The Churchill Factor: How One Man Made History (36 page)

In October 1942, in the depths of the war, he wrote a letter to Anthony Eden, in which he sketched out a vision for the post-war
world. The best hope was a ‘
United States of Europe’, excluding Russia, in which the barriers between the nations of Europe would ‘be minimised and unrestricted travel will be possible’. After the war he made a series of rhapsodical speeches about this union of Gaul and Teuton, the foundation of the Temple of Peace, and so on.

At Zurich in 1946, Churchill said,

We must build a kind of United States of Europe . . . The structure of the United States of Europe, if well and truly built, will be such as to make the material strength of a single state less important . . . If at first all the States of Europe are not willing or able to join the Union, we must nevertheless proceed to assemble and combine those who will and those who can.

But who were these states? Did he think that Britain should be part of it? Sometimes it seems that he did. In May 1947 he gave a speech at London’s Albert Hall—addressing the crowd as the Chairman and Founder of the United Europe Movement, to ‘present
the idea of a United Europe in which our country will play a decisive part’. He concluded with what looks like an unmistakable commitment that ‘Britain will have to play her full part as a member of the European family’.

By May 1950 he was making
a speech in Scotland, and claiming credit for the very genesis of the Schuman Plan; and again he seems clear that Britain must be part of the programme.

For more than forty years I have worked with France. At Zurich I appealed to her to regain the leadership of Europe by extending her hand to bring Germany back into the European family. We have now the proposal which M. Schuman, the French Foreign Minister, has made for the integration of French and
German coal and steel industries. This would be an important and effective step in preventing another war between France and Germany and lay at last to rest that quarrel of 1,000 years between Gaul and Teuton. Now France has taken the initiative in a manner beyond my hopes. But that by itself would not be enough. In order to make France able to deal on proper terms with Germany, we must be with France. The prime condition for the recovery of Europe is Britain and France standing together with all their strength and with all their wounds; and then these two nations offering their hands to Germany on honourable terms and with a great and merciful desire to look forward rather than back. For centuries France and England, and latterly Germany and France, have rent the world by their struggles. They have only to be united together to constitute the dominant force in the Old World and to become the centre of United Europe around which all other countries could rally. But added to this you have all the mighty approval of the great world power which has arisen across the Atlantic, and has shown itself in its hour of supremacy anxious only to make further sacrifices for the cause of freedom.

A united Europe, in other words, is not only good for France and Germany and Britain: it’s what America wants, too.

I could cite other texts, from other speeches—at Brussels, Strasbourg, The Hague (many of them ending in tears from Churchill, ovations from his continental audiences, and at least one of them delivered in his own superb version of French); but I hope the point is nearly made. If you close one eye, and you listen with only half an ear, you can understand why Churchill is one of the presiding divinities of the European Union.

He is up there on his couch in the Euro-Olympus—alongside
European Union architects Monnet, Schuman, Spaak, De Gasperi—with Common Agricultural Policy grapes being dangled into his mouth. No wonder he has roundabouts and avenues named after him in Brussels; and no wonder you will find his face on the walls of the Strasbourg Euro-parliament.

So much for the case that Churchill was a visionary founder of the movement for a united Europe. It contains a very large dollop of truth. It is also true that he believed Britain should play a leading role in this process of unification. It is not, however, by any means the whole story, as the Euro-sceptics know full well.

That is what makes them so furious—because they, too, can point to Churchillian texts that plainly offer a different vision for Britain and the rest of the united Europe. Right back there in 1930, when he first had his brainwave about imitating America and creating a single European market, he entered this crucial reservation about his own country.

But we have our own dream and our own task. We are with Europe, but not of it. We are linked, but not comprised. We are interested and associated but not absorbed. And should European statesmen address us in the words that were used of old: ‘wouldest thou be spoken for to the King, or the Captain of the Host?’, we should reply with the Shunammite woman, ‘I dwell among my own people’.

Sometimes this is a little bit misquoted, for the sake of emphasis, and the words ‘Nay, sir,’ are put first into the mouth of the Shunammite woman—a rich lady who used to provide a spare room for the prophet Elisha; though not even the prophet Elisha could have prophesied that his generous female friend was to become most famous as the world’s first British Euro-sceptic.

But the point stands. Churchill saw Britain as somehow dwelling apart from the European congeries; and in the course of one of his many bust-ups with General de Gaulle, he said that if Britain had to choose between Europe and the open sea, she would always choose the open sea.

In Churchill’s universe, Britain was of course a European power—perhaps the greatest European power. But that was not the limit of her global role. Yes, he wanted a united Europe, and yes, he saw that Britain had an important role to help bring about that happy union—upon a continent that had seen such misery. But his role was to be a sponsor, a witness, rather than a contracting party.

Britain was certainly meant to be there in the body of the church, but as an usher or even as the priest rather than one of the partners in the actual marriage. If you want proof that he never saw Britain as a part of that federal union, it is there in his actions. It was only a few months after that 1950 debate on the Schuman Plan that he again became Prime Minister. If he had really wanted Britain to join the Coal and Steel Community, he could surely have entered an application then. He had the prestige; he had the support from men such as Macmillan and Boothby and the young Edward Heath, who made his maiden speech in that debate, with a powerful call for participation in the plan.

Some say Churchill effectively did a U-turn on gaining power, and dropped his fervent Europeanism as soon as it was obvious that it wasn’t so popular with Anthony Eden and other Tories. On this analysis, there is a touch of the John Major about Churchill—trimming to appease the Euro-sceptics. I don’t think this does justice to him, or to his vision. Go back to that crucial speech to the Commons of 27 June 1950, where he sets out his European views in full.

He comes to the nub of our anxieties today: the precise role of Britain.

. . .
The question that we have to decide for ourselves—and there is certainly plenty of time for mature consideration of it—is, what association should Britain have with the Federal Union of Europe if such a thing should come to pass in the course of time?

It has not got to be decided today, but I shall give, with all humility, a plain answer. I cannot conceive that Britain would be an ordinary member of a Federal Union limited to Europe in any period which can at present be foreseen. We should in my opinion favour and help forward all developments on the Continent which arise naturally from a removal of barriers, from the process of reconciliation, and blessed oblivion of the terrible past, and also from our common dangers in the future and present. Although a hard-and-fast concrete federal constitution for Europe is not within the scope of practical affairs, we should help, sponsor and aid in every possible way the movement towards European unity. We should seek steadfastly for means to become intimately associated with it.

There you go: he wants the UK to be ‘intimately associated’ but cannot conceive that Britain will be ‘an ordinary member’. There was no U-turn; there was no flip-flop. That was exactly the policy that he took with him into government.

It is not that he is against Europe, or inherently hostile to any continental power. On the contrary, he loved France with a passion, and was perhaps the most uninhibitedly Francophile prime minister Britain has ever had. It is just that he had an idea of Britain that transcended Europe, and which involved keeping Britain turned to face the rest of the world.

In this he was remarkably consistent all his political life. He ended his 1930 article with a vision for Britain as the intersecting set in a
three-circle Venn diagram. ‘
Great Britain may claim, with equal justification, to play three roles simultaneously, that of an European nation, that of the focus of the British Empire, and that of a partner in the English speaking world. These are not three alternative parts, but a triple part . . .’

The empire has long gone, but the promiscuous internationalism of the approach seems ever more sensible today. In a world where the EU’s share of global GDP is steadily diminishing, where the USA remains the world’s largest economy, and where there is startling growth in former Commonwealth countries, Churchill’s circles are still a reasonable way to look at Britain’s place and role.

It is hard to know how Churchill would have handled the Schuman Plan, if he had won the 1945 election. But one thing we can be sure of: he would never have made Labour’s mistake. He would certainly have been there. Perhaps with his fearsome energy in debate, he might have persuaded the other Europeans to go for an intergovernmental approach—dropping the idea, which remains so difficult and occasionally so infuriating to this day, that national and democratically elected governments can be routinely overruled by a ‘supranational’ body.

If Churchill had been in power in 1948; if he had insisted on being at the table; if the Churchill Factor had been at work in those very early European talks—who knows, we might have a different model of the EU today; more Anglo-Saxon, more democratic.

By 1950 it was probably already too late. Yes, Labour missed the boat—and that was a mistake. But the truth is that Monnet and Schuman didn’t really want Britain at the table: otherwise they would have given London a reasonable time to respond, rather than convening the talks at such breakneck speed, and they would not have made agreement to supranationalism a condition of taking part.

When Churchill looked at what was unfolding in Europe in the
1950s, he didn’t have any particular feeling of rancour, or regret, or exclusion. On the contrary, he looked at the developing plans for a common market with a paternal pride. It was his idea to bring these countries together, to bind them so indissolubly that they could never go to war again—and who can deny, today, that this idea has been a spectacular success?

Together with NATO (another institution for which he can claim joint credit) the European Community, now Union, has helped to deliver a period of peace and prosperity for its people as long as any since the days of the Antonine emperors. That is not to deny the many inadequacies and excesses of the system. Nor is it to minimise the strain—clearly foreseen by Churchill in 1950—of incorporating an ancient and proud democracy such as Britain into a type of ‘supranational’ government.

What would he have done today? What would he have made of the euro? What would he have thought of the working time directive? What would he have said about the Common Agricultural Policy? In a sense all these questions are absurd.

We cannot tax the great man in this querulous way. He cannot hear us. The oracle is dumb.

What we can do is examine his considerable and notably consistent body of thinking on this kind of question, and adduce some general principles.

He would have wanted a union between France and Germany as long as there was the slightest risk of conflict, and as a lifelong liberal free marketeer he would have supported free trade across a giant tariff-free zone.

He would have wanted the European organisation to be strongly and closely allied to America, with Britain actively helping to cement the relationship.

He would have seen the importance of that united Europe as a
bulwark against an assertive Russia and other potential external threats.

He would have wanted to be personally involved at the head-of-government level. Knowing him as we do, it is impossible to imagine him allowing an important summit of world leaders to take place without him.

He would want as far as he possibly could to protect the sovereignty of the House of Commons, the democracy that he defended and that he served all his life.

On the evening of 5 March 1917, he left a darkened Commons Chamber in the company of Alexander MacCallum Scott, a Liberal MP. He turned and said: ‘
Look at it. This little place is what makes the difference between us and Germany. It is in virtue of this that we shall muddle through to success & for lack of this Germany’s brilliant efficiency leads her to final disaster.’

Of course those desiderata now look self-contradictory. But if Churchill had been spared by the electorate in 1945—if he had helped paint the fresco when the plaster was still wet on the wall—then it seems possible that those contradictions would never have arisen.

Churchill’s legacy on the continent of Europe is phenomenal and benign. Whatever exact role he meant Britain to play, he was one of those who created a seventy-year era in which there has been no war in western Europe—and the very idea seems ever more absurd.

And the impact of Churchill is felt to this day in places far beyond Europe—and many would say for the better.

CHAPTER 21

MAKER OF THE MODERN MIDDLE EAST

I
n her heyday, the pleasure yacht
Christina
was the most ostentatiously opulent if not downright vulgar private boat that had ever floated on the sea. She had Impressionists on the wall and live lobsters in the pool and barstools upholstered with leather diligently harvested from the foreskins of whales. But of all the exotic items assembled by Aristotle Onassis, the most important were his guests—prize lepidoptera that he caught in his gossamer net.