The Empire Project: The Rise and Fall of the British World-System, 1830–1970 (102 page)

But, on this battlefront, there were very mixed signals. The British economy had not performed badly. It had paid for a notable increase in living standards at home – the ‘affluence’ for which the Conservative government was keen to take credit. But it had not performed well enough to allow Britain to become (or remain) an economic great power. There were several reasons for this. It may have been partly the fault of an old or obsolete infrastructure whose renewal was too costly under post-war conditions. This was the burden of being an ‘old’ industrial power. A more immediate difficulty was the need to transform an industrial structure largely adapted to the highly diversified markets in non-industrial countries that had been Britain's main customers since the inter-war years and before. The move towards a production system based on higher volume and standardisation was technically difficult and very disruptive in labour relations.
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As a result, the great shift from textiles to engineering as Britain's industrial staple was made too slowly.
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Thirdly, British leaders shrank from the challenge to domestic opinion. In theory at least, they might have hoped to improve Britain's export performance and suppressed the inflationary trend that helped make sterling so fragile by enforcing a ‘flexible’ market in labour. An attack on restrictive practices, and the willingness to risk a short-term rise in unemployment, might have forced down real wages and secured productivity gains. Politically, there was no question of this. Full employment was part of the post-war compact: it was widely assumed that electoral suicide would follow its breach. Thus the sterling economy followed a zigzag path dictated by the aspiration to great-power status, the fear of abandoning its traditional base in the ‘Commonwealth world’, and mortal terror of an electorate enraged by an attack on job security and hard-won affluence. It would have needed an exceptionally benign outside world for this course to have brought British leaders the results that they craved.

Descent to Suez

As we saw in the last chapter, almost unobserved there had been a critical change in the position of Britain in Egypt. The means and the will to exert British military power directly in Cairo had quietly collapsed in January 1952. The political crowbar in the Residency's possession since the era of Cromer could no longer be used. Yet, in London, the value of Egypt and the Canal Zone base had never seemed higher. Reaching an agreement over the use of the base and for Egypt's cooperation in Middle East defence was as urgent a priority for Churchill's government as it had been for Attlee's. But, by the time it was signed in October 1954, it was an open question whether the hard-won agreement had any value at all, except to avoid a hugely embarrassing ‘scuttle’. The arduous path to its making had signalled a shift in the balance of strength. The tragedy that followed sprang from a gross paradox. The importance that London attached to its regional primacy now had no counterpart in its regional power: the reverse was the case. The desperate remedy of Eden's Suez invasion was required to conceal this. The crushing failure that followed exposed its truth.

Why did London care so much about Egypt and the Canal Zone? Behind the logistical detail of stores and supply routes, the imaginary defence lines against a Soviet advance into the Middle East, and the plans to bomb Southern Russia in the event of world war, lay a (largely) unspoken assumption. Britain's ability to use the Canal Zone and its bases (as well as drawing more widely on Egyptian resources since the Zone was not self-sufficient) was its greatest surviving geostrategic asset outside the Home Islands. It served as the pivot from which British power could be projected north towards Russia, eastwards to the Gulf (and its oil), across the Indian Ocean to Australia and New Zealand, and south to East Africa. The Canal Zone depended upon Egyptian goodwill to function efficiently; but it was also the lever with which to extract cooperation from Cairo. Preserving Britain's claim to make use of the Zone was a standing affront to Egyptian nationalist feeling. But it was also the main guarantee that Egypt's leaders would take a ‘realistic’ view of their national interests and accept the reality of their ‘satellite’ status in the British world-system.

Egypt was important for itself. It was also the pre-eminent state of the Arab Middle East. It had the biggest population, the largest middle class and the oldest tradition of nationalist politics. Its writers, intellectuals and journalists exerted a pan-Arab influence. For most cultural purposes, Cairo was the capital of the Arab world. The Al-Azhar, half mosque, half university, was
the
great centre of Islamic learning. This gave Anglo-Egyptian relations a particular delicacy. A compliant, if not ‘loyal’, Egypt was the key component of Britain's Middle Eastern
imperium
as
the
regional power, regulating the relations of the Arab states with each other as well as with the outside world. An Egyptian ‘revolt’ against this ‘system’ would be a serious threat. As we have seen, under post-war conditions the Arab Middle East as a whole had become even more valuable from London's viewpoint than before 1939. This was partly a matter of strategic defence against Russia, partly a matter of oil. But, despite the prominence that both these assume in the archival record, the intensity with which British leaders regarded their Middle East interests, and the extent to which they became the index of Britain's world power status, hint at a larger assumption. It was sometimes expressed in terms of prestige, but its real meaning ran deeper.

Before 1939, it was a commonplace that the ultimate source of British power in the world, including its great-power status in Europe, was the Royal Navy. British sea-power had had to share global supremacy with that of America: but, in European waters and the Indian Ocean, it had remained pre-eminent in the inter-war years. Almost unheralded, the course and outcome of the Second World War struck the maritime sword from Britain's hand. Taken together, the growth of air warfare, the massive scale of Soviet land forces and the colossal expansion of the American navy removed any illusion that the strategic significance of Britain's sea-power was remotely comparable with what it had been just a decade before. We ‘cannot afford the American technique of building up large naval forces to support continental land battles’, remarked the Chiefs of Staff sorrowfully.
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The Middle East
imperium
silently filled the gap. Strategic command of the region gave Britain a critical role in the defence of Europe. It secured its primacy among the West European states and (perhaps more important) conferred an exceptional leverage in London's often tetchy relations with Washington. More than anything else, it lifted Britain out of the category of a merely European power. And, although London sought material help from the Americans, it insisted on Britain's claim to be the
political
guardian of the West's regional interests. In the plans drawn up in mid-1953, it was British, Arab and Commonwealth forces that were to defend the Middle East against a Soviet invasion.
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Among British leaders, no one was more sensitive than Anthony Eden to the grand geopolitics of Middle East power.

This was the setting in which the British tried to reopen the question of their right to use the Canal Zone bases after the expiry of the 1936 treaty due in 1956. Eden as Foreign Secretary was determined to do this, despite lurid warnings from Cairo where the British ambassador was convinced that Egypt was on the brink of chaos.
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Against Churchill's scepticism and the ambassador's proposal that, rather than seek an agreement, British policy should aim ‘to isolate Egypt as a potential enemy’,
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Eden insisted that the new set of ministers King Farouk had appointed (following the bloody riots in Cairo) offered the best chance for striking a bargain. Egypt, as part of a new ‘Middle East Command’, would take charge of the Canal Zone bases in peacetime. The British would keep on the spot only the minimum force needed to ‘help’ the Egyptians to maintain the bases. The alternative, Eden warned his Cabinet colleagues, was a long confrontation and the effective loss of the base. ‘I am convinced’, he told Churchill,

that we shall not reach an agreement unless we are willing to agree to the principle of evacuation. The net result of the last five months has been to bring Egypt to the verge of anarchy. The present Egyptian government is the best we can hope for. Its position is precarious and its continuance in power depends on its ability to clip the wings of the Wafd. To do this it needs some helpful move by us, and it needs it soon…The plain fact is that we are no longer in a position to impose our will on Egypt, regardless of the cost in men, money, and international goodwill both throughout the Middle East and in the rest of the world.
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But progress was meagre. There was little incentive for the Egyptian ministers to risk acceptance of Eden's terms, all too readily seen as a transparent device for keeping Britain's grip on the Zone and its military bases. Nor did they dare give up Egypt's claim to be sovereign in the Sudan, whose political future remained deeply uncertain. The Egyptian ambassador was convinced, reported a senior Foreign Office official,

that the only chance of our inducing the Egyptians either to accept our formula or to begin negotiations with us over the Sudan…lay in our being able to make them believe that the ultimate result of their refusal…would be the reoccupation of Cairo by British forces. This was the only thing they were really scared of.
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While the British brooded over this latest rebuff and pondered Egypt's place in their new global strategy, Cairo's politics lurched in an unexpected direction.
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In July 1952, a military coup pushed aside the old rivalry between the Court and the Wafd. The ‘Revolutionary Command Council’, led by Neguib and Nasser, became the real power. The Egyptian army, hitherto a quiescent if discontented force, now had to be squared.

By the end of the year, Eden was ready to try again. The same set of pressures was still pushing him forward. Without Egyptian goodwill, the Canal Zone was useless as a great military base. Indeed, without an agreement, it might become the scene of a guerrilla war. Its huge British garrison of 80,000 men was chiefly employed in defending itself: ‘It is their presence that creates the need for them to be there’, said a British official with mandarin irony.
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But simply handing it over would be a colossal defeat. It must be available in case of a war against Russia, said the military planners. Egypt had to promise its help if the Middle East were invaded. To let Cairo completely cut loose from its British connection would weaken Britain's allies in the other Arab states, and might provoke further demands for British withdrawal – including from the important air bases at Habbaniya and Shaiba in Iraq. It would signal a drastic decline in both the will and the means to enforce British interests. It would be bound to stir up fierce objection at home among those who disliked the ‘appeasement’ of nationalism or any retreat on the front line of empire – opinions well represented in the Conservative party. Eden's new formula was a cautious advance on the abortive proposal for a ‘Middle East Command’. Now, with American backing, the Egyptians were urged to join a new organisation for the region's defence, the ‘Middle East Defence Organisation’ or MEDO. Loosely modelled on NATO, MEDO would include both the Arab states and their Western ‘friends’, principally Britain and the United States. On joining this club, Egypt would be entrusted with the Canal Zone and its bases, to be run with some British help. This time the prospects for settlement seemed brighter. In February 1953, London and Cairo reached an agreement on the future of the Sudan, so often the stumbling block to their friendly relations. Like all previous regimes, Egypt's military leaders were determined to regain what they saw as its rightful authority in the vast country it had colonised in the previous century but then lost to the Mahdist revolt and the British reconquest. All shades of opinion resented what was seen as a British conspiracy to encourage Sudan's separation and patronise Sudanese nationalism. The British, for their part, had briefly considered giving up the Sudan as the price for a new treaty with Cairo in 1946, but then had drawn back.
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Neither Attlee nor Bevin had known the Sudan's peculiar history – unlike the veteran of Omdurman now at 10 Downing Street. The 1953 agreement was an interesting compromise. It promised Sudanese self-government by 1956, the same year that the Anglo-Egyptian treaty expired. The Sudanese people would choose through the ballot box whether they wished to become independent or seek a union with Egypt. For both the signatories it was a calculated risk. But Neguib (who had close ties with the Sudan) may have hoped that giving up Egypt's sovereignty claim would increase the backing for union in Sudanese politics against its Mahdist opponents and their nationalist rhetoric.
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But as the pessimists had predicted, the defence talks soon stalled. Neguib and his colleagues rejected an advance commitment to MEDO. Nasser knew about ‘Rodeo’, said an embassy official
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and was deeply suspicious of British intentions. The Revolutionary Command Council had one ambition – to get the British troops out and end any risk of British intervention in Cairo. The delicate balance of Egyptian politics, in which Revolutionary Command Council rule coexisted uneasily with the monarchy (only abolished in July 1953), the Wafd party and the Muslim Brotherhood, sharpened their fear of a British ‘coup’ on the one hand and popular outrage on the other. They dreaded being painted as pro-British puppets betraying the national cause. They were determined not to let any British military units, however disguised as ‘technicians’, remain in the Canal Zone. On the British side, when deadlock was reached in the middle of May, a new wave of violence was feared. ‘Serious trouble may now be imminent’, warned the Joint Intelligence Committee.
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Despite Churchill's reluctance to make any further concessions, a new round of talks was begun, with the outgoing British commander-in-chief in Egypt, General Sir Brian Robertson, negotiating soldier to soldier. With MEDO now dead (the final rejection came in July), disagreement was centred on how the base would be managed once the British withdrew, and how large a force of technicians would be required to maintain it. The discussions struggled on. In September, the Egyptians raised a further objection: the British technicians must be in civilian clothes. In London, the Cabinet decided first to break off, but then to press on. But, as the year came to an end, they had little to show. The Egyptians were willing to let the Canal base be used if an Arab state was attacked, but not Turkey or Iran, the Soviet Union's Middle East neighbours. They wanted a swift British withdrawal and a minimal presence of non-uniformed technicians. They would only consider a seven-year agreement.