The Churchill Factor: How One Man Made History (35 page)

Churchill foresaw all that with unerring clarity, just as he had understood the threat from Nazi Germany. He also prophesied that one day the whole thing would collapse—and with unexpected speed. He was right, and we lived to see that moment of joy, too.

—

O
UTSIDE THE
C
ECILIENHOF
in Potsdam the sun seems very bright, after the gloom of the conference room. We get on our bikes and cycle through the meadows and gardens by the Wannsee.

I look at the name of the road. Mauerweg, it says. Of course! This is the place where the East German regime constructed the hideous wall that once divided the city, and which was felled in that glorious eruption in 1989. Once it was a symbol of terror and oppression: now there is nothing but a kingly cycle path.

On one side of the path, lounging brazenly in the sun, we suddenly come across a crowd of German nudists: nut-brown old men doing
Junker
calisthenics, young women in pairs communing mystically with nature. It occurs to me how different, in some ways, the Germans must be: this is not the sort of scene, after all, you would
expect in Hyde Park on a Sunday afternoon—and we are in the Berlin equivalent. And yet these undraped and obviously defenceless people are the very personification of the pacifism and gentleness of modern Germany.

They vote for whom they choose. They say what they like. They pierce whatever portion of their body they please. They believe in free-market capitalism. They do not fear the knock on the door in the night. Their world has changed since the Wall came down. These sun-worshippers are much more obviously the children of Churchill’s ideology than of Stalin’s.

Who walked around the White House with no clothes on? I rest my case.

It was his ideas which were to prevail, his concepts of freedom and democracy which won. In that speech at Fulton he helped shape the essential architecture of the post-war world—the transatlantic alliance that in 1948 was to become NATO, and which was integral to the final defeat of communism in Russia and throughout eastern Europe.

He was also one of the very first to articulate an idea that is central to that security architecture—the vision of a reconciled France and Germany, and of a united Europe. That is an idea that remains in some ways exceedingly controversial today; and so is the question of what Churchill really meant by a united Europe, what he intended to happen, and what role he thought Britain would play.

CHAPTER 20

CHURCHILL THE EUROPEAN

I
t is a measure of Churchill’s prophetic numen that people will still try to invoke him as the arbiter of various modern political dilemmas. Out of his voluminous sayings a text will be found to legitimate some opinion or validate some course of action—and that text will be brandished in a semi-religious way, as though the project had been posthumously hallowed by Churchill the sage and wartime leader.

There is no question upon which his departed spirit has been more regularly consulted than the intractable business of Britain’s relations with ‘Europe’. It is a controversy that has bedevilled every one of his successors as Prime Minister. In some cases the problem has become so toxic as to lead to their political assassination, or attempted assassination.

Revolving as it does around the lofty questions of national sovereignty, democracy and British independence in the face of a great continental alliance, ‘Europe’ would seem to be an exquisitely Churchillian dispute: just the sort of thing, you might think, that could be settled by appeal to the example of the hero of 1940.

The trouble is that he is claimed by both sides. Europhiles and
Euro-sceptics: both factions believe in him. Both factions hail him as their prophet—and sometimes the argument as to his true meaning and intentions takes on the frenzy of a religious schism.

In November 2013, for instance, Manuel Barroso, then President of the EU Commission, made a speech in which he accurately quoted what Churchill had said in 1948 (and earlier, and
passim
) about the need to create a united Europe. This provoked a hail of abuse from the myriad denizens of the Euro-sceptic internet.

Some of them attacked Churchill, in one case calling him a ‘fat, lying scumbag’. Some of them defended Churchill, and bashed Senhor Barroso. Perhaps we could sum up the general mood by quoting one of the anonymous Euro-sceptic correspondents, who on one newspaper website, at least, goes by the
nom de guerre
of ‘stillpoliticallyincorrect’.

We don’t need advice from this second-rate, unelected, unaccountable foreign politician [said stillpoliticallyincorrect of Barroso]. The sooner he is dangling from a Brussels lamp post the better. Why doesn’t he clear off back to his own country and stop bossing us about? I hate the man and hope he dies soon, along with the rest of the EU commissars and most MEPs—including all the foreign ones! Then we can chuck out all the scrounging foreigners who have no real right to be here.

Leaving aside the merits of the points he (I bet it’s a he) makes, there is a palpable rage here—a choking bile—at the very notion of this Portuguese fellow invoking the memory of Winston Churchill, to justify the programme of European integration.

In the imagination of most such people, Churchill is surely the embodiment of rock-ribbed British bulldoggery and independence. How can he be claimed by the Euro-federalists?

To see the origins of the feud, we need to probe the mind of the man himself, and to understand what he meant by European integration, what he wanted from it—and what role he saw for Britain. Let us go to the famous debate in the early days of June 1950, when the House of Commons is struggling to come to terms with the Schuman Plan—a sudden and audacious offer from the eponymous former French Prime Minister.

The UK has been challenged by France to join talks, with Germany, Italy and Benelux, on creating a new supranational body, to oversee the common European markets in coal and steel. This body will have a High Authority—the embryonic European Commission. It will have an assembly of national parliamentarians and a council of national ministers—the prelude to the eventual European Parliament and Council. It will have a court of justice, the beginnings of the all-powerful European Court in Luxembourg.

Here is Britain, in other words, being asked to assist at the very birth of the European Union. The clay is wet. The mould has yet to set. Now is the moment when Britain could have intervened decisively; accepted the invitation from France—and jointly seized the steering wheel.

Instead, the Labour government is suspicious, if not hostile. Britain is still the biggest coal and steel producer in all Europe—why should these industries submit to some inscrutable system of European control? ‘
The Durham miners won’t wear it,’ says one Labour cabinet minister; and so the Attlee government has told the French to hop it.

A letter has been dispatched to M. Schuman, thanking him for his interesting ideas, but politely declining to take part in the talks. In the minds of many on both sides of the English Channel, this is an absolutely critical turning-point in the history of Britain and Europe. This was when we missed the European bus, train, plane, bicycle, etc.
It was to be almost a quarter of a century before Britain finally joined—by which time the structures of the EU had been fixed in a way that was uncongenial to Britain, and to purist concepts of national democratic sovereignty.

What Churchill says now in this debate on the Schuman Plan—as Leader of the Opposition—is clearly vital to an understanding of his instincts. The first thing you notice about his parliamentary performances during this period is that he absolutely fizzes with energy. He is still zapping round the world making enormous, well-thought-out speeches on geopolitics. He is churning out his war memoirs, and indeed he will shortly receive the Nobel prize for literature.

He is almost seventy-five years old, and yet he is making countless interventions in Parliament, virtually every day, on every subject from railway freight charges, to Burma, to Korea, to the fishing industry, to the efficiency of the microphones they have just installed in the House.

It is fascinating to read the Hansard parliamentary record of the Schuman Plan debate, and see that age has done nothing to muffle his general irrepressibility. The Chancellor of the Exchequer is Sir Stafford Cripps (the austere figure ludicrously touted as his rival during the war), and it falls to Cripps to defend the government’s negative response to Schuman. Churchill heckles him exuberantly. ‘
Utter rubbish!’ he shouts. ‘Nonsense!’

At one point poor Cripps has to ask him to have the politeness to be quiet, or else go and continue his conversation outside—like a badly rattled chemistry teacher confronted by the naughtiest boy in the class. When Churchill stands up to speak at 5.24 p.m., he has heard a debate that is virtually identical to the European debate today.

Labour Euro-sceptic MPs have denounced the suggestion that this ‘
High Authority’ could have some bureaucratic control of the emerging common market, and that they could act without the strict
approval of national governments. Who are these people? asks one Labour MP. What right would they have to tell us what to do?

‘
They would be an oligarchy imposed on Europe, an oligarchy which, with arbitrary power and with enormous influence, would be able to affect the lives of every person in this country.’ There speaks the voice of the British Euro-sceptic, in words that might equally be used of M. Juncker and the EU Commission today.

To all of which the Tory Europhiles have responded, on this afternoon in 1950, with arguments that have become equally traditional.

‘
Do we really want to be isolated?’ asks Bob Boothby, Churchill’s former PPS. ‘When all is said and done, unbridled national sovereignty remains the prime cause of the hideous disasters that have befallen us in this nightmare century.’ Boothby ends by urging his Right Honourable Friend—Churchill—to lead the way and save western Europe for a second time, by helping the creation of a united Europe.

It is time for the Leader of the Opposition to sum up. Which side will he come down on? Churchill begins safely enough. He attacks the Attlee government for their incompetence: the French would never have been so rude as to spring this on us unawares if he had been Prime Minister, says Churchill. But on the key question, he soon makes himself clear. Yes, he thinks Britain should be there at the Schuman talks, and he lays into Attlee for his failure of leadership.

‘
He seeks to win for himself and his party popular applause by strutting around as a Palmerstonian jingo,’ says Churchill, adopting the usual line of attack upon all British prime ministers who have sought in some way to distance Britain from the European project. Then he essentially takes Boothby’s line: that Britain should not be left out.

. . . It will be far better for us to take part in the discussions than to stand outside and let events drift without us . . . The French have a saying: ‘
Les absents ont toujours
tort
’. I do not know whether they learn French at Winchester [this is presumably a joke at the expense of Richard Crossman, the intellectual Labour MP, who has just made an anti-European speech] . . . The absence of Britain deranges the balance of Europe . . .

. . . and so on.

If Britain fails to engage, he warns, then there is a risk that the European bloc will become a neutral force, equidistant between Moscow and Washington; and that, he believes, would be a disaster. Would Britain have accepted Schuman’s invitation, if he had been Prime Minister? Yes, is the resounding answer.

He addresses full-on the basic question of sovereignty, and he ends the speech with typical Churchillian internationalism. He makes the classic argument of the British Europhile: that the UK already shares sovereignty over defence with NATO and with America. Why should it be so unthinkable to share sovereignty with Europe?

The whole movement of the world is towards an inter-dependence of nations. We feel all around us the belief that it is our best hope. If independent, individual sovereignty is sacrosanct and inviolable, how is it that we are all wedded to a world organisation? It is an ideal to which we must subscribe. How is it that we have undertaken this immense obligation for the defence of Western Europe, involving ourselves as we have never done before in the fortunes of countries not protected by the waves and tides of the Channel? How is it that we accepted, and under the present Government eagerly sought, to
live upon the bounty of the United States, thus becoming financially dependent upon them? It can only be justified and even tolerated because on either side of the Atlantic it is felt that inter-dependence is part of our faith and the means of our salvation . . .

. . . Nay, I will go further and say that for the sake of world organisation we would even run risks and make sacrifices. We fought alone against tyranny for a whole year, not purely from national motives. It is true that our lives depended upon our doing so, but we fought the better because we felt with conviction that it was not only our own cause but a world cause for which the Union Jack was kept flying in 1940 and 1941. The soldier who laid down his life, the mother who wept for her son, and the wife who lost her husband, got inspiration or comfort, and felt a sense of being linked with the universal and the eternal by the fact that we fought for what was precious not only for ourselves but for mankind. The Conservative and Liberal Parties declare that national sovereignty is not inviolable, and that it may be resolutely diminished for the sake of all the men in all the lands finding their way home together.

It is this sort of text which has been taken up and waved around as proof that Churchill was a rampant federalist—a believer in a United States of Europe. There is plenty more. He first seems to have articulated a vision of European union in 1930, after he had been travelling in the USA—and been much struck by the lack of borders and tariffs, and the way a single market helped economic growth. He wrote an article called ‘A United States of Europe’; indeed, he is credited with coining the phrase.