member states. Three categories of mandate were created, corresponding to the level of political development achieved by the peoples of each territory. The ex-Ottoman colonies were designated as ‘A’ mandates, which were considered capable of full independence in the short to medium term; their peoples were recognised as possessing a suspended sovereignty and the territories were to be administered essentially as protectorates by the mandatory power. ‘B’ mandates, including such countries as the Cameroons and Tanganyika, were believed to require a more extended period of development; the principles underlying their governance were to be set out in an individual mandate agreement or charter tailored to the specific requirements of each territory.14 ‘C’ mandates were those, like South-West Africa (Namibia) and Nauru, whose independence lay farthest in the future; in all significant respects these had the status of colonies, save only for the obligation of the mandatory power to submit an annual report concerning their progress to the PMC. This body, as established by the League Council in 1921, was composed of between 9 and 11 experts on colonial administration, the majority of them appointed by non-mandatory powers. Meeting twice a year, the PMC’s function was to receive and publish reports based on questionnaires submitted to mandatory states, and to make recommendations to the Council. It had no means, however, of enforcing these recommendations, which could be vetoed by any mandatory power on the Council. The only weapon in the PMC’s armoury, therefore, was to be the force of international public opinion.15 Labour’s attitude to the PMC between the wars was of much the same character as its response to the creation of the League as a whole. Although some left-wingers regarded the commission as an instrument of capitalist imperialism and as such unfit to play any part in colonial oversight – Frank Horrabin, for example, recommending that a socialist government in Britain ought to render its account concerning the mandates not to Geneva but to the Labour and Socialist International – the stance of most Labour activists was constructively critical.16 While welcoming the setting up of some kind of international machinery for

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colonies, party leaders and opinion-formers complained that the mandates system was inadequate and slanted in favour of the victorious Great Powers. In the first place, Arthur Henderson declared in 1922, ‘mandates should be given and where necessary withdrawn, by the League of Nations; not shared out as at present, by the temporarily dominant Powers among themselves’.17 In the second, the mandatory system should include all colonies, not just those captured from the Central Powers. Third, the authority of the PMC needed to be expanded to enable it to inspect, and to appoint League observers to the governing agency of, every mandate and dependent territory.18 Finally the Germans, upon admission to the League, should have their former colonies restored to them on the same terms as other mandatory powers. These calls for an extension of imperial internationalism ought not, however, to be taken as indicating that Labour attached a high priority to colonial reform. To the contrary, the party’s brief stints in power between the wars left ‘no mark on Colonial policy’19 beyond an expansion in 1924 of the assisted emigration scheme and the creation of a minuscule colonial development programme during MacDonald’s second administration. More than half of the annual reports issued by the Labour Party in the interwar years were devoid of a single reference to colonial affairs.20 Although ritual condemnations of ‘capitalist imperialism’ in the abstract were common, if a single issue in this period agitated the small minority of party members interested in colonial problems, it was the threat posed by low-paid native labour to white British people’s standard of living.21 Thus a 1926 book on Labour’s imperial policy by Leslie Haden Guest, a leading member of the party’s Advisory Committee on Imperial Questions, was typical in its apprehension that the spread of capitalism in the colonies might ‘destroy much of the industry of Great Britain’ by undercutting domestic wage-rates.22 The author did, however, draw consolation from the belief that ‘industrialisation does not attract the negro’, and that the ‘natural tendency’ in tropical Africa was towards the creation of ‘happy and prosperous agricultural communities’ whose demand for industrial goods would stimulate production within Britain.23 The proper policy for Labour, in Guest’s view, was to encourage this ‘natural’ and mutually beneficial trend, thereby ensuring that colonial peoples would not be victimised by predatory foreign capitalists. Well to the background in this vision of a symbiotic relationship between complementary economies was any recognition of the empire as a political problem, an entity whose existence depended on and was sustained by ‘the primary fact of armed acquisition and compulsory retention of the dependent territories’. Nor were Labour writers any

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more clear-sighted in their view of a possible rôle for the League in diminishing racial antagonisms both within and between nations. Even Leonard Woolf, one of the more enthusiastic proponents of the mandates system whose interest in imperial questions stemmed from his experiences as a colonial officer in Ceylon in the early years of the century, considered that the best the League could do in this regard was to reduce the potential for such conflicts, by promoting – and, in the mandates themselves, enforcing – the highest achievable level of racial purity and homogeneity. No one who wishes to see international society develop on League lines can possibly believe that the presence of the negro population in North America is a good thing for the negroes themselves, for the United States, or for the world. He would therefore be opposed to anything which might create a similar situation elsewhere in the world … The League should steadily set its face against the creation of alien enclaves, whether they be Asiatic or African in North America, or white in Africa.24 As the party remained indifferent to, if not unconscious of, the stirrings of anti-colonial sentiment elsewhere than in India, where the writing was already on the wall for British rule, so did it display a corresponding reluctance to address the broad question of the legitimacy of one people presuming to exercise even a benevolent governance over another. The explanation for this persistent myopia within Labour circles is hinted at in an infelicitously titled tract by George Lansbury, which provided further evidence that socialists were far from immune to the prevailing currents of social Darwinism and national self-interest. Asserting once again, in a virtual plagiarism of Fabianism and the Empire, Labour’s conviction that the developed countries must assume control over ‘large portions of the earth’ for the foreseeable future, Lansbury reminded his readers that the world as a whole had claims equal, if not superior, to those of the indigenous peoples. ‘It would not have been right, to take an extreme example, that a people like the Red Indians of North America, merely because they were wandering here and there over vast areas at a certain period, should have prevented the development of the United States.’25 Labour was prepared, Lansbury said, to accept ‘scrutiny’ by the PMC in ‘all those colonies inhabited mainly by peoples of primitive culture’, but not to hand over ‘British colonies to any other authority’.26 These areas Labour viewed as virgin territory ripe for settlement and development by the unemployed of Britain and the Commonwealth, offering the potential to provide ‘untold wealth’ in return. Nevertheless, British people ought to remain

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sensitive to the fact that it was they who were interlopers in these territories, necessary and beneficial though such settlement might be. They should therefore eschew as un-socialist and un-Christian all conceptions of racial superiority, and ensure that the reciprocal right of ‘coloured’ peoples to enter Britain was not infringed. Lansbury’s views, to be sure, did not represent the whole spectrum of Labour opinion between the wars. Even though the defection of the ILP in 1932 carried out of the party’s ranks some of the most committed opponents of continued imperial rule, Labour did not lack for critics of British dominion over non-white peoples. While many of these condemned the Empire on doctrinaire Marxist or Leninist grounds, others maintained that the social and cultural deficiencies stereotypically associated with Britishness – snobbery, insularity, arrogance, ignorance of foreign languages – rendered the British peculiarly unfit to exercise control over other peoples. Few, however, questioned that such tutelage was required. Rather, a common tendency was to idealise the colonial credentials or potential of some other country in whose national character these unattractive traits were considered to be less marked. Thus the Webbs, in their extended apologia for Soviet Communism, declared in ringing tones that ‘in contrast to the fumbling injustice of British rule … the Soviet Union has triumphantly vindicated its supreme right to deal with more primitive communities’. ‘Anti-imperialism’ of this kind, however, was more superficial than real, inasmuch as the allegiance thus transferred could as readily be switched back to its original object if the record of the foreign state in question should begin to appear in a less favourable light. In the same way, much Labour enthusiasm for the principle of international oversight of colonial rule reflected dissatisfaction with the record of the British government rather than genuine conviction of the merits of the League. Relatively little of this ‘soft’ internationalism could be expected to survive if the Labour left’s belief in the inherent malignity of the British Empire should for any reason begin to abate. It should nonetheless be acknowledged that despite the paternalistic and patronising tenor of even the most well-meaning Labour interventions on colonial questions between the wars, resulting in large measure from the exclusion from the party’s counsels of representatives of the colonial peoples themselves, clear differences did exist between the left and right of British politics in matters of imperial administration. Unlike the Conservatives, Labour activists recognised the economic inequality inherent in the colonial system, in some cases frankly acknowledging the extent to which British living standards were based upon imperial exploitation. This recognition, however, characteristically led both wings of the party to an unwarrantedly narrow

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definition of ‘exploitation’ as synonymous with capitalism, and an assumption that socialist states were incapable by definition of behaving in a self-interested fashion. No doubt Labour’s blind spot in this regard owed something to the fact that its colonial policy came into being at a time of economic disruption and postwar depression, in which the development of the Empire’s resources appeared as one of the few positive beacons of hope. But the belief that the restraint of unscrupulous foreign investors and the encouragement of ‘native’ enterprises were sufficient to acquit a metropolitan power of any charge of maladministration tended to lead to the conclusion that, once a socialist government was in place, the principal objective of ‘international oversight’ would be to ensure the adoption by less enlightened polities of British best practice.

REDEFINING AN EMPIRE, FINDING A RÔLE It is unlikely that this complacency on the part of the British democratic left would soon have been abandoned had not the approach of another war compelled a degree of new thinking on the subject. In the view of some Labour policymakers in the second half of the 1930s – notably the then head of the ACIQ, Charles Roden Buxton – the rise of dictatorial régimes in Germany, Italy and Japan was explicable mainly as the expression of popular resentment in these countries over Britain’s obstruction of their desire to acquire overseas empires commensurate with their status as Great Powers. Buxton thus advocated ‘the transfer of territories under Mandate – in case other and better methods should unfortunately fail’ – to the Axis powers, in accordance with the principle that the simplest and fairest way of addressing the demands of ‘unsatisfied’ countries was to satisfy them.27 So unvarnished a policy of appeasement was rejected a priori by most members of the Labour leadership;28 but elsewhere in the party, concern that jealousy over Britain’s retention of its vast empire might be fuelling international tensions impelled Transport House to look again at the possibility of direct international control. In 1936 a policy statement drafted by the Advisory Committee on Imperial Questions emphatically ruled out any transfer of territories to the dictatorships, but suggested that there was much to be said for ‘a real experiment of direct League administration in some selected area – even though it is not yet capable of wide application … If these colonial territories could be and were transferred from national to international government … the distinction between satisfied and unsatisfied Powers would cease to exist.’29

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As the Second World War approached, therefore, Labour’s policy on colonial internationalism had described a complete circle, reverting to the stance it had originally assumed during the First. But the war itself was to raise the entire question of colonial policy to a much higher priority for the party than had hitherto been the case. After September 1939, fundamental questions about the legitimacy of imperialism as an institution began to be voiced by an increasingly insistent chorus of critics of the war, ranging from British Communists to US isolationists, and were loudly amplified by German propaganda agencies. Accusations from such quarters that Britain’s motives for fighting were purely selfish and that the conflict was nothing more than a struggle between rival imperialisms became a major concern for the government and hence, after the formation of the Churchill Coalition in May 1940, for Labour also. Thenceforward, the party found itself obliged not only to counter, in the national interest, enemy and neutralist propaganda against British colonial policies, but to reassure its own supporters that in joining the government it had not become contaminated by Tory imperialism. Its response consequently proceeded along two divergent lines, the incompatibility of which became more pronounced as the war continued. Contradicting much of its previous rhetoric, Labour asserted that, regardless of the dubious means by which the colonies had been acquired and the exploitation that undoubtedly had taken place in the past, the British Empire was now a humane and progressive institution whose primary raison d’être was the political and material advancement of the peoples under its control. Simultaneously, Labour began to press for a wider scope for the international authority of the future in colonial administration, both to provide a safeguard against self-interested national policies and to give native inhabitants more say in their own governance. The tension between these two propositions – that the Empire was in no need of political reform but that its supervision by the world organisation should nonetheless be intensified – became apparent in the internal Labour debate over colonial policy during 1940 and 1941. In almost every instance, proposals to broaden the powers and competence of the Mandates Commission or accelerate the colonial peoples’ progress toward self-determination were counterbalanced by exceptions or codicils aimed at reasserting the integrity of the British Empire. Thus when the NEC, in its first public statement of war aims, described Labour’s principal objective in colonial policy to be to ‘move forward as speedily as possible towards self-government’, the Advisory Committee on Imperial Questions added a rider two months later that ‘Self-government in the declaration of February, 1940, means selfgovernment within the framework of the British Commonwealth of

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Nations.’30 The same pattern was evident in the deliberations of the Advisory Committee itself. In September 1941 Leonard Woolf drafted a memorandum arguing that nearly all the colonies outside Africa were ‘ripe for full self-government or at any rate for a very large measure of self-government’. Although the African peoples would not reach the same point ‘[f]or a considerable time to come’, Woolf maintained that training for self-government must be the party’s principal goal. Almost immediately he was taken to task by two of his fellow committee-members, who vigorously contested the primacy he had assigned to political development. To J.F.N. Green, former Assistant Secretary at the Colonial Office, self-government in those areas where it had been tried had merely delivered colonial peoples over to exploitation by oppressors of their own race. ‘The vote in Jamaica has not relieved Jamaican poverty and illiteracy; the vote in Cyprus merely handed over the peasantry to the lawyer-usurper.’ Woolf’s erstwhile colleague in the Ceylonese civil service, Thomas Reid, added that colonial peoples had little interest in self-government if it meant having to fend for themselves in a perilous and uncertain world. Most, if not all of these, owing to the freedom and integrity and justice of British rule would be loath to be abandoned by Britain, to be swallowed up by some aggressive power. Nor can Britain allow such conquests if she has regard for her own safety in a world of power politics.31 By such arguments, Green and Reid carried Labour’s attempted vindication of the ‘progressive’ character of the modern Empire to its logical conclusion. In so doing, however, they effectively, if perhaps unintentionally, excluded the oversight of political development in the Empire from the potential functions of the future international authority, the extension of whose powers the party was simultaneously elevating as proof of its own ‘progressive’ outlook on colonial administration. An opportunity for Labour to resolve this dilemma arose in August 1941 with the conclusion of the Atlantic Charter. The third point of the declaration, drafted in haste by Churchill and Cadogan, affirmed the signatories’ respect for ‘the right of all peoples to choose the form of government under which they will live’, a formula the Prime Minister had devised to reassure the US Administration that he was not contemplating any secret arrangements with other powers in Europe.32 In so doing, however, he exposed a flank to his coalition partners at home. Attlee, quickly perceiving that the commitment was capable of

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a much broader interpretation, seized the opportunity both to clarify Labour policy and to embarrass his Conservative colleagues into taking a more liberal stance on the Empire. The day after the terms of the Charter were broadcast, while Churchill was still in mid-Atlantic, the Labour leader told a meeting of West African students in London that they would not find in the declaration ‘any suggestion that the freedom … for which we fight should be denied to any of the races of mankind’. With this speech Attlee sought to align his party with the principle of colonial self-determination, and once again opened the door to a broader conception of international supervision. His attempt to present Churchill with a fait accompli, though, fell flat. Upon returning, the Prime Minister took the first opportunity to disavow any such commitment on the government’s part, specifically excluding from the Charter’s application ‘the regions and peoples which owe allegiance to the British Crown’ and unctuously assuring Parliament that existing British colonial policy ‘will be found to be entirely in harmony with the high conception of freedom and justice which inspired the Joint Declaration’.33 Attlee received this implied rebuke with equanimity; but indicated that Labour would not be bound by it when, in the course of a Cabinet debate concerning a draft joint declaration with the United States confined to the subject of colonial affairs, he came out in favour of a still more radical approach, the complete ‘internationalisation of colonies’.34 … there was an important political aspect about all this, and … in the view of the Labour Party the British electorate would not be content to go on bearing a financial burden in respect of Colonies for which the advantage mainly accrued to a capitalist group. The maintenance of national sovereignty over colonies required the maintenance of national armaments, and in respect both of armaments and sovereignty over backward peoples the political views … were in favour of the substitution of an international system of responsibility and control.35 The Deputy Prime Minister’s vision of an international authority that would ‘equalise’ the conditions of independent states and dependent territories, as well as serve to attenuate the distinction between them, by exercising important governmental functions on behalf of each, received further elaboration in a paper he submitted to the Cabinet nine months later. While decrying as ‘ridiculous’ the apparent belief of the US Secretary of State, Cordell Hull, that ‘the inhabitants of St Helena, the Solomons, Trinidad or the Gambia are longing for independence and are hoping that their countries will become independent sovereign

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states’, Attlee contended that the welfare of these territories and of the divided European states alike could best be guaranteed by the interposition of an activist international organisation. ‘A really effective international police force with an international tribunal will remove from the ambit of self-government some of the greatest difficulties which face communities. Foreign policy and defence problems will be dealt with by an authority which is supernational.’36 These Cabinet-level exchanges, however, offered no substitute for a genuine Labour Party policy, the need for which had become urgent inasmuch as the League, and with it the PMC, had been reduced to no more than a nominal existence at the beginning of the war. The NEC’s interim statement The Old World and the New Society (1942) and a resolution moved by Leslie Haden Guest at Labour’s Annual Conference the same year each attempted to lay down some foundations upon which a detailed programme could be constructed, the former declaring in favour of a severely limited form of colonial trusteeship and the latter proposing a ‘Charter of Freedom’ – in effect a bill of rights – for dependent peoples.37 Not, however, until the spring of 1943 did a comprehensive statement of colonial policy appear, the fruit of three years’ intermittent work of the Advisory Committee on Imperial Questions. Drafted mainly by Woolf, its chief recommendation was for the creation of an expanded mandates commission under the authority of the future world organisation. Although the document envisaged this body as being somewhat more powerful than its League predecessor, there is nonetheless a marked contrast between the expansive rôle in regulating the affairs of sovereign states Woolf was simultaneously outlining for the world organisation in his capacity as secretary of the FSIB, and the minimal authority he was prepared to concede to the new mandates commission. In essence it was to be no more than ‘a peripatetic inspectorate’ possessing neither regulatory functions nor representation for the colonial peoples themselves, although it might ‘associate’ with its work residents of the territories it was examining. ‘Inspection, and publicity at the proper time for publicity, and neither control nor interference with the administration, are the functions of the League.’ If a sovereign power was failing to live up to its responsibilities, then the utmost the commission might do would be to refer the matter to the World Court, which itself would merely be able to recommend the modification or termination of the mandate.38 But Woolf went further than the Covenant had done in holding that ‘all backward colonial territories’ should be treated as mandates, and that the system of imperial preference adopted at Ottawa in 1931 be abolished. These proposals, largely unmodified, were approved by the NEC and the Annual Conference in 1943 –

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which simultaneously adopted a resolution calling for ‘the acceptance of the principle of inter-national supervision and accountability in Colonial policy and administration’39 – and published as an official statement of party policy.40 Modest though these ideas were, they were far in advance of what several influential Labour leaders showed themselves willing to contemplate. The impulse to defend the government’s custody of the Empire against its numerous domestic and foreign detractors combined with war-heightened patriotic sentiment had lent by the middle of the conflict a distinctly Kiplingesque flavour to the pronouncements of Labour ministers, who unexpectedly discovered hidden virtues in a system they had formerly condemned as the quintessence of capitalist exploitation. In a September 1942 speech, for example, Attlee praised Britain for having done ‘at least … as much as many and more than most colonising powers to give an honest and enlightened administration and to raise the standards of backward people’.41 A similar U-turn was apparent in Herbert Morrison’s wartime attitude to colonial questions. Speaking shortly after the fall of Poland, he had disavowed as an acceptable war aim for ‘our highly privileged nation’ the right ‘to own more colonies than any mere foreigner’, and affirmed that Britain must pursue ‘the problem of colonial possessions on international lines, even if this means the limitation of national sovereignty’.42 Two months later he went further yet, announcing his willingness to ‘give up’ the colonies to ‘an international administration’ if other imperial powers followed suit.43 By the middle of the war, however, a far less self-critical tone marked Morrison’s pronouncements on the extent of the British Empire’s accountability to international opinion. In an address in January 1943, after praising ‘the political enlightenment and humane integrity of our colonial administration’, the Home Secretary confined himself to expressing the hope that it would be possible to achieve ‘without prejudice to our own primary obligation for the wellbeing and progress of British territories, some wider pooling of tasks and responsibilities …’. He gave little indication, though, that he saw any rôle whatever for intervention by the international authority. Indeed, in what seemed to be an attempt to exclude such intervention, he went on to claim that what was good for the British Empire was ipso facto good for the world organisation. ‘[T]he long-term interests of our Empire are wholly in accord with the long-term interests of the international society of nations as a whole.’44 In a subsequent speech, the Labour Home Secretary invoked the rhetoric of federalism – whose application to western Europe he was later furiously to oppose – as another reason for preserving the Empire inviolate into the distant future.

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This is no time to give the principle of political separatism free rein – to multiply the numbers of half-grown autonomous states dotted about the world. What we want is surely to have less exclusiveness, not more – to hold fast to every fragment of cohesion and unity in the world … This is the real meaning of the British Empire today.45 Morrison was not alone in his anxiety to ward off unwarranted interference by the world organisation in Britain’s overseas possessions. The question of the relationship between the international authority and the colonies had not been raised at the Dumbarton Oaks conference, all three delegations – for different, though related, reasons – being equally anxious to keep it off the agenda. The matter could not be deferred for long, however, and, in preparation for the Yalta and San Francisco meetings, the Churchill Coalition began to draw up plans defining its attitude to the mandates system. At the end of 1944 the Tory Colonial Secretary, Oliver Stanley, put forward a paper calling for its effective abolition. The system in its existing form, he averred, was objectionable inasmuch as it prohibited the construction of military bases in territories under its supervision, restricted the mandatory power’s freedom to regulate trade and emigration, and subjected the activities of the government to the scrutiny of the PMC – in other words, in all of its defining characteristics. It was essential to ensure that any agencies created to replace the PMC should have no executive or supervisory powers; that the General Assembly ‘should not be free to single out British colonies … for special investigation or debate’; and that ‘any discussions should be general in character, and so should cover all backward territories irrespective of whether they were independent or colonial in status’. For this undisguisedly self-interested programme the Colonial Secretary found his strongest supporter among the Labour ranks. Ernest Bevin not only fully endorsed Stanley’s proposal, but urged that the latter’s suggestion of an International Colonial Centre to which reports on dependent territories might be periodically submitted, included ‘as a sop to the Americans’, should be further watered down so as to preclude the possibility of it exercising any function as a ‘governing body’.46 Shortly afterwards, Bevin declared himself in favour of outright annexation of all former mandates, arguing that Britain should propose that, after a five-year probationary period, mandatory powers should be given the right to petition for a termination of the mandate and assume full sovereignty – an idea that even some Conservative members of the coalition recognised as unacceptable to international opinion.47 Once again, it was left to Attlee to express his unease at the direction events were taking – although, lacking the support of his own party

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colleagues, he was obliged to use as an argument the attachment of the Dominions to the principle of international accountability. In a memorandum to Churchill on 5 March 1945, he pointed out that Stanley’s proposed evisceration of the mandates system was not supported by the governments of Australia and New Zealand. He further reminded the Prime Minister that in a secret protocol at Yalta the previous month the Big Three had agreed to consider the establishment of a system of territorial trusteeship, albeit one that was to be confined to the former League mandates, territories detached from the Axis powers, and areas voluntarily placed under the supervision of the world organisation. This raised the question of whether the government had in fact committed itself to the continuation of the mandates system.48 Although Churchill’s response to the latter query was a robust negative, the strength of US and Dominions opposition to the exclusion of mandates from the remit of the UN forced the Conservative members of the coalition reluctantly ‘to accept in principle the continuance of the Mandates, but to insist on their revision in order to eliminate their worst features’.49 Notwithstanding this forced retreat, neither Attlee, Bevin nor Alexander raised any objection to a paper introduced by Stanley at a meeting of the Armistice and Post-War Committee on 26 March which aimed to prevent any general discussion of the colonial question at San Francisco. ‘If we had to do that … it would mean throwing the whole Colonial Empire open to discussion by this motley assembly, a procedure which I should regard as hazardous in the extreme.’50 This drastic divergence between the policy laid down at the 1943 Annual Conference and the Labour ministers’ handling of the issue in the APW Committee aroused the concern of Attlee’s Parliamentary Private Secretary, John Dugdale. In a memorandum written shortly before the Labour leader’s departure for San Francisco, Dugdale pointed out that his assent to Stanley’s proposed démarche was in ‘complete contradiction to the official policy of the Labour Party …’. It is apparent … that the Colonial Secretary would like, if he could, to abolish the Mandate system in its entirety and that it is only because he has failed to do this that he proposes various ways in which it can be considerably weakened … Surely this is not a line with which we can have very great sympathy … Is the position really that Australia and New Zealand are going to the San Francisco Conference determined to make proposals in line with those of our own Labour Party policy and that these proposals are to be opposed by the United Kingdom delegation? It seems to me

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that if this is the correct interpretation, it would be a most unfortunate position for you to be associated with, and I hope very much you may secure some modification in our attitude before the Conference starts.51 So much at variance, indeed, with Attlee’s previous and future statements on colonial policy was Stanley’s memorandum that his silent concurrence with it at the 26 March meeting can only be interpreted as a tactical decision, in light of Churchill’s recently expressed determination to oppose ‘our being hustled or seduced into declarations affecting British sovereignty in any of the Dominions or Colonies’, to defer further discussion of this issue to a more propitious occasion.52 But in the cases of Bevin, Alexander53 and later Shinwell, it would appear that the views described by Dugdale as the antithesis of party policy did in fact closely approximate to their own convictions. As early as 1930, Bevin in particular had expressed narrowly nationalist views on the colonies, telling the TUC that ‘Safety first for those in possession is the rule in every empire’,54 a credo little different from Churchill’s more succinct ‘What we have we hold.’ Later in the decade, he became a partisan of Lionel Curtis’s scheme for pan-European development of the African colonies, an area he regarded as potentially ‘one of the great treasure houses of the world’ which Britain had both a right and a duty to develop in its own interest and those of the inhabitants.55 The apotheosis of Bevin’s identification of the ideals of ‘socialist imperialism’ with those of the nation as a whole came in 1948, when he claimed with apparent conviction that ‘We have ceased to be an Imperialist race: we dominate nobody.’56 It is difficult to explain why attitudes so radically opposed to settled party policy were not more resolutely challenged by backbench and grassroots opinion during and after the war. Part of the answer must lie in the sheer lack of interest in, and awareness of, colonial affairs among the Labour membership. The myopic insularity of those who reiterated at frequent intervals that the war was bringing about a revolutionary transformation of Britain, while remaining oblivious to the genuinely revolutionary forces that were being unleashed across the Third World, was an all-too-typical indication of the position of the non-white Empire in most party activists’ scale of priorities.57 Another was the shallowness of the pool of expert knowledge and advice upon which Labour could draw. The Advisory Committee on Imperial Questions during the high tide of the postwar government numbered a scant 38 members, only 14 of whom were MPs – of these latter, moreover, the majority took no real part in its activities.58 Former colonial administrators were strongly overrepresented, many

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of whom, like Reid and Green, would indignantly have repudiated any imputation that they possessed ‘advanced’ opinions on the future of the Empire.59 The most important Labour-affiliated ginger-group working in this field – the Fabian Colonial Bureau (FCB), launched in October 1940 by the South African academic, Dr Rita Hinden – was smaller still.60 Certainly its level of activity was out of all proportion to its size: in the next ten years, the FCB was to produce its own monthly magazine; issue numerous pamphlets on various aspects of colonial administration; and prevail upon sympathetic MPs to ask parliamentary questions drafted by its experts. But inasmuch as most of the FCB executive was also represented on the Advisory Committee – with the future Labour Colonial Secretary, Arthur Creech Jones, combining the chairmanship of both organisations for an 18-month period in 1944–45 – it could hardly be considered an alternative source of inspiration or influence so far as Transport House was concerned. Furthermore, the FCB maintained close and cordial relations with the officials of the Colonial Office, with whom Creech Jones regularly consulted on ‘all manner of problems’.61 Its conception of the powers to be exercised by an international authority in the colonial arena was thus predictably unadventurous, and did not differ in kind from the policy that Labour had already adopted in 1943. The FCB’s major wartime manifesto, published the following year, spoke dismissively of mandates as ‘merely annexation seeking the cloak of fine phrases’, while conceding that the system had helped to assert the principles of international accountability and third-party interest. Somewhat paradoxically, though, the FCB proceeded to recommend the reconstitution of this system, although on regional rather than universal lines. In each major area of colonial administration (e.g. the Pacific, tropical Africa or south-east Asia) it advocated the creation of a regional authority composed of a Council similar to that of the League, a conference of the colonial peoples, and a permanent secretariat. These bodies would be advisory and have powers similar to those of the PMC, although they might also have the right to conduct on-the-spot inspections.62 Like Woolf’s 1943 statement, moreover, the Fabian document was resolutely hostile to the idea of direct international administration of colonies, which it misleadingly asserted had been proven impracticable in the case of the New Hebrides in the early years of the century.63 There was little likelihood, then, of Labour adopting a more ambitious stance on international control of colonies while the proposals of the main extra-parliamentary left-wing pressure group barely went as far as its own policy-in-being. But at least the party’s commitment to the core principle of international accountability,

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albeit on a carefully circumscribed level, was reaffirmed in April 1945 in a memorandum by the Advisory Committee which declared this to be the most important and valuable legacy of the mandates system, and asserted that the situation ‘whereby the metropolitan nation was judge and jury in its [own] cause, will no longer be tolerated’.64 A similar note was struck in the Labour Party Research Department’s handbook for speakers in the 1945 general election campaign, which unambiguously proclaimed the party’s support for ‘the establishment of an international Colonial Commission (a greatly strengthened mandates system to apply to all Colonies not yet ripe for self-government) attached to the new International Authority’.65 This emphasis on the indispensability of international supervision seems therefore to be sufficiently well articulated in the party’s wartime policy planning as to call into question D.K. Fieldhouse’s criticism that ‘Neither in 1945, nor even in 1947, had the Labour party clearly formulated its views on the future of the colonial empire.’66 The question was rather how far Labour was prepared to live up to the limited internationalism in colonial affairs to which it had committed itself.

‘WALLOPING ONE’S OWN NIGGERS’ The system of colonial supervision agreed at San Francisco, it must be acknowledged, did not set an especially demanding standard to which states in possession of colonies should aspire. Although Article 73 of the United Nations Charter enjoined metropolitan powers to uphold ‘as a sacred trust’ the political, social, economic and educational advancement of all colonial peoples and the ‘progressive development of their free political institutions’, it imposed no obligations beyond the periodic transmission to the Secretary-General of statistical and technical information concerning economic and social conditions in the territories under their control. A slightly more rigorous régime, on the other hand, was prescribed for trust territories. While participation in trusteeship system was entirely voluntary on the part of administering countries, which themselves were empowered to draw up the terms of trusteeship agreements, those territories included in the system were to be subject to the scrutiny of a Trusteeship Council, composed of equal numbers of representatives from administering and nonadministering states. This entity, a principal organ of the UN, was empowered to draw up questionnaires relating to political as well as economic and social development in trust territories for submission to the General Assembly; to receive petitions from inhabitants; and to make periodic visits of inspection at times to be agreed with the

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administering power. Like the PMC, however, the Council was to possess no executive functions of its own. During the early days of the new Labour administration, Attlee seemed ready to countenance far-reaching changes in Britain’s handling of its imperial responsibilities. In his paper on the future of the Italian colonies referred to above (pp. 145–6), he opposed the demand by the Foreign and Colonial Secretaries that Britain should seek trusteeship over Cyrenaica and Tripolotania with a strong counter-argument that there was no room for further expansion of the British Empire, and that the UN should be employed to relieve the country of overseas burdens it could no longer afford: Apart from strategic considerations, I can see no possible advantage to us in assuming responsibility for these areas. They involve us in immediate loss. There is no prospect of their paying for themselves. The more we do for them the quicker shall we be faced with premature claims for self-government. We have quite enough of these awkward problems already. After the last war, under the system of mandates, we acquired large territories. The world outside not unnaturally regarded this as a mere expansion of the British Empire. Trusteeship will appear to most people as only old mandates writ large.67 Such views were anathema to Bevin, who harboured what Dalton described as a ‘fascination’ with the Middle East as an area vital to British military and commercial interests and who feared that failure ‘to advance our claims would only leave the field open for other bidders, e.g., U.S.S.R.’.68 But the exchange between the Prime Minister and the Foreign Secretary offered an early portent of a growing division within the party on the meaning of colonial trusteeship, one group regarding the UN as an instrument by which Britain might honourably discharge what was becoming an increasingly insupportable financial, political and ideological burden; and another seeing in the Empire the last best hope of Britain’s re-emergence as a Great Power and viewing the intervention of the international authority as an unwelcome intrusion in its sovereign affairs. From the end of 1945 the balance between these two schools of thought began to swing decisively in favour of the latter, all but eliminating any rôle for international authorities in the party’s colonial policy. At the outset there was some basis for believing that the proponents of a strengthened trusteeship system might gain the upper hand, notwithstanding the fact that Attlee’s nominee as Colonial Secretary, George Hall, seemed an uninspired choice for the position. A relatively

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anonymous official of the Transport and General Workers’ Union – Bevin’s union – who had spent two years as Parliamentary UnderSecretary at the Colonial Office during the Churchill Coalition, Hall appeared to have few ideas of his own about the future of colonial administration.69 His lack of initiative, however, made him all the more dependent upon his Under-Secretary, Arthur Creech Jones, the former chairman of both the Advisory Committee on Imperial Questions and the FCB, and the party’s leading spokesman on colonial affairs. This appeared to bode well for the internationalist cause, inasmuch as Creech Jones and Rita Hinden, immediately before the general election, had written a pamphlet echoing the recent recommendations of the Advisory Committee and upholding the ideal of ‘an international conscience as to the way Imperial Powers handle their responsibilities …’. Some colonies, they acknowledged, were so far advanced along the road to self-government that international supervision at so late a stage would be regarded as a hindrance rather than a help. ‘But for those areas which still remained “dependent” and even, perhaps, for those racial minorities inside sovereign states suffering disabilities of their own (such as the Negroes in the U.S.A.), some form of international trusteeship was essential.’70 Creech Jones’s and Hinden’s pamphlet thus contained one of the more ambitious programmes to emerge from the Labour Party during the war, expanding as it did the jurisdiction of the PMC’s mooted successor into the domestic affairs of sovereign states. But it was to be almost the very last expression of such ideas to emanate from the frontbench or Transport House. Virtually from the moment they assumed office, Labour ministers – the new Under-Secretary among them – were to devote most of their attention to fending off the efforts of the UN to exercise the ‘third party judgement’ the party had adopted as the guiding principle of its colonial policy. Moreover, Creech Jones’s former prominence as the co-founder of the principal socialist pressure-group on colonial affairs now served to ensure that this change of front would not only go uncondemned by the FCB, but to a considerable extent denied. The government’s rapid jettisoning of inconvenient policy commitments commenced within a few months of its assumption of power. At the first session of the General Assembly in January 1946, Bevin stated that Britain’s willingness to place its African mandates under trusteeship ‘naturally depends upon our being able to negotiate terms which in our view are generally satisfactory’.71 A week later, Hall and Creech Jones circulated Britain’s first draft trusteeship agreement, for the former ‘B’ mandate of Tanganyika, a document which can have given the Foreign Secretary no grounds for complaint. Interpreting with some elasticity Article 84 of the Charter, which permitted the

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adminstering power to ‘make use of volunteer forces, facilities, and assistance from the trust territory in carrying out [its] obligations towards the Security Council’, the Colonial Office proposed to extend this concession to cover the construction of military, naval and air bases for the use of British forces in East Africa, where Bevin had ambitious, although characteristically vague, plans to locate Britain’s principal strategic outpost east of Suez once India had become independent.72 Moreover, derogating from the principle of the Open Door laid down in Article 76 (d), traditionally regarded as a cornerstone of ‘progressive’ colonial administration, the Labour government reserved the right in the draft treaty to establish such economic monopolies as appeared to it ‘to be in the interests of the inhabitants of Tanganyika’. Both of these measures were loyally defended by Hinden, who had succeeded Creech Jones as chairman of the FCB;73 although in a rare expression of disquiet the Bureau did give vent to its regret that the Labour government could not have found a way since taking office to make clear ‘by some deliberate act or gesture, that it stood for principles other than those of its Tory predecessors’.74 From the outset, moreover, Labour ministers reacted with extreme defensiveness to the UN’s machinery for international supervision of colonies, assuming a priori that any criticism of their policies was actuated by ignorance, malice or envy. Indeed, it is not too much to say that the Attlee administration chose to consider the ‘non-administering’ powers in the UN as implacable opponents long before it placed the Soviet Union in the same category. Even before the first meeting of the UN General Assembly had concluded at the beginning of 1946, Bevin complained bathetically that Britain was being made the victim of a racially motivated vendetta: Hardly a single Delegation outside the Mandatory Powers and the British Commonwealth spoke favourably of the Trusteeship agreements; and the large majority by which they were finally approved was due mainly to a realisation that failure to approve them in a form acceptable to the Administering Authorities would result in the Trusteeship system not being brought into force … In all this there was regrettable evidence of racial prejudice stimulated by the ‘coloured’ delegations against the ‘whites’.75 In its dealings with the UN, therefore, the Labour government conducted itself on the principle that international oversight of its colonial administration, being almost by definition mischievous, was to be resisted. In particular, the sophisticated tools of textual analysis employed by ministers to reconcile the trusteeship agreements with

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Britain’s obligations under Articles 76 and 84 contrasted sharply with their interpretation of other provisions in the Charter. In its approach to the remainder of Chapters XI–XII, the Labour government adhered to the narrowest possible definition of the UN’s authority to scrutinise non-self-governing territories, strenuously resisting all efforts to extend the trusteeship system beyond the strict letter of the Charter. Two particularly controversial issues illustrated the government’s determination to defeat the international organisation’s attempts to trespass upon British national sovereignty in this regard. These were South Africa’s illegal annexation of its former mandate of South-West Africa, and the degree of supervision the UN was entitled to exercise over territories not formally included in the trusteeship system. The first of these questions, although less immediately relevant to Britain’s own concerns, indicated the government’s anxiety to maintain control over the political destiny of its colonies against possible encroachment by the UN. In April 1944 the South African Prime Minister, J.C. Smuts, announced that the mandates system had become obsolete and that Pretoria recognised no obstacle to the incorporation of its mandate of South-West Africa into the Union. At the San Francisco Conference, the South African delegation declared its government’s intention to convert the territory into the Union’s fifth province, following ‘consultations’ with the inhabitants. A year later, South Africa informed the General Assembly that 87 per cent of the residents of all races in South-West Africa had expressed the ‘earnest desire’ to amalgamate with the Union. The integrity of the consultation procedure, accurately described by an Anglican missionary working in the territory as ‘a complete farce’, was immediately challenged by a number of UN members including the United States, which called for a Commission of Enquiry to visit the country and make a recommendation concerning its future to the General Assembly. The South African action created a dilemma for the Labour government in view of Pretoria’s deplorable record as a mandatory; the fact that its racial policies were, in the words of one member of the Advisory Committee, ‘the very antithesis of the policy of the Labour Party’; and the repercussions of this unilateral abrogation of a mandate upon the credibility of the infant UN trusteeship system. On the other hand, as the Dominions Secretary, Viscount Addison, pointed out, ‘a most unfavourable impression would be created in South Africa’ if Britain were to side with the UN against its Commonwealth partner. The Cabinet therefore decided to placate both sides by declaring that it reposed full confidence in South Africa’s consultation procedure, but that it would be for the UN to decide whether the methods used were satisfactory.76 Ministers were forced off the fence a week later,

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however, when Smuts made clear that this formula was unacceptable to him, and that ‘whatever was said in the General Assembly’, South Africa would proceed with its annexation plans. After some debate, the Cabinet arrived at the ‘general view … that it would be inexpedient for the United Kingdom Government to refrain from supporting the Union Government in this matter …’. At the 1947 General Assembly, the British Labour delegation cast the sole vote against a resolution calling upon Pretoria to place South-West Africa under UN trusteeship. The South African government, true to its word, thereupon proceeded to annex the territory, in response to which the GA referred the matter to the International Court of Justice for a legal adjudication. At a Cabinet meeting, the Colonial Secretary and the Ministers of State at the Commonwealth Relations Office and the Foreign Office jointly proposed that Britain should submit an amicus curiae brief associating itself with South Africa in the hearings. This advice was not taken, the remainder of the Cabinet concurring that a policy of non-involvement would make it easier for Britain to ignore the verdict if it were unfavourable, as indeed proved to be the case.77 South Africa too rejected the Court’s unanimous judgement that it did not possess the competence to alter the status of its mandate without the consent of the UN. By the summer of 1950, the Labour government thus found itself in the uncomfortable position of standing as the only public supporter of one of the leading international outlaws of the day. Only slightly less damaging to the government’s internationalist prestige was its stance concerning the territories to which the trusteeship system should extend. As we have seen, Labour’s wartime policy was unambiguous on this point. As Creech Jones and Hinden had declared in The Colonies and International Conscience, it was ‘sheer hypocrisy that one Colony should be reported on at Geneva and the Colonies next door should not’. Labour backbenchers in consequence looked forward to the placing of all of Britain’s crown colonies under trusteeship, a course several newly elected MPs pressed upon the government within weeks of its assumption of office.78 The Cabinet, however, with almost equal celerity decided that such a policy was no longer feasible. With Bevin’s backing, Hall in December 1945 sought his colleagues’ approval to continue the line of the Churchill Coalition that ‘there should be no question of our agreeing to place under any form of international trusteeship any of our Colonial territories, other than those now administered under Mandate’. The sole objection to this course was raised by Shinwell, the Minister for Fuel and Power, who questioned whether any British territories should be placed under trusteeship at all. Only after Creech Jones reassured him that the move would have no deleterious economic consequences did he accede to the idea.79

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The government’s change in policy was temporarily obscured by Noel-Baker’s rather disingenuous reassurance at the 1946 Annual Conference that ‘Our policy has been to support the United Nations in every way … on the question of colonial policy, translating our mandates into trusteeship …’.80 The formal inauguration of the trusteeship system in January 1947, on the other hand, made concealment much more difficult. At the General Assembly the following October, the Indian delegate, Sir Maharaj Singh, introduced a resolution calling upon powers responsible for the administration of non-self-governing territories to place some or all of them under trusteeship. Responding to the resolution, an embarrassed Creech Jones was compelled to launch a frontal attack against the institution of trusteeship itself. International public opinion, he argued, was an important safeguard for colonies, ‘provided of course that that opinion itself is informed, objective and unprejudiced’. The international trusteeship system did not in his view meet that standard. Furthermore, ‘responsible public opinion’ in the colonies was ‘against international intervention in their affairs’, which would be regarded as both a ‘retrograde and humiliating step’ and a likely impediment to its progress toward selfgovernment. It also constituted an unwarranted implied ‘slur’ against the conditions provided by Britain in its colonial territories, which compared favourably with those prevailing in independent states.81 In reply, Singh quoted back to Creech Jones appropriate sections of The Colonies and International Conscience, pointing out that the views contained in that publication ‘were not identical with those which Mr. Creech Jones had expressed in the Committee’.82 The Colonial Secretary’s ordeal marked the beginning of a prolonged struggle between the Labour government and the ‘non-administering’ powers in the UN, which sought not only the extension of trusteeship but also aimed at increasing the level of scrutiny exercised by the General Assembly over territories not yet included in the system. In particular, the non-administering members pressed colonial powers to provide information not merely on social and economic conditions, but on steps taken to advance ‘dependent’ peoples’ progress toward self-government. These initiatives were resisted by Creech Jones even more energetically than he had opposed calls to place more territories under trusteeship. The non-administering countries, he warned his colleagues, were engaged in a pernicious campaign to ‘widen the scope of the Charter by recommendations or resolutions designed to extend our obligations’. All such attempts were to be resisted, since we could not undertake to comply with a request which was calculated to involve discussion at the Assembly of political problems

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and which was designed to involve [sic] and embarrass and afford a platform for scurrilous misrepresentation at the United Nations … Undoubtedly at United Nations meetings we shall continue to meet a great deal of prejudice, ignorance and hostile criticism … We must recognise that in these matters there is likely to be a ‘hard core’ of inconvertible opponents – namely, the Slav bloc, India, and, probably for some time at least, the ‘coloured’ nations …83 The Colonial Secretary nonetheless recognised that the seeming abandon with which the Labour government was discarding its previous commitments, in justification of which even the ultra-loyalist FCB was hard pressed to find plausible explanations,84 was damaging both the party’s and the country’s credibility. Hector McNeil, as the minister most closely in touch with UN affairs, was also deeply concerned about the degree to which Britain had made itself unpopular in the General Assembly. While maintaining robustly that Britain’s difficulty ‘is not in our case … [but] primarily the terrifying ignorance of most delegations, and particularly the Middle East and South American ones, of Colonial administration, and particularly of our Colonial administration’, McNeil proposed in a personal letter to Creech Jones a novel method of boosting the government’s public image. [A] very attractive idea … would be to include as one of our alternate delegates next year a reliable, experienced subject from one of our colonial territories. A negro would be in a much better position … at the Assembly to advance our case if he actually believed in it than any of us ever are [sic]. It would be extremely difficult from the propaganda point of view for the Soviet [sic] or for India to attack him.85 Facing another torrid session at the forthcoming General Assembly, Creech Jones, with Bevin’s support, forwarded this ingenious suggestion in June 1948 to the Prime Minister, who gave it his approval.86 Their choice of a suitable spokesman fell upon Grantley Adams, president of the Barbados Labour Party and head of the Executive Council in the island’s House of Assembly. Adams was ideally suited to their purpose. An Oxford-educated lawyer who professed the belief that ‘the Labour Government is prepared to grant complete responsibility as soon as the Colonies are in a position to take it’, the strongly antiCommunist Adams, while ostensibly speaking for the people of the colonies, would ‘in fact be representing the United Kingdom and … act[ing] as a spokesman for H.M.G.’s policy’.87 Moreover, as the

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leading political figure of a territory on the brink of full independence, he was ‘implacably opposed to all attempts to place the Colonies under the supervision of the United Nations’.88 At the meeting of the TC that October, Adams proceeded to deliver the performance for which he had been selected. Speaking, he said, ‘for the peoples of the British Colonial Empire’, he rejected the suggestion that theirs was a ‘grim relentless struggle for freedom against reactionary colonial oppressors’. To the contrary, ‘We do not look upon the British Government as a ruthless exploiter. We do not regard the ties that link us with the British Crown as an intolerable yoke. Far from it.’ The government’s employment of Adams as a spokesman against UN scrutiny seems to have done little to improve its public standing at home or abroad. Although Creech Jones considered his inclusion in the delegation ‘a successful experiment’, the representatives of several other countries on the TC were unimpressed, describing Adams’s presence as ‘rather too obvious window-dressing’.89 The Pan African Federation, in a critical resolution, pointed out that Adams had no mandate to speak on behalf of any of the colonial peoples, far less all of them; while a member of the Advisory Committee on Imperial Questions observed that, purely as a matter of tactics, ‘no better service was done to the Trusteeship Council than the attack [he] made upon it’.90 Nor did the episode reduce the intensity of criticism directed at Britain’s reluctance to co-operate with the UN in the TC or the Assembly, or mitigate the increasingly resentful and bitter response of Labour ministers to these attacks. The Trusteeship Council, Creech Jones lamented four months later in what had become a ritual complaint, was motivated by ‘prejudice’, and had become ‘a forum for largely ignorant and often malicious criticism of the Administering Authorities …’.91 In a confidential circular to governors of African territories in July 1949, he indicated that the chief value the government attached to it was as a platform from which to broadcast the successes of British colonial rule: … the United Kingdom Delegation will continue to spare no effort to bring home to the Council a full and proper appreciation of the achievements of the United Kingdom in its administration of its trust territories, and an appreciation of the real nature of the problems with which we are faced. But, for so long as the present conditions in the Trusteeship Council last, much of the efforts of the United Kingdom Delegation will still, I fear, have to be devoted to the task of endeavouring to minimize the harm that might result from some of the Council’s more irresponsible debates and decisions.92

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Barely three years after the General Assembly’s first session, then, the Labour government had virtually ruled out any place for the UN in Britain’s colonial policy, although it was still prepared to consider the body as a dumping-ground for burdensome colonial liabilities, like Palestine or Eritrea, in which it had no vital economic or strategic interest.93 That it should have felt impelled to issue a public statement ‘denying the right of the United Nations to exercise any control or supervision over the affairs of the colonies’ was interpreted by the FCB as evidence that the General Assembly and the Trusteeship Council had become pawns of the Cold War, and served only to provide ‘an arena for “Iron Curtain” propaganda against the ”imperialism” of the West’.94 This is, however, far too simplistic an explanation. Not only did the real division in the Trusteeship Council lie, as Creech Jones privately acknowledged, between ‘administering’ and ‘nonadministering’ powers, but until March 1948 (and again from January to August 1950) the Soviet Union was engaged in a boycott of the Council in protest against decisions relating to the US trusteeship of Micronesia and Chinese Communist representation on the SC with which it violently disagreed.95 Of all the UN’s principal organs, therefore, the trusteeship system was impeded less by Cold War obstructionism than any other. The Minister of State at the Colonial Office, Lord Listowel, a former luminary of the FCB, tacitly admitted as much when he informed the House of Lords that the government’s principal reason for ‘not wishing to throw the Colonies into the area of debate at Lake Success’ was that ‘the criticism we receive from the United Nations is characterised by an absence of realism … which results naturally and inevitably from the ignorance and inexperience of non-administering powers’. Furthermore, as indicated in a 1950 Cabinet paper by James Griffiths, Creech Jones’s successor as Colonial Secretary, the Labour government objected not merely to supervision by the UN, but the interposition of any international authority, regardless of its political complexion. For that reason Griffiths argued that the European Convention on Human Rights, then in preparation, should exclude any provision for individuals from the colonies to be heard before the European Court: The bulk of the peoples in most Colonies are still politically immature and the essence of good government among such peoples is to establish respect for one single, undivided authority which they are taught to recognise as responsible for their affairs. The right of petition to an international body would obscure this principle and would suggest to Colonial peoples either that the ultimate authority in the affairs of their territory is not the Crown or that

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there is more than one ultimate authority. This confusion would undoubtedly be exploited by extremist politicians in the Colonies in order to undermine the authority of the Colonial Government concerned … administration would be made more difficult and agitation more easy … It is important that no such unnecessary handle should be offered to trouble-makers within or without Colonial territories …96 A definite factor in explaining Labour’s apparent volte-face on colonial internationalism, although no more than one among many, was the personal and political attributes of the Labour Colonial Secretaries. In 1949, Charles Greenidge, Woolf’s successor as secretary of the Advisory Committee, reminded another member, the West Indian economist W. Arthur Lewis, that the latter had previously warned him ‘not to expect much Socialist policy, as [Creech Jones] was already nobbled by his officials’. In light of the Labour government’s stance, Greenidge now concurred emphatically with this assessment. In his reply, Lewis wondered whether any purpose was being served by the Advisory Committee continuing to produce statements on colonial policy, ‘since a Labour Colonial Secretary seems to do just as his officials please, without reference to the documents we write’.97 While Greenidge and Lewis, two of the Advisory Committee’s more ‘progressive’ members, were clearly frustrated by the Labour government’s failure to give greater weight to their counsels, there is some force to their criticism of the Colonial Office’s incumbents. Certainly neither of Labour’s first two Colonial Secretaries could be described as a dominant personality. Hall left no discernible mark on the Colonial Office during his brief tenure there, while Creech Jones, though ‘arguably one of the ablest and best-informed Colonial Secretaries of the century, [was] a man who was weak in Cabinet and in the Commons and whom Attlee was thinking of removing when he lost his seat at the general election of March 1950’.98 But the same cannot be said of James Griffiths, who was Bevin’s choice to succeed him as Foreign Secretary99 and who made even fewer concessions to colonial internationalism than either of his predecessors. In any event, a narrow focus upon the characters of these three individuals fails to show how they, or their officials, were able to pursue such policies with so little fear of contradiction by their colleagues in Cabinet, Parliament or the party. Part of the explanation can be found in the umbilical connection that existed between the FCB and the administration in relation to which it was, in theory, intended to function as a ‘critic and spur’. As noted above, even during the days of the Churchill Coalition the FCB

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had worked energetically to ingratiate itself with the Colonial Office. After the ascension of its chairman to the Cabinet, the relationship between the two became so close that the FCB became little more than a quasi-autonomous adjunct of the official machinery of government. Its independence was further compromised by the appointment of four of its leading members, including Hinden, to Colonial Office committees and a fifth, Listowel, to the Under-Secretaryship.100 It was hardly to be wondered at, therefore, that in 1946 Creech Jones’s replacement as FCB chairman, Frank Horrabin, should publicly acknowledge that for political reasons the Bureau no longer felt free to criticise frankly the policies of a Labour government.101 Two years later, an individual member was to complain that ‘the Bureau merely seemed to be acting as a sort of Public Relations Officer for the Labour Government’s Colonial Ministers’, a charge concerning which the FCB’s record on colonial internationalism, at any rate, provides little basis for refutation.102 Of still greater importance, however, was the ideological milieu out of which most Labour colonial policy in these years emerged. As already mentioned, this structure bore the stamp of its Fabian architects, the Webbs, who regarded the British proletarian and his colonial peasant counterpart – although the latter to a far greater degree – to be fundamentally incapable of self-government and in need of the expert administrator’s services. Self-government, in the original Fabian schema, was no substitute for good government; and although this formula was modified at home it never ceased to apply to the colonies: as Listowel remarked in 1948, it was ‘no part of a truly progressive policy to hand over the responsibilities of government to the educated African oligarchy of the towns’.103 This left-wing variant of the British mission civilisatrice was reinforced by an element of Victorian racialism which was by no means extinct within the Labour Party in mid-century, an example of which can be found in the appalling vista that flashed before Dalton’s eyes when Attlee offered him the Colonial Office after the February 1950 general election. ‘I had a horrid vision of pullulating, poverty stricken, diseased nigger communities, for whom one can do nothing in the short run, and who, the more one tries to help them, are querulous and ungrateful … of friction over trusteeship at UNO … of Parliamentary questions by pro-native cranks and anti-native capitalists – all this in a rush of a few seconds.’104 The same tendency was also responsible for derailing a proposal in 1950 to replace Creech Jones with Aneurin Bevan, who, according to Dalton, was considered likely ‘to be carried away by his colour prejudice, pro-black and antiwhite’.105

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Most significant of all was the wartime reaction against national self-determination as a desideratum of Labour foreign policy. In his contribution to Fabian Colonial Essays, published just before the end of the war, H.N. Brailsford opposed the obsolete ‘Liberal’ concentration upon self-government to British socialists’ modern ‘economic approach to the problems of empire’.106 Creech Jones revealed how much he too had been influenced by this intellectual current when, in his first speech of the 1945 general election campaign, he drew an explicit parallel between ‘small states’ and ‘small colonies’ as entities that could never aspire to become ‘absolutely independent units … They must be associated with stronger Powers … if they are to survive either politically or economically.’107 An admirably concise encapsulation of the practical implications of this philosophy was provided by Hinden a year later in an exchange with Kwame Nkrumah at an FCB conference: When Mr. Nkrumah said ‘We want absolute independence’ it left me absolutely cool … British socialists are not so concerned with ideals like independence and self-government, but with the idea of social justice … To us the word ‘freedom’ is absolutely bound up with the idea of equality. When we say that the worker must be ‘free’, we think he must be free from the disabilities from which the workers have suffered. When you say you want to be ‘free’, you think that Britain should clear out.108 If demands by the colonial populations for self-determination were indicative of their failure to appreciate their true interests, however, similar demands on their behalf by the Trusteeship Council and the General Assembly needed to be resisted all the more energetically. The insistence by a majority of UN members that colonialism was a political institution, and their consequent pressure on administering powers to take concrete steps towards the political independence of their colonies, was seen by many Labour members as at best adhesion to a shibboleth, and at worst a smokescreen with which to disguise their hostility towards Britain itself. Thus Bevin declared, in an unconscious evocation of the Soviet polarisation of ‘economic’ and ‘political’ democracy, that the UN’s error lay in its ‘almost exclusive emphasis … upon political “independence” without any regard to social or economic advancement’; while a member of the Advisory Committee, Professor Victor Purcell of Cambridge University, demanded in 1949 to know why should ‘the Labour Party … give support to a commonplace of American “liberal” (i.e. anti-British) propaganda’ that the creation of colonies

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was ‘wrong ab initio, and that this wrong can only be righted by a complete transformation of their nature?’109 So common and so undisguisedly hostile to the very notion of international accountability did such pronouncements become that an appalled Brailsford, his earlier reservations about the fissiparous effects of colonial nationalism notwithstanding, wondered aloud in 1947 whether in its imperial policy the government was engaged in an effort to obliterate the internationalist principles for which he, Arthur Henderson and others had stood. The Labour Government … will not tolerate the criticism even of other White men. It claims the old-fashioned right to do what it will with its own, or (to use Joseph Chamberlain’s ugly phrase) to ‘wallop its own niggers’ … There remain[s] the hope that the United Nations might embody the conscience of mankind. This hope our Government is doing its utmost to destroy.110 Persuaded, then, of the ignorance or malignity of the other countries participating in the trusteeship system, Labour found it easy by 1950 to dismiss the idea of international supervision as a concept that had largely outlived its usefulness. Its reasons for doing so, however, were for the most part unconnected to the Cold War. Labour’s experience in the area of colonial internationalism, then, lends little support to the theory that, but for Soviet obstructionism in the Security Council, the UN would have evolved into a harmonious agency of world government.111 Rather, it demonstrates the fragility of the party’s internationalist commitment in the postwar period, and the corresponding correlation between Labour’s rapidly narrowing conception of world order and its expanding perception of national self-interest. There was, in fact, a fundamental similarity in the philosophy underlying Labour’s wartime attitude to the small European nations, and to the non-self-governing peoples of the British Empire after the war. In both cases, historical and material forces were held to have rendered obsolete their aspirations to a separate existence. Only as part of a larger entity, aligned with and ‘protected’ by one of the Great Powers, could they hope to avoid falling prey to another more ruthless still. Britain, as the most highly evolved Great Power, was particularly well qualified to offer such guardianship. So far from being, as British socialists sought in the late 1940s to portray it, an equal and freely chosen partnership between the metropole and the ‘less-advanced’ peoples, Labour’s version of ‘trusteeship’ in practice resembled the politics of the protection-racket, in which colonial peoples in the most literal of senses were to be made ‘an offer they couldn’t refuse’.

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NOTES 1. See especially D.K. Fieldhouse, ‘The Labour Governments and the Empire– Commonwealth, 1945–51’, in R. Ovendale (ed.), The Foreign Policy of the British Labour Governments 1945–1951 (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1984); D. Goldsworthy, Colonial Issues in British Politics 1945–1961: From ‘Colonial Development’ to ‘Wind of Change’ (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971); P.S. Gupta, Imperialism and the British Labour Movement, 1914–1964 (London: Macmillan, 1975), and ‘Imperialism and the Labour Government of 1945–51’, in J. Winter (ed.), The Working Class in Modern British History: Essays in Honour of Henry Pelling (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983); and S. Howe, Anticolonialism in British Politics: The Left and the End of Empire, 1918–1964 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993). For a recent discussion of colonial internationalism in the earlier part of the century, see M.D. Callahan, Mandates and Empire: The League of Nations and Africa, 1914–1931 (Brighton: Sussex Academic Press, 1999). 2. Shaw, Fabianism and the Empire. 3. Due note should, however, be taken of those Radical and Liberal critics of Empire – of whom John A. Hobson was the outstanding figure – who found their way into the Labour movement after the Great War. For discussions of the nature and limitations of the Edwardian Radical critique of imperialism, see B. Porter, Critics of Empire: British Radical Attitudes to Colonialism in Africa, 1895–1914 (London: Macmillan, 1968); Howe, Anticolonialism in British Politics, pp. 27–40. 4. V.M. Creech Jones, ‘Declarations of the Labour Party Concerning International Control of Colonies’, December 1944, Advisory Committee on Imperial Questions (hereafter ACImp.Q) No. 283, LPP. 5. Labour Party and Trades Union Congress, Memorandum on War Aims to be Presented to the Special Conference of the Labour Movement at the Central Hall, Westminster, London, S.W., on Friday, December 28th, 1917 (London: Co-operative Printing Society, 1917), p. 6; InterAllied Labour and Socialist Conference, Memorandum on War Aims Agreed Upon at the Central Hall, Westminster, London, S.W., on February 20th to 24th, 1918, p. 13. 6. As Partha Sarathi Gupta notes, Labour’s blindness to the ‘imperialism of free trade’ owed much to the high proportion of former Liberals who came to dominate the party’s colonial policy after the war, carrying ‘their Cobdenite assumptions about free trade and peace with them …’. Gupta, Imperialism and the British Labour Movement, p. 35. 7. See J.M. Winter, ‘The Webbs and the Non-White World: A Case of Socialist Racialism’, Journal of Contemporary History, 9, 1 (January 1974). 8. Shaw, Fabianism and the Empire, p. 15. 9. J.R. MacDonald, Labour and the Empire (London: George Allen, 1907), pp. 99, 102. 10. New Statesman, 2 August 1913. 11. Labour Party, The Colonial Empire (London: Labour Party, 1933). 12. In a January 1918 policy statement, the political consciousness of the ‘black’ races was declared to be too undeveloped and inchoate for them to take any meaningful part in determining their own conditions of life. ‘They can only make it known that the particular government under which they have been living is bad in some or all respects, and indicate the specific evils from which they desire liberation.’ 13. Henry Winkler, however, argues that, although members of the Round Table group were the first to ‘hit upon the idea of national control [of colonies] under international supervision’, its elaboration and development as a practical proposal during the war ‘stemmed in large measure from the wartime efforts of British Labor’. H.R. Winkler, ‘British Labor and the Origins of the Idea of Colonial Trusteeship, 1914–1919’, Historian, 13 (1951). 14. In practice all the ‘B’ mandate agreements, as ratified by the League in July 1922, were virtually identical. Their major provisions were for the prohibition of military bases and recruitment within the mandate except for policing and defence purposes; suppression

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15.

16. 17. 18. 19.

20. 21.

22.

23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28.

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of slavery; respect for native land rights; freedom of conscience and worship; maintenance of the Open Door for all League members; and acceptance of the jurisdiction of the Permanent Court of International Justice in the event of any dispute between League members over the application of these principles. See League of Nations, The Mandates System: Origins, Principles, Application (Geneva: League of Nations Publications Department, 1945); C.L. Upthegrove, Empire by Mandate: A History of the Relations of Great Britain with the Permanent Mandates Commission of the League of Nations (New York: Bookman, 1941), ch. 1; F.D. Lugard, The Dual Mandate in British Tropical Africa (London: Blackwood, 1922). J.F. Horrabin, ‘The Break With Imperialism’, in Addison et al. (eds), Problems of a Socialist Government. Henderson, Labour and Foreign Affairs, p. 10. L. Woolf, Mandates and Empire (London: British Periodicals, 1920); ‘A Labour Policy for the British Commonwealth of Nations’, 26 LPCR (1925). N. Leys, ‘Memorandum on Labour’s Colonial Policy’, February 1939, ACImp.Q No. 205, LPP. J.H. Thomas, Labour’s first Colonial Secretary, ‘was said to have introduced himself to his department heads with the statement, “I’m here to see there is no mucking about with the British Empire.”’ K. Harris, Attlee (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1982), p. 63. That is, those of 1921–23, 1926, 1929, 1931–35 and 1937. Thus before the Great War MacDonald had stated that ‘The Chinese and Japanese emigrant is … to the Trade Unions of Canada and Australasia just what the Russian Jew is to the Stepney workman … The power to exclude undesirable immigrants [and] to classify whole races amongst these undesirables … may be exercised by the selfgoverning States without in any way violating these Imperial traditions which as democrats we desire to preserve.’ Labour and the Empire, pp. 62–3. The prevalence of such fears was commented upon in 1920 by L.F. Rushbrook Williams, publicity officer of the government of India, who noted that ‘the average [Labour] workingman is in some danger of … regarding all the peoples of India as highly undesirable niggers whose mission in life is to undersell more civilised countries in the Labour market’. Quoted in Gupta, Imperialism and the British Labour Movement, p. 49. Ernest Bevin was equally anxious to keep colonial competition in check. In 1930 he told the Annual Conference of the Trades Union Congress: ‘I sit on a Colonial Development Committee under an act passed by the Labour Government, and I see the expenditure of millions of pounds going on for the development of areas where native races have not yet begun to be industrialised. You talk about the coal trade. Ought there not to be some control against the possible development of coal in Tanganyika and in East Africa, which might come into competition with your coal here at a time when the world does not want it?’ L. Haden Guest, The Labour Party and the Empire (London: Labour Publishing Co., 1926), pp. 89–90. Guest subsequently defected to the Conservative Party. L. Woolf, Imperialism and Civilization (London: Hogarth Press, 1928), pp. 133–4. G. Lansbury, Labour’s Way with the Commonwealth (London: Methuen, 1935), pp. 96–7. Ibid., pp. 116–17. C. Roden Buxton, The Alternative to War (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1936), pp. 35, 110–11. See also his ‘Peaceful Change’, March 1938, ACIQ No. 489, LPP. But by no means all. While Attlee condemned Buxton’s suggestions because ‘they contain only concessions to the aggressive States’, Dalton on his own initiative offered an assurance to visiting Nazi Party officials that, if Germany agreed to disarmament and rejoined a modified League, Labour would ‘be prepared to consider sympathetically German claims in the fields both of commerce and colonies’. Attlee to Buxton, 29 March 1938, Charles Roden Buxton papers, Mss. Brit. Emp. s. 405, 3/2, f. 42, Rhodes House Library, Oxford; Dalton diaries, 13 July 1938, British Library of Political and Economic Science.

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29. Labour Party, Advisory Committee on Imperial Questions, The Demand for Colonial Territories and Equality of Economic Opportunity (London: Labour Party, 1936), p. 48. The suggestion of ‘an experiment in international administration in some suitable area, e.g. in Polynesia’, was echoed two years later by Will Arnold-Forster. Colonies as a Trust (Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Institute of Public Affairs, 1938). 30. Labour Party, National Executive Committee, Labour, the War, and the Peace; ‘The Labour Party’s Declaration of Policy for Colonial Peoples’, April/July 1940, ACImp.Q No. 219A, LPP. 31. Woolf, ‘Draft Memorandum Formulating a Colonial Policy for the Labour Party After the War’, September 1941, ACImp.Q No. 236, LPP; Reid, ‘Comment by T. Reid on L.S. Woolf’s Memorandum No. 236’, November 1941, No. 236 (a), LPP; Green, No. 236 (c), LPP. 32. Reynolds, The Creation of the Anglo-American Alliance, p. 260. 33. 394 H.C. Deb. 5s., c. 69 (9 September 1941). 34. Jebb minute, 9 October 1942, FO 371/31526, U 1032/828/70. 35. Attlee, minutes of FO meeting, 10 September 1942, quoted in W.R. Louis, Imperialism at Bay: The United States and the Decolonization of the British Empire, 1941–1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978), p. 193. 36. Attlee, ‘The Application of Democratic Principles of Government’, 11 May 1943, CAB 66/38, W.P. (43) 199. 37. Labour Party, The Old World and the New Society: A Report on the Problems of War and Peace Reconstruction (London: Labour Party, 1942); 41 LPCR (1942), p. 155. The former statement declared Labour’s ‘admission’ of the fact that ‘for a long time to come the effective control of these territories must remain, under Parliament, in the hands of the Colonial Office …’. (p. 19). 38. ‘The Labour Party’s Declaration of Policy for Colonial Peoples’, April/July 1940, ACImp.Q No. 219A, LPP. 39. 42 LPCR (1943), p. 207. For the NEC, Noel-Baker welcomed the resolution ‘because it puts the demand of self-government by the Colonial peoples as the prime purpose of everything we do … [and] because it would establish the principle that the government of backward peoples is a trust, exercised by the ruling nations for the world at large’. Ibid., p. 208. 40. See Woolf, ‘Draft Memorandum Formulating a Colonial Policy for the Labour Party after the War’, September 1941, ACImp.Q No. 236; comments by Green and Reid, cited in n. 31 above; ‘Memorandum Formulating a Policy for African Colonies and Those in a Similar Stage of Development for the Labour Party after the War’, March 1942, ACImp.Q No. 236B, LPP; Labour Party, Advisory Committee on Imperial Questions, The Colonies: The Labour Party’s Post-War Policy for the African and Pacific Colonies (London: Labour Party, 1943). 41. Attlee speech, 6 September 1942, quoted in Labour Party Press Department, Labour in the War Government, p. 14. 42. Morrison speech, 27 November 1939, quoted in C.R. Attlee, A. Greenwood et al., Labour’s Aims in War and Peace (London: Lincolns-Prager, 1940). 43. Daily Herald, 29 January 1940. 44. Speech at Newcastle-on-Tyne, 12 January 1943. Morrison set little store on the idea that a major function of the international authority would be to supervise the colonies’ progress towards self-government. ‘It would be sheer nonsense – ignorant, dangerous nonsense – to talk about grants of full self-government to many of the dependent territories for some time to come. In those instances it would be like giving a child of ten a latch-key, a bank account, and a shotgun.’ 45. The Empire, he assured his audience, was ‘something for which there is no need to apologise. In other ears, perhaps, the word has a ring of domination; not in ours.’ Speech to the Anglo-American Press Association, 6 October 1944. Considerations of space unfortunately preclude the quotation of more than a small sample of the Home Secretary’s catalogue of chauvinist bêtises during the war years. For

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46. 47.

48. 49. 50. 51. 52.

53.

54. 55.

56. 57.

58. 59.

60.

61.

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a convenient compilation, the interested reader is referred to H. Morrison, Prospects and Policies (New York: Knopf, 1944). A.P.W. (44), 23rd meeting, 14 December 1944, CAB 87/66. Though not the Prime Minister. In a minute to Eden, he described his understanding of the APW Committee’s proposals as being ‘the best scheme that can be devised (1) to secure international agreement to the termination of the Mandate System and avoid its extension to enemy territories conquered in the present war; and (2) to allow foreign powers a means of expressing their reasonable and legitimate interest in Colonial territories without affecting our sovereignty and executive authority, or entitling them to meddle in constitutional questions, or establishing international bodies possessing powers of interference divorced from responsibility’. A.P.W. (45), 5th meeting, 5 March 1945, CAB 87/66; Churchill minute to Eden, 18 January 1945, PREM 4/31/4, M. 85/5. Emphasis in original. Attlee to Churchill, 5 March 1945, PREM 4/31/4. Memorandum by Stanley in Attlee, ‘International Aspects of Colonial Policy,’ 28 March 1945, W.P. (45) 200, CAB 87/66. Stanley, ‘International Aspects of Colonial Policy’, March 19, 1945, A.P.W. (45) 38; A.P.W. (45), 8th meeting, 26 March 1945, CAB 87/66. Dugdale to Attlee, ‘Colonial Policy’, n.d. (c. mid-April 1945), CAB 87/66. Churchill minute to Eden, 31 December 1944, PREM 4/31/4, M. 1257/4. Wm. Roger Louis has suggested that Attlee during the war was the ‘intellectual heir of the nineteenthcentury Little England’ tradition, and that he ‘stands out far less as a Labour ideologue than as an Englishman who chose to close ranks against the Americans’. This assessment, however, hardly seems consistent with his strong defence of the internationalist principle in 1942, and again as Prime Minister in 1945. Louis, Imperialism at Bay, pp. 48–9, 464. In 1946 Alexander nostalgically recalled the deep impression made on him during his boyhood by such apostles of Empire as Kipling and Henty, going on to observe that ‘I am glad that when the testing time came in May 1940 that [sic] I had not rejected what men call platitudes, for in such times the so-called platitudes became a verity of life.’ Quoted in M. Blackwell, Clinging to Grandeur: British Attitudes and Foreign Policy in the Aftermath of the Second World War (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1993), p. 11. Quoted in ibid., p. 154. Hence his observation shortly before the outbreak of the Second World War that ‘Our crime [in the colonies] isn’t exploitation, it’s neglect.’ Quoted in F. Williams, Ernest Bevin: Portrait of a Great Englishman (London: Hutchinson, 1952), p. 209. See also Bullock, Life and Times of Ernest Bevin, vol. I, pp. 627–34. Quoted in Howe, Anticolonialism in British Politics, p. 144. Cf. H.J. Laski’s Reflections on the Revolution of Our Time (1943), which in the course of a three-page discussion of colonial problems asserted that the only observable political consequence of the war in the Far East had been ‘the inert acceptance of their new [Japanese] masters by the native populations …’. List of members for 1947, Greenidge papers, 12/7, f. 1. Kenneth Morgan points out that even the leading lights of Labour’s younger generation had close family connections to the machinery of colonial administration. See K.O. Morgan, ‘Imperialists at Bay: British Labour and Decolonization’, in R.D. King and R. Kitson (eds), The Statecraft of British Imperialism: Essays in Honour of Wm. Roger Louis (London: Frank Cass, 1999), p. 235. The eight members of its consultative committee, who were responsible for most of the work undertaken by the Bureau, were Arthur Creech Jones (Chairman), Hinden (Secretary), Frank Horrabin, Julian Huxley, Margery Perham, Professors W. Arthur Lewis and W.M. Macmillan, and Woolf. Although the Colonial Office was initially hostile to the FCB, Creech Jones worked to convince officials of its anxiety to be ‘constructive’. After some time, ‘their sincerity and

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62. 63.

64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69.

70. 71. 72. 73. 74.

75. 76. 77.

78.

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patent goodwill towards the colonies thawed the Colonial Office and a relationship, friendly as well as businesslike, was established’. Pugh, Educate, Agitate, Organise, p. 189. Fabian Society, International Action and the Colonies: Report of a Committee of the Fabian Colonial Bureau (Fabian Research Series No. 75) (London: Fabian Publications, 1944). The New Hebrides experiment, frequently cited as evidence of the necessity for sovereign control of colonies, was not an example of administration by an international authority at all, but an Anglo-French condominium. The other oft-invoked case used to argue against international administration, the ‘Anglo-Egyptian Sudan’, was a legal fiction disguising the reality of a British protectorate. References to the successful international governance of the city of Tangiers, on the other hand, were conspicuous by their absence in British writings on Empire. ‘The Colonies and International Accountability’, April 1945, ACImp.Q No. 292, LPP. Labour Party Research Department, Speaker’s Handbook 1945 (London: Labour Party, 1945), p. 195. Fieldhouse, ‘The Labour Governments and the Empire–Commonwealth’, p. 103. Attlee, ‘Future of the Italian Colonies’, 1 September 1945, CAB 129/1, C.P. (45) 144. Bevin, ‘Disposal of the Italian Colonies and of the Italian Mediterranean Islands’, 10 September 1945, CAB 129/2, C.P. (45) 162. Creech Jones, according to Hugh Gaitskell, was ‘very angry at being Parliamentary Secretary to George Hall. He said, “I have just been talking to him. He knows nothing whatever about the Colonies … I am sick to death of doing other people’s work and letting them get the credit for it”.’ P.M. Williams (ed.), The Diary of Hugh Gaitskell 1945–1956 (London: Jonathan Cape, 1983), p. 10 (entry of 6 August 1945). A.J. Creech Jones and R. Hinden, The Colonies and International Conscience (Fabian Research Series No. 92) (London: Fabian Publications, 1945). Quoted in R.N. Chowdhuri, International Mandates and Trusteeship Systems: A Comparative Study (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1955), p. 73. R. Edmonds, Setting the Mould: The United States and Britain 1945–1950 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), p. 121. The New Statesman, on the other hand, aptly described the agreement as a ‘Blank Cheque for the Trustee’. New Statesman and Nation, 10 August 1946. Empire, 9, 1 (May–June 1946). Hinden’s justification of Labour’s generous interpretation of Article 84 was made on the ingenious ground that ‘The idea of absolving the peoples of a trust territory from responsibility for their own defence, accords very badly with the current idea of helping them to advance rapidly to self-government and to take their share in the responsibilities which devolve on all independent peoples.’ Ibid., 9, 3 (August 1946). It should be noted, however, that other administering powers were scarcely more scrupulous. The United States, for example, excluded the Trusteeship Council altogether from inspection of the former mandate of Micronesia that it had captured from Japan by designating these territories ‘strategic areas’, and – in an exceptionally tendentious interpretation of Article 79 of the Charter – denying any power but itself the right to approve the agreements legitimising this action, a stance that provoked a Soviet boycott of the TC until 1948. Bevin to Attlee, 3 January 1946, FO 800/508/UN 4611. CAB 128/6, C.M. 85 (46), 10 October 1946. See also the Cabinet Papers by Addison, 15 April 1946; and Hall, 16 April, both entitled ‘Trusteeship’, CAB 129/9, C.P. (45) 157, 158. Griffiths, Gordon-Walker and Younger, ‘South West Africa – Proceedings before the International Court of Justice’, 1 May 1950, CAB 129/39, C.P. (50) 88; CAB 128/17, C.M. 28 (50), 4 May 1950. See speeches of Harry Hynd and Zilliacus respectively in 413 H.C. Deb. 5s., cols 667–8, 879–80 (22 and 23 August 1945).

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79. Hall, ‘International Trusteeship System – Future of Territories Now Held under Mandate’, 17 December 1945, CAB 129/5, C.P. (45) 342; Cabinet minutes, 20 December 1945, CAB 128/2, C.M. 64 (45). 80. Morning session, 12 June, 45 LPCR (1946), p. 149. 81. Speech by Creech Jones to GA Fourth Committee, 13 October 1947, file 9/5, f. 173, Creech Jones papers, Mss. Brit. Emp. s. 332, Rhodes House Library. Emphasis in original. 82. United Nations, General Assembly: Official Records. Fourth Committee: Trusteeship. Summary Record of the Forty-Fourth Meeting, UN GA A/C, 4/SR.44, 14 October 1947. 83. ‘United Nations General Assembly, 1947 – The Colonial Question’, 30 January 1948, CAB 129/24, C.P. (48) 36. 84. The FCB conceded that Creech Jones’s ‘violent’ opposition to strengthening the trusteeship system at the 1947 GA must have seemed ‘bewildering …’. But this did not mean that Labour ministers had turned their backs on their past professions. ‘The British attitude springs from a deep-seated lack of confidence in the motives at work on these United Nations decisions.’ Moreover, what ministers had promised ‘was that the principle of accountability should be extended to all territories. This has been done under Chapter 11, and does not in any way imply the use of the existing Trusteeship Council.’ Empire, 10, 6 (December 1947). Emphasis in original. 85. McNeil to Creech Jones, 4 November 1947, FO 800/508/UN 4611, UN/47/16. 86. Bevin to Attlee, 28 July 1948, PREM 8/913, P.M./48/64. The ‘choice of such a person’, Paul Mason of the FO noted unctuously, ‘… would be a salutary reminder to those members of the United Nations who attack our colonial administration of the degree of enlightenment and advancement which in fact prevails in the Empire’. Some of the gloss was taken off this self-congratulatory statement by a minute in which a CO functionary described the precautions he had found it necessary to take to find a London hotel for the delegate and his wife to stay in which there would be ‘no likelihood of any unpleasant incidents arising from Mr Adams’ colour’. P. Mason to A.H. Poynter, CO, 25 May 1948; minute by J.E. Hebecq, 9 September 1948, CO 936/5/3. 87. F.A. Hoyos, Grantley Adams and the Social Revolution (London: Macmillan Caribbean, 1988), p. 133; minute by A.N. Galsworthy, 24 August 1948, CO 936/5/3. 88. ‘A Barbadian at UNO’, Empire 11, 5 (December 1948). 89. Creech Jones, ‘United Nations: Non-Self-Governing Territories and Trusteeship’, 7 February 1949, CAB 130/32, C.P. (49) 24; minute by J.M. Martin, n.d. [c. 1 July 1950), CO 936/36/13. The experiment was not repeated in 1949, although the following year Creech Jones’s successor, James Griffiths, appointed the Fijian Sir Lalabaluvu Sukuna, a loyalist lieutenant-colonel in the British Army, as an adviser to the British TC delegation. 90. Hoyos, Grantley Adams and the Social Revolution, p. 140; Wilfred Benson, speech to the Colonial Service Course, Cambridge, 30 November 1948, file 26/2, f. 65, Greenidge papers. 91. Creech Jones, ‘United Nations: Non-Self-Governing Territories and Trusteeship’, 7 February 1949, CAB 130/32, C.P. (49) 24. The Secretary of State’s view echoed that of one of his officials, who characterised the TC in March 1950 as ‘an entirely misguided and obstructive organ used solely for anti-British propaganda’. W.G. Wilson to A.N. Galsworthy, 23 March 1950, CO 936/56/4. 92. Creech Jones, ‘Fourth Session of the Trusteeship Council’, 7 July 1949, 25151/13/49, file 15/4, f. 55, Creech Jones papers. 93. A year after Britain’s transfer of the Palestine mandate to the UN in 1947, Bevin proposed to place Eritrea under the trusteeship of Ethiopia, the latter being furnished for this purpose with a legislative council on which the local inhabitants and representatives of four neutral UN states would have a majority. CAB 131/5, D.O. (48), 15th meeting (6 August 1948).

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94. ‘UNO and Colonies’, Empire, 11, 4 (October 1948); ‘What is UNO Doing?’, Venture, 1, 10 (November 1949). 95. A fact to which Bevin drew the Cabinet’s attention, in a memorandum which reads somewhat ironically in view of the Colonial Secretary’s attitude. ‘An example of effective United Nations work, of the kind which was hoped for when the organisation was founded, has been given to some extent by the Trusteeship Council. It is impossible to doubt that we owe this example to the fact that the Trusteeship Council has been boycotted by the Russians.’ Bevin, ‘The Threat to Western Civilisation’, Annex II: ‘The Soviet Refusal to Co-operate in the United Nations’, 3 March 1948, CAB 129/25, C.P. (48) 72. 96. Griffiths, ‘Council of Europe – Convention of Human Rights: Right of Individual Petition’, 28 July 1950, CAB 129/41, C.P. (50) 189. Bevin and his Minister of State at the Foreign Office also held that ‘the establishment of a European Court of Human Rights was unnecessary and undesirable’, and that individuals ought not to be permitted to complain to an international body that their rights had been violated. In view of the loopholes the British had written into the Convention, however, it was proposed to accede to the Court’s establishment ‘if it appears that His Majesty’s Government in the United Kingdom would be one of an embarrassingly small minority in opposing it’. Younger, ‘Council of Europe – Convention on Human Rights’, 25 July 1950, CAB 129/41, C.P. (50) 179. 97. Greenidge to Lewis, 27 October 1949; Lewis to Greenidge, 15 November, file 12/9, fols 122–3, Greenidge papers. 98. Fieldhouse, ‘The Labour Governments and the Empire–Commonwealth,’ p. 86. Christopher Mayhew noted in 1946 how Bevin ‘lays down the law to Arthur CreechJones [sic] … in the most imperious way’. Attlee later described his appointment of Creech Jones as ‘one of my mistakes’. Mayhew diary, 20 March 1946, quoted in Time to Explain (London: Hutchinson, 1987), p. 93; Harris, Attlee, p. 446. 99. Bullock, Life and Times of Ernest Bevin, vol. III, p. 758. 100. Goldsworthy, Colonial Issues in British Politics, p. 131; Pugh, Educate, Agitate, Organise, p. 225. 101. ‘… the Bureau is a Department of the Fabian Society, and thus it has not quite the same freedom as a political party. As an affiliated organisation of the Labour Party there are certain limitations on its freedom of propaganda.’ Horrabin address, transcript of Fabian colonial conference, 12–14 April 1946, file 69/3, f. 236, FCB papers. 102. David Goldsworthy has argued that ‘it would be wrong to regard the Bureau as a body concerned chiefly to justify the ways of Labour ministers’, citing the occasions on which the FCB offered criticism of government policy on points of detail. But this opposition, where it existed, was expressed in the most muted language and never pressed very far. Much more frequent were testimonials in this vein: ‘We feel confident … that the Colonial Ministers are absolutely sincere in their desire to fulfil the Party’s programme. Any charge of insincerity is unworthy and stupid. The more exaggerated hopes and disappointments are borne [sic] of political naïveté, and some of the individual criticisms spring from ignorance or misrepresentation of the facts.’ Goldsworthy, Colonial Issues in British Politics, p. 133; Empire, 9, 1 (May–June 1946). 103. Quoted in Fieldhouse, ‘The Labour Governments and the Empire–Commonwealth’, p. 108. For a discussion of the ideological roots of Fabian ideas of ‘trusteeship’, see M. Cowen and R. Shenton (eds), ‘The Origin and Course of Fabian Colonialism in Africa’, Journal of Historical Sociology, 4, 2 (June 1991). 104. Dalton diary, 28 February 1950. 105. Ibid., 30 October 1950. 106. H.N. Brailsford, ‘Socialists and the Empire’, in R. Hinden (ed.), Fabian Colonial Essays (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1945), p. 23.

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107. Creech Jones speech to the Anti-Slavery and Aborigines Protection Society, 7 June 1945, in International Trusteeship of Colonies (London: Anti-Slavery and Aborigines Protection Society, 1945), p. 7. 108. Report of discussion at FCB conference, ‘The Relationship between Britain and the Colonial Peoples’, 12–14 April 1946, file 69/3, fols 183, 237, FCB papers. 109. Bevin to Attlee, 3 January 1946, FO 800/508/UN 4611; Purcell to Greenidge, 2 August 1949, file 12/9, f. 92, Greenidge papers. 110. H.N. Brailsford, ‘Were We Utopians?’, New Statesman and Nation, 10 December 1949. For the similar – but all too rare – protest of another veteran internationalist, Will Arnold-Forster, see ‘Trusteeship or Annexation,’ New Statesman and Nation, 5 April 1947. 111. For an expression of which, see the Labour Party Speaker’s Handbook 1949–50, pp. 404, 406.

7

Socialism in One Country: The Failure of Labour Europeanism

The Labour campaign in favour of European union represents the most serious attempt during the 1940s to synthesise the doctrines of the two major internationalist camps within the party. The idea of a western European political authority was not so much a compromise between ‘Whig’ and ‘muscular’ variants of internationalism as a discrete movement which incorporated elements of both. It was indebted to the former for the ideal of evolution towards an ever more inclusive political entity, superseding the nation-state’s claim to absolute and irresponsible sovereignty; and to the latter for the concept of power as an indispensable attribute of an international authority – the conviction that the organisation must possess both the determination and the means to enforce its will in a fallen world. It is the more surprising, then, that the movement should have made so little headway within the party during these years. One part of the explanation is that Labour Europeanism was until the 1960s an exclusively backbench affair, unable to claim the effective support of any figure of real influence in the NEC or Transport House. It thus lacked a voice within the higher counsels of the party, as well as a visible rallying-point around whom support could be gathered. These were serious handicaps. Nevertheless, proponents of a European union possessed substantial advantages of their own – widespread disillusionment with the universalism of the League and its successor, fear of economic and political subservience to the emerging superpowers, apprehension over the danger of a fourth major European war in 70 years, the readiness and indeed the anxiety of Continental socialists to defer to British leadership of a postwar European federation, and the prospect of significant cross-party support. That they made so very poor a hand of such valuable cards is a generally neglected aspect of Labour’s decision to keep Europe at arm’s length during this period, a stance which has usually been attributed solely to the intransigence

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of the party’s frontbench.1 But neither the immediate failure, nor subsequent partial success, of the campaign within the Labour Party for an international organisation of the western European states can be explained simply in terms of the balance of political power between the contending factions. To a greater degree than had been the case with the UN, European political integration raised fundamental questions about the meaning and distinctiveness of British national identity, as well as of the ‘British road’ to socialism, that Labour politicians from left and right found deeply unsettling. The extraordinary alliances, and even more extraordinary arguments, arrayed against Labour Europeanists by their colleagues from both ends of the ideological spectrum can be fully understood only by examining the extent to which their proposals threatened to expose many of the party’s – and the country’s – deepest and least articulated convictions of a uniquely British communal nature and purpose.

FEDERAL UNION The emergence of a pro-European faction in the Labour Party was a direct result of the collapse of the League and Britain’s consequent involvement, for the second time in a single generation, in a war whose origins lay on the European continent. Previous statements of interest in European federation were few, vague and often contradictory, as was demonstrated by Labour’s subscription to a call by a conference of Allied socialist parties in 1916 for the ‘unity, independence and autonomy of the nations in the peaceful Federation of the United States of Europe and the World’.2 Before 1939, the principal agitation in favour of a European federation had been conducted by a handful of small Continental organisations, the most significant of which was the Pan-Europa society founded in 1922 by an Austro-Japanese aristocrat, Graf Richard von Coudenhove-Kalergi.3 Only on one occasion did their efforts show any sign of bearing fruit, when in September 1929 the French Premier, Aristide Briand, suggested in a speech to the League Assembly that economic prosperity required the creation of ‘some kind of federal bond’ between European nations. The ‘Briand Plan’, elaborated in a French memorandum circulated to western European governments the following May, was a minimalist document which actually contained little that could be described as federalist, insisting as it did on the sovereign independence of member-states and ruling out a European customs union as incompatible with the principles of the League. Nevertheless, even this modest proposal for a loose regional association within the League failed to make headway

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in the face of a combination of sauve qui peut protectionist sentiment, Dominions hostility and the British Labour government’s traditional Francophobia. Neither Arthur Henderson nor his lieutenants NoelBaker and Dalton appeared to regard Briand’s initiative as more than a manoeuvre to advance French interests at Britain’s and Germany’s expense. To the extent that they took the proposal seriously, they saw it as a temptation to the League’s most active and vigorous members to divert their attention toward more limited and parochial objectives.4 By the time Labour left office in 1931 the Foreign Office had written off the idea of a European organisation on even the most limited political or economic scale as impracticable, to the apparent indifference of government and party alike. The adoption of a system of reciprocal preferences between Commonwealth countries at the Ottawa Economic Conference in 1932 provided final confirmation, if any were still required, of the importance of European integration in Britain’s scale of priorities. The resurrection of this idea, after having to all appearances been buried with a stake through its heart, came in response to political rather than economic imperatives. The League’s failure in Manchuria and Abyssinia, as we have seen, led many in the Labour Party and beyond to conclude that an international organisation whose centre of gravity lay in Europe could at best be relied upon to focus its attention upon European problems alone. At Munich in 1938 the refusal of Britain and France to come to the aid of Czechoslovakia, a democratic state to the defence of whose territorial integrity and political independence they were bound by the Covenant and, in the case of France, by bilateral treaty, undermined even this modest assumption. In view of the seemingly immovable reluctance of the League’s leading members to contemplate warlike measures against aggression unless their own interests were directly threatened, many British people became convinced that no commitment by wholly sovereign states, however solemnly undertaken, could ever again restore credibility to the betrayed ideal of collective security. A considerable number, driven to reassess their most basic beliefs about the way the international system worked, proceeded directly to the conclusion that internationalism was a dangerous mirage from which only the dictators had derived any benefit, an assessment that a gallery of repentant pro-Leaguers from Lord Vansittart on the right to A.L. Rowse on the left broadcast to their compatriots with the ardour of the painfully disillusioned. To others, the lesson of the League pointed in a different direction. An abstract principle like collective security, they contended, could never realistically have been expected to inspire the masses to risk losing their lives and property in its defence – especially if the beneficiaries of their sacrifice lived half a world away. On the other

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hand, to fall back upon the doctrine of unrestricted national sovereignty would be to play into the hands of Hitler and Mussolini, who had exploited with such success the nationalist fervour of their own peoples and the grievances of irredentist minorities beyond their borders. The creation of a political union in western Europe offered a way out of both these difficulties. Elastic enough to accommodate many diverse cultures, yet cohesive enough to embody a common European civilisation valued by all its citizens, a continental federation would, they argued, be a potent instrument for peace while providing a focus for emotional identification that legalistic formulations like the League had always lacked. Over and above these considerations, an even more powerful argument in favour of European federation at the close of the 1930s was the fact that most of the alternatives had already been tried without success. The undercurrent of desperation that lay beneath limited federal schemes was clearly apparent in the Churchill Coalition’s lastditch attempt to keep France in the war by proposing unilaterally the immediate creation of a Franco-British Union in June 1940. It is difficult to see in this offer, with its appearance – a not wholly inaccurate one – of having been drawn up on the back of an envelope, anything more than a quixotic gesture by ministers clutching desperately at any remaining straws,5 and it is almost inconceivable that, even if the French government had accepted it, any union between the two countries could have been sustained on more than a pro forma basis into the postwar period.6 Nevertheless, the fact that the leaders of all three main political parties, for however brief a moment, were prepared to entertain a proposal that would have been unthinkable under any circumstances 20 years earlier is indicative of a limited but definite shift in attitudes respecting Britain’s relationship to the European continent. That shift, moreover, was not confined to the political élite, but was visible in the emergence of a number of highly active national organisations in the late 1930s and early 1940s which saw Britain’s future in the world in terms of its involvement in Europe rather than the overseas Empire.7 Whether favouring an organic association growing out of shared functional arrangements or a fully fledged political federation, the new movements were united by the conviction that a divided Europe was doomed to recurring conflict, and that no European union could be brought into being unless Britain took the lead in launching it. The most important of these Europhile groups was Federal Union, launched formally in January 1939. Even though the society’s influence declined markedly during the later stages of the war, it made a lasting contribution during its early years as a nursery of Labour

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internationalists. Like its Great War counterpart, the League of Nations Society, Federal Union was formally politically independent: in reality, the organisation served most effectively as a launching-pad for the parliamentary careers of young and enthusiastic Labour and Liberal pro-Europeans. Its theoretical work notwithstanding, the true significance of Federal Union during the war lies in its recruitment and nurturance of a critical mass of Europeanists on the centre-left until they were sufficiently well organised to continue the struggle in the party-political arena. The society was formed by a trio of young university graduates who came together in the wake of the Munich crisis to discuss the worsening international situation. Charles Kimber, an oil-company executive and self-professed ‘Macmillanite’, and Derek Rawnsley, the idealistic but politically unschooled owner of a print shop, had become convinced that war was inevitable unless a new international system, organised around the principle of participatory democracy rather than the sovereignty of nation-states, could be created in place of the League. They were joined by a Liberal barrister, Patrick Ransome, who had studied under Laski at the London School of Economics and been influenced by his views on internationalism. It was Ransome who steered the fledgling society away from the notion of revising the League Covenant and towards the idea of a federal supranational state with its nucleus in western Europe. FU quickly attracted the attention of a number of influential figures associated with the Royal Institute of International Affairs, including the Commonwealth historian W.K. Hancock; Philip Kerr (Lord Lothian) and Lionel Curtis of the journal Round Table; the former Times editor Wickham Steed; and the Labour activist and London University don Barbara Wootton, who saw in it ‘a step towards world government … the only way of putting an end to war’.8 The lastnamed three constituted themselves a Panel of Advisers for the new society, issuing a broadly worded manifesto signed by 35 ‘progressive’ notables which invited prospective supporters to attach their own names and encourage their friends to do likewise. This petition elicited hundreds of responses from across the political spectrum, among them an eclectic contingent from the Labour Party – Ernest Bevin, George Catlin, Arthur Creech Jones, Evan Durbin, C.E.M. Joad, Kingsley Martin and Leonard Woolf.9 From the Liberals William Beveridge came forward to offer support; as did a handful of maverick Tory parliamentarians like Richard Law, Albert Braithwaite and Sir Joseph Leech; and the recently arrived Austrian refugee, Friedrich von Hayek. Even King George VI was sufficiently inspired by the federal idea to propose to the Foreign Secretary in the wake of the fall of

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France that Britain should enlist the United States government in support of a declaration of the two countries’ willingness ‘to assist, by financial and economic means, any form of federation which the countries of Europe desire to enter voluntarily …’.10 At this point, however, Federal Union was more a vehicle for protest against ‘more of the same’ in foreign policy than an organisation with a coherent philosophy of its own. Many of its less prominent adherents, like the three founders, were youthful idealists with little or no previous involvement in political life; some were relics of prewar Liberal internationalism for whom practical as opposed to moral considerations were distinctly secondary if they entered into the equation at all; while others, including some of the original signatories of the manifesto, conceived of the society as little more than the British branch of the identically named movement in the United States founded almost simultaneously by Clarence Streit. An ever-present complication running through the history of Federal Union in Britain was the confusion arising in the minds of the public – and, for that matter, many of its own members – between its specific objectives and those of Streit’s separate organisation. A Rhodes Scholar from Missouri, junior member of the US delegation to the Paris Peace Conference in 1919, and League of Nations correspondent for the New York Times during the 1930s, Streit had come to believe that the sole factor worthy of consideration in international politics was the ideological struggle between democracy and autocracy. For most of the 1930s, he observed, the democratic states had been under continuous assault from the dictatorships, and the proposition that liberal-democracy had become decadent or obsolete was gaining more and more converts at both ends of the political spectrum. After comparing statistics of population, wealth, mineral resources, share of world trade and other such indices, however, Streit concluded that the true situation was precisely the opposite. It was in reality the democratic countries that were dynamic and powerful: the resources of Germany, Italy, Japan and the Soviet Union, even in combination, were insignificant by comparison. Yet because of their suicidal attachment to national sovereignty – all the more illogical in view of the fundamental congruence of their governmental structures and political ideals – the democracies were suffering themselves to be dominated and dictated to by countries whose moral and material resources were far inferior to their own. The facts are: Fifteen democracies together practically own this earth, and do not know it. Each of these democracies was made to secure precisely the same object, the freedom of man, and they all

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forget it. These democracies have no one but themselves to blame for their difficulties and to fear for their freedom, and they do not see the beam for the mote. United, these fifteen are (within human limits) almighty on this planet … United, these fifteen democracies become impregnable, secure beyond danger of attack, and the world is made safe from further economic and military warfare. But they are not united. There and nowhere else is the rub.11 Streit’s solution was that these leading democracies – the United States, Britain and its Dominions, Ireland, France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Switzerland and the Scandinavian countries – should assemble at a constitutional convention and form a permanent federation, following the century-and-a-half-old precedent of the thirteen American colonies. In 1937 he set forth his proposals in a privately published manifesto entitled Union Now, which in the spring of 1939 was reissued commercially in New York and London. Appearing just in time to benefit from the heightened public anxiety generated by the German occupation of Prague and the failure of the League to respond to the most flagrant of Hitler’s aggressions to date, the book enjoyed a spectacular success, going through 15 editions in less than a year and eventually selling more than 300,000 copies.12 Abandoning journalism, Streit returned to the United States shortly before the outbreak of the war and set up Federal Union, Inc., to promote the ideal of democratic federation to the US people. Although the three founders of Federal Union in Britain dismissed Streit’s scheme as ‘totally unrealistic’ and ‘undesirable’, they were unperturbed by the fact that an organisation with a much higher profile, sharing their name but little else, had come into being. Indeed, they were confident that British FU could ride the coat-tails of Streit’s success and rapidly gain a mass membership of its own. To that end, they prevailed upon the British publishers of Union Now to insert a membership application for their own society within every copy sold. This was a serious tactical blunder. FU’s founders were certain that the entrenched nature of US isolationism would defeat any attempt to include the United States in such a scheme, and that in any event the shared cultural traditions essential to a viable federation existed only in western Europe. As Kimber later recalled, We were not anti-Yank, but Europe to us had a special identity, and it was as a European institution that we had criticised the League and were seeking to replace it … Since everyone’s attention was focused on Europe we simply assumed that, like us, everyone

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else would take it for granted that the Federal Union we were proposing would be European.13 Their appeal to the readers of Union Now, however, had precisely the opposite effect. Although this helped to boost recruitment in the short term, many of the new members were Streit adherents who vigorously opposed any deviation from his ideas as a betrayal of the federalist cause.14 The division within the movement was exacerbated still further when the two most active members of the Panel of Advisers, Curtis and Lothian, whose long-standing advocacy of Empire federalism in the Round Table had anticipated many of the arguments of Union Now,15 became ‘totally sold on Streit’ and commenced an agitation to replace Kimber and the Europeanists in FU with their own nominees.16 The result was to create a permanent ideological schism which gravely weakened the organisation during its critical early years. The outbreak of war temporarily masked FU’s internal dissensions, as members from both wings concentrated upon the crisis at hand. Like the Labour Party, FU took the propagation of a democratic revolution in Germany as one of its principal objects. This theme occupied a prominent place in the society’s first publications: a leaflet bearing the optimistic title ‘Offer Federal Union to the German People and Paralyse Hitler’s Armies’; a Penguin Special written by W.B. Curry, headmaster of the experimental Dartington Hall school; and a more detailed and technical discussion of federalism by the distinguished constitutional lawyer W. Ivor Jennings.17 In view of the fact, then, that the immediate policies of the two organisations were proceeding along parallel lines, it is unsurprising that so many prominent Labour internationalists should have been drawn to FU, although here too the division between ‘Streitites’ and Europeanists asserted itself. By early 1941 the list of FU officeholders from the Labour Party included – in addition to those already mentioned – Noel Brailsford, Ritchie Calder, John Parker, Henry Usborne, Francis Williams and Konni Zilliacus. Other Labour members, including Harold Wilson, donated their services to the Federal Union Research Institute, set up in 1940 by Beveridge to investigate the practical problems of federalism. A number of trade unionists, among whom the most conspicuous were George Gibson, president of the TUC, and Walter Padley of the shop-workers’ union, USDAW, likewise lent their support to the movement. The Co-operative Party, which maintained a permanent electoral alliance with Labour, officially adopted federation as the basis of its foreign policy, and several youthful Party activists – most notably Christopher Mayhew, the future Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State at the Foreign Office – publicly announced their support for the idea.18 Furthermore,

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the meteoric growth of the society, which claimed more than 10,000 members in 253 branches nationwide at the end of its first year, made an impression even upon those Labour leaders who were not instinctively sympathetic to its ideas. Thus Dalton, in a bid to attract FU adherents, called upon the Chamberlain government to ‘apply themselves to a scheme for a federal Europe after the war’,19 while Attlee declared in his ‘peace aims’ speech of 8 November 193920 the belief that ‘Europe must federate or perish’, a statement which later would return to haunt him as Prime Minister. In January 1940, the party’s Press, Publicity and Campaign committee concluded that federalism had gained so much public attention that Labour ought to take a formal stance on the question.21 No less remarkable than the society’s rapid development, however, was the hostility it evoked from opponents on both wings of the Labour Party. In July 1940, the ex-Communist John Strachey published a Left Book Club volume which conflated the British and US versions of Federal Union, condemning both as ‘the form in which imperialist policy is inclined to present itself today’ and inverting FU’s ‘revolutionist’ rhetoric to argue that such a union was precisely what the German people were fighting against – not to mention being the eventuality that the USSR had signed the Nazi–Soviet Pact in order to prevent!22 Both he and D.N. Pritt, who unleashed a broadside of his own against FU in the same year, maintained that the true cause of war was not unrestrained national sovereignty but the capitalist economic system.23 That judgements of this sort were not confined to the fellowtravelling element but reflected the opinions of at least the more callow variety of Labour intellectual, is indicated by a paper coauthored by the youthful Anthony Crosland, which in a relentless vulgar-Marxist exegesis blasted FU as ‘an anti-Red herring’ whose ‘parrot-cry’ of ‘Federate or Perish’ was little more than ‘a euphemism for “Federate or Capitalism will perish”.’24 But Labour moderates were just as likely as their colleagues on the left to collapse both versions of federation into a single category and to view them as a threat to their own preferred ideals of international government, as did Noel-Baker when he rejected criticism of the League Covenant for failing to limit national sovereignty as giving ‘far too much away to the advocates of “Union Now”.’25 The fervour of Labour opposition to FU was hardly justified by the level of political influence the movement proved able to exercise. Combining administrative incompetence with ideological incoherence, the society was ill equipped even during its heyday to capitalise upon its remarkable growth in membership. An internal report early in 1940 described the ‘pitiful inadequacy’ and ‘chaos’ of FU’s organisation, an

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assessment confirmed a few months later when an audit revealed the movement to be several thousand pounds in debt. As a society with an unusually youthful demographic profile, moreover, FU was badly hampered by the call-up of many key members to the armed forces.26 But the most serious impediment to the movement’s success remained a lack of agreement over fundamental objectives. While FU’s statement of aims, adopted by a delegate conference in February 1940, sidestepped these divisions by calling only for ‘a federation of free peoples under a common government’ as the first step towards an eventual world federation, the organisation’s inability to decide between a regional and an ideological basis for union compelled its leaders to stand behind the dubious proposition that federalism was as much an end as a means; and that any federation, between however many countries, and for whatever purpose, was to be welcomed. A vivid illustration of the political dead-ends into which such heterodoxy could lead the movement was provided in 1941 by the campaign waged within FU by the former Cornell political-science professor and Labour activist George Catlin – who was equally opposed to proponents of European federation and supporters of Streit – for an immediate union of Britain, the United States and the Dominions, an entity to which he gave the name ‘AngloSaxony’. This scheme, which might uncharitably be described as an attempt to erect a theory of international organisation upon a foundation of Rotary Club-dinner bons mots,27 was envisaged by its author as a reconstitution of Britain’s extended cultural hinterland, in which ‘negroes from Nigeria as well as the negroes from Alabama’ would come together in recognition of their common allegiance to ‘a Great Black British Empire’. Catlin was likewise persuaded that ‘there is very strong and genuine feeling in both Norway and Holland in favour of joining the British Commonwealth and re-cementing the old historic lands of the Empires of Canute and of William of Orange’. As for the remainder of Europe, AngloSaxony would be entitled ‘to compel federation … and to tell States, small or great, who [sic] declined to co-operate that it would treat them as the [American] North treated the Secessionist States of the South …’. But Catlin was confident that the process of creating his ‘organic union’ could be achieved peacefully by an Anglo-American Conference headed by the British King and the President of the United States, whose assistants might be ‘Mr de Valera, General Smuts, or King Haakon …’.28 Unsurprisingly, this idiosyncratic proposal made little headway within the ranks of the Labour Party, attracting praise only from the amiable but undeniably unintellectual First Lord of the Admiralty, A.V. Alexander.29 The most remarkable aspect of Catlin’s exotic scheme, however, was the fact that FU was prepared to promote

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it alongside its competing programmes for European and world federation, rather than risk provoking a breach within the society.30 It was nevertheless from its personnel rather than the often eccentric quality of its proposals that FU derived its greatest significance. A particular case in point was the society’s chairman, R.W.G. (‘Kim’) Mackay, who was to become the leading theoretician of Labour Europeanism during the next decade. Born in Australia in 1902 to British parents, Mackay came to London in 1934 to practise as a solicitor with his cousin Leslie Hale, the future Labour MP for Oldham. A protégé of Cripps, a successful companies lawyer and a political activist of prodigious energy and organisational ability, Mackay soon plunged into the political fray, standing as Labour candidate for Frome (Somerset) in the 1935 election. In his ideological development he derived little from the Marxist doctrines of his mentor, identifying instead with the ethical socialism of R.H. Tawney, another of FU’s early supporters.31 Elaborating upon the latter’s critique of irresponsible power, located both in the domestic class structure and the institution of state sovereignty, Mackay argued that the achievement of social justice in Britain was impossible in an international system organised on a basis of the war of all against all. Reversing the traditional socialist maxim that economic inequalities were the underlying cause of political divisions, he contended that a political order that regarded the inhabitants of neighbouring countries as economic rivals gave rise to tensions that would eventually lead to war. Although, like many other Labour moderates, he looked initially to the League to provide the nucleus of a global socialist commonwealth,32 Mackay had by 1940 become convinced that the answer lay closer to home and that the securing of peace for Britain and the world was essentially a European problem. Mackay’s faith in the potential of European federation was fundamentally an argument from the negative: whether their economies were capitalist, socialist or communist, members of federal systems like the United States, the USSR or his native Australia did not carry their differences to the point of war with each other, whereas fully sovereign states regularly did. It did not follow, on the other hand, that one could ‘group any number of … States in a federation and say: “That federation will solve the problem of national sovereignty.”’33 Geographical and political considerations were no less important. This, in his view, was the obvious truth that both the Streit variant of Federal Union and the Round Table advocates of imperial federation within the British wing of the organisation had overlooked. An ideological union of the sort Streit favoured would, if successful, merely provoke a combination of the dictatorships and divide the world into

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two hostile camps. Nor could the British Commonwealth, as Lothian and Curtis believed, offer a suitable model for federation. The real force making for Commonwealth unity was the Empire’s military, economic and political dependence upon the resources of the metropolitan country; yet this had not deterred Ireland from opting out of the Commonwealth’s war with Germany, or prevented South Africa from nearly doing likewise.34 Mackay predicted that the war would accelerate existing centrifugal tendencies in the colonies and provide additional incentives to most of the self-governing Dominions ‘to link their fortunes to the Pacific and the U.S.A. rather than to Europe and Great Britain’.35 Once freed of these extra-European impediments, Britain would recognise its principal postwar task as the achievement of a lasting reconciliation between itself, France and Germany, a problem which only the creation of a federation consisting of those three at least, with exclusive power to regulate external affairs, defence, customs and currency, could satisfactorily resolve.36 The most cogent statement of the federal case to that point, Mackay’s call for a western European union, published in April 1940, propelled the Europeanist wing of FU into the ascendant at least for the moment. A much more daunting challenge, however, was to marshal a pro-European majority in Parliament. To the disappointment of the Labour contingent in FU, party leaders displayed no readiness to move beyond vague intimations of sympathy with their cause. While Labour published in 1940 a pamphlet by Woolf calling for a FrancoBritish Union ‘to be expanded, as early as possible, into a federation of West-European democracies’,37 official policy statements rarely went so far as even to acknowledge European unity as a question deserving close scrutiny. Apart from Attlee’s brief and ambiguous statement of November 1939, FU never managed to secure anything resembling a definite commitment from any member of the Labour hierarchy. As already noted, its lack of success in this regard was preordained to some extent by Transport House’s determination to avoid making any statement on foreign affairs that might embarrass the frontbench or cut across the coalition’s policy. But the diffidence of Labour’s leaders also reflected their lack of interest in purely European questions, as opposed to relations with the Great Powers and the Dominions.38 The widening gap between FU and Labour, on the other hand, carried implications potentially troubling to the latter. As members of a wholly autonomous movement, supporters of European federation already possessed a vehicle of their own for influencing public opinion. Should they choose to convert it from a pressure-group to an organisation aiming at political mobilisation, they would present a significant

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challenge to a party already under fire from its own grassroots for failing to give a lead in foreign affairs. Labour’s vulnerability in this respect was increased by its adhesion to the electoral truce, which simultaneously alienated many activists who chafed at the restrictions it imposed, inhibited the party from campaigning effectively at local level and raised fears that a rare window of opportunity to seize the initiative from the Tories was being lost. Apprehensions that Labour’s wartime inaction would pave the way for a new ‘khaki election’ and a second Versailles Treaty became so pronounced that, in 1941, a group of prominent figures in the media and politics came together under the chairmanship of one of FU’s first members, the author and broadcaster J.B. Priestley, to try to ‘give the war effort a leftward turn’.39 The following year this so-called ‘1941 Committee’ merged with the Forward March movement launched by the Christian Socialist, Sir Richard Acland, to form a new political party of the centre-left, Common Wealth. From the beginning Labour members of FU worked hand-in-hand with both organisations. Konni Zilliacus, although not formally a member of the 1941 Committee, ‘co-operated actively with the international side of the Committee’s propaganda and research work’,40 while other notable Labour supporters like Ritchie Calder and Kingsley Martin also participated in its activities. By far the most important of the ‘renegades’, however, was Mackay himself, who resigned from Labour in June 1942 to contest a by-election at Llandaff and Barry on a platform including European federation, subsequently accepting the post of Common Wealth party secretary. Mackay’s action was less an abandonment of Labour than an attempt to save the party, as he saw it, from the consequences of its own torpidity. Although some of his new colleagues harboured more expansive ambitions, he himself never regarded Common Wealth as anything more than a wartime ‘stand-in for the Labour party’. His candidacy nonetheless created a dilemma for FU, confronting it with the choice of compromising its political independence or failing to assist its own chairman to further the society’s objectives. The National Council resolved this difficulty by passing a resolution authorising officers to provide support to any candidate who agreed to endorse federalism, following which FU enthusiastically threw itself behind Mackay’s campaign. Common Wealth, in response, adopted European federation as the main plank of its international policy. On the whole, Common Wealth seems to have got the better of this bargain. Even though Mackay narrowly failed to defeat his Conservative opponent, the infant party could only have benefited from its association with a nationwide movement which provided it

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with a distinctive and coherent foreign policy and whose idealistic overtones appealed to Common Wealth’s predominantly suburban middle-class membership. The already low standing of Europeanism in the Labour Party, on the other hand, was diminished still further by Mackay’s defection. Attlee’s and Bevin’s response to what they interpreted as a hostile act was to demand that their names be removed from FU publications as ‘supporters of the federal idea’;41 and in 1943 the NEC placed Common Wealth on the list of banned organisations notwithstanding the latter’s policy of contesting only those seats in which, as a result of the electoral truce, no Labour candidate was standing. Labour officials, according to Mackay, carried their vendetta still further, conducting a ‘dirty-tricks’ campaign of slander against him personally.42 Whatever the truth of these charges may be, the fact remained that, in making an enemy of Labour, FU had committed the second serious blunder of its brief history. Mackay’s resignation from the party may have been actuated by the best of motives; but by enabling Labour to write off European federation as the policy of an opposing movement, he damaged the cause he was most anxious to promote. Furthermore, by excluding himself from Labour circles just at the moment when the NEC was beginning a serious scrutiny of postwar problems, he lost whatever opportunity might have existed to secure a commitment to an agency of European government at least as one element of the party’s policy. Convinced that Labour’s continued participation in the Churchill Coalition was leading both the left and the cause of European federation to disaster, Mackay remained indifferent to these considerations. No European union, he argued, was achievable ‘unless there is a Socialist Government in Britain to co-operate with the Socialist Government in the U.S.S.R. to bring it about’. Since Labour had seemingly passed up the opportunity to secure victory for socialism while the war persisted, the responsibility lay with Common Wealth to ‘stir up the left-wing forces of this country’ until such time as the Labour front bench should come to its senses, withdraw from the government and bring together ‘by affiliation or otherwise’ the ILP, the Communists, Common Wealth and all other left-leaning organisations in a united socialist front.43 This optimistic scenario, however, was based on two fundamental misconceptions: that the Soviet Union would view with favour the appearance of a non-Communist super-state on its western border, and that the pressure of public opinion would compel Transport House to adopt a political strategy it had implacably opposed for more than 20 years. There was less excuse for the second of these misapprehensions than the first. Misled by Common Wealth’s remarkable run of success in by-elections between 1943 and 1945, when it

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captured four seats from the Conservatives (often with the covert assistance of local Labour organisations), Mackay too readily concluded that left-wing voters were responding to the foreign policy his party was upholding in trust for Labour. In the wake of another impressive performance at Rusholme in July 1944 in which a Common Wealth candidate had come close to capturing what had been one of the safest Tory seats in the country, he declared that ‘Socialists and the rank and file of the Labour Party believe in the abolition of national states, in a European federation and a world federation …’.44 Not only was this an unwarranted projection of the agenda of one party onto the members of another, but it even misconstrued the nature of Common Wealth’s own appeal. As Angus Calder has persuasively argued, the Common Wealth phenomenon owed far more to middleclass voters’ fears of a reversion to prewar Toryism and to the absence of an effective left-wing opposition than to the distinctiveness of its policies.45 Deprived at the end of the war of its transitory advantage as the only ‘safe’ outlet for the expression of anti-Conservative sentiment at election time, Common Wealth’s support would evaporate as quickly as it had arisen. Largely through Mackay’s tactical missteps, then, European federation at the end of the war quickly became a political orphan. Labour’s sweeping victory in the 1945 election, and Common Wealth’s no less comprehensive defeat, confirmed the negligible appeal of Eurocentric policies for the mass of British voters. Reduced to a single parliamentary seat, Common Wealth had no option but to accept Transport House’s terms in exchange for the absorption of its leadership into the Labour Party. With only nine federalist members returned in the new Parliament,46 Mackay and the other Labour members of FU faced the task of rebuilding support within the party for the European cause almost from scratch.

THE LABOUR EUROPEANISTS Fortunately, some basis for such an operation already existed in the form of the nascent ‘Third Force’ movement.47 During the latter stages of the war a number of left-wing Labour activists had become increasingly conscious of the ideological vacuum in the party’s foreign policy created by the League’s demise, as well as the extent to which the strain of war had increased Britain’s economic, strategic and intellectual dependence upon the United States. Newly elected to the Commons in 1945, members of this tendency – of which Richard Crossman, Michael Foot and Ian Mikardo were the outstanding figures – began

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to agitate against the ‘Atlanticist’ orientation of the government’s foreign policy. Broadly marxistant in economic if not in political terms, they questioned the viability of any international organisation predicated upon the unity of nations possessing antagonistic economic systems, and consequently reposed little faith in the ability of the UN to prevent a trial of strength between the two great power-blocs of East and West once the menace of the common enemy, Germany, had been removed. Should such a contest take place, they believed, Britain’s traditional policy of allying itself with one side to prevent an attempt at world domination by the other would prove futile: marooned in no-man’s-land between the two superpowers and far more vulnerable to attack than either, it was certain to become the first casualty of any future war no matter with which side it chose to align itself. The moral to be drawn from these considerations was set out in the first detailed programme for a Third Force, published by Crossman at the beginning of 1946. The ‘natural’ direction in which European politics was tending, he asserted, would, unless the superpowers intervened, culminate in the formation of an Eastern group associated with the USSR and a Western group associated with Britain. This was to be welcomed, for it was with its immediate neighbours that Britain’s true interests lay: We have old friendships there which have been proved in the trials of war. We have markets there without which we become the economic bondslave of the U.S.A. And, above all, we have a common interest with our neighbours in Western Europe in relation to the prospects of a third world war … Whether we call it by the name or no, we form a natural neutrality union in the post-war world, bound together by our determination not to become involved in the struggle for world domination between America and Russia, if that struggle should begin.48 The Third Force concept, however, had more ambitious objectives than was implied by a mere declaration of non-involvement in the Cold War. As the largest and most powerful democratic socialist state, Britain had the potential to become a rallying-point for European nations repelled both by the social backwardness of US capitalism and the anti-democratic methods of Soviet communism. Thus it might emerge as the leader of an ideological union, occupying the centre ground both geographically and politically, and capable of offering to the world a practical yet idealistic and humane alternative to the materialist philosophies of East and West.49

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It was natural, in view of the similarity of their respective programmes, that Europeanists and Third Force proponents would find themselves working together in pursuit of their common objectives. In November 1946 the leading Labour federalists supported an amendment to the King’s Speech calling for a reorientation of foreign policy along the lines indicated in Crossman’s article, while five months later Mackay and Christopher Shawcross added their signatures to a pamphlet co-authored by Crossman, Foot and Mikardo, Keep Left, containing the authoritative expression of Third Force ideas.50 In return, the loose coterie of backbench critics which became known as the ‘Keep Left group’ subscribed virtually en masse to a Commons motion drafted in 1947 by Mackay expressing support for European federation. Yet there were significant differences between the two wings of the alliance. For Keep Left, the overriding problem was to maintain Britain’s non-aligned stance in the face of escalating tensions between the two superpowers, a priority born to some extent of its members’ reflexive anti-Americanism.51 Its European policy was a means to an end: in Crossman’s view, it made little difference whether the Third Force emerged ‘by a formal constitutional act or by functional ad hoc organization …’.52 To committed Europeanists, on the other hand, the Cold War was, if not entirely an abstraction, at all events an issue whose merits were largely distinct from the question of whether European institutions of government ought to be created. So few allies could Mackay and his colleagues claim in the immediate postwar years, however, that they felt strong pressure to seek out support wherever it could be found. This sense of isolation propelled them toward their second injudicious excursion across party lines. Their partner on this occasion was none other than the Leader of the Opposition, Winston Churchill, who had been conducting an independent European policy of his own since the end of 1945. The sincerity and depth of Churchill’s interest in European union is a question that continues to provoke debate.53 During the war he had praised the ideas of Coudenhove-Kalergi, whose right-wing vision of ‘Paneuropa’ as a Christian bulwark against ‘Bolshevist internationalism’ coincided in many respects with his own.54 As noted in Chapter 4, his scheme for a postwar world organisation had featured a European council, although its precise nature and functions were never made clear. But in view of his abrupt loss of interest in the question after his return to power in 1951, it is not excessively cynical to conclude that the primary attraction of European unity for Churchill while in opposition was the opportunity it afforded him to project himself as a statesman on the world stage while simultaneously embarrassing the Labour government. Both motivations were apparent in a widely

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applauded speech he delivered at Zürich on the question in September 1946. A masterpiece of ambiguity, the address condemned the failure of the Big Three to remain united, and called for the creation of ‘a kind of United States of Europe’ of which Britain, the United States and the Soviet Union would act as ‘friends and sponsors …’.55 Four months later, Churchill became chairman of a British Committee for United Europe whose secretary was his son-in-law, Duncan Sandys, and on which three leading PLP Europeanists, Gordon Lang, Evelyn King and Lord Lindsay of Birker, accepted seats.56 As had been the case with Common Wealth, the three parliamentarians’ involvement with the United Europe committee constituted another example of Labour Europeanists lending themselves to an organisation at odds with the leadership of their party and obtaining nothing of substance in return. Although the committee was politically balanced between the three main parties, and although its public offspring, the United Europe Movement launched in May 1947, professed non-partisanship, both organisations were generally, and correctly, seen as instruments of the Conservative Party.57 Nor was this popular association of Europeanism with Toryism compensated for by a more effective mobilisation of public support than FU, whose position the United Europe Movement significantly undermined, had been able to achieve.58 Explicitly disavowing ‘any great mechanism of areas and branches, membership drives and intensive canvasses’, lacking any definite policy and almost entirely dependent upon subventions from Conservative donors for its survival, the Movement was little more than a Trojan horse which was allowed to disappear in 1950 after its usefulness to its sponsors had expired. By fraternising with it, Labour Europeanists succeeded only in discrediting their cause in the eyes of the party leadership, already thoroughly antagonistic to the idea, and dissipating their energies on an organisation whose ineffectiveness was all but foreordained. Not until late 1947 was any concerted effort made to mobilise support for European integration within the PLP itself. In September Mackay dispatched a circular letter to all members which argued that federation by continents alone could restore credibility to the party’s foreign policy by making the UN ‘a real world government instead of the present unreal organisation based as it is on the “sovereign equality of all peace-loving states”’.59 A period of canvassing followed, culminating in the launch on 2 December of a PLP Europe Group to ‘promote the political and economic integration of Europe’. At the inaugural meeting Mackay was elected chairman, John Hynd vicechairman and Christopher Shawcross secretary. Belatedly recognising the necessity to distinguish Labour’s European policy from that of the

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Conservatives, Mackay repudiated from the outset any association between the new organisation and ‘the Churchill Group or other groups likely to use the United Europe project as a device for dividing the West against the East …’. Instead the group would conduct detailed studies ‘to find whether a positive British Socialist Foreign policy may be constructed on the principle of European Union’.60 At its peak in 1948, the PLP Europe Group numbered 80 backbenchers, drawn predominantly from the centre and left of the party. Many of these, however, seem to have been nominal members: at the fortnightly meetings, the number in attendance rarely exceeded two dozen. The formation of the Europe Group signified a more realistic approach on the part of Labour Europeanists who, after nearly a decade of activity, tacitly acknowledged thereby that the creation of a pro-European majority in the party would require a long process of consensus-building. Had they continued to harbour doubts upon this point, the diversity of opinion within the group itself should have sufficed to disabuse them. After only three meetings, deep divisions appeared between a federalist wing, led by the officers, which insisted on the necessity of a political union of western Europe; and a functionalist camp which, employing the arguments of David Mitrany, contended that economic co-operation offered the only means of drawing Europe together without exacerbating political tensions. A third element ‘appeared to be against both methods’.61 In the hope of reaching some consensus, members agreed that each of the three factions should draw up papers summarising its own position, copies of which were presented and discussed at a meeting of the group in March 1948. The federalist paper, drafted by Mackay, Hynd, Christopher Shawcross and Sydney Silverman, reiterated that adhesion to the UN Charter did not ‘involve any real limitation of national sovereignty or any extension of socialist principles’, whereas a European union having as its ‘main aim, the creation of a trading area large enough for its economic development … on the basis of a planned collective economy’ could achieve both. It was important, however, to ensure that whatever federation was created ‘should not be directed or appear to be directed, as an alliance military or otherwise against the Soviet Union or any other state of Europe’.62 For the functionalists, Aidan Crawley replied that the chief priority was to restore the devastated economy of Europe, a task that political federation might as easily hinder as help. The Europe Group’s function should therefore be to impress upon the government the need to co-ordinate the Continent’s basic industries, leaving political questions to one side until the economic problems had been solved. The third paper, by

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William Warbey and Leah Manning, earned the condemnation of federalists and functionalists alike for maintaining that nothing less than world government would suffice while declining to offer any suggestions as to how it might be achieved.63 The group was thus presented with a clear choice between the first two papers: in the vote that followed, a majority rejected the proposition that political fusion was indispensable to a planned European economy and endorsed the functionalist position.64 Thenceforward, Labour Europeanists were to be permanently divided into two camps: a hard core of federalists and a larger, though on the whole less active, functionalist group. The result of this exercise, then, showed how little common ground existed even within Labour’s pro-European wing, revealing in the process a distinct lack of consistency and rigour in the arguments of both of the contending parties. The federalists’ identification of ‘a planned collective economy’ as the ‘main aim’ of European federation, for example, was contradicted by their subsequent admission that a union was desirable even if it were not socialist. ‘As socialists we desire to see a socialist federation of Europe, but as democrats, we must work with other political parties to bring about a European Parliament which we hope will become a socialist parliament.’ Likewise, their demand that European unity should not be capable of being perceived as directed against the USSR negated what many on Labour’s right would have regarded as the most cogent argument in favour of federation. The functionalists, on the other hand, assumed – as Mitrany himself had done – that economics and politics were wholly separate domains, and that it would be possible to create vast European economic agencies without addressing the question of how and by whom they were to be controlled.65 Serious though these internal divisions were, the Labour Europeanists had much upon which to build. Although a distinct minority within the Parliamentary Party, the members of the PLP Europe Group were disproportionately drawn from the younger and more intellectually agile cohort of Labour MPs. In the network of well-established and dynamic integrationist movements active on the European continent they could find readily available sources of support and ideological stimulation. While not the force it had been in the early 1940s, Federal Union remained to hand as a nationwide lobbying organisation, enabling the pro-European case to be put forward without the taint of partisan politics. Relatively few contemporaneous political campaigns, in either the domestic or the external spheres, could boast of such an advantageous position.

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USING ‘EUROPE’, ABUSING THE EUROPEANS Although consensus on the form of a possible European integration policy for Labour had proven elusive, the real battle within the party was not to be fought in the Europe Group, whose membership did at least share a common commitment to closer ties with the Continent. The difficulty was rather to overcome the opposition of the four-fifths of the PLP who were not members of the group and who regarded the prospect of European union involving Britain with acute suspicion. This category included, to a greater or lesser degree, the entire Labour frontbench. The question of a specifically ‘European’ policy did not arise for the government until the end of 1947.66 During the first two years of peace, the Prime Minister and Foreign Secretary had been preoccupied with the attempt to reach a modus vivendi with the Soviet Union – an effort that was finally abandoned after the failure of the Council of Foreign Ministers’ meeting in November 1947 – and the problem of convincing the United States of the need to lighten Britain’s military and economic burden. Throughout that period, Bevin’s only serious initiatives with respect to western Europe as a political or economic unit had been twice to raise at Cabinet, and then defer, consideration of a customs union, an idea he had first aired publicly at the TUC Annual Conference in 1927.67 His renewal of interest in European integration, although following by a matter of days the launch of the PLP Europe Group, was unconnected to backbench sentiment in the party. Rather, it signified on the Foreign Secretary’s part a characteristic mixture of anxiety and ambitiousness regarding Britain’s influence in the world. In the absence of some inspiring and positive international ideal to set before the peoples of western Europe, Bevin was becoming increasingly worried that their will to resist constant Soviet pressure would eventually be worn down. While living standards obviously needed to be improved as a matter of urgency, it seemed to him vital to offer Western Europeans an alternative to Communism on the political as well as the economic plane. Moreover, the fact that relations with the USSR had broken down beyond hope of repair meant that Britain need no longer hold back from a closer co-ordination of Europe out of solicitude over Soviet fears of the emergence of a ‘Western Bloc.’ At the beginning of 1948, after discussing the matter with the US Secretary of State, George Marshall, Bevin presented a paper to the Cabinet recommending the creation of ‘some form of union in Western Europe’ to include Scandinavia, the Low Countries, France, Italy and Greece in the first instance, with Portugal, Spain and Germany

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participating when circumstances permitted. This ‘need not take the shape of a formal alliance’, but could be accomplished through ‘close consultation with each of the Western European countries …’. Such an arrangement, supported by ‘power, money and resolution and bound together by the common ideals for which the Western Powers have twice in one generation shed their blood’, might not only benefit the Continentals, but enable Britain once again to confront the superpowers on level terms. Provided we can organise a Western European system such as I have outlined above, backed by the power and resources of the Commonwealth and of the Americas, it should be possible to develop our own power and influence to equal that of the United States of America and the U.S.S.R. We have the material resources in the Colonial Empire, if we develop them, and by giving a spiritual lead now we should be able to carry out our task in a way which will show clearly that we are not subservient to the United States of America or to the Soviet Union.68 As Bevin’s unconscious paraphrase of Churchill’s Zürich formula (‘a kind of United States of Europe’) indicated, he had no very clear vision of the type of system he wanted to create. At first glance, his proposal to place Britain at the head of a ‘Western Union’ capable of standing up to the superpowers recalled the notion of a Third Force, and it was this aspect that he chose to accentuate in his speech announcing the new policy to the Commons on 22 January, the more pro-European elements of which were inserted at the last moment by his Parliamentary Under-Secretary, Christopher Mayhew.69 An explanatory memorandum by his principal private secretary, however, showed that Bevin’s concept of European integration was at once more extravagant and more ephemeral than any of the schemes urged on him by Keep Left,70 being capable of description as ‘European’ only in the loosest sense. At one end of the globe Bevin envisaged the system extending to the countries of South America, which were to agree to supply food and raw materials to western Europe in exchange for a defensive alliance involving a revived form of lend-lease. At the other, India and Pakistan were to be included on similar terms, and ‘with the whole middle zone stretching to Indonesia and Malaya, our Middle Eastern problems would fall into place in this wider perspective’. The Secretary of State’s general conception is that under the umbrella of the new 5-power treaty which we hope to get in the

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near future, we should work out a much wider scheme for the general coordination and defence of the whole world outside the Soviet orbit. What we should in fact be aiming at is a U.N.O. as it should have been had the Soviet [sic] cooperated. Since we could not rely on Soviet cooperation we must, without actually doing away with the U.N.O. machinery, develop on more practical and realistic lines a world organisation which would gradually be extended from the Western European nucleus.71 The grandiosity and vagueness of this plan found their mirror-image in the methods Bevin proposed to employ to bring it into being. Giving a literal application to his call for Britain to provide a ‘spiritual lead’ to Europe, the Foreign Secretary declared his intention to mobilise ‘behind the whole concept of Western Union in the widest sense … all the great religious faiths, Christian, Moslem, Buddhist, etc. … in opposition to communism. Before, however, attempting to organise Islam and Buddhism it is essential to arrive at some unity among the Christian Churches.’ To this end Bevin planned, in a fit of ecumenical enthusiasm, to meet with the spiritual heads of the Anglican, Catholic, Nonconformist and Presbyterian churches in Britain and persuade them to participate in a world congress of Christian churches ‘on the basis of the defence of religion, peace, liberty and social justice’.72 On a slightly less exalted plane, the Foreign Secretary also proposed to make arrangements for closer and more expeditious consultation with the Commonwealth governments; to undertake a coordinated study of the defence problems of the entire non-Communist world; and to strengthen the European socialist parties ‘under British leadership and under the slogan of “Democratic Socialism” as distinct from “Social Democracy” (with its Marxist associations)’. Too much ought not to be made of this curious programme, for all that it represented what now passed for internationalist thought on the Labour frontbench. The product of unrealistic assumptions, wishful thinking and, perhaps, an unconscious need to assuage Britain’s wounded amour-propre in the wake of its humiliating retreat from Greece and Turkey the previous year, Bevin’s master-plan was never to descend from the realm of abstraction to the world of practical politics.73 It nonetheless revealed much about the Foreign Secretary’s conception of European integration, in what it omitted no less than in its positive prescriptions. Above all, the absence of any discussion of common political structures for the Continent, even as a far-distant goal, made clear the extent of Bevin’s determination to keep his European neighbours at a safe distance. The point was further emphasised in a Cabinet paper in which he warned his colleagues of the risks involved

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in ‘associating ourselves with partners in Western Europe whose political condition is unstable and whose actions may be embarrassing to us’, although he concluded that the chance was worth taking so long as Britain’s influence remained ‘decisive on major issues’.74 It was a small but suggestive indication of how seriously Bevin regarded these risks that he should apparently have considered the task of transcending the centuries-old rift between Canterbury and Rome as a more palatable – and practical – recourse for the government than giving the barest consideration to the idea of European federation. It should, nevertheless, be acknowledged that in this respect the Foreign Secretary’s attitude differed little from that of the great majority of his party. In the second half of the 1940s, expressions of disdain by Labour policymakers for their European neighbours’ ways of life, political and economic systems and ascribed national characteristics reached levels unprecedented in the party’s history. While an element of chauvinism has always been present within Labour – as the careers of Robert Blatchford, Ben Tillett and E.D. Morel attest – never before had open displays of hostility and contempt toward the peoples of the Continent been so prevalent, or so indiscriminate. The roots of such prejudice no doubt are numerous and complex, bound up as they are with deeply entrenched concepts of British national identity.75 Nevertheless, there can be little doubt that the experience of the Second World War played a pivotal rôle, reinforcing British particularist tendencies and nourishing on the left the tendency to regard all Continental Europeans as cut from the same bespattered cloth.76 Wartime prejudices, in turn, fuelled Labour’s jaundiced outlook with respect to European integration. The carefully fostered myth of Britain ‘standing alone’ after the rest of western Europe had tamely surrendered to the Nazis77 not only contributed to widespread national hubris – a disease to which Labour was no more immune than other parties – but cast a searching light on the collective ‘moral fibre’ of the Continentals. To many Labour policymakers after the war, the fate of these peoples – whether aggressors, collaborators or capitulators – was best explained in terms of intrinsic defects of national character. In the Darwinian test that had been the Second World War, Britain alone had demonstrated the durability of its traditions and its institutions. It followed that any future integration that took place should be on the basis of Continentals conforming themselves to British norms, rather than the reverse.78 The belief among Labour leaders that an almost Manichaean division existed between the British and other Europeans thus deeply coloured, if it did not predetermine, their political attitudes. It most commonly found expression in the form of a denial of the latter’s capacity to

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internalise, or even fully comprehend, the liberal-democratic values that were said to inhere in the former. At a dinner-party in 1947, for example, at which Mackay’s proposals for European political and economic integration were debated, Evan Durbin ‘passionately denounced the idea on the grounds that none of these other countries, except small and uninfluential powers like Belgium, Holland and Scandinavia, were particularly well fitted for the democratic way of life … nor had they our traditional tolerance and kindliness’.79 William Pickles of the Fabian Society, differing only in his explanation for this democratic deficit, attributed Britain’s immunity to the ‘political schizophrenia’ peculiar to Continental Europe to the fact that in the British case ‘the Parliamentary tradition preceded the growth of universal suffrage …’.80 For M. Phillips Price, the problem lay with the Europeans’ lack of integrity and public-spiritedness: ‘no continental country has a civil service of such honesty and efficiency as ours and … the middle classes of the continent, unlike our own, have no taxpaying tradition’.81 Douglas Jay, on the other hand, saw Continental countries’ enthusiasm for federation as a confession of their lack of ‘confidence in, or loyalty to, their own fragile constitutions’, a consideration which for him explained why the French evangelist of European integration, Jean Monnet, ‘talked as one whose country had been defeated in the war’.82 Hence, as Hector McNeil, Bevin’s Minister of State, argued in October 1949, Britain’s natural partners in the world were the United States and the Commonwealth, not the European nations. ‘Anti-European feeling is a commonplace of British thought. Everyone had relatives in the USA and Canada. Most have no one in Europe, except the dead of two wars.’83 It was all of a piece, therefore, with Labour ministers’ expressed attitudes that a Cabinet committee memorandum in July 1949 should have offered as one of the weightiest arguments against the construction of a Channel Tunnel the danger that such a project would lead to ‘the weakening of that unquestioning sense of superiority over the peoples of the continent that forms an essential element of British self-confidence and which has proved of value in recent times’.84 Closely related to this scarcely veiled contempt for Britain’s European neighbours was the anxiety felt by many Labour activists that to consort too closely with Continentals would be to risk contamination from societies harbouring doctrines inimical to British traditions or democratic socialist values. Three of these ‘alien’ creeds – Catholicism, Communism and capitalism – gave rise to particular concern on both wings of the party. Hostility to the influence of the Catholic Church, a sentiment which united individuals who agreed on little else and which may have drawn strength from Labour’s traditional

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Nonconformity, was seen as an especially powerful argument against British involvement in European union. Kingsley Martin, for example, one of a number of prominent Labour intellectuals in whom antiCatholic paranoia assumed the same proportions and fulfilled the same psychological imperatives as did belief in the Judaeo-Masonic conspiracy for devotees of the extreme right,85 warned a colleague in 1949 that the Vatican was plotting ‘to govern the world’ and regarded ‘all means … justified to that end’.86 ‘Everywhere I see the growing strength of Catholicism as the organisation that is used by Capitalism to try and restore itself in this unhappy continent.’87 Western Union, according to Martin, was one of the tools over which the Pope’s divisions were trying to gain control for the purpose of extending the shadow of Romish ‘totalitarianism’ across the globe. In a 1948 radio talk for the BBC on this theme, the more inflammatory parts of which the Corporation refused to transmit, he accused officials in the State Department of pursuing a European integrationist policy in response to pressure from the US Catholic hierarchy, creating the possibility that ‘Catholicism will dominate Western Union’.88 Such sentiments, although less stridently expressed, were commonplace on left and right of the party alike, frequently coupled with assertions that the forces of Catholicism and capitalism were working in harness to ensnare Labour Britain within a right-wing superstate. Thus Zilliacus characterised the ‘Western Bloc policy’ as congenial to ‘the black international, the unholy trinity of clericalism, militarism and big business in Europe’,89 while his ideological antithesis James Callaghan gave as the principal reason for opposing European federalism the certainty that ‘such a Federation would be Catholic, Liberal and Reactionary’.90 Nor were these attitudes confined to the back benches. In 1950 McNeil’s successor as Bevin’s deputy, Kenneth Younger, confided to his diary in words almost identical to those used by Zilliacus his suspicion that the Schuman Plan for the integration of Europe’s coal and steel industries ‘may be just a step in the consolidation of the Catholic “black international” which I have always thought to be a driving force behind the Council of Europe’.91 Apprehensions that involvement in a federal Europe would spread the contagion of Communism to British shores, on the other hand, were for the most part confined to Labour’s right wing. At a meeting with his French and US counterparts at the Quai d’Orsay in 1948, Bevin expressed his fear that a Western Union Assembly on a parliamentary basis, which would inevitably include proportional representation for the Communists, would give the latter a platform and would result in

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attacks on Britain, the only country in Western Europe which had no Communists to speak of.92 Anthony Crosland likewise connected Britain’s postwar record of ‘full employment and a high degree of social peace’ to the fact that no communist Member sits in the House of Commons. It is not surprising that she fears to jeopardise this social and economic stability by surrendering sovereignty to a federal government in which the majority would be held by countries not similarly successful, and with internal policies most different from our own.93 Dalton’s opposition to integration comprehended both ends of the spectrum, suggesting that a European parliament on ‘French lines’ would ‘make a wonderful platform for Churchill on the one hand and the Communists on the other’.94 There is little to suggest, though, that the authors of these warnings ever took the possibility of a European assembly imposing Communism upon Britain at Moscow’s behest very seriously, especially inasmuch as the Soviet Union’s attitude to western European unity so closely paralleled their own. In February 1949, for example, a Soviet spokesman described the concept of the United States of Europe as ‘a kind of mutual insurance society against social progress’; three months later, the Norwegian service of Radio Moscow condemned the Statute of the Council of Europe as ‘a confession of treason against national sovereignty’ and a manoeuvre to strengthen Britain as against the other European states.95 The real concern of Labour Eurosceptics thus lay not so much with the political complexion of a putative federation as with the notion of conceding any measure of sovereignty to a body on which Continentals predominated, no matter how amenable to British conceptions of democratic socialism that body might prove to be.

TAMING THE ‘HAGUE ZOO’ A good example of the Labour leadership’s sensitivity regarding agencies of European integration, however innocuous in character, may be found in its policy toward the ‘Congress of Europe’. In the winter of 1947, a coalition of pro-European organisations including FU and the United Europe Movement made plans for a continentwide gathering to be held at the Hague in May 1948.96 In deference to Sandys and Churchill (who was invited to preside), the published aims of the meeting made no reference to federalist objectives but

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spoke merely of demonstrating ‘the powerful and widespread support which already exists for the European idea’ and producing ‘material for discussion, propaganda and technical studies …’.97 Nor, to the disappointment of the federalist members of the sponsoring societies, was there to be any question of convoking a ‘European States-General’ of political activists; instead, invitations were issued to a wide range of notables drawn from industry, the churches, women’s organisations, the arts and education, as well as to parliamentarians attending in their personal capacities. The likelihood, therefore, that the Hague Congress would give rise to any conclusion much above the lowest common denominator, far less an embryonic European parliament, was small indeed. Nevertheless, Transport House went to extraordinary lengths to deter Labour members from having anything to do with it. In a published exchange of correspondence with Churchill, Shinwell reported the NEC’s view that ‘the subject of European unity is much too important to be entrusted to unrepresentative interests’ like those of which the congress was composed.98 Two months later, the International Sub-Committee authorised the party secretary, Morgan Phillips, to issue a circular strongly deprecating the participation of any Labour member on the ground that ‘it was likely gravely to jeopardise the Labour Party’s policy of preserving a continuous Socialist formula throughout the development of European unity’.99 When it nonetheless appeared a fortnight before the meeting that as many as 40 Labour MPs might attend, the NEC unanimously voted to direct Phillips to write once more to the recalcitrants reaffirming the party’s opposition and warning that membership by MPs of any permanent organisation arising out of the Congress would be regarded as a violation of party discipline.100 This heavy-handed attempt to intimidate the Europeanists failed in its main object. Faced with Leslie Hale’s threat to resign the whip and Mackay’s warning of the propaganda dividend the Tories would reap from the spectacle of Labour delegates withdrawing under duress at the last minute, Transport House grudgingly conceded that its statements on the matter might be taken as advisory rather than mandatory. The episode nonetheless vividly illustrated the Labour hierarchy’s instinctive tendency to regard closer relations with Continentals, even at a comparatively harmless and unofficial level, as potentially detrimental or menacing. While the outcome of the Hague Congress101 did little to justify the NEC’s fears, the growth of federalist sentiment among the governments of Britain’s allies presented a more serious challenge. While the war was still in progress, a wide cross-section of non-Communist European resistance movements had begun to turn to federalism as an antidote to Fascist state-worship and the scourge of recurrent

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European ‘civil wars’.102 The European movement continued to gather momentum on the Continent during the early postwar years, making such enormous strides that a poll taken among members of western European parliaments in September 1947 found federalist majorities or pluralities to exist in the French, Belgian, Dutch, Luxembourgeois and Italian national assemblies.103 The process was bolstered by the enthusiastic support of leading figures in the US Congress and administration, including the heads of the State Department and the Economic Co-operation Administration, which had been set up in 1948 to oversee the disbursement of Marshall Aid. In the US’s view, western Europe was unlikely to become economically or militarily self-sufficient, nor could Western Germany be reintegrated into the community of nations, unless a far-reaching measure of integration took place.104 Their outlook, conveyed to the British government in a variety of subtle and not-so-subtle ways, was vigorously and sometimes bitterly opposed by Bevin;105 it was, however, one he was unable to ignore. Partly as a means of deflecting US pressure and giving substance to his ‘Western Union’ speech of January 1948, the Foreign Secretary included in the Treaty of Brussels, a defence pact signed in March between Britain, France and the Benelux countries, provisions for a permanent ‘Consultative Council’ of the five foreign ministers and their staffs to discuss matters of common concern. Building on this Brussels machinery, Bevin hoped to divert the attention of the other member-states away from a European assembly in favour of a European Council of Ministers, which would meet twice yearly ‘on rather similar lines to the General Assembly of the United Nations, though on a much smaller scale’. Such a body, meeting in private and acting on the principle of unanimity, ‘would go a long way towards spiking the guns of those who wish to frame a Constitution and who criticise His Majesty’s Government for not going fast enough in the direction of “Western Union,” while at the same time preserving in effect the full sovereignty of the participating States …’.106 In a personal minute to Attlee, Bevin described his ‘Council of Western Europe’ as constituting ‘something in the nature of a Confederation’, which, if successful, would simultaneously reduce federalist pressure on the French Socialists and ‘take some of the wind out of the sails of the Opposition at home, and of those elsewhere who allege that we are not proceeding fast enough towards the unification of Europe’.107 If this or a somewhat less ambitious scheme on the same lines were implemented, ‘it is to be hoped that the whole programme would be so stage-managed as to create an increasing impression in America, during a very critical period, that “Western Union” really was being built up …’.108

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The Foreign Secretary’s manoeuvre was to serve only as a bargaining-chip, however. Attlee, while agreeing on the need for a further advance toward Western Union, confessed that the proposal ‘does not attract me very much’.109 A similar response was received from Cripps. Furthermore, while the other Brussels Treaty governments endorsed the idea of a ministerial council, they declined to accept it as a substitute for a parliamentary assembly.110 The whole question was instead referred back to the Consultative Council, which convened a five-power ‘Committee for the Study of European Unity’ at the end of November. After nearly six months of negotiations, a compromise was reached between the British model of an intergovernmental organisation and the Franco-Belgian demand for a constituent assembly whose delegates would be elected by national parliaments. The final agreement, signed in May 1949, provided for a Council of Europe to be established at Strasbourg, composed of a Committee of Ministers meeting in private and a public Consultative Assembly of parliamentarians acting in their individual capacities, nominated by member-governments. As a safeguard against the possibility that the Assembly, in Bevin’s words, might be used ‘as a stick with which “public opinion” – in other words, to a large extent, the various Oppositions – might belabour the various Governments of the day’,111 the Committee of Ministers was given exclusive power to define the Assembly’s agenda, veto its resolutions and determine the Council’s membership. These precautions notwithstanding, Labour’s leadership looked upon the new organisation with no more than grudging acceptance, which before long began to give way to full-blooded hostility. The importance attached by the government to the first meeting of the Council of Europe in August 1949 was demonstrated when the leader of the Labour delegation, Herbert Morrison, abandoned the Assembly after a fortnight for a holiday in the south of France, leaving matters in the hands of Dalton, another unreconstructed Eurosceptic. The Committee of Ministers, ruling discussion of defence and economics to be beyond the Assembly’s competence under the Statute, offered no agenda for the meeting beyond questions of the Assembly’s own procedure. As even Labour’s International Secretary, Denis Healey – who normally lost few opportunities to ventilate his disdain for the ‘Strasbourgeoisie’ – conceded, ‘The British Labour representatives brought no concrete proposals of their own and on most issues the most positive attitude they could permit themselves was not to take the lead in opposition.’112 When after a month the Assembly finally adjourned, it had achieved little in the face of repeated British vetoes beyond the passage of an ambitiously phrased resolution, drafted by

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Mackay, expressing its aspiration to convert the Council into a ‘European political authority with limited functions but real powers’.113 For his part, Bevin was no less determined to ensure that such an authority never emerged. In the Foreign Secretary’s opinion, the only really valuable attribute of the Council of Europe was its existence. Standing as a symbol of ‘confidence and unity among the Western nations’, it was ‘one of the major weapons in the cold war’. It also served a useful function in persuading the United States that Britain was committed to European unity. But Ministers should not lose sight of the fact that the Assembly’s primary purpose was to exert pressure upon them to ‘undertake measures of unification beyond what they consider desirable or acceptable to the British people’. Our relationship with the rest of the Commonwealth and, almost equally important, our new relationship with the United States ensure that we must remain, as we have always been in the past, different in character from European nations and fundamentally incapable of wholehearted integration with them. How soon or how sharply this conflict may come to light in Strasbourg or elsewhere is hard to say. One of the principal disadvantages of the Council of Europe from the point of view of His Majesty’s Government is that by its nature it brings such issues under the glare of public discussion, where it is much more difficult than it would be in an ordinary governmental context to sustain the traditional non-committal and two-way facing policy of this country.114 Although Bevin forbore to specify the difference – if any – between ‘two-way facing’ and ‘two-faced’, his meaning was clear. The Labour government, while remaining resolutely opposed to European integration, would endeavour to conceal the fact as long as possible so as to avoid undermining the confidence of the Western Europeans and drawing upon itself the opprobrium of the United States. To this end, the Foreign Secretary recommended a series of tactical concessions, including permitting the Assembly to set its own agenda and creating intergovernmental committees to examine ‘the majority’ of its recommendations, thereby giving it the impression that it was being taken seriously and forestalling demands for its own year-round institutions. An unfortunate by-product of this disingenuous strategy was that the Cabinet’s true intentions were concealed not only from other European governments, but also the Labour Party itself. As a result, a tragi-comic situation arose in which Labour Europeanists struggled mightily to conciliate a leadership with which no compromise was

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possible, but which was precluded by higher political considerations from admitting the fact. A further irony was that, until late 1949, the PLP Europe Group had been pursuing a policy designed to bring pressure to bear on the government, only to abandon it in favour of a more accommodationist stance just at the time that Bevin was ruling out further integration between Britain and the Continent. Labour Europeanists responded to Bevin’s Western Union speech of January 1948 with interest but little sense of anticipation.115 Correctly doubting that the address represented a Damascene conversion on the Foreign Secretary’s part, the leaders of the Europe Group interpreted his initiative as an attempt to harness pro-European sentiment to the prosecution of the Cold War. As such it presented both a danger and an opportunity. If Bevin were permitted to link the drive for European integration to a host of unrelated issues, the movement’s forward progress might be delayed, if not entirely derailed. But the fact that the Labour government had for the first time explicitly recognised the benefits of Western European co-ordination left an opening which the application of political pressure might conceivably widen. Shortly afterwards, therefore, Mackay laid down a Commons motion carefully designed to speak to the concerns the Foreign Secretary had expressed, as well as to garner the maximum possible level of support by relegating contentious questions like federation to the background. The motion called upon the government to take steps in consultation with the Commonwealth ‘to create in Western Europe a political union strong enough to save European democracy and the values of Western civilisation’, together with a trading area large enough ‘to enable its component parts to achieve economic recovery and stability’. To this end, an ‘emergency policy’ was advocated, involving the creation of an intergovernmental council representing the 16 member-states of the Organisation for European Economic Co-operation, together with Western Germany, to co-ordinate social, economic and defence policies; while as a ‘long-term policy’ a constituent assembly of the same countries would work out a framework for full-scale federation.116 The purpose of the motion, as Mackay frankly acknowledged to the Prime Minister’s Parliamentary Private Secretary, was to flush out the government and force it ‘in terms which cannot be misunderstood, [to] define what Western Union means’.117 In the event, it failed in its object, because not enough members, from either side of the House, were prepared to support it. Confronted by a mere 190 signatories from all parties, few of whom were likely to defy their respective whips in a division, the government had no reason to dance to the Europeanists’ tune. At a subsequent meeting between the Prime Minister and Foreign Secretary and a delegation

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of pro-European parliamentarians, Attlee and Bevin reiterated to Mackay their opposition to a European assembly or, for that matter, a policy involving ‘any reference to the surrender of sovereign rights’.118 In mid-1948, therefore, Mackay and his colleagues can have had few illusions about the chasm between their conception of Western Union and that of the Labour frontbench. Unimpressed by the Europeanists’ abortive show of strength, the government felt no need to make concessions to head off the possibility of a backbench revolt. Accordingly, Mackay concluded that the necessary pressure would have to come from outside. At the beginning of 1949 he embarked upon a tour of the United States to persuade influential people there to withhold economic assistance from Britain unless it agreed to join a European federation. The British government, he contended, was the last remaining obstacle to a united Europe, which otherwise could be accomplished ‘in a matter of weeks’. Hence ‘some one has got to give Britain a push’, and in view of the weakness of the Continental countries that someone could only be the United States. The American Government is giving billions of dollars in Marshall Aid to secure European Unity but nothing is being done to bring about that unity. Therefore it is the job of the American Government to bring pressure on the British Government to see that it does take the necessary steps to bring about a European union. … The State Department can make its representations to the British Government in such a way that it is asking Britain to take the lead in Europe and if it were done in that way the British would be flattered … If [the State Department, Congress and the President] will insist on the Union of Europe in 1949 as a condition of the continuance of aid in 1950 we may see a Union of Europe this year. If they don’t we may never see it.119 The unsubtle nature of this appeal bore testimony to its author’s growing impatience and frustration with the attitude of his own party leadership, as well to what can only be described as a surprising degree of naïveté in a politician of his experience. Apart from the obvious consideration that Transport House was certain to look sourly upon the spectacle of a Labour MP urging a foreign power to apply economic sanctions against the government of which he was a supporter, it is difficult to imagine how Mackay could have believed that any attempt on the United States’ part to blackmail Britain into joining a European federation would not on that ground alone cause a substantial proportion of British and European public opinion to

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resist the entire project. His outspokenness on this occasion can only be interpreted as indicating his conclusion that there was nothing further to be achieved by co-operation with the frontbench, whereas a policy of agitation might at least gain their attention.120 After only a few weeks, however, Mackay abandoned his attempt to kick over the traces. Erroneously interpreting the signature of the Statute of the Council of Europe as evidence that at least some members of the government did, after all, possess federalist leanings, he hailed the agreement as a major step toward full political integration. Meagre though the powers of the Council as described in the Statute may have been, it nonetheless constituted the first genuine European assembly, the majority of whose members, moreover, were likely to be committed federalists. The new body thus appeared to him to contain the potential to develop, if not into a full-scale federal parliament, then at least an organ with definite and expanding areas of responsibility alongside those of national governments. He was further mollified by the receipt at this moment of a letter from the Democratic Senator from Arkansas, J. William Fulbright, who reported that Bevin had expressed to him the belief the Council’s Committee of Ministers ‘will become the Cabinet of Europe and that it is the beginning of a real European government’.121 Never a natural rebel, Mackay seems to have taken this assurance at face value, greeting with relief the opportunity to reconcile himself with the party and to address himself to the more congenial problem of broadening the Council of Europe’s horizons. Thenceforward, he and the PLP Europe Group – having been renamed the European Co-Operation group, the better to reflect the diversity of opinion within it – were to devote most of their time and effort to the task of reconciling the Labour leadership to the Council – an exercise in futility as it would prove to be. The first intimation that the Europeanists may have sought a premature armistice with the Cabinet was not long in coming. After the conclusion of the Council’s first meeting in the autumn of 1949, at which the British delegation had found itself virtually isolated on the question of expanding the Assembly’s powers, International Secretary Denis Healey, in response to Bevin’s request, drew up ‘a statement as to how far we can go in co-operating with the Council of Europe, and … why this co-operation must be limited’.122 The general line of his first draft was approved by the NEC in October 1949, subsequent drafts being produced by Ernest Davies, a recently appointed junior minister at the Foreign Office, with input from Bevin, Dalton and Morrison.123 The final version, 12 pages long, was approved unanimously at an NEC meeting attended by all its ministerial members on 24 May 1950 and released to the public on 12 June.

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The content, timing and tone of this publication all seemed to have been calculated to give maximum offence to pro-Europeans. Commencing with a rehearsal of Labour’s success in eliminating unemployment and assuring living standards in Britain, the document, satirically entitled European Unity, derided the record of other European countries, arguing that their lack of effort in this area made them unattractive partners for a socialist economy. ‘Socialists would welcome a European economic union which was based on international planning … But international planning can only operate on the basis of national planning, and many European Governments have not yet shown either the will or the ability to plan their own economies.’ Nevertheless, the statement made clear that the NEC’s hostility to European integration was wholly independent of anything the Continental countries might do to accommodate themselves to Labour’s requirements: In every respect except distance we in Britain are closer to our kinsmen in Australia and New Zealand on the far side of the world than we are to Europe. We are closer in language and in origins, in social habits and institutions, in political outlook and in economic interest. The economies of the Commonwealth countries are complementary to that of Britain to a degree which those of Western Europe could never equal.124 The country whose way of life was most congenial to democratic socialist Britain was not to be found among any of its western European neighbours, but across the Atlantic. The United States ‘ever since 1931 … has pursued more advanced policies than most of the European countries’. But the undeniable success of the US federation constituted no argument in favour of a federal assembly for Europe, since this was likely to be dominated by ‘a permanent anti-Socialist majority’. For the same reason, any extension of the powers of the Assembly of the Council of Europe was to be opposed, although, if it could but confine itself to its proper sphere and work for the achievement of full employment and fair shares on the Continent, it might yet play a valuable rôle. Almost as unfortunate as the profusion of ‘self-righteous insular boasting’ in the statement, of which the Manchester Guardian justifiably complained,125 was the NEC’s decision to release it at a press conference the day before the government gave its formal reply to a French proposal for the co-ordination of Europe’s basic industries. The Schuman Plan, communicated to the Foreign Office in May, called for the creation of a ‘high authority’ to regulate and control the coal

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and steel industries throughout western Europe. Although this proposal seemed on the surface designed to accommodate the British government’s insistence that European unity be approached through pragmatic and functional expedients rather than attempts to write a continent-wide constitution, the plan had a distinct political subtext, as was indicated in a subsequently deleted paragraph in the first draft: ‘This proposal has an essential political purpose: to open a breach in the rampart of national sovereignty limited enough to obtain consent, but deep enough to lead States in the direction of the unity required for peace.’126 It was this aspect of the scheme, rather than any insuperable economic obstacle, that impelled the Cabinet to decline to participate in the negotiations to create a European coal and steel community.127 While the Labour government’s decision to reject the French initiative was unconnected to the preparation of the NEC statement and, indeed, had been foreordained by Bevin long before its publication,128 the appearance of European Unity at this inconvenient juncture conveyed the impression that the Schuman Plan’s merits had not been granted even the most cursory examination and that the sole consideration determining the British response had been the Labour leadership’s doctrinaire Euroscepticism.129 Such an interpretation not being far from the truth, an unedifying game of political pass-the-parcel ensued in which the individuals responsible for the statement sought to fasten responsibility for its most intemperate passages upon each other without actually disavowing the attitudes embodied therein.130 European Unity provoked a furious reaction from the Labour proEuropeans. In a scathing published rebuttal, four times longer than the original document, entitled Heads in the Sand,131 Mackay attacked ‘the aunt sallies which it put up to knock down … its refusal to look beyond Britain, and finally, and above all … its hypocrisy, its smugness, and its complacency’. The Labour statement, he pointed out, was riddled with internal contradictions. On one side it declared that the ‘uncontrolled’ capitalist economies of western Europe made union with them impossible; on the other it offered Britain’s alliance with the epitome of global capitalism, the United States, as an alternative. Similarly, its suggestion that Britain was the nerve centre of a worldwide Commonwealth, which precluded a closer relationship with Europe, was not borne out by the facts. The Commonwealth was neither economically self-sufficient, nor politically unified, nor even, in a real sense, any longer ‘British’. By 1945, Mackay pointed out, the United States’ investments in Canada alone exceeded those of Britain in all the Dominions put together. More fallacious still were the document’s economic arguments, concerning which Britain could scarcely presume

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to lecture Europe until it had solved its own problems in this area. European Unity, ‘with ostrich optimism’, contended that Britain had done so and that Labour’s application of controls had saved it from bankruptcy: It may be nice to think that this is true; but at best it is only partly true. Without the unpaid American dollar advances which we have received, no amount of controls could have provided us with all the cotton, tobacco, food and the other raw materials and foodstuffs which we imported … While these controls and the policy of the Socialist government have had an important effect, what has done the trick, or what has made the trick possible, has not so much been the successful application of socialist principles in Great Britain as the successful working of capitalism in the United States.132 Such considerations notwithstanding, Mackay concluded, the most important arguments in favour of unity were political, not economic. ‘So long as Europe is divided politically, so long will it be a field for Russian interference. Once it is united the likelihood of successful Communist penetration into Western Europe becomes less.’ Other Labour Europeanists added their voices to the chorus of condemnation. Harold Nicolson declared European Unity ‘a truly deplorable document’ which made him regret his decision to join the party.133 Noel-Baker, unhappily ensconced at the Ministry of Fuel and Power, considered resigning in protest, although the opportunity to revive his flagging political career figured as prominently in his calculations as his outrage at the damage done to the party’s internationalist reputation.134 A pamphlet written by Labour members of FU pointed out that if, as the Executive maintained, the Assembly of the Council of Europe was unfit to assume legislative powers, ‘it is up to us to put forward suggestions for its reform’.135 Despite their disappointment and anger, however, Mackay and his colleagues, for two overriding reasons, forbore to break ranks with the party. The first was that the debate over the Schuman Plan reopened the division within the PLP European Co-operation Group between federalists and functionalists, many of the latter regarding the proposal as an attempt to introduce federalism by the back door.136 The second was Mackay’s apparent belief that European Unity had been drafted and issued by Dalton alone as part of a power-struggle within the party’s upper echelons, and that it did not therefore represent the consensus of the leadership.137 Thus at this critical moment Labour pro-Europeans were too divided among themselves to provoke a showdown with the

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frontbench; nor was it as apparent to them as it ought to have been that a breaking-point had in fact been reached. Instead, during Labour’s last year in power, Mackay engaged in an ever more desperate and futile attempt to reach agreement on a way forward with the chimerical Europeanist element among the party leadership of whose existence he had managed to persuade himself. At the second Assembly of the Council of Europe in November 1950, he advanced an ingenious proposal designed to bridge the gap between federalists and moderate Eurosceptics for whom the main stumbling-block was the ‘all or nothing’ nature of federalism. This aimed gradually to transform the Council of Europe into a bicameral European legislature without substantially altering its structure or diluting the leading rôle of the Committee of Ministers. Under Mackay’s scheme, a European law would come into force only after it had been voted on by the Assembly, which was to become a directly elected chamber, and accepted unanimously by the Committee of Ministers. Once approved, the new legislation would apply not only to member states but all their citizens as well. After a sufficiently large corpus of European law had come into being, it would be administered by an executive elected by the Assembly. Over time, therefore, an increasing range of matters would be transferred from the jurisdiction of memberstates to that of the Council of Europe.138 The ‘Mackay Protocol’ was greeted with enthusiasm by the federalist majority in the Assembly, who transmitted it to the Committee of Ministers for their consideration.139 While it was in their hands, Mackay embarked upon his most intensive campaign yet to interest Labour frontbenchers in his plan. At the end of 1950 he wrote to Tawney, I am going to devote the whole of the next year, at the expense of all other things, including health, to try and get the foundations laid of some kind of political authority in Europe, because I think we are just at the point when with a little push, it can be achieved. A right appeal to the Labour Party is part of this push …140 To this end he sought meetings with more than a dozen ministers, circulated hundreds of copies of the protocol to his colleagues in Parliament, ‘pestered’ Ernest Davies ‘persistently [though] in vain’ at Strasbourg141 and chartered an aircraft to enable him to lobby politicians abroad. Mackay’s campaign, however, had virtually no chance of success. Unknown to him, Davies had already launched a pre-emptive strike against the protocol, circulating a Foreign Office memorandum to other government departments dismissing the scheme as unworthy

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of ‘serious or detailed consideration’.142 A still more devious countermeasure was employed by Dalton, who encouraged Mackay to believe that he might look more favourably upon the protocol if certain sentences were removed: although Mackay complied fully, Dalton continued his behind-the-scenes opposition.143 Nor was Mackay aware that by the beginning of 1951 Bevin and Morrison, both profoundly suspicious of federalist plots, had agreed that ‘the United Kingdom gains little by its membership of the Council of Europe and would be well out of it’, differing only on the tactical issue of when withdrawal should take place.144 His irrepressible optimism must nonetheless have been dampened by the open scorn displayed by his fellow Labour delegates at Strasbourg for the institution of which they were a part, one of whom, Anthony Crosland, spent his days in bed in a state of alcoholic incapacity145 and whose leader Dalton, through his repeated displays of discourtesy, gave many Continental delegates the impression, ‘perhaps rightly, that the British Government was intent on sabotaging the whole experiment’.146 Given these circumstances, the Committee of Ministers’ ultimate rejection of the Mackay Protocol, and with it ‘the end of the attempt to increase the powers of the Council of Europe’,147 ought not to have come as a surprise. Rather, it was an easily predictable consequence of the policy the Labour frontbench, with at least the tacit if not the active support of a majority of backbenchers, had been pursuing with hardly any deviation since the beginning of the previous decade. In view of the consistency of the party’s fundamental Euroscepticism, some consideration of the larger ideological context in which that policy was formed is called for. In the face of the evidence examined above, it is difficult to sustain the argument that a substantial or influential section of the Labour Party during this period was ever, in any real sense, committed to the ideal of European unity, even if it be conceded that this commitment might have waxed and waned at various times during the second half of the 1940s.148 The proposition that Labour as a whole desired greater European integration but differed only over whether to achieve it by federalist or functionalist methods, asserted by a number of authorities,149 has been seriously undermined by Edmund Dell’s penetrating re-examination of the party’s reaction to the Schuman Plan.150 Reaching a similar conclusion to these authors from vastly different premises – while remaining equally oblivious to inter-party debates – recent attempts to apply the methods of the US ‘Wisconsin School’ to modern British diplomatic history for the purpose of depicting the Attlee administration as the sinister postwar ‘consolidator’ of western Europe appear still less persuasive.151

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On the other hand, an assessment of Labour’s European policy which sees the party’s leaders ‘clinging to grandeur’, unable to adjust to the loss of Britain’s imperial glory and to acknowledge that its future was as part of Europe, is scarcely more satisfactory.152 Apart from the fact that to assume the leadership of western Europe offered the fastest and most straightforward way for Britain to reassert its influence in the world after the war, such explanations tend once again to slight the ideological aspect of the question. Labour politicians after 1945 did not simply pick up where they had left off in 1939, far less where their Conservative opponents had left off. The course of Labour Europeanism was in fact as deeply influenced by the experience of wartime dislocation as Labour universalism had been in the case of the League of Nations, although, since there was not a significant proEuropean movement within the party before the war, the extent to which this is so is not as clearly apparent. Rather it is the wartime ‘hardening’ of Labour internationalism, which forms the central theme of this work, that accounts most satisfactorily for the deeply equivocal nature of the party’s approach to European questions. Although the idea of a European union was compatible with, and indeed derived some of its strength from, the ‘muscular’ internationalist conception that the first duty of an international authority was to uphold the law and prevent aggression, it was undermined by the widespread conviction within the party that the least-qualified candidates for such a rôle were the Europeans themselves. Adhering to the belief that successful resistance to Nazi tyranny was a necessary qualification to exercise power abroad, Labour activists no longer regarded Britain’s European neighbours as suitable partners with whom to construct a new world order. Having betrayed or failed adequately to defend the liberal and democratic values that Britain had come to regard as peculiarly its own, there was no guarantee they might not do so again. Indeed, these countries’ very anxiety to have Britain assume the lead in a European federation was suspect in itself, signifying the fickleness of their national loyalties and suggesting in turn the malleability of their principles. Hence the constant reiteration by Bevin, Jay, Dalton and others that the phenomenon of European federalism was symptomatic of Continentals’ lack of faith in their own countries, the psychological reaction to their experience of defeat in the war. Hence also Labour’s insistence that real unity could only be achieved by the European nations modelling themselves upon those international arrangements whose durability had been proven: the British Commonwealth and the Anglo-American alliance, neither of which relied on written constitutions, but rather on the ‘spiritual values’

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of which Bevin spoke in 1948 and which he commended the Continentals to adopt. To the far smaller group of Labour pro-Europeans, on the other hand, those values appeared to be much less firmly established in Britain itself than their Eurosceptic colleagues believed. Markedly less disposed to take refuge in, and celebrate, Britain’s historical record and its postwar accomplishments, Labour federalists had not been as deeply affected in their internationalist convictions by the experience of war. Peace and prosperity were no less indivisible in the postwar era, they believed, than in the 1930s; any diminution of these abroad would unfailingly make its impact felt at home. For this reason, Mackay found it necessary in 1950 to remind his colleagues in the party that ‘We in the Labour movement have always said that we have more in common with the working people in the other countries of Europe than we have with the capitalist in our own country.’153 It was, however, the failure of the Europeanists to recognise that the character of Labour internationalism had drastically changed – mirroring their opponents’ complacent belief in the self-evident superiority of British institutions – that contributed to the ineffectiveness of their crusade. Instead of acknowledging the tremendous extent to which the always-latent sense of British exceptionalism had been intensified by the war and adjusting their tactics accordingly, they convinced themselves that a pro-European majority in the party, and the country, already existed, and needed only to be called into action by the invocation of socialist doctrine, or appeals to political and economic self-interest. Insensitive to the changing party mood during the war, they remained equally tone-deaf to the mood of the British people as a whole afterwards. For this reason their campaign was virtually foredoomed to failure: after diverting their attention during the crucial 1940–45 period to the mobilisation of nationwide support when a carefully directed campaign within Labour itself might have paid dividends, they then proceeded to squander their energy on the irreconcilables in their party when the only consideration likely to make any impression upon the latter would have been a groundswell of opinion within the country. The lack of impact made by Labour Europeanism in the 1940s was thus in the last analysis a collaborative effort involving both internationalist camps in the party. Neither could have achieved so little alone.

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NOTES 1. This interpretation is shared by many of the older works, notably J.T. Grantham, ‘The Labour Party and European Unity, 1939–1951’, unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, Cambridge University, 1977, as well as M. Blackwell’s more recent Clinging to Grandeur. 2. 15 LPCR (1916), p. 32. 3. R.N. Coudenhove-Kalergi, An Idea Conquers the World (London: Hutchinson, 1953), p. 91. See also R. White, ‘The Europeanism of Coudenhove-Kalergi’, in P.M.R. Stirk (ed.), European Unity in Context: The Interwar Period (London: Pinter, 1989); W. Lipgens, A History of European Integration, vol. I: 1945–1947 – The Formation of the European Unity Movement (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982), pp. 35–44; and H.M.G. Jebb, The European Idea (New York: Praeger, 1966), ch. 3. 4. R.W.D. Boyce, ‘Britain’s First “No” to Europe: Britain and the Briand Plan, 1929–30’, European Studies Review 10, 1 (January 1980). R. White has argued that the Labour government’s response displayed ‘sympathy for the ends of the Briand proposals with scepticism à propos its means’, but except in the case of the free-trade enthusiast Willie Graham, President of the Board of Trade, there is little concrete evidence to support such a view. See his ‘Cordial Caution: The British Response to the French Proposal for European Federal Union of 1930’, in Bosco (ed.), The Federal Idea; and R. Boyce’s ‘Was There a “British” Alternative to the Briand Plan?’ in P. Catterall with C.J. Morris (eds), Britain and the Threat to Stability in Europe, 1918–45 (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1993), pp. 17–34. 5. As Avi Shlaim has concluded in ‘Prelude to Downfall: The British Offer of Union to France, June 1940’, Journal of Contemporary History, 9, 3 (July 1974). For a contrary view, see A. Bosco, ‘Federal Union, Chatham House, the Foreign Office and Anglo-French Union in Spring 1940’, in Bosco (ed.), The Federal Idea. See also J. Monnet, Mémoires (Paris: Fayard, 1976), pp. 16–31, and E.M. Gates, End of the Affair: The Collapse of the Anglo-French Alliance, 1939–40 (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1981), pp. 227–44. 6. In 1945, Churchill and Attlee separately confirmed to the House of Commons that they no longer regarded the offer as valid. 7. Notable among these was the British section of Pan-Europa; the National Peace Council; and Political and Economic Planning, whose manifesto in favour of European unity, Building Peace out of War: Studies in International Reconstruction, was published in 1944. 8. Wootton, In a World I Never Made, p. 98. 9. Another public advocate of a ‘continental’ democratic federation was Brailsford, who produced a critical but friendly analysis of the subject on FU’s behalf. H.N. Brailsford, The Federal Idea (London: Federal Union, 1940). See also his America Our Ally (London: Victor Gollancz, 1940), ch. 6. 10. Halifax replied diplomatically that no possibility at that moment existed of the US agreeing to guarantee a new European order of any kind, and that ‘the formation of some sort of federation of the free States of Europe … though it might appeal to the popular imagination, raises many practical difficulties’. Lord Hardinge [the King’s Private Secretary] to Halifax, 5 August 1940; Halifax to Hardinge, 13 August 1940, PRO INF 1/862. 11. C. Streit, Union Now: The Proposal for Inter-Democracy Federal Union (Shorter version) (New York: Harper, 1940), pp. 75–6. 12. W.T. Wooley, Alternatives to Anarchy: American Supranationalism Since World War II (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1988), p. 91. 13. C. Kimber, ‘Federal Union’, in Catterall with Morris (eds), Britain and the Threat to Stability in Europe, p. 107. This essay is an excellent brief survey of British FU’s early years.

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14. R. Mayne and J. Pinder, Federal Union: The Pioneers. A History of Federal Union (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1990), pp. 13–14. 15. See A. Bosco, ‘Lothian, Curtis, Kimber and the Federal Union Movement (1938–40)’, Journal of Contemporary History, 23, 3 (July 1988). 16. Kimber, ‘Federal Union’, p. 108. 17. ‘Offer Federal Union to the German People and Paralyse Hitler’s Armies’ (n.d.), Federal Union National Council documents, Box 58, Henry Usborne papers, 705:731, BA 12,246, Worcester Record Office (WRO); W.B. Curry, The Case for Federal Union (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1939); W. Ivor Jennings, A Federation for Western Europe (Cambridge: Macmillan, 1940). For details of FU’s ‘revolutionist’ approach during the war, see R.A. Wilford, ‘The Federal Union Campaign’, European Studies Review, 10, 1 (January 1980). 18. Mayhew, Time to Explain, p. 53. Although he did not refer to FU by name, G.D.H. Cole too called for the creation of a European federation in a New Statesman article of November 1939. 19. 355 H.C. Deb. 5s., c. 20 (30 November 1939). 20. See p. 57 above. 21. Press, Publicity and Campaign committee minutes, 16 January 1940, LP/JSM (INT), box 6, James Middleton papers, LPP, National Museum of Labour History, Manchester. 22. J. Strachey, Federalism or Socialism? (London: Victor Gollancz, 1940), pp. 48, 52–3. 23. War, Pritt believed, ‘is impossible between Socialist states. For them the causes of war are automatically eliminated; they have nothing to quarrel about.’ On the other hand, members of a capitalist Federal Union would be driven to fight each other by disputes over markets and colonies. D.N. Pritt, Federal Illusion? An Examination of the Proposals for Federal Union (London: Frederick Muller, 1940). 24. A. Crosland, G. Kent and K. Illsley, ‘Federal Union – The Truth’, Crosland papers, 2/19, BLPES. 25. Noel-Baker, ‘Comments on Lord Cecil’s re-draft of a Note on World Settlement after the War’, n.d. [c. winter 1939], Cecil of Chelwood papers, Add. Mss. 51109, British Library, f. 38. 26. Gilbert McAllister, untitled report (c. Feb. 1940), Federal Union papers, 6/5, BLPES; Mayne and Pinder, Federal Union, p. 30. See also ‘Executive Committee’s Report to the Council’, covered by letter from Kimber, 11 June 1940, Federal Union National Council documents, Box 8, Usborne papers, WRO. 27. For example, Catlin’s contention that the English recognised ‘the natural and inalienable right of the Scots to rule them’, and that this example of inter-ethnic tolerance proved the viability of a union of the English-speaking peoples. G.E.G. Catlin, One Anglo-American Nation: The Foundation of AngloSaxony as Basis of World Federation – A British Response to Streit (London: Andrew Dakers, 1941), p. 25. 28. Ibid., p. 127. 29. G.E.G. Catlin, For God’s Sake, Go! An Autobiography (Gerrard’s Cross: Colin Smythe, 1972), p. 262. In a speech at Manchester University in 1941, Catlin claimed improbably that One Anglo-American Nation had received the endorsement of eight Ministers or exMinisters of State. Manchester Guardian, 25 September 1941. 30. In 1942, FU published a modified version of Catlin’s ‘AngloSaxony’ proposal as a Federal Tract under the title Anglo-American Union as a Nucleus of World Federation (London: Macmillan, 1942). 31. A. Bosco, Federal Union and the Origins of the ‘Churchill Proposal’: The Federalist Debate in the United Kingdom from Munich to the Fall of France 1938–1940 (London: Lothian Foundation Press, 1992), p. 81. 32. Speech to the Labor Club, Melbourne University, 15 July 1938, Mackay papers, Group 24/15, BLPES; letter to Manchester Guardian, October 1938. 33. Speech to the Royal Institute of International Affairs, ‘The United States, Russia and Ourselves’, 21 April 1942, Group 24/15, Mackay papers.

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34. R.W.G. Mackay, Federal Europe: Being the Case for European Federation together with a Draft Constitution of a United States of Europe (London: Michael Joseph, 1940), p. 70. 35. Mackay, ‘The United States, Russia and Ourselves’. 36. Mackay, Federal Europe, p. 110. 37. L. Woolf, The Future of International Government (London: Labour Party, 1940), pp. 9–10. Woolf also advocated ‘an international organisation or League, including this federation and open to and, if possible, including all States in the world’. 38. One instance of this attitude was the NEC’s curt dismissal in 1941 of an FU request to be provided with the names and addresses of certain Labour candidates so that it might send them federalist materials. NEC minutes, E.C. 4 1941–42, 40, LPP. 39. Addison, The Road to 1945, p. 158. 40. Copy of a letter from Zilliacus to Raymond A. Gauntlett, 18 June 1942, 15/5, Kingsley Martin papers, University of Sussex. 41. FU Directors’ Meeting minutes, 4 November 1942, 1/8, F.L. Josephy papers, BLPES. 42. Copy of telegram from Mackay to Middleton, n.d. NEC records 8C, p. 415, LPP. 43. Mackay memorandum, n.d. [c. early 1944], Group 24/18, Mackay papers. 44. Manchester Guardian, 29 July 1944. 45. A. Calder, The People’s War (London: Jonathan Cape, 1969), pp. 545–9. 46. Of these, seven were Labour members, one a Liberal and one independent. Lipgens, History of European Integration, vol. I, p. 153, n. 130. 47. For a brief but perceptive assessment of the movement, see W.D.A. Jones, The Russia Complex: The British Labour Party and the Soviet Union (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1977), pp. 154–9, 168. See also J. Schneer, ‘Hopes Deferred or Shattered: The British Labour Left and the Third Force Movement, 1945–49’, Journal of Modern History, 56, 2 (June 1984). 48. R.H.S. Crossman, ‘Britain and Western Europe’, Political Quarterly, 17, 1 (January–March 1946), p. 9. 49. Although the Labour frontbench decried the Third Force programme as unrealistic, it came to adopt a remarkably similar policy as a long-term objective following the breakdown of Anglo-Soviet relations at the end of 1947. In terms that Crossman would enthusiastically have endorsed a year earlier, Ernest Bevin declared in a 1948 Cabinet paper that ‘It is for us, as Europeans, and as a Social Democratic Government, and not the Americans, to give the lead in the spiritual, moral and political sphere to all the democratic element in Western Europe which are anti-Communist and at the same time genuinely progressive and reformist, believing in freedom, planning and social justice – what one might call the “Third Force”.’ Bevin, ‘Review of Soviet Policy’, 4 January 1948, CAB 129/23, C.P. (48) 7. 50. R.H.S. Crossman et al., Keep Left (London: New Statesman and Nation, 1947). While much of the pamphlet dealt with domestic affairs, it was in their attitude to foreign policy, as Geoffrey Foote has noted, ‘that the Keep Left group emerged as both distinct and portentous’. The Labour Party’s Political Thought, pp. 269–70. 51. Hence Tom Driberg’s warning to the Foreign Secretary in absentia that the British people would not ‘follow him to war … against Soviet Russia, in partnership with the barbaric thugs of Detroit and the Mammon Imperialists of Wall Street’. 430 H.C. Deb. 5s., c. 366 (15 November 1946). 52. Crossman, ‘Britain and Western Europe’, p. 11. 53. For concise statements of the opposing viewpoints, see R. Quinault, ‘Churchill’s United Europe’, History Today, 42, 6 (June 1992); Bullock, Life and Times of Ernest Bevin, vol. III, pp. 786–7. 54. In his meeting with Henry Wallace on 22 May 1943 (see pp. 124–5 above), Churchill had remarked that Coudenhove-Kalergi’s ideas on a form of United States of Europe ‘had much to recommend them’. Churchill, report of conversation, 22 May 1943, FO 954/22A, W.P. (43) 233. See also R.N. Coudenhove-Kalergi, Europe Must Unite, trans. A. McFadyean (Glarus: Paneuropa Editions, 1939).

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55. Quoted in A. and F. Boyd, Western Union: UNA’s Guide to European Recovery (London: Hutchinson, 1948), pp. 109–12. 56. Churchill’s chairmanship of this organisation need no more be taken as proof of the depth of his commitment to European unity than his presidency in 1936 of the British wing of the New Commonwealth Society, a small body advocating the internationalisation of armed forces and the creation of an international tribunal with power to revise territorial boundaries, should be considered to betoken any desire on his part to see the objectives of that organisation carried into practice. See Ceadel, Semi-Detached Idealists, pp. 283–6, 346. 57. This perception was strengthened by the prominence of the seven Tory members of the committee, six of whom – Churchill, Amery, Stanley, Brown, Maxwell Fyfe and Sandys – had been or were to become Ministers of the Crown, in contrast to their Labour counterparts, among whom arguably the most notable personality was the publisher Victor Gollancz. 58. Proving itself no less gullible than the Labour Europeanists, the FU Executive voted in January 1947 to co-operate with the UEM even though the latter failed to meet FU’s demand that it commit itself to British membership of a European union, endorse the ultimate ideal of world government and repudiate any anti-Soviet intent. 59. ‘Note on a Socialist Federation of Western Europe’, 1 September 1947, Group 13/1/12, Mackay papers. Two years later, Mackay again declared European federation to be the first step towards revision of the UN Charter. ‘With the creation of a federation in Europe we could then take steps to amend the constitution of the United Nations, and try to get a world federal government, in which the participating states would be the Soviet Union, the United States of America, Europe, India, China, Africa and South America.’ R.W.G. Mackay, ‘Strasbourg Will Not Fail’, European Affairs,1, 5 (August 1949), p. 11. 60. Minutes of PLP Europe Group formative meeting, 2 December 1947, Group 8/3/9, Mackay papers. 61. Minutes of third meeting, 10 February 1948, Group 8/3/9, Mackay papers. 62. ‘This means that we do not support the present attempt of the Government to extend the Treaty of Dunkirk to the other states of Western Europe, for whether it is intended to prevent the aggression of Germany or not, it will be regarded as a Western Block and as a military alliance against the Soviet Union.’ ‘Western Union: The Federal Approach’, Group 9/1/10, Mackay papers. 63. Crawley, ‘Western Union: The Functional Approach’; Warbey and Manning, ‘Britain and Europe’, Mackay papers. 64. Minutes of fifth meeting, 2 March 1948, Group 8/3/9, Mackay papers. 65. Alan Milward has pointed out that the number of questions which ‘could be regulated between states at the merely functional level after 1945 seems … to have been very small. Most, no matter how apparently unthreatening, were elevated into matters of political principle and high-level diplomatic dispute.’ A.S. Milward, The European Rescue of the Nation-State (London: Routledge, 1992), p. 14. 66. In a May 1946 speech the Lord Privy Seal and Leader of the Commons, Arthur Greenwood, had made an ‘oblique reference’ to the question of a united Europe, indicating his reluctance to see ‘British individuality and our proper rights’ subordinated to the ‘whims’ of nameless others. J.T. Grantham, ‘British Labour and the Hague “Congress of Europe”: National Sovereignty Defended’, Historical Journal, 24, 2 (June 1981), p. 445. 67. Bullock, Life and Times of Ernest Bevin, pp. 318, 358; Williams, Ernest Bevin, vol. III, p. 149. Seán Greenwood has interpreted Bevin’s plans in the winter of 1945–46 for an AngloFrench alliance as part of a ‘project for Western European co-operation’, although both he and the Foreign Office soon recoiled from the idea in response to Soviet hostility and loss of confidence in France as a suitable partner after de Gaulle’s resignation in January

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68. 69. 70.

71. 72.

73.

74. 75.

76.

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1946. This argument, however, hangs a great deal upon Bevin’s single invocation before 1947 of the term ‘Western Union’, a concept that was then even more vague and shapeless than the one to which he was to give the same name two years later. See S. Greenwood, ‘Ernest Bevin, France and “Western Union”: August 1945 – February 1946’, European History Quarterly, 14, 3 (July 1984), and his Britain and the Cold War 1945–91 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000), pp. 35–7. Henry Usborne recorded a conversation with Bevin at the end of 1946 in which the Foreign Secretary trenchantly expressed his views on the limits applying to British involvement in a putative European union. ‘If the UK were to join a United States of Europe as a full member of the federation, and the Red Army then invaded France, the government of federal Europe would capitulate – would do a Pétain – rather than engage in more battles over their still shattered homes and villages. A federal government could thus surrender Britain to Russia without her forces being able to fire a single shot. Britain was not prepared to risk that, he insisted.’ Usborne, ‘A History of the British Parliamentary Group for World Government’, in Bosco (ed.), The Federal Idea, vol. II, p. 119. Bevin, ‘The First Aim of British Foreign Policy’, 4 January 1948, CAB 129/23, C.P. (48) 6. 446 H.C. Deb. 5s., c. 396 (22 January 1948); Mayhew, Time to Explain, p. 112. Whose support he was nonetheless not above claiming. At a meeting of the foreign ministers of the five Brussels Treaty powers, ‘Mr. Bevin informed his colleagues that the Keep Left movement, who [sic] had criticised him in the past, had now changed their minds and were urging him to go even further and faster in the direction of Western Union.’ Bevin, ‘The Brussels Treaty’, 24 March 1948, CAB 129/26, C.P. (48) 96. Frank Roberts, ‘Western Union’, 5 March 1948, PREM 8/1413, Part 1. ‘It is of course essential’, Roberts prudently noted, ‘that the Foreign Office should remain well in the background and that the lead for this should come from the Churches themselves.’ For a further discussion of this aspect of Bevin’s scheme, see D. Kirby, ‘Divinely Sanctioned: The Anglo-American Cold War Alliance and the Defence of Western Civilization and Christianity, 1945–48’, Journal of Contemporary History, 35, 3 (July 2000). As Christopher Mayhew recalled, Bevin’s 22 January speech was drafted too late to consult or even inform anyone beyond the Permanent Under-Secretary at the FO, Orme Sargent, with whom it was ‘hastily’ cleared. The result was that ‘not only our friends abroad but our own embassies were taken completely by surprise and the office was flooded with requests for further information’. But even months later, few additional details were available. The following autumn, Edward Bridges, Permanent Secretary to the Treasury, asked some senior FO officials to explain to him and his Treasury colleagues ‘the meaning and implications of the Western Union Policy, some parts of which were very obscure to them’. The FO representatives confessed themselves little wiser than Bridges himself, and could offer no assistance. Mayhew, Time to Explain, pp. 112–13; A. Adamthwaite, ‘Britain and the World, 1945–9: The View from the Foreign Office’, International Affairs, 61, 2 (Spring 1985), p. 234. Bevin, ‘European Economic Co-operation’, 6 March 1948, CAB 129/25, C.P. (48) 75. The literature on the social and cultural components of British national identity has grown significantly in the last few years. See especially L. Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation 1707–1837 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992); R. Porter (ed.), Myths of the English (London: Polity, 1992); K. Robbins, Great Britain: Identities, Institutions and the Idea of Britishness (London: Longman, 1998); and R. Samuel (ed.), Patriotism: The Making and Unmaking of British National Identity, 3 vols (London: Routledge, 1989). So William Wallace has argued in the course of his discussion of ‘the myth of AngloSaxondom’, which he defines as ‘a free England defying an unfree Continent’. See

260

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78.

79.

80. 81. 82.

83. 84. 85.

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W. Wallace, ‘Foreign Policy and National Identity in the United Kingdom’, International Affairs, 67, 1 (January 1991), pp. 70–2. The word ‘myth’ is used here in both of its current senses: as a proposition whose ‘truth’ rests upon sacramental rather than evidentiary foundations, and as a widely held but inaccurate statement of fact. As regards the first of these meanings, Madeleine Bunting has remarked in her fine study of the German occupation of the Channel Islands that ‘The islanders’ unique experience throws into question Britain’s most basic assumptions about her own rôle in the war. Fifty years after the war’s end, the echo still reverberates in contemporary politics that … [o]nly Britain had sought no compromise and had “an unblemished record” in standing up to Nazism. The Channel Islands do not fit this history; islanders compromised, collaborated and fraternised just as people did throughout occupied Europe … It is this history that the British people have been unable to assimilate; it directly challenges their belief that the Second World War proved that they were inherently different from the rest of Europe.’ M. Bunting, The Model Occupation: The Channel Islands under German Rule, 1940–1945 (London: Harper Collins, 1995), pp. 5–6. The remarkable durability of this line of reasoning in contemporary British political discourse has been noted by David Reynolds, citing a 1990 speech by Enoch Powell: ‘Where were the European unity merchants in 1940? I will tell you. They were either writhing under hideous oppression or they were aiding and abetting that oppression. Lucky for Europe that Britain was alone in 1940.’ D. Reynolds, ‘1940: Fulcrum of the Twentieth Century?’, International Affairs, 66, 2 (April 1990), p. 349, n. 78. Gaitskell diary, 4 December 1947. Williams (ed.), Diary of Hugh Gaitskell, p. 47. At a Fabian conference in 1940, Durbin remarked, ‘I do not wish personally to be governed by French and Germans, and I do not think the British people will. Hence I do not think we can enter a purely European Federation in which the French will have the same number of votes as we and the Germans twice as many. Not one in 10,000 Englishmen would contemplate such a thing.’ FSIB memorandum, 6 July 1940, J/57/1/26, Fabian Society papers. W. Pickles, ‘The Strasbourg Illusion’, Political Quarterly, 21, 1 (January–March 1950). M. Phillips Price, undated memorandum, Group 9/1/1, Mackay papers. D. Jay, Change and Fortune: A Political Record (London: Hutchinson, 1980), p. 222. The same point had earlier been made by Dalton: ‘No doubt … the experiences of war, including the experience of being occupied by the enemy has broken the back of nationalist pride in many of these countries and this helps to popularise the Federalist myth.’ Quoted in G. Warner, ‘The Reconstruction and Defence of Western Europe’, in N. Waites (ed.), Troubled Neighbours: Anglo-French Relations in the Twentieth Century (London: Weidenfeld, 1971), p. 280. Quoted in Adamthwaite, ‘Britain and the World’, p. 231. Quoted in C. Lord, Absent at the Creation: Britain and the Formation of the European Community, 1950–2 (Aldershot: Dartmouth, 1996), p. 42. Thus H.G. Wells alleged that the Catholic Church was bent on obstructing the adoption of a ‘federated world’ as an Allied war aim, and warned that ‘You can no more trust a devout Catholic in your household and in your confidence than you can risk frankness or association with a Nazi spy.’ Harold Laski, on the other hand, thought the true analogue of the Church was to be found on the other end of the ideological spectrum. Catholicism, he declared in 1947, was ‘as much an expression of the purposes of a foreign power as any influence exerted by the Communist Party’. Laski was especially alarmed by the number of Catholics who had obtained ‘pivotal posts in the Foreign Service, exercising a power of infiltration which must make members of the Communist Party feel that they are infants at the game’. H.G. Wells, Guide to the New World: A Handbook of Constructive World Revolution (London: Victor Gollancz, 1941); H.J. Laski, ‘America–1947,’ Nation, 13 December 1947.

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86. Martin to Woolf, 17 October 1949, New Statesman archive, University of Sussex. 87. Fabian Autumn Series lecture, 15 November 1944, 3/14/44, Kingsley Martin papers. 88. Transcript of broadcast, 28 May 1948, 35/3, Martin papers. So deeply did Martin’s antiCatholic paranoia extend that in 1950 he speculated to a friend in the BBC that Catholics in the Corporation were conducting a secret vendetta against him, thus accounting for the fact that he was no longer being asked to appear on-air as frequently as in the past. The actual explanation, provided to Martin’s biographer by Lionel Feilden, former Head of the BBC’s General Talks Department, was somewhat more mundane: ‘He was a terribly bad broadcaster … I did everything I could to help him, but no good.’ Quoted in C.H. Rolph, Kingsley: The Life, Letters and Diaries of Kingsley Martin (London: Victor Gollancz, 1973), p. 274 (emphasis in original). 89. Zilliacus letter, New Statesman and Nation, 4 May 1946. 90. Callaghan to Martin, 24 August 1950, New Statesman archive. 91. Younger diary, 14 May 1950, quoted in Bullock, Life and Times of Ernest Bevin, vol. III, p. 783. The New Statesman, in a rare expression of agreement with the Labour frontbench, likewise characterised the Plan as the fruit of ‘an unholy alliance of the Vatican and the heavy industrialists of the Ruhr and the Comité des Forges’. New Statesman and Nation, 10 June 1950. 92. Minute of 26 September meeting, ‘Conversations during the Secretary of State’s Visits to Paris for the Meeting of the General Assembly of the United Nations, September–October, 1948’, FO 800/510, UN/48/36. 93. C.A.R. Crosland, ‘Prospects for the Council of Europe’, Political Quarterly, 22, 2 (April–June 1951), p. 145. Crosland overlooked the Commons membership of Willie Gallacher and Phil Piratin, both Communists. 94. Dalton memorandum, 25 January 1949, quoted in High Tide and After, p. 316. 95. Quoted in European Movement, European Movement and the Council of Europe (London: Hutchinson, 1949), p. 159. 96. The decision followed the successful organising of a conference of more than 200 delegates from 16 countries held under the auspices of the European Union of Federalists, an umbrella-organisation of national federalist societies, at Montreux in August 1947. 97. Quoted in Lipgens, History of European Integration, vol. I, p. 682. 98. Quoted in A. and F. Boyd, Western Union, p. 82. 99. International Sub-committee minute 62, 20 April 1948, LPP. 100. Phillips letter, 28 April 1948, Group 9/1/2, Mackay papers. See also Grantham, ‘Hugh Dalton and “The International Post-War Settlement”’, pp. 447–51. 101. This took the form of a predictably anodyne resolution calling upon the European nations to ‘transfer and merge some portion of their sovereign rights so as to secure common political and economic action for the integration and proper development of their common resources’. The Times, 11 May 1948. 102. Lipgens, History of European Integration, vol. I, pp. 53–8. 103. Ibid., p. 440. Only a quarter of the members of the British House of Commons, however, expressed themselves in favour. 104. Bullock, Life and Times of Ernest Bevin, vol. III, pp. 517–18, 535. The preamble to the Marshall Plan had made this desire explicit: ‘It is … declared to be the policy of the people of the United States to encourage the unity of Europe.’ 105. At a meeting with Marshall on 4 October 1948, Bevin complained vociferously about a speech by the Republican Presidential candidate, Thomas Dewey, which contained ‘the threat of holding up appropriations if Europe did not immediately federate herself. It caused bitter reactions in Britain when we were treated as a small country of no account and accused of dragging her [sic] feet in regard to Western Union.’ FO 800/510, UN/48/38.

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106. The Foreign Secretary did not conceal the fact that he regarded even this small step as a tactical concession made under duress. ‘Unless … we are to adopt a purely negative attitude, with unfortunate consequences in America, France and elsewhere, it seems essential to devise some scheme which will satisfy the demand for a move and at the same time avoid any commitment to the dangerous expedients advocated by the Federalists and their allies.’ Bevin, ‘North Atlantic Treaty and Western Union’, 2 November 1948, CAB 129/30, C.P. (48) 249. 107. Bevin to Attlee, 26 September 1948, PREM 8/1431, Part 2, P.M./48/78. 108. Bevin to Attlee, n.d. [c. 18 October 1948], PREM 8/1431, Part 2, P.M./48/82. 109. Attlee to Bevin, 28 September 1948, PREM 8/1431, Part 2, M 124/48. 110. See minutes of conversations between Bevin and Paul-Henri Spaak, 29 September 1948; Robert Schuman, 2 October; and Ramadier, 26 October, FO 800/510, UN/48/36. Schuman was deeply disappointed by Bevin’s proposal: far from a confederation, the mooted Council would be in his view little more than a ‘Commonwealth of Western Union …’. 111. Bevin, ‘European Unity’, 7 January 1949, CAB 130/32, C.P. (49) 3. 112. Healey, ‘Report on the Consultative Assembly of the Council of Europe, August 10th–23rd, 1949’, Part II C, 9/7/42, Dalton papers. 113. Robertson, The Council of Europe, pp. 88–9. Mackay was the author of this resolution; its fate was summarised with admirable brevity by Jean Monnet. ‘Il est transmis aux ministres, on n’en parlera plus.’ Monnet, Mémoires, p. 333. 114. Bevin, ‘Council of Europe’, 24 October 1949, C.P. (49) 204. Writing in 1972, Ernest Davies, Parliamentary Under-Secretary at the Foreign Office in 1950–51, recalled that ‘Bevin was fearful that the Council of Europe would become a supranational authority involving surrender of a measure of national sovereignty … particularly on the economic front.’ Daily Telegraph, 23 January 1972. 115. Aidan Crawley’s reaction was typical: ‘… deeply impressed though I was by the central part of his speech, I also had a sense of anti-climax’. 446 H.C. Deb. 5s., c. 593 (23 January 1948). 116. Motion no. 33, 448 H.C. Deb. 5s., cols 2302–3 (18 March 1948). 117. Mackay to Arthur Moyle, 3 May 1948, Group 8/1, Mackay papers. 118. Norman Brook, ‘Western Union’, 24 June 1948, CAB 129/28, C.P. (48) 162. 119. The domestic political arguments raised by Labour leaders against federation, Mackay maintained, were mythical. ‘It is not a question of public opinion. British and European public opinion would accept a federation of Western Europe tomorrow.’ ‘Memorandum on the European Recovery Programme and European Political Union’, 1 February 1949, Group 7/2/8, Mackay papers. 120. As indeed it did. Denis Healey, who was visiting the United States at the same time, took careful note of Mackay’s activities, bringing them to the attention of Morgan Phillips and the NEC. Upon his return Mackay was interviewed by the Party Secretary and warned as to his future conduct. Healey to Phillips, 28 February 1949, GS/LS/25i, Box 4, General Secretaries’ Papers 1945–64; NEC minutes, 23 February 1949, 160, LPP. 121. Fulbright to Mackay, 4 April 1949, File 57/2, Federal Union papers. It is not inconceivable that Bevin may have said something of the sort; note his similarly misleading statement on world government quoted on p. 149 above. 122. Dalton diaries, I/38, p. 15 (16 June 1950); Ernest Davies to Bevin, 19 April 1950, File 3/1/199, Davies papers, BLPES. 123. Dalton diaries, I/37, p. 60 (10 October 1949); NEC minutes, 26 October 1949, 92, LPP; Healey to Davies, 26 April 1950, Morrison to Davies, 5 May 1950, File 3/2/153, 161, Davies papers; Davies, ‘The Labour Party and European Co-operation’, 25 April 1950, Part II C, 9/9/30, Dalton papers. 124. Labour Party, National Executive Committee, European Unity: A Statement by the National Executive Committee of the British Labour Party (London: Labour Party, 1950),

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125.

126.

127.

128.

129.

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p. 4. The document’s supposition that the Commonwealth countries would be content permanently to forgo industrialisation and remain producers of raw materials, the better to maintain the ‘complementary’ relationship of their economies with Britain, was a curious reversion to the Edwardian doctrine of imperial federation which the Dominions had unambiguously rejected almost half a century previously. Additionally, the speciousness of the plea that Britain could not integrate with other European countries until the latter adopted socialism had been exposed in a telegram from Morrison to Attlee while the former was heading the delegation to the first assembly of the Council of Europe: ‘… it is far from the case that there is anything in the nature of a Socialist bloc [at the Assembly] … I am far from sure indeed if a Socialist bloc would be a good thing especially as it would be intersected by the European Movement.’ Morrison to Attlee, 23 August 1949, PREM 8/1413, Part 4. An editorial summarised the message of European Unity as follows: ‘“Socialist” Britain is the most perfect of countries, and … only if Europe is first remade in our own image can we begin to co-operate fully.’ Manchester Guardian, 13 June 1950. ‘Cette proposition a une portée politique essentielle: ouvrir dans le rempart des souverainetés nationales une brèche suffisamment limitée pour rallier les consentements, suffisamment profonde pour entraîner les États vers l’unité nécessaire à la paix.’ Monnet, Mémoires, p. 351. Herbert Morrison’s much-quoted declaration that Britain could not accept the Schuman Plan because ‘the Durham miners won’t wear it’ has too often been taken at face value: but as Edmund Dell points out, Will Lawther, president of the National Union of Mineworkers, was in favour of Britain participating in negotiations on the Plan and was prepared to back the scheme if it could be shown that British miners’ standard of living would not be adversely affected. Other contemporary rationalisations, uncritically accepted by historians, are little more convincing. Douglas Jay’s intemperate claim that ‘The fact that the French publicly announced the Plan on the same day as we heard of it … shows pretty plainly that … it had always been their intention to exclude the British … and where possible to damage this country’ is ironic, in view of the fact that Bevin had been universally praised for taking the initiative in responding to the Marshall Plan, of which he similarly received no advance warning. Finally, British assertions that to accept the French government’s invitation to talks necessarily involved ‘entering into an advance commitment to pool coal and steel resources and to set up an authority, with certain supreme powers’, were belied by Schuman himself. See Jay, Change and Fortune, pp. 199–200; Foreign Office, Anglo-French Discussions Regarding French Proposals for the Western European Coal, Iron and Steel Industries, May–June 1950 (Cmd. 7970) (London: HMSO, 1950), p. 11. For detailed analyses of the Labour government’s response to the Schuman Plan, see the works by Dell and J.W. Young cited in notes 148 and 150 below, together with Lord, Absent at the Creation. Less than a year earlier, Bevin had reminded his colleagues that ‘our existing policy … lays down that, though we may make considerable sacrifices for the sake of European economic co-operation, we should not run risks which would jeopardise our own chances of survival if the attempt to restore Western Europe should fail, and that we should not involve ourselves in the economic affairs of Europe beyond the point at which we could, if we wished, disengage ourselves. I know of nothing which should lead us to modify this policy.’ Bevin, ‘Council of Europe’, 24 October 1949, CAB 129/37, C.P. (49) 204. John Strachey, Secretary of State for War, did much to reinforce this perception when he described the Schuman Plan in a speech at Colchester as a ‘plot’ hatched by ‘the great capitalist interests of Europe’ whose object was to give control over the mines of South Wales to a handful of ‘dictators’. In a less-than-credible retraction, Strachey subsequently claimed to have been misquoted, denying having used the term ‘plot’ and accusing the Press Association reporter of failing to hear a part of the speech in which he credited the authors of the Plan with ‘the finest of intentions’. The Times, 2 July 1950.

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130. Thus Attlee complained to Dalton that he ‘didn’t remember ever seeing [European Unity] before’, until Dalton reminded him that he had personally added one of its sentences at the 24 May NEC meeting; Healey accused Dalton of writing in ‘some of the more savagely anti-European remarks’; Dalton in turn claimed to have expunged language by Davies, approved by Bevin, that was ‘much stiffer & less compromising … than anything put in the draft’; while to complete the farce Davies alleged that the uncompromising parts were added after his draft had been completed. Only Bevin had the courage of his convictions, confirming after the furore broke that he was ‘quite happy about it all … [and] had initialled & approved [the] final draft’. Dalton diaries, I/38, pp. 16–17 (16 June 1950); B. Reed and G. Williams, Denis Healey and the Policies of Power (London: Sidgwick & Jackson, 1971), p. 74; E.A.J. Davies, ‘Random Recollections of a Journalist and Politician’ (unpublished manuscript, BLPES, 1987), p. 260; Dalton diaries, p. 20 (15 June 1950). 131. An ironic reference to another Healey-drafted paper entitled Feet on the Ground (London: Labour Party, 1948), which had fulsomely protested Labour’s devotion to Western Union and the functional approach to European unity. 132. R.W.G. Mackay, Heads in the Sand: A Criticism of the Official Labour Party Attitude to European Unity (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1950), p. 17. 133. Quoted in Pimlott, Hugh Dalton, p. 581. 134. Noel-Baker to Megan Lloyd George, 3 June 1950, Megan Lloyd George papers, 23256C/107, National Library of Wales, Aberystwyth. 135. Federal Union, Let the Argument Proceed: A Reply by Labour Members of Federal Union to the Policy Statement ‘European Unity’ (London: Federal Union, 1950). 136. This category included such figures as Harold Davies, John Haire, John Hynd and Sydney Silverman. 137. In the introduction to Heads in the Sand, Mackay made a veiled reference to ‘the Dalton statement’ being connected to ‘the internal struggle for power among the leaders of the Labour Party …’ (p. viii). Contributing, no doubt, to this misapprehension were press reports that ‘assumed, incorrectly, that the timing of the anti-Schuman document had been deliberately fixed by Dalton to embarrass the Foreign Office … some commentators saw his behaviour as a blatant bid for Bevin’s job’. Pimlott, Hugh Dalton, p. 581. 138. Mackay, ‘The Council of Europe and How It Should Be Developed,’ 19 April 1950, Group 19/3/8, Mackay papers. 139. Robertson, Council of Europe, p. 95. 140. Mackay to Tawney, 10 December 1950, 57/2, Federal Union papers. 141. Davies, ‘Random Recollections’, p. 263. 142. Davies memorandum, 26 April 1950, File 3/1/224, Davies papers. 143. Mackay to Dalton, 13 January 1951, 57/2, Federal Union papers; Dalton to Attlee, n.d. [c. March 1951], Part II C, 9/23/8, Dalton papers. Typical of Dalton’s political style was this recommendation to the Prime Minister concerning Mackay’s inclusion in the Labour delegation to Strasbourg: ‘To omit him … would give an appearance of victimisation and I should not be at all surprised if, in the event of our doing this, the Tories were to offer to nominate him as one of their Delegation … It is much better to take him, but to make sure that he is isolated within our Delegation.’ 144. Copy of a minute from Bevin to Morrison (F.S./51/9), 22 January 1951, Part II C, 9/18/40, Dalton papers. Bevin advised that the best time for ‘standing up frontally to the pretensions of the Strasbourg Assembly’ would be after NATO had ‘given the continentals confidence’, after the relationship of the latter and the OEEC had been resolved ‘so that we do not look as if we were sabotaging two European institutions at the same time’, and after Germany became associated with or joined NATO. All these conditions, Bevin believed, might be satisfied within 12 months. 145. Upon his return Crosland published an article describing the Assembly’s procedures as ‘deeply shocking to Britsh delegates trained in a tradition of efficient bureaucracy,

Socialism in One Country

146.

147. 148.

149.

150. 151.

152. 153.

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careful drafting, lengthy research, and detailed discussion in Committee’. See letters from Robert Boothby and A.J.P. Taylor to Crosland, 27 May 1951, 4/2, Crosland papers; Crosland, ‘Prospects for the Council of Europe’, p. 147. Pimlott, Hugh Dalton, p. 582. If anything, though, his colleagues may have cherished warmer feelings for the Council than some Labour commentators at home, one of whom, the Fabian academic William Pickles, described it in a Political Quarterly article as ‘the Hague Zoo’ and the ‘puking infant of Strasbourg’. Warming to his theme, Pickles went on to liken the Assembly’s relationship to a genuine parliament with ‘an adulterous week-end at Brighton … to the institution of marriage – it offers some of the pleasures, but none of the responsibilities’. Such strictures, of course, overlooked the fact that it was the expressed policy of the Labour government to prevent the Assembly from acquiring any. See Pickles, ‘The Strasbourg Illusion’, p. 59. Robertson, Council of Europe, p. 96. As J.W. Young has argued in his stimulating but not wholly convincing study, Britain, France and the Unity of Europe 1945–51. Even though Young almost entirely overlooks the influence of internal Labour policy, concentrating instead upon the government’s diplomatic record, much of the evidence he presents seems to run counter to his thesis. In 1947, as he points out, the Foreign Office economic departments, the Board of Trade and the Treasury were raising all possible objections that could be raised even to the idea of a European customs union, while the Colonial Office performed the same function with respect to one confined to the British and French colonies. Bevin himself, Young concedes, in practice was little better. ‘Bevin had many ideas about what to try to seek in Western Europe – military strength, sound finances, a strong industrial base – but he had few ideas on exactly how to get these, beyond forming a military alliance.’ Young, p. 82 (emphasis in original). In addition to Young, see, e.g., E. Windrich, British Labour’s Foreign Policy; Attlee, As It Happened; Healey, The Time of My Life; Greenwood, ‘Ernest Bevin, France and “Western Union”’; G. Warner, ‘The Labour Governments and the Unity of Western Europe, 1945–51,’ in R. Ovendale (ed.), The Foreign Policy of the British Labour Governments 1945–1951 (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1984). E. Dell, The Schuman Plan and the British Abdication of Leadership in Europe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995). See, e.g., Curtis, The Ambiguities of Power, which argues that Western Union was part of a careful strategy to gain ‘control over Third World economic resources’ and facilitate ‘the control of dissent within Western states’ (p. 38). A similar, but rather more sophisticated, interpretation is offered by John Saville in The Politics of Continuity. Blackwell, Clinging to Grandeur. Mackay, Heads in the Sand, p. 4.

Conclusion

The crisis of Labour internationalism in the 1940s, while in some respects predictable, was far from inevitable. Although the breakdown of the League had dealt a severe blow to many members’ faith that the natural order of political evolution was inclining the world toward ever more progressive and inclusive forms of government, the party’s adhesion to the core principle that an international authority was an indispensable component of a stable world order was, except on the margins, surprisingly little affected by the failure of the Genevan experiment. Nor was the breakdown of internationalism in the second half of the decade foreordained by any more serious shortcoming on the part of the new international organisation than had been present in the old. Indeed, in almost every significant respect, it may reasonably be contended that the UN was far more favourably positioned to serve as the instrument of an internationalist foreign policy than had been the League. Unlike the latter, the UN was a genuinely inclusive organisation, in which all the Great Powers were represented from the beginning. It imposed more stringent obligations upon its members, all of whom were positively bound to carry into effect the instructions of the Security Council. It incorporated an extensive apparatus of social and economic co-operation in the form of the specialised agencies – as the League, with the conspicuous exception of the International Labour Office, did not. Although it did concede the right of veto to the five Great Powers, this was nonetheless a vast improvement over the procedure of the League, in which all members, both in the Council and the Assembly, had possessed a similar ability to paralyse the organisation. And though it had few positive successes to show in the political sphere during its early years, the League arguably had fewer still. On the face of things, therefore, there is no very obvious reason for Labour not to have clung to the new international authority with even more fervour than it did to the old.

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The evidence presented here suggests that the true explanation for this apparent anomaly is to be found not, as has been contended, in the defects of the UN as a political organisation – manifest though these were, and remain – but instead in the changed ideological context within which Labour internationalism was reformulated between 1939 and 1945. Largely in response to the political and cultural tensions generated by the war, Labour’s traditional internationalism, which had maintained that the interests of Britain and those of the rest of the world were complementary and sought an international organisation to give institutional expression to that congruence, yielded to a far more pessimistic philosophy, which saw British values as isolated in a hostile world and looked to an international authority to uphold and defend them against their enemies by whatever means were necessary. On a more visceral – but no less important – level, the war also served to reconcile the Labour movement psychologically to its own country, while simultaneously alienating it from the nations of the European continent. Between 1919 and 1939 Labour internationalism had taken as a fundamental principle that British workers shared more in common with members of their class abroad than with the well-to-do at home. While this sense of socialist fraternity did not induce party members to define themselves exclusively or even primarily in class terms, as the experience of the Great War had shown, it did mean that the Labour movement’s identification with the nation-state was qualified by other ideological considerations. By the early 1930s, the party was preaching resistance to their own government should it participate in aggressive war as the first duty of the British people, whose primary allegiance was due to the international authority as the embodiment of ‘world-citizenship’. As Clement Attlee declared to the Commons in November 1933, ‘You have got to make the League of Nations a real League, and you have to put loyalty to the League of Nations above loyalty to your country.’1 Almost as important a factor lending support to interwar internationalism was the party’s regard for left-wing governments abroad and, complementarily, its growing suspicions of its own. While the Labour left had always professed a special reverence for the ‘socialist sixth of the world’, the entire party was united in its admiration for the achievements of the social-democratic administrations in Scandinavia; the socialist-led Popular Front in France; and, above all, the left-wing Republican government in Spain, in contrast to whose stirring fight against the forces of international Fascism the vacillating and inglorious policy of the British government stood out all the more starkly.2 The disparity between the two examples, reinforced by bitter memories of the 1931 ‘betrayal’, engendered among Labour

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supporters a sense of alienation from the institutions of the British state, which by the mid-1930s had grown to a degree never previously seen nor, until the early 1980s, to be approached again. Stafford Cripps’s demand at the 1933 Annual Conference, that the next Labour government pass an enabling act conferring upon the Executive whatever powers were necessary to ensure that the socialist transformation of Britain would not be defeated by a counter-revolutionary coup, was an extreme expression of a more general and widely shared apprehension that the capitalist cabal supposedly responsible for the Zinoviev letter and the ‘bankers’ ramp’ would stop at nothing to defend its class interests.3 This anxiety underlay Labour’s seemingly illogical decision to vote year after year against the government’s defence estimates while the dictatorships grew increasingly bold and aggressive, for fear that when the crisis ultimately came the guns would be found pointing in the wrong direction.4 To many Labour activists, therefore, Britain’s military weakness alone could provide an incentive for the National Government to make common cause with the other members of the League; whereas a grave danger existed that a well-armed Britain, with no need to rely upon collective security, would either use its military power to embark upon an anti-socialist crusade or conclude a modus vivendi with the dictatorships to preserve the Empire at Europe’s expense.5 Labour’s wartime experience altered these attitudes radically. In direct contrast to the impact of war on the home front, and the response of ‘never again’ which it evoked with respect to the unemployment and poverty of the 1930s, the events of 1940 provided ‘a reaffirmation of Britishness and the “British way” of doing things. Far from creating a radical, “all-change” culture, the War gave Britain the opportunity to carry on regardless, sustaining a culture of continuity.’6 The most powerful impressions thus left upon a significant proportion of Labour supporters by six years of bitter struggle against the Fascist dictatorships were, first, the renewal of moral authority which Britain had earned by its resistance to Hitlerism, entitling it once again to exercise power on the world scene in the interest of humanity – the ‘moral bath’ of which Herbert Morrison spoke in 1943 – and second, the corresponding unfitness of other, less meritorious countries overseas. The events of the Second World War seemed to offer incontrovertible evidence that Britain’s culture, traditions and values were indeed profoundly different from those of its neighbours, and the experience permanently curbed mainstream Labour’s tendency to look abroad for socialist rôle-models. In its place, the conviction that Britain, and especially a Labour Britain, could profitably instruct other countries but had little to learn from them led in turn to the appearance of that

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distinctive note of socialist self-satisfaction which party spokesmen struck so frequently in the 1940s, and which had been virtually absent in the previous decade.7 Thus whereas the ‘Whig’ internationalism of the interwar years had asserted, and often overstated, the similarity of Britain’s values and interests to those of other nations, its successor no less vehemently insisted upon, and frequently grotesquely exaggerated, the differences between them. The ‘new internationalism’, indeed, at times could appear highly reminiscent of the old nationalism. Labour’s foreign policies after 1945 lent a degree of credence to David Mitrany’s concern that ‘the social ends of Labour … were likely to lead straight into a narrow nationalism, unless carefully tied to international ends …’.8 Denis Healey, looking back in 1952 on the Attlee administration’s record, seemed to concede as much when he propounded as a general rule that ‘to the extent that the internal structure of a given state satisfies the need of the workers within it, to that extent its socialist party will tend to put the national interest before international solidarity’9 – a proposition whose affirmation by one of Labour’s leading rightists provided an ironic counterpoint to Stalin’s dictum that class struggle becomes more intense the closer a society approaches Communism. The failure of ‘muscular’ internationalism to embed itself permanently in Labour ideology after 1945, however, is due less to the rise of a spirit of socialist chauvinism on the left than to the contradictions inherent to the idea itself. Conceived at a moment when British selfconfidence began to be tempered by an appreciation of the country’s postwar weakness, ‘muscular’ internationalism as expressed in the ‘Four-Power Plan’ and the similar schemes emerging from the Fabian Society International Bureau looked upon a new international authority as an agency through which Britain could both project power overseas and relieve itself of external commitments whose burden it was no longer able to sustain. The incompatibility of these goals meant that ‘muscular’ internationalism as a basis for a coherent Labour foreign policy was effectively stillborn. From the UN’s earliest days, the Attlee administration was confronted with the corollary to Gladwyn Jebb’s conception of ‘the will to power’ as the essential basis of British diplomacy: that here as elsewhere an unbreakable nexus existed between power and performance. The international organisation, in other words, could either reflect the unequal distribution of power amongst its members and thus tend to strengthen the ‘haves’ at the expense of the ‘have-nots’ – in which category Britain now increasingly found itself – or leave untouched the existing balance, in which case the tendency within the organisation would favour stasis rather than movement. Both Bevin and the proponents of world government

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within the party, unlike the ‘Whig’ internationalists of the interwar years and after, were prepared to confront this choice head-on: but the divergence of their preferred alternatives, leading on the one side to an abandonment of the ideal of international government and on the other to a myopic utopianism, provided a convincing demonstration of the incompatibility of ‘muscular’ internationalism’s component parts. The impact of war on the European variant of Labour internationalism is equally apparent. The product of the second occurrence of hostilities on the continent in a single generation, Labour Europeanism represented an attempt to marry ‘muscular’ internationalism’s emphasis on power as an inescapable factor in world politics to the ‘imagined communitarianism’ of ‘Whig’ internationalism, formerly incarnated in the much-invoked ‘spirit of Geneva’. In an ironic turnabout, Europeanism’s lack of appeal to the majority of Labour supporters was due not to any objection to power-politics as such, but rather to the party’s doubts about the extent to which any form of community could be said to exist between the British and their European neighbours – the failure, in other words, was precisely one of imagination. The most forcible consideration inclining Labour against genuine participation in an international political organisation confined to western Europe was the conviction that the peoples of the Continent could no longer be considered fit partners for a Britain whose ideals, and steadfastness in defending them, were of a different calibre from those found outside the English-speaking world. It was this attitude, so characteristic of the British right during the interwar years, that the traumatic experience of the Second World War for the first time communicated to a majority of the left, against which the small body of Labour Europeanists, whose appreciation of the postwar balance of power was in many ways more prescient than that of their ‘pragmatic’ opponents, beat their heads in vain. By the late 1940s, therefore, Labour internationalism had become splintered along distinct and largely incompatible fault-lines. These divisions, however, were the consequence of the party’s attempts to reinvigorate internationalism rather than abandon it, by seeking a rationale for international action that took into account the ‘realities’ of the world as it appeared to Labour during the Second World War. It was above all the ephemeral nature of those supposed realities, like those which had guided Labour foreign policy in the 1930s, that in the final analysis brought about the terminal decline of internationalism as a coherent ideology of the British left.

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NOTES 1. 281 H.C. Deb. 5s., c. 148 (7 November 1933). 2. See T. Buchanan, The Spanish Civil War and the British Labour Movement (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). 3. As we have seen, the same considerations could also fuel extreme-left pro-Sovietism, which saw the League of Nations merely as one more agency of world capitalism. But such views were always in the minority within the party in the 1930s. 4. As Michael Foot recalls, ‘The question uppermost in the mind of most Socialists was not how Germany could be thwarted, but rather how soon and in what form would the [Fascist] pattern be applied in Britain and how could it be resisted.’ M. Foot, Aneurin Bevan: A Biography, vol. I: 1897–1945 (London: Macgibbon & Kee, 1962), pp. 196–7. As noted in Chapter 1 above (n. 67), this concern extended far beyond the anti-capitalist left of the party. 5. Hence Attlee’s observation that ‘We had no trust whatever in Neville Chamberlain’s Government. There was always the possibility that they would prefer the evil dictators to democracy.’ Williams, A Prime Minister Remembers, p. 12. 6. J. Bulpitt, ‘The European Question: Rules, National Modernisation and the Ambiguities of Primat der Innenpolitik’, in D. Marquand and A. Seldon (eds), The Ideas that Shaped PostWar Britain (London: Fontana, 1996), p. 231. 7. Expressions of this self-congratulatory mood can be cited ad infinitum: a few examples will suffice. According to Arthur Greenwood, the then Labour Party chairman, there was ‘no country in whose hands the future of the world could be safely left except Britain’. Tribune likewise declared, ‘No other land is so exempt from hysteria, so selfdisciplined, so humane and reasonable.’ In the view of the right-wing MP Stanley Evans, the British were ‘fine people who have made a greater contribution to the progress of mankind than any other people’; while his left-wing counterpart Seymour Cocks considered the British political system ‘infinitely better than those [sic] in any other country …’. Quoted in J.H. Huizinga, Confessions of a European in England (London: Heinemann, 1958); 427 H.C. Deb. 5s., c. 1754 (23 October 1946); 446 H.C. Deb. 5s., c. 446 (22 January 1948). 8. Mitrany to Frank Aydelotte, 12 November 1945, ‘Mitrany Books Reviews, Letters and Press Correspondence’ box, file 1, Mitrany papers, BLPES. Attlee himself had expressed the same apprehension more than a decade earlier. ‘I rather anticipate a period during which Socialism will be increasingly national ie [sic] economic forces will make for a transformation of society on collectivist but national lines. The crux will be whether this development will result in another war between socialistically organised but national states or whether the nationalism will pass away and give way to a federation of socialist states.’ Attlee to Tom Attlee, April 1933, quoted in Harris, Attlee, p. 116. 9. D. Healey, ‘Power Politics and the Labour Party’, in R.H.S. Crossman (ed.), New Fabian Essays (London: Turnstile Press, 1952), p. 148.

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Morgan, K.O., ‘Imperialists at Bay: British Labour and Decolonization’, in R.D. King and R. Kitson (eds), The Statecraft of British Imperialism: Essays in Honour of Wm. Roger Louis (London: Frank Cass, 1999). Newman, M., ‘Labour, Europe and the World: The Post-War Labour Government and West European Integration’, in Socialism and European Unity: The Dilemma of the Left in Britain and France (London: Junction, 1983). Owen, N., ‘Decolonisation and Postwar Consensus’, in H. Jones and M. Kandiah (eds), The Myth of Consensus: New Views on British History, 1945–64 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1996). Prynn, D.L., ‘Common Wealth – A British “Third Party” of the 1940s’, Journal of Contemporary History, 7, 1–2 (January–April 1972). Pugh, M. ‘Pacifism and Politics in Britain, 1931–1935’, Historical Journal, 23, 3 (September 1980). Quinault, R. ‘Churchill’s United Europe’, History Today, 42, 6 (June 1992). Reynolds, D. ‘Churchill and the British “Decision” to Fight On in 1940: Right Policy, Wrong Reasons’, in R. Langhorne (ed.), Diplomacy and Intelligence During the Second World War: Essays in Honour of F.H. Hinsley (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985). ——‘1940: Fulcrum of the Twentieth Century?’, International Affairs, 66, 2 (April 1990). ——‘The Atlantic “Flop”: British Foreign Policy and the Churchill–Roosevelt Meeting of August 1941,’ in D. Brinkley and D.R. Facey-Crowther (eds), The Atlantic Charter (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1994). Robbins, K., ‘Labour Foreign Policy and International Socialism: MacDonald and the League of Nations’, in K. Robbins (ed.), Politicians, Diplomacy and War in Modern British History (London: Hambledon Press, 1994). Russell, D., ‘“The Jolly Old Empire”: Labour, the Commonwealth and Europe, 1945–51’, in A. May (ed.), Britain, the Commonwealth and Europe: The Commonwealth and Britain’s Applications to Join the European Communities (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001). Schneer, J., ‘Hopes Deferred or Shattered: The British Labour Left and the Third Force Movement, 1945–49’, Journal of Modern History, 56, 2 (June 1984). Seyd, P., ‘Factionalism within the Labour Party: The Socialist League 1932–1937’, in A. Briggs and J. Saville (eds), Essays in Labour History 1918–1939 (London: Croom Helm, 1977). Sherwood, M., ‘“Diplomatic Platitudes”: The Atlantic Charter, the United Nations and Colonial Independence’, Immigrants and Minorities, 4, 2 (June 1991).

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Shlaim, A., ‘Prelude to Downfall: The British Offer of Union to France, June 1940,’ Journal of Contemporary History, 9, 3 (July 1974). Smith, R. and Zametica, J., ‘The Cold Warrior: Clement Attlee Reconsidered, 1945–7’, International Affairs, 61, 2 (Spring 1985). Stewart, M., ‘British Socialists and the Question of European Unity, 1939–45’, European Studies Review, 10, 1 (January 1980). Taylor, M., ‘Patriotism, History and the Left in Twentieth-Century Britain’, Historical Journal, 33, 4 (December 1990). Taylor, P., ‘Functionalism: The Theory of David Mitrany’, in P. Taylor and A.J.R. Groom (eds), International Organisation: A Conceptual Approach (London: Frances Pinter, 1978). Twitchett, K.J., ‘The Colonial Powers and the United Nations’, Journal of Contemporary History, 4, 1 (January 1969). Wallace, W., ‘Foreign Policy and National Identity in the United Kingdom’, International Affairs, 67, 1 (January 1991). Warner, G., ‘The Reconstruction and Defence of Western Europe’, in N. Waites (ed.), Troubled Neighbours: Anglo-French Relations in the Twentieth Century (London: Weidenfeld, 1971). ——‘Bevin and British Foreign Policy’, in G.A. Craig and F.L. Lowenheim (eds), The Diplomats, 1939–1979 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994). Weight, R., ‘State, Intelligentsia and the Promotion of National Culture in Britain, 1939–45’, Historical Research, 69, 168 (February 1996). Westad, O.A., ‘The New International History of the Cold War: Three (Possible) Paradigms’, Diplomatic History, 24, 4 (Fall, 2000). White, R., ‘The Europeanism of Coudenhove-Kalergi’, in P.M.R. Stirk (ed.), European Unity in Context: The Interwar Period (London: Pinter, 1989). Wilford, R.A., ‘The Federal Union Campaign’, European Studies Review, 10, 1 (January 1980). Wilson, P., ‘The New Europe Debate in Wartime Britain,’ in P. Murray and P. Rich (eds), Visions of European Unity (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1996). Winkler, H.R., ‘British Labor and the Origins of the Idea of Colonial Trusteeship, 1914–1919’, Historian, 13 (1951). ——‘Arthur Henderson’, in G.A. Craig and F. Gilbert (eds), The Diplomats 1918–1939 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1953). ——‘The Emergence of a Labor Foreign Policy in Great Britain, 1918–1929’, Journal of Modern History, 28, 3 (September 1956). Winter, J.M., ‘The Webbs and the Non-White World: A Case of Socialist Racialism’, Journal of Contemporary History, 9, 1 (January 1974).

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DISSERTATIONS Farrar, E., ‘The British Labour Party and International Organization: A Study of the Party’s Policy towards the League of Nations, the United Nations and Western Union’, Ph.D., University of London, 1952. Grantham, J.T., ‘The Labour Party and European Unity, 1939–1951’, Ph.D., Cambridge University, 1977. Millen-Penn, K., ‘From Liberal to Socialist Internationalism: Konni Zilliacus and the League of Nations, 1894–1939’, Ph.D., State University of New York, Binghamton, NY, 1993. Morefield, J.M., ‘“Families of Mankind”: Liberal Idealism and the Construction of Twentieth Century Internationalism’, Ph.D., Cornell University, 1999. Rose, C.R., ‘The Relation of Socialist Principles to British Labour Foreign Policy, 1945–51’, D. Phil., Oxford University, 1959.

PERIODICALS Daily Herald Daily Telegraph Empire European Affairs Fabian Journal Fabian News Federal Union News International Conciliation Manchester Guardian The Nation New Leader New Statesman and Nation News Chronicle New York Times Nineteenth Century Observer Political Quarterly Socialist Commentary Socialist Outlook The Times Tribune Twentieth Century Venture

Index

Abyssinian crisis, 39–40, 75, 76, 141, 216 Acland, Sir Richard, 226 Adams, Grantley, 199–200 Addison, Christopher, 1st Viscount, 164, 196 Albu, Austen, 82 Alexander, Albert Victor, 156, 189, 223 Amery, Leopold, 121–2 Angell, (Ralph) Norman, 17, 28, 86 Armistice and Post-War Committee, 127–8, 132, 189 Arnold-Forster, William, 85–6 Atlantic Charter, 80, 85, 111–12, 184–5 Atomic weapons, international control of, 146–9, 162 Attlee, Clement, 2, 5, 16, 31, 36, 39–40, 41, 43, 54, 56, 67–9, 97, 99, 102, 104, 105, 106–7, 109, 110, 112, 116, 123, 127, 131–2, 141–2, 144, 145–6, 149, 151, 152, 154–5, 157, 164, 234; support for world ‘super-state’, 34–5, 267; November 8 1939 ‘war aims’ speech, 57; at San Francisco conference, 133–4; and colonial administration, 184–6, 187, 188–90, 193, 199, 202; and European federation, 222, 225, 227, 242–3, 245–6 Austria, 79 Australia, 189, 224, 248 Baldwin, Stanley, 30 Balogh, Thomas, 89, 90 Barnes, George, 174 Belgium, 76, 77, 78, 220, 238 Berle, Adolf, 111 Berne Conference, 24

Bevan, Aneurin, 78, 143, 203 Beveridge Report, 97 Beveridge, William, 1st Baron, 160, 218, 221 Bevin, Ernest 40, 42, 90, 99, 104, 112, 117, 119, 122, 127, 143, 145–6, 153, 154, 155, 162, 165, 202, 253, 269; appointment as Foreign Minister, 144–5, 146; early attitude to UN, 149–53; and revision of UN Charter, 155–8, 164; rejects alternative to UN, 166; and colonial administration, 188, 189–90, 193–5, 197, 199, 204; and Federal Union, 218, 227; and ‘Western Union’ proposal, 234–7, 239–40, 242, 245–6; and Council of Europe, 243–5, 246–7, 251; and Schuman Plan, 249 Blatchford, Robert, 237 Boer War, 174, 177 Brailsford, Henry Noel, 16, 17, 18, 20, 22, 35–7, 40–1, 76, 86, 89, 91, 126, 163, 204, 205, 221 Braithwaite, Albert, 218 Briand, Aristide, 215–16 Bright, John, 16 British Committee for United Europe, 231 British Commonwealth, 60, 68, 79, 106, 108, 120, 121, 123, 125, 180, 183, 223, 225, 236, 238, 244, 248, 249, 253 Brussels Treaty, 162, 242, 243 Bryce Group, 18, 20 Bulgaria, 79 Butler, Richard Austin, 109, 133 Butterfield, Herber, 6 Buxton, Charles Roden, 42, 182

294

The Labour Party, Nationalism and Internationalism

Cabinet Committee on War Aims, 104–6, 119 Cadogan, Sir Alexander, 103, 111, 145, 184 Calder, Ritchie, 221, 226 Callaghan, (Leonard) James, 239 Cameroons, 178 Camus, Albert, 160 Canada, 121, 177, 238, 249 Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 86 Carr, Edward Hallett, 78–9, 90 Catholic Church, Labour attitudes toward, 238–9 Catlin, George, 218, 223–4 Cecil of Chelwood, Viscount (Lord Robert Cecil), 28, 30, 114, 157 Chamberlain, Austen, 29 Chamberlain, Joseph, 205 Chamberlain, (Arthur) Neville, 1, 44, 74, 75, 142, 222 Channel Tunnel proposal, 238 Chatham House. See Royal Institute of International Affairs Chelmsford, 161 China, 33, 112, 117, 157, 163 Churchill, Winston Spencer, 1, 44, 97, 104, 106, 110, 111, 112, 119; and regional organisations proposal, 124–27, 132, 142; and colonial administration, 184–5, 189–90; and European unity, 230–1, 240–1 Clay, Harold, 61–2 Clemenceau, Georges, 61 Cobden, Richard, 16, 79 Cocks, Seymour, 163 Cole, George Douglas Howard, 55, 79–80, 84, 90, 163 Colonial Office, 191, 195, 203 Colonies, international administration of, 182 Committee on Reconstruction Problems, 106 Common Wealth Party, 226–8, 231 Commonwealth Relations Office, 197 Communist Party of Great Britain, 183, 227 Concert of Europe, 19 Congress of Europe, (1948) 240–1 Conservative Party, 1, 29–30, 39, 72, 98, 106, 141–2, 231

Cooper, (Alfred) Duff, 30, 104–5 Co-Operative Party, 221 Coudenhove-Kalergi, Richard von, 215, 230 Council of Europe, 10, 239, 240, 243–4, 246–7, 248, 250, 251–2 Council of Foreign Ministers, 153, 154, 234 Cranborne, Robert, Viscount (5th Marquess of Salisbury), 131 Crawley, Aidan, 158, 232 Creech Jones, Arthur, 191, 194, 195, 197–202, 203, 204, 218 Creech Jones, Violet, 175 Cripps, (Richard) Stafford, 90, 99, 109, 112, 224, 243, 268; and Socialist League, 36–40; and regional organisations proposal, 119–27, 132, 146 Crosland, Anthony, 222, 240, 252 Cross, Richard, 18 Crossman, Richard Howard Stafford, 55, 76, 81, 228–30 Crusade for World Government. See Parliamentary Group for World Government Curry, W.B., 221 Curtis, Lionel, 190, 218, 221, 225 Czechoslovakia, 76, 77, 85, 122, 216 Dallas, George, 57 Dalton, Hugh, 30–1, 40, 42, 44, 51, 53–4, 57, 58, 73, 99, 103, 104, 112, 116, 123, 144, 145, 151; and The International Post-War Settlement, 61–7; and colonial administration, 193, 203; and European federation, 216, 222, 240, 243, 247, 250, 252, 253 Davies, Ernest, 247, 251 Davies, Rhys, 164 Denmark, 77 De Valera, Éamon, 223 Dickinson, G. Lowes, 18, 22 Disarmament Conference, 31 Draft Treaty of Mutual Assistance, 27 Dugdale, John, 189–90 Dumbarton Oaks Conference, 84, 127, 128–9, 188; Labour Party reactions to, 129–32 Dunkirk, 1, 73 Durbin, Evan, 60, 218, 238

Index Economic Co-operation Administration, 242 Eden, Anthony, 106, 112, 116, 122, 123, 126, 128, 133, 134, 146, 149 Einstein, Albert, 160 El Alamein, 124 English Civil War, 7 Ensor, R.C.K. ,16 Eritrea, 201 Esperantist movement, 5 European Convention on Human Rights, 201 Fabian Society, 17, 21, 66, 75, 150, 174, 203, 238; Fabian Research Department, 18; International Authority Group, 82; International Bureau, 83–4, 86, 89, 130, 186, 269; International Political Authority Group, 84; Fabian Colonial Bureau, 191, 194–5, 199, 201, 202–3, 204 Federal Union, 56, 159, 240; creation, 217–18; 220–1; Federal Union, Inc. (U.S.), 220; Federal Union Research Institute, 221; relations with Labour Party, 221–24, 225–6; and Common Wealth party, 226–8 Finland, 76 Flanders, Allan, 84 Foch, Ferdinand, 61 Foot, Michael, 74, 75, 228, 230 Foreign Office, 102–3, 104, 109, 144, 145, 247, 248, 251; Economic and Reconstruction Department, 112; and regional organisations proposal, 119–27; Political Intelligence Department, 177–8 Foreign Research and Press Service (later Foreign Office Research Department), 87, 90, 103, 104, 105–6, 107–110, 112, 114, 119, 127 Forward March movement, 226 ‘Four-Power Plan’, 112–16, 119, 120–3, 124, 152, 269 Fourteen Points, 23, 90, 176 France, 29, 41, 66, 67, 76, 112, 151, 157, 216, 217, 220, 234, 248–9, 267 Franco-British Union proposal, 217, 225 Franco, Francisco, 143 Fulbright, J. William, 247 Functionalism, 86–91, 232–3

295

General Act of Arbitration, Conciliation and Judicial Settlement, 31 Geneva Protocol, 28–31 George VI, King, 144, 218 Germany, 24, 34, 52–3, 55, 67, 77, 81–2, 107–8, 113, 115, 124, 176, 179, 219, 229, 234, 245 Gibson, George, 221 Gillies, William, 42, 52–3, 61, 105 Gladstone, William Ewart, 16 Goebbels, Josef, 81 Greece, 78, 122, 125, 143, 153, 158, 234, 236 Green, J.F.N., 184, 191 Green, Thomas Hill, 16 Greenidge, Charles, 202 Greenwood, Arthur, 102, 104, 106, 109 Griffiths, James, 201, 202 Group of Inter-Allied Socialists, 59 Guest, Leslie Haden, 179, 186 Haakon VII, King, 223 Hague Congress. See Congress of Europe Hague Peace Conference, 18, 19 Haldane, Richard, Viscount, 29 Hale, Leslie, 161, 224, 241 Halifax, 1st Earl of (Edward Wood), 104–5, 106 Hall, George, Viscount, 145, 193–4, 197, 202 Hancock, William Keith, 218 Hardie, James Keir, 17 Hayek, Friedrich von, 218 Healey, Denis, 82, 129, 243, 247, 269 Henderson, Arthur 15, 27, 28, 32, 51, 144, 179, 205; and League of Nations proposals, 21–23; and revision of the Covenant, 25–6; as Foreign Minister, 30–1; and ‘Briand Plan’, 216 Hinden, Rita, 191, 195, 197, 203, 204 Hitler, Adolf, 8, 34, 40, 43, 51, 55, 56, 75, 79, 101, 104, 142, 217, 220 Hoare-Laval Pact, 40, 142 Hobhouse, Leonard, 16 Hobson, John A., 16, 17, 20, 25, 91 Hopkins, Harry, 106, 111 Horrabin, (James) Frank, 178, 203 Hughes, Emrys, 53 Huizinga, Johan, 82 Hull, Cordell, 62, 185

296

The Labour Party, Nationalism and Internationalism

Huysmans, Camille, 22 Hynd, John, 231, 232 Independent Labour Party, 17, 20, 21, 24, 33, 35–6, 176, 227 India, 177, 195, 199, 235 Indonesia, 153, 154, 158, 235 Inter-Allied Labour and Socialist Conference, 23, 175 International Peace Campaign, 43 Iran, 153 Ireland, 55, 220, 225 Italy, ex-colonies of, 145–6, 193 Japan, 33–4, 113, 219 Jay, Douglas, 238, 253 Jebb, (Hubert Miles) Gladwyn, 112–16, 118, 120–3, 127, 132, 134, 269 Jenkins, Roy, 145 Jennings, W. Ivor, 221 Joad, Cyril, 218 ‘Keep Left’ group, 230, 235 Kellogg Pact, 37, 100 Kerensky, Aleksandr Feodorovich, 21 Keynes, John Millington, 118 Kimber, Charles, 217, 220, 221 King, Evelyn, 231 King, Mackenzie, 148 Korean War, 163–4 Labour Party: Parliamentary Labour Party, 15, 25, 75, 97, 147, 233; Advisory Committee on International Questions, 18, 24, 28, 41–3, 52, 57, 59, 86, 130–1, 132, 182; National Executive Committee, 20, 21, 23, 32, 33, 36, 39–40, 43, 51, 53–4. 56–64 passim, 66–7, 80, 103, 163, 183, 186, 214, 227, 241, 247–8, 249; National Joint Council, 33; International Sub-Committee, 53–4, 58–9; International Relations SubCommittee, 57, 65; Central Committee on Reconstruction Problems, 57–8; Policy SubCommittee, 58, 62; Policy and Publicity Committee, 162; Advisory Committee on Imperial Questions, 179, 182, 183, 184, 186–7, 190–1, 192, 195, 196, 200, 202, 204; Research Department, 192; Press, Publicity

and Campaign Committee, 222; PLP Europe Group (later European Co-Operation Group), 231–4, 245, 247, 250 Labour and Socialist International, 5, 25, 178 Lang, Gordon, 231 Lansbury, George, 32, 39–40, 180–1 Laski, Harold, 5, 53–5, 61–2, 75, 78–9, 85, 89, 91, 218 Law, Richard, 103, 112, 218 League of Nations, 2, 5, 6, 8, 9, 10, 14, 15, 19, 20, 21–44 passim, 50, 54, 58, 64, 73, 82, 92, 99–103, 114, 122, 124, 130, 134, 135, 141–2, 175–7, 220, 224, 228, 266–7; Assembly, 7, 26, 28, 29, 32, 266; Covenant, 24–5, 26, 32, 40. 92, 100, 101, 103, 178; International Labour Office (later International Labour Organisation), 25, 118, 267; Council, 26, 60, 266; Permanent Court of International Justice, 30, 59; Permanent Mandates Commission, 177–80, 183, 188, 191, 193, 195; and Briand Plan, 215–16 League of Nations Society, 20 League of Nations Union, 27, 28; ‘Peace Ballot’, 39–40 Leech, Sir Joseph, 218 Left Book Club, 222 Levy, Benn, 147 Lewis, W. Arthur, 202 Liberal Party, 15, 17, 21, 27, 28, 98 Liberia, 133 Lincoln, Abraham, 36 Lindsay of Birker, Lord, 231 Listowel, Lord, 201, 203 Lloyd George, David, 24, 61, 178 Locarno Pact, 30 Lothian, Lord, 218, 221, 225 Lytton, Lord, 33, 36, 150 MacArthur, Douglas, 163 MacDonald, (James) Ramsay, 15, 17, 22–3, 24, 32, 33, 174, 177, 179; opposition to Draft Treaty of Mutual Assistance, 27–8; and Geneva Protocol, 29–30 ‘Mackay Protocol’, 251–2 Mackay, R.W.G., 224–5, 226–8, 230–2, 238, 241, 244, 245–7, 249–52, 254

Index Malaya, 235 Manchurian crisis, 33–4, 35, 75, 121, 124, 141, 216 Manhattan District Project, 148 Mann, Thomas, 160 Manning, Leah, 233 Marshall, George Catlett, 234 Marshall Plan, 242, 246 Martin, (Basil) Kingsley, 81, 150, 218, 226, 239 Marx, Karl, 118 Mayhew, Christopher, 221, 235 McNeil, Hector, 150, 157, 199, 238, 239 Menuhin, Yehudi, 160 Micronesia, 201 Middleton, James, 58–9 Mikardo, Ian, 228, 230 Mill, James, 118 Milner, Alfred, Viscount, 175 Mitrany, David, 86–91, 118, 232, 269 Molotov, Vyacheslav Mikhailovich, 126, 133 Monckton, Sir Walter, 109 Monnet, Jean, 238 Morel, E.D., 17, 176, 237 Morrison, Herbert, 8, 41–2, 99, 117, 162, 164, 187–8, 243, 247, 252, 268 Moscow Declaration, 59, 62, 63, Mukden incident, 33 Munich crisis, 1, 43, 44, 141, 216 Mussolini, Benito, 39, 101, 142, 217 National Council of Labour, 39, 42 National Government, 1, 32–3, 38, 40, 41, 44, 50, 75, 99, 102, 105, 142, 268 Nauru, 178 Netherlands, 220, 223, 238 New Hebrides, 191 New Zealand, 148 Nicolson, Harold, 250 ‘1941 Committee’, 226 Nkrumah, Kwame, 204 Noel-Baker, Philip J., 29, 30, 31, 42–3, 53, 54, 55, 57, 59, 61–2, 80, 83, 85, 89, 98, 100–03, 129, 132–3, 135, 141–2, 144, 145, 151, 156, 198, 216, 222, 250 North Atlantic Treaty Organisation, 10, 162 Norway, 77, 223 Optional Clause, 30

297

Organisation for European Economic Co-operation, 10, 162, 245 Orr, Sir John Boyd, 160 Orwell, George (E.A. Blair), 73–4 Ottawa Economic Conference (1931), 186, 216 Owen, A.D.K. (David) 90, 122 Padley, Walter, 221 Pakistan, 235 Palestine, 201 Pan African Federation, 200 Pan-Europa Society, 215 Pankhurst, Emmeline, 174 Parker, John, 82, 84–5, 221 Parliamentary Group for World Government, 159–61, 166 Parmoor, 1st Baron (Charles Cripps), 28, 29 People’s World Convention. See Parliamentary Group for World Government Pethick-Lawrence, Frederick, Baron, 85 Phillimore Committee, 102–3 Phillips, Morgan, 241 ‘Phoney War’, 50 Pickles, William, 238 Poland, 75, 79, 122, 125, 143 Ponsonby, Arthur, Baron, 17, 29 Population transfers, 65, 84–5 Portugal, 234 Price, M. Phillips, 238 Priestley, J.B., 226 Pritt, D.N., 222 Purcell, Victor, 204 Radio Moscow, 240 Ransome, Patrick, 218 Rawnsley, Derek, 218 Reid, Thomas, 61, 184 Roosevelt, Franklin Delano, 103, 106, 110, 111, 112, 126, 129, 132 Round Table group, 178, 224 Rowntree, Joseph, 18 Rowse, A.L., 216 Royal Institute of International Affairs, 105 Sandys, Duncan, 231, 240 San Francisco Conference, 132, 133–4,

298

The Labour Party, Nationalism and Internationalism

142, 146, 147, 148, 158, 188, 189, 192, 196 Sargent, Sir Orme, 145 Schuman Plan, 248–9, 250 Second International, 15, 17, 22, 24 Selassie, Haile, 76 Senghor, Léopold Sédar, 160 Serbia, 78 Shaw, George Bernard, 16, 174 Shawcross, Christopher, 158, 230, 231, 232 Shawcross, Sir Hartley, 156 Shinwell, Emmanuel, 57, 190, 197, 241 Silverman, Sidney, 150, 232 Singh, Sir Maharaj, 198 Smuts, Jan Christian, 61, 91, 178, 196–7, 223 Snow, Julian, 161 Snowden, Philip, 29, 33 Socialist League, 35–8, 65 Socialist Vanguard Group, 66, 84, 89 South Africa, 79, 174, 196–7, 225 South-West Africa, 178, 196–7 Spanish Civil War, 75 Stalin, Josef (Dzugashvili), 79, 80, 126, 129, 132, 133, 269 Stalingrad, 124 Stanley, Oliver, 188–90 State Department (U.S.), 111, 239, 242, 246 Steed, Wickham, 218 Steinbeck, John, 160 Stockholm Peace Conference, 21 Stokes, Richard Rapier, 53, 164 Strachey, John, 222 Streit, Clarence, 219–21, 224 Switzerland, 220 Tanganyika Territory, 178, 194–5 Tawney, Richard Henry, 224, 251 Tehran Conference, 103, 126 ‘Third Force’ proposal, 155, 228–30, 235 Thomas, Ivor, 42–3, 50, 80, 130 Thomas, James, 33 Tillett, Ben, 237 Toynbee, Arnold, 87, 103, 104, 105–6, 107–110, 113, 116, 118 Trades Union Congress, 234; General Council, 33; Parliamentary Committee, 23 Transport and General Workers’ Union, 109, 194

Trevelyan, Charles, 17, 36 Truman, Harry S., 133, 146, 148 Turkey, 79, 124, 125, 236 Union of Democratic Control, 17, 21, 22, 23, 26, 28, 37 Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, 24, 35, 37, 41, 60, 61, 66, 79, 80, 98, 108, 111, 112, 113, 114, 115, 119, 120, 125, 126, 127, 131, 133, 146, 166, 193, 195, 203, 219, 222, 227, 229, 232, 233, 235–6, 250; abuse of UN veto, 153–4, 155–6, 162, 165; boycott of Security Council, 163, 201 United Europe Movement, 231, 232 United Nations Association, 150, 152 United Nations Organisation, 8, 10, 128, 236, 266–7, 269; General Assembly, 6, 128, 130–1, 132, 152, 156, 157, 158, 159, 164, 192, 194, 196–7, 198–201, 204, 242; Economic and Social Council, 128, 150, 156; International Court of Justice, 128; Security Council, 128, 130, 132, 133, 142, 143, 147, 153, 155–9 passim, 194, 266; Great Powers veto, 128–9, 130–33, 143, 153–4, 157, 159, 162, 164, 165, 173; Charter revision, 142, 147, 155–8; site of, 151; Preparatory Commission, 151; Military Staff Committee, 156; Trusteeship Council, 157, 173, 192–3, 200, 201, 204 United States of America, 9, 60, 61, 66, 88, 98, 106, 107–8, 112, 113, 114, 115, 120, 125, 126, 127, 133, 220, 229, 235, 238, 249–50; League of Nations proposals, 23–4; and European federation, 242, 244, 246, 248 Usborne, Henry, 159–61, 221 Vandenberg, Arthur H., 133 Vansittart, Robert, Baron, 216 Versailles, Treaty of, 24, 30, 53, 55, 66, 77, 91, 176, 226 Vyshinsky, Andrei Yanuarievich, 153, 154 Wallace, Henry, 124, 125 Wallas, Graham, 18 Washington Conference (1945), 148–9

Index Warbey, William, 91, 233 Ward, Barbara, 80 Warriner, Doreen, 82, 83 Webb, Beatrice, 18–19, 177, 181, 203 Webb, Sidney, Baron Passfield ,17, 18–20, 21–22, 23, 177, 181, 203 Webster, Charles Kingsley, 132 Wedgwood, Josiah, 29 ‘Western Union’ proposal, 234–7, 239, 242–3, 245–6 Williams, Francis, 38, 52–3, 74, 78, 221 Williams, Tom, 161 Wilson, Harold, 84, 221 Wilson, Woodrow, 20, 22, 23, 24, 90, 110, 111, 178 Woolf, Leonard, 8, 17, 18–20, 25, 41–3, 50, 52, 83–4, 86, 88, 91, 129, 148, 218, 225; and International Relations

299

Sub-Committee, 57–9; and The Internatioonal Post-War Settlement, 66–7; and colonial administration, 180, 184, 191 Wootton, Barbara, 218 Workers’ Travel Association, 5 World government, 7, 34–5, 159–61, 267, 269 Yalta Conference, 132, 153, 188, 189 Yates, Paul, 82 Younger, Kenneth, 239 Yugoslavia, 122 Zedong, Mao, 163 Zilliacus, Konni, 36–7, 141, 154–5, 165, 221, 226, 239 Zimmern, Alfred, 177–8 Zinoviev letter, 268