Immediately after World War II, there was a chance that Britain could
have escaped this self-deceiving error. At that time, Britain's
leaders did not entertain any illusions about the economic straits in
which it found itself. Prime Minister Clement Attlee wrote that
"Britain was facing a difficult position as a great power which had
temporarily been gravely weakened." Referring to the United States,
Churchill lamented to his physician, "They have become so big and we
are so small. Poor England!" As the costs of the British commitment
to Greece began to rise in 1946, the Chancellor of the Exchequer Hugh
Dalton minuted that "I regard the Greeks as a poor investment for the
British taxpayer."

But clear-headed though they might have been about the precarious
state of the nation's finances, the psychological hurdles were too
high. Britain's leaders were too embedded in a tradition--and the
victory in World War II was too recent--for them to draw the
appropriate conclusion regarding global activism, namely, that a
prohibitive price would have to be paid on the home front. So Britain
persisted in painting her destiny on a global canvas for many years
after the financial crisis of the winter of 1947 should have brought
home once and for all her incapacity to sustain such a role. The Suez
expedition of 1956; the maintenance of large overseas garrisons; the
Falklands war; the unbridled British enthusiasm for the Gulf War--all
these events share a common denominator in what the British
commentator Peregrine Worsthorne has described as "ancestral voices,"
or what General de Gaulle called a penchant for the "open sea."
Given the choice, the British preferred (and continue to prefer) a
foreign policy that produced occasional glory on distant foreign
fields rather than the hard slog in the nearby trenches of Europe.

The cost has been great in terms of diminished domestic standards of
living and, ironically, even more diminished influence--particularly
in Europe. Instead of being one of the richest members of the
European Union, Britain falls below the EU average; instead of being
a leader in Europe, the British are forced to react to whatever the
Franco-German axis serves up, and--even when they have logic and
sound political judgment on their side--have difficulty making their
case heard. This point finds recent expression in the cool
take-it-or-leave-it tone concerning Britain's European options in the
September 1994 position paper issued by the ruling CDU party in
Germany.

The Fateful British Mistake

The seeds of the British post-World War II mistake were sown early. A
Foreign Office minute of 1943, commissioned to examine Britain's
place in the postwar world, observed that:

"If we did not fulfill our world wide role, Britain would sink to the
level of a second-class power and become either a European Soviet
state or a penurious outpost of American pluto-democracy or a German
Gau as the forces might dictate."

This led to the strategic error of holding back from developments on
Britain's doorstep. In a famous speech in Zurich in 1946 Churchill
called for a United States of Europe, of which Britain, rather than
being a member, would be a gracious "friend and sponsor." Foreign
Secretary Ernest Bevin warned his Cabinet colleagues that "the United
Kingdom--because of its overseas connections--could never become a
fully European nation."

The illusion could sometimes go even further. A 1949 Conservative
Party document entitled Imperial Policy stated that "it is sometimes
forgotten that the potential strength of the British Empire and
Commonwealth is greater than that of the United States and USSR."

In a series of other speeches, Churchill deepened this sense of
self-deception or--to put it more kindly--the British passion for a
global destiny. In his "Iron Curtain" address in Fulton, Missouri in
1946, he outlined a future of global British glory--this time in
partnership with the United States: "If the population of the
English-speaking Commonwealth be added to that of the United
States...there will be no quivering, precarious balance of power to
offer its temptation to ambition or adventure." He followed this with
his depiction of Britain as lying at the center of three concentric
circles: the Commonwealth and Empire; Europe; and the United
States--a view of things that, far from representing an advantage,
was to result in uncertainty and vacillation in determining how the
three should be related to each other and which circle should be
given priority.

These sentiments were in marked contrast to those that de Gaulle was
expressing across the Channel. No less absorbed with glory than the
British, he advocated an entirely different approach:

"Our planet as it is today shows two masses both of which are intent
on expansion but are driven by wholly different internal forces and
also by different ideological currents. Although one may hope that
they will not become enemies, America and Russia are automatically
rivals...In view of our situation, the preservation of our
independence becomes the most burning and decisive issue."

Churchill's words set the tone for the evolution of British postwar
diplomacy. Writing in Foreign Affairs in October 1947, Anthony Eden,
then a member of the Conservative opposition but destined to succeed
Churchill, wrote that Britain was both "a part of the European
continent and separate from it." He added with evident approval that
the "average Britisher is probably more conscious today that London
lies at the heart and center of the British Commonwealth and Empire
than he is even of his European neighbors."

Relative status in the world, but particularly vis-Ã -vis these same
European neighbors, began to obsess British statesmen from both left
and right. In 1948 the Labour Minister Herbert Morrison said that the
issue of the day was "whether we are going to be a great power or a
small one--a leader or a hanger-on." In 1950 the British ambassador
in Washington, Oliver Franks, reported to Prime Minister Clement
Attlee that "far from being one of the queue of European powers, we
clearly are one of the two world powers outside Russia." Two years
later Churchill--once again prime minister--recorded that "I love
France and Belgium, but we must not allow ourselves to be dragged
down to that level." In the same year Eden, now again foreign
secretary, said in a speech at Columbia University:

"Forming a European federation is something we know in our bones we
cannot do...Britain's story and her interests lie far beyond the
continent of Europe. That is our life. Without it we should be no
more than some millions of people living on an island off the coast
of Europe in which nobody wants to take a particular interest."

From this perspective, it is hardly surprising that Britain missed
the significance of the events that led up to European Community. In
1955 the British ambassador to France Gladwyn Jebb made light of the
seminal European meeting in Messina with the comment, "No very
spectacular developments are to be expected as a result of the
Messina Conference...the principal progress will be purely verbal."
In the same spirit, Jean Monnet's early advocacy of European
cooperation--advocacy which eventually led to the Treaty of Rome in
1957--was dismissed by Prime Minister Harold Macmillan with the
words, "I have known Monnet for a very long time indeed and he is a
charming man. But he has an incurable weakness for blueprints and
constitutions. I would not take them seriously." It is also not
surprising that the signing of the Treaty of Rome saw Macmillan
closeted with Dwight Eisenhower in Bermuda, talking global grand
strategy and nuclear politics and so far elevated above this decisive
moment in European history that he did not even mention the treaty
ceremony in his diaries.

The debate of Britain's independent nuclear deterrent is
characterized by these same concerns about status. Lord Cherwell,
Churchill's scientific adviser, wrote that without the bomb Britain
"would rank with other European nations who have to make do with
conventional weapons." Advocating an independent British nuclear
weapons program, he added:

"If we are unable to make the bomb ourselves and have to rely on the
United States for these vital weapons, we shall sink to the level of
a second-class nation, only permitted to supply auxiliary troops,
like the native levies who have been allowed small arms but not
artillery."

This reasoning drew a sharp retort from Henry Tizard, the chief
scientific adviser at the Ministry of Defense:

"We persist in regarding ourselves as a great power, capable of
everything and only temporarily hard pressed by economic
difficulties. We are not a great power and never will be again. We
are a great nation, but if we continue to behave like a great power
we shall soon cease to be a great nation."

These words encapsulate the test facing Britain at the end of World
War II. In many ways, it must be said--admittedly with the benefit of
hindsight--that Britain failed that test. In his memoirs, former
Foreign Secretary Lord Carrington, writing of the late 1950s, when he
had been viewing Britain at a distance as high commissioner in
Australia, put it charitably:

Essay Types: Essay