Memory and Power in Post-War Europe: Studies in the Presence of ...

112 Anne Deighton
Europe needed Britain’s leadership. Oliver Franks is reported to have said
that the failure to join the ECSC ‘cost us the leadership of Europe which
we had enjoyed from the end of the War until May 1950’. 28 Indeed, a
major study by Edmund Dell (himself a successful Labour politician) on
the ECSC is actually called The Schuman Plan and the British Abdication
of Leadership in Europe. Dell argues that the ‘British reaction to the
Schuman Plan was the failure to perceive that British participation in it
was consistent with Britain’s view of itself. It could be a global power,
and at the centre of the Commonwealth and sterling area, and still participate
in the Schuman Plan.’ 29 Recent research makes it clear that, in
the discussions about the Schuman Plan, the British cabinet was peeved
that the idea had been brought forward by the French and Germans without
their knowledge and, indeed, that the Americans had seen the draft
plan before the British. When the British government then tentatively
suggested that they might sit in on the planning committees, this was to
be on the condition that they would do so without commitment. When
the French then set the British a deadline for unconditional participation,
the British deliberately withdrew, fully aware that they were abandoning
leadership on the Continent in favour of a global role. 30
By 1951, when Labour left office, a framework of continuing great
power status was in place, despite Britain’s parlous financial state. It was
built upon the memory of Britain’s past imperial world role, which was
now to be symbolised by the atomic bomb; a close bilateral and multilateral
(NATO) alliance with the United States which reinforced their
shared successes in war; the creation of the Commonwealth to deal with
decolonisation and change in the empire/dominions; and continued attachment
to sterling as a global currency, despite the 1947 and 1949
sterling crises. Attachment to the Commonwealth (particularly the white
dominions), to the United States and NATO, and indeed to the possession
of nuclear weaponry appear to have reflected very well the images
of former imperial status, and have become largely internalised into the
British body politic. None of these characteristics of British foreign policy
have yet been seriously contested in Britain. However, this architecture
of Britain’s international role was to prove a severe constraint in the face
of the reconstruction and reinvention of a West European power bloc.
28 Alex Danchev, Oliver Franks: Founding Father (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 1993,
75.
29 Edmund Dell, The Schuman Plan and the British Abdication of Leadership in Europe
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), 4. This view is very close to that held by the
‘Strasbourg’ Conservatives at this time, see Skär, The Conservative Party, passim.
30 Documents on British Policy Overseas, Series II, Vol. II, No. 33. The French were aware
of this, too: Janne Taalas, ‘Leadership in Western European multilateral diplomacy,
1947–1951: Britain in the Marshall Aid negotiations and France in the Schuman Plan
negotiations’, D.Phil. thesis, University of Oxford, 1999.