The Empire Project: The Rise and Fall of the British World-System, 1830–1970 (104 page)

It was now that the weaknesses of the British position, painfully exposed in the Canal Zone diplomacy, made themselves felt. The Cabinet agreed straightaway that Nasser should be made to back down, if need be by force and by Britain alone. But the coercion of Egypt was not going to be easy. It would mean a major invasion with repercussions elsewhere on British commitments. It might mean the occupation of Egypt until a compliant government was formed – if indeed one could be found. It would deeply embarrass Britain's closest Arab allies and vindicate Nasserite claims that they were colonialist toadies. Above all, perhaps, although there were signs that Nasser's removal would be welcomed in Washington, American backing for a British invasion was out of the question. Paratroop diplomacy, in Washington's view, would be a crime and a blunder, and wreck Western influence at a critical time. The British hoped for international action, but the legal case against Nasser was transparently weak (the Suez Canal Company was after all an Egyptian company). Once Dulles made clear that he did not favour action against Nasser to extract the Canal dues (reversing the effect of nationalisation), Eden's position was desperate. No British leader had been more deeply committed to upholding Britain's Middle Eastern
imperium
as an ‘empire by treaty’. Now that Nasser had revealed it as a house of cards, his authority as prime minister could hardly survive.

Although Eden could not or would not admit it, his position was so difficult as to be almost impossible. Awareness of his own part in handing back the Canal Zone, and thus freeing Nasser to act, may have made matters worse. How far he acknowledged that the scheme to invade Egypt in concert with France, drawn up and agreed on by the middle of August, was based on very fragile assumptions is unclear. But it may explain his reluctance to consult more widely among his colleagues and officials. Indeed, it seems clear that, insofar as they grasped his intentions, these aroused doubt and uncertainty. The Foreign Secretary (Selwyn Lloyd), the Minister of Defence (Walter Monckton), the Lord Privy Seal (R. A. Butler), the First Lord of the Admiralty (Lord Hailsham) and the Chief of Naval Staff (the redoubtable Lord Mountbatten) were all of this number. But neither doubts nor doubters had any effect.

Part of the reason was that few outside a very small circle knew enough of the detail of what Eden intended or had enough status to voice their dissent. To challenge Eden's authority in a period of crisis would have been exceptionally dangerous, especially for one of his Conservative colleagues. As Churchill's successor, Eden had stepped into his shoes as the great anti-appeaser, and champion of British world power. Moreover, a very strong group in the Cabinet endorsed his decision to erase Nasser's influence, and to do so by force. They could not have ignored the risks that this ran. But the real question they faced was what else could be done. Any compromise deal (of the kind Selwyn Lloyd hoped for) that left Nasser in power would not meet their purpose – to uphold what Eden called Britain's ‘Middle Eastern position’. They may have accepted, like Eden himself, that the jumble of treaties, alliances, protectorates, colonies, bases, gunboats and garrisons that made up this undeclared empire could not stand the challenge that Nasser's defiance would pose; and that without this undeclared empire Britain's world power could not survive long. For behind the dire warnings about the Canal and Nasser's hand on ‘our windpipe’, this was the real issue.

On one point at least, Eden knew he was vulnerable. He needed a pretext to launch an invasion or risk being denounced as an imperialist aggressor. This would have been deeply embarrassing both abroad and at home, where the cross-party support he had enjoyed at the outset could not have survived. To escape this dilemma he embarked on what came to be seen as the most reckless gamble of all. On 13 October, as the decision to launch the invasion grew nearer, he was urged by the French to make a secret arrangement with Israel, which was also eager to weaken Nasser, and willing to strike.

The sequel is infamous. On 22 October, the British and French (who had their own quarrel with Nasser) made their secret pact with Israel to occupy the Canal Zone in concert with an Israeli invasion of Sinai. The prize for all three was the elimination of Nasser. On 29 October, the Israeli attack began. On 1 November, when Nasser rejected their demand to stop fighting, the Anglo-French intervention began. Egyptian airfields were bombed, and on 5 November British and French troops landed in Egypt to seize the Canal. But, in a matter of days, intense pressure from Washington and the threat of sterling's collapse without dollar support forced first a ceasefire and then the withdrawal of the Anglo-French forces, to be replaced by a ‘peace-keeping’ contingent under United Nations authority. Eden's health now collapsed and so did his premiership. The confrontation with Nasser, on which he was set, consigned him to oblivion and raised Nasser to power as the pan-Arab hero.
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In less than two years, the Iraqi regime on which Eden's policy was centred had been destroyed in a coup. The British fell back on Southern Arabia and the Gulf. The British ‘moment’ in the Middle East, when they had been the authors and arbiters of its regional politics, was over.

‘Anthony, are you out of your mind?’ was how Eisenhower put it to Eden when he learnt of the British invasion. There was certainly much about Eden's conduct of policy that was reckless and irregular. He chose to ignore the widespread misgivings among both his military and his diplomatic advisers over the use of force against Nasser: whether it was justified legally and morally; whether it was practicable militarily; whether it could work politically to produce a replacement for Nasser; whether it would wreck Britain's standing in the Arab Middle East more surely than compromise, however unpalatable. Eden's secretive style, the exclusion of almost all of his expert advisers, his highly strung manner, the rough edge of his tongue, and his over-vehement language, unnerved many who saw him as to his balance and judgment. If it had been known more widely that he had concealed his intentions from Washington's eyes, let alone colluded with France in an Israeli invasion, opposition to his policy inside and outside the government would have been much greater. Eden was unlucky that his Suez expedition coincided with the popular uprising in Hungary. This raised the temperature of East–West relations and fuelled Washington's fury at the ill-timed embarrassment to Western diplomacy that Eden inflicted. But his misjudgment of Eisenhower was a catastrophic mistake, and so was the assumption – on Macmillan's advice soon retracted in panic – that sterling was strong enough to ride the political storm.

But should Eden's actions be seen as the great aberration in Britain's last phase of imperial power? Only if we subscribe to the historical myth of ‘managed decline’. In this fanciful tale, (most) British leaders responded pragmatically to the symptoms of weakness: pulling back here; devolving power there; carefully cutting their coat to the available cloth; steering their bark towards the safety of Europe. Eden stands out as the reactionary relic, impervious to reason. But the tortuous approach march to the crisis at Suez (and not just the crisis itself) gives little comfort to this sanctimonious legend. The assumption that Nasser could and should be removed extended far beyond Eden. Eden himself had been the apostle of pragmatism in the wearying struggle for an Anglo-Egyptian agreement. At the Geneva conference in 1954, his restraining influence on the United States, and his support for a compromise peace, played a key role in bringing the first Indochina war to an end. His metamorphosis into a war-mongering imperialist less than eighteen months later seems hard to explain. Invoking his health, or his need to appear ‘strong’ for party political reasons, may have some virtue but misses the main point. For Eden had always been clear that settling the Anglo-Egyptian dispute would mark a new phase in Britain's Middle Eastern diplomacy, but not a retreat. With the Canal base disposed of, and Egyptian resentment subsiding, the British would be in a far better position to ‘manage’ the region's affairs. He was acutely aware of how vital it was to make good Britain's claim to be the regional ‘guardian’. Without it, the influence he was able to wield (not least at Geneva) was bound to decline sharply, while American power would rise in proportion. He was convinced from the outset (so his actions suggest) that the British position, already under siege from American, Soviet and Arab nationalist pressure, could not survive Nasser's challenge, and certainly not once he took the Canal. Eden's tragedy was that most of the means to bring Nasser to heel had already dissolved – the hidden lesson of 1954. The informal ‘empire-by–treaty’ which he had hoped to construct was already dying or dead. It was the frantic effort to revive it that led to the desperate measures, and even more desperate failure, of October–November 1956.

No end of a lesson?

‘Let us admit it fairly as a business people should, We have had no end of a lesson: it will do us no end of good.’ This was Rudyard Kipling's harsh comment on the failings and blunders that the Boer War had exposed.
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Its key phrase was adopted by Anthony Nutting (Eden's junior minister at the Foreign Office, who had resigned in protest at his policy) as the title of his book published ten years after the crisis.
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For Kipling, the point of the lesson was to waken British opinion to its imperial duty. ‘We have had an Imperial lesson. It may make us an Empire yet.’ For the ‘Suez generation’, perhaps the lesson was different: bleaker for those who were still deeply attached to an imperial destiny; salutary for those who were anxious to escape from the futile pursuit of imperial power, and the deadweight of tradition it laid (so they thought) on British society.

Suez has been seen very widely as the real turning point in Britain's post-war attempt to remain a great power. The crushing humiliation of the premature ceasefire; the enforced withdrawal of British and French troops; the public excoriation at the United Nations; the open breach with the United States; and Eden's fall as prime minister (even if masked by ill-health): these were misfortunes that befell lesser powers, not one of the Big Three that had won the Second World War. Suez on this count appears as the end of illusion: a brutal exposure of geopolitical realities in a ‘superpower’ world. Suez marked the pricking of the Churchillian bubble: the belief that Britain could intervene decisively in world affairs, when and if it chose. Yet it is doubtful how far British leaders drew such an apocalyptic conclusion or abandoned their great power mentality. It has also been argued that Britain's defeat over Suez was the trigger for the rapid withdrawal from colonial responsibilities that set in after 1960. That too may be too simple a view. Official opinion had long since accepted that maintaining colonial rule against mass opposition, or the resistance of local political leaders, was counter-productive at best. Independence for Ghana, Malaya and Nigeria, and increasing self-government in most other colonies, were agreed as objectives well before Suez. The conversion of ‘empire’ into a self-governing ‘Commonwealth’ had been loudly proclaimed as the keystone of policy. And, although the disaster of Suez might have made British governments more nervous about the risks of military action, it did not deter them from keeping their existing commitments in Aden, South Arabia and the Persian Gulf as well as in Southeast Asia after 1960, although the military burden these imposed began to rise steeply. Nor did it discourage the confident view that British power was sufficient to delay self-rule in East Africa until ‘safe’ successor regimes had emerged on the scene.

It may be more plausible to see the domestic divisions over Suez as heralding a more sceptical view of the value of Empire to Britain. The prestige and appeal of ‘imperial attitudes’ had suffered severely: to mock or attack them had become somewhat safer. Suez in that sense might almost be thought of as the domestic equivalent to the loss of Singapore in 1942. After Singapore's fall, recalled the novelist J. G. Ballard, then a youthful internee in Shanghai, ‘Chinese shopkeepers, French dentists and Sikh school-bus drivers made disparaging remarks about British power’.
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After Suez, an alternative view of Britain's place in the world, no longer ‘great’, no longer imperial, could not be lightly dismissed. Indeed, some six months before the Suez invasion was launched, the BBC had screened a series of programmes titled ‘We the British: Are We in Decline?’, a question to which the first (on colonial wars) had replied with a disconcertingly definite yes.
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Yet it took considerably longer before it seemed wise to assume that the imperial idea (in however diluted a form) no longer commanded wide public loyalty.

From our vantage point some fifty years later, the ‘logic’ of Suez was to show how constrained British power had become. Eden had struggled to maintain at least the appearance of parity with the United States. Britain's Middle East role had been crucial to this. The defeat over Suez had a dual implication. It revealed the grim truth that to incur serious disapproval in Washington would place any British government in considerable danger, while the collapse of British influence in the Middle East region simultaneously shrivelled the leverage that London could exert on its superpower partner. Henceforth, Britain's place in great power diplomacy would depend even more on a rhetorical ‘leadership’, on a confident voice influencing global opinion, and on the reinvention of empire as a beneficent legacy, a school of stable democracy. It may have been this that made Harold Macmillan, an actor to his fingertips, a more attractive successor to Eden than his main Conservative rival, R. A. Butler. Only very gradually did British leaders begin to accept that the adventure of Suez had made them ‘Public Enemy Number One’ in the eyes of much of the world.
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Secondly, Suez revealed the continued fragility of the sterling economy. ‘Whatever longer term effects Suez may prove to have on the economy’, the Governor of the Bank of England told Harold Macmillan soon after, ‘it has certainly had the immediate effect of laying bare to the public eye, both at home and abroad, some of the weaknesses of which we have long been conscious.’
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It was a strident reminder that diplomatic isolation could disrupt economic and financial stability, and thus hopes of recovery. London had always depended on flows of ‘hot money’ – short-term deposits by overseas lenders, placed there for convenience or to exploit higher interest rates. They made London more ‘liquid’, and were a profitable adjunct to the City's other activities. Before 1914, fears of conflict or crisis would usually drive ‘hot money’ towards London, not away. By 1939, the strength of the dollar meant that New York was a haven, so the prospect of Britain's involvement in war drained money westwards. But the danger this posed was reduced by the scale of Britain's overseas assets and it took defeat in the European war of 1939–40 to make it acute. In 1956, however, no ‘cushion’ of assets was there to protect sterling from anxious or speculative selling – and the Chancellor of the Exchequer from his descent into panic. In fact, it seems likely that Macmillan exaggerated the loss of sterling reserves, through muddle or deliberately.
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But fear of falling short of the minimum floating balance for the sterling area was undoubtedly real.
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As long as sterling's fixed value was the centrepiece of their policy, British governments were desperately vulnerable to the threat of a ‘run’, whether imagined or real. Eden's successors knew how quickly sterling's weakness could disable a policy that offended the White House.