The ensemble of ideas about Greater Britain which began to coalesce in the late nineteenth century percolated into the British state, the main political parties and the wider culture. But these schemes and visions met with growing scepticism in the early part of the next century. They were challenged, in particular, by the profound political instability and economic dislocation of the 1930s and the growing spectre of military conflict in Europe. Anxieties about Britain's place in the world rose as free trade was increasingly under threat, the ‘white dominions’ demanded greater autonomy, and it became increasingly apparent that the days of empire might well be numbered. The USA was now a major power in its own right and had steadily overtaken Britain as an economic power.
This chapter explores some of the strains and tensions generated by these developments and looks in particular at Winston Churchill's supple and evolving thinking about the different transnational allegiances which Britain should hold on to in order to maintain its power and influence – Anglo-America, the empire, the Commonwealth and Europe. It also explores his unique, and rather ambivalent, contribution to post-war thinking about Britain's geo-political position and future and highlights his role as a source of important and influential ideas about the Anglosphere. Churchill's thinking represents an important conduit between Edwardian ideas of empire and citizenship and the years after 1945, when a fixation upon Britain's relative economic decline and doubts about its imperial heritage underpinned the UK's decision to join the EEC. His iconic History of the English-Speaking Peoples1 represented an effort to disseminate visions of British pre-eminence to a broad public. The Anglosphere was now being presented to a mass audience.
While he has become indelibly associated with the lineage of the Anglosphere, Churchill himself did not use this term, preferring to talk of the English-speaking peoples or races. But he is still widely cited as the architect of an Anglosphere tradition that is fundamentally at odds with the idea of UK involvement in an integrated Europe.2 This appropriation of his mantle remains contentious and can be misleading. Far from being a creator of this lineage, his thinking was a direct descendant of some of the foundational ideas about race, nationhood and citizenship that were assembled in the later years of the nineteenth century.3 Equally, it was formed out of direct experience of the military and administrative aspects of colonial governance.
Historians continue to debate how important the imperial experience was for Churchill and what exactly were the most important and consistent principles he held on the various issues relating to colonial rule on which he spoke and acted during his career. His political contemporary Leo Amery famously characterised his interest in empire as synthetic and secondary to his much deeper interest in England, a charge repeated by Clement Attlee.4 In fact, perceptions of Churchill's relationship with empire altered at different stages of his career. It was during the 1920s that he acquired the reputation for being a ‘diehard’ who was out of step with his colleagues and stuck in a pre-First World War mindset. This view of him returned to the fore as he expressed his opposition to the Attlee government's attempts, after 1945, to make decolonisation an orderly process.5
This reputation was confirmed by the support he expressed for the ‘forward policy’, a position associated with imperial enthusiasts from the nineteenth century. Churchill was known as somebody ready to advocate military action by Britain to defend its imperial interests and willing to break with mainstream orthodoxy in defending such a stance. He urged a firm military response during the 1920s in the face of the growing nationalist movement in India, a position that was seen as defying credibility in official circles. And in 1931 he reacted with fury to the news of negotiations between the viceroy of India and Mahatma Gandhi for a political truce after the latter had launched a campaign of civil disobedience. In an address to the Council of the West Essex Unionist Association, he declared:
It is alarming and also nauseating to see Mr. Gandhi, an Inner Temple lawyer, now become a seditious fakir of a type well known in the East, striding half-naked up the steps of the Palace, while he is still organizing and conducting a defiant campaign of civil disobedience. … The truth is that Gandhi-ism and all it stands for will have to be grappled with and finally crushed.6
These diehard motifs were important elements in his thinking about India in particular, and the British Empire more generally, but they were not the whole story.7 Churchill also held with some consistency to several key principles that tended to shape his various judgements about the imperial situations and issues with which he engaged. He undoubtedly retained an intuitive belief in racial hierarchy from the Victorian era and believed resolutely in the cultural superiority of the Anglo-Saxon peoples. But he also held to the broadly liberal conviction that with the blessings of this civilisational inheritance came the duty to behave humanely towards other races. There were also traces in his thinking on empire of the Gladstonian conscience of the previous century and a particularly strong commitment to the importance of Anglo-American civilisation.8
The liberal streaks within his outlook help explain Churchill's sharp criticism of overt and counter-productive forms of racial exploitation and violence. Despite some shifts of emphasis and tone and a pragmatic temperament which led him to consider situations on a case-by-case basis, his thinking exhibited considerable continuity in this area. Above all, he was convinced that empire was the necessary condition for British pre-eminence. Even during some of the most pressing moments of the Second World War he was acutely aware of potential threats to colonial interests. In his very first speech to the House of Commons as prime minister, he declared that the British Empire, not Britain alone, would fight to the end against Hitler. And, following the battle of El Alamein, he defiantly declared in the Commons that he had not become the king's first minister to preside over the ‘liquidation’ of the empire.
His colonial thinking coalesced in the course of several formative, early experiences. The young Churchill became an extremely well-known figure in the English-speaking world, mainly as a result of his work as a military journalist and seeker of adventure. His early posting to India, as a young cavalry officer, afforded his first experience of warfare and led to a deeper, more informed set of reflections about empire on his part. He then travelled as a journalist-cum-soldier to the North West Frontier, where he observed and took part in intensive military action in the mountainous terrain of Afghanistan, and then ventured in the same capacity to Sudan. There, he observed the darker side of British imperialism and came face to face with various acts of violence and brutality. But it was in South Africa, during the Boer War from 1899 to 1900, that Churchill came to the attention of a much larger audience. Working again as an embedded military reporter, he was captured and made a famous – though not uncontroversial – escape from a prisoner-of-war camp and returned to a hero's welcome in England.9 The Boers, whose cause was fashionable in the Anglophone world, elicited considerable ambivalence in him. He admired their fortitude and belief in self-government. But, ultimately, he remained steadfast in his commitment to the priority of Britain's imperial interests, an imperative that overrode any call to affinity with another white Christian people ‘bringing civilisation’ to Africa.
In addition to this early penchant for adventure and self-aggrandisement, Churchill was seen, when he first entered politics, as a figure inclined to favour military modes of thinking. He worked hard to overcome these associations. During his first ministerial position, as under-secretary of state for the colonies from 1905 to 1908, he impressed with his hard work and gift for strategic thinking. Thereafter he was drawn away from colonial issues and deliberately sought to broaden his range of experience and political interests by promoting the cause of domestic social reform on behalf of the working classes. But this cause also had an imperial dimension, as Churchill joined the ranks of those concerned that the unfitness of the working classes represented the gravest threat to Britain's commitment and capacity to retain a great empire.
After leaving the Colonial Office, and following stints as president of the Board of Trade and home secretary, Churchill moved to the position of first lord of the Admiralty in 1911. There he engaged with questions of military strategy and was a keen moderniser of Britain's naval forces in the context of growing competition from Germany. In his eyes the Royal Navy was integral to Britain's supremacy over the world's main sea routes, with the passage to India guarded by its bases at Gibraltar, Malta, Suez and Aden. Conversant with the ideas of Mahan and other naval authorities, Churchill was a keen exponent of the view that sea lanes remained the arterial routes of the world economy, and he argued that, if it was to remain a global power, Britain needed to invest in the requisite hardware to secure pre-eminence in this area.10
Churchill returned to the Colonial Office in 1921 and served in Lloyd George's coalition government for another two years. Dogged by criticism that he was heavy-handed in his response to colonial situations, especially in relation to the challenges associated with both Eastern and Southern Africa, he was also an advocate of responsible colonial governance – hence his speech in 1920 on the Armritsar massacre, in which he ably defended the government's censure of General Dyer. In relation to East Africa, he did appear, in this period, to shift towards being more sympathetic to the white settlers seeking to oppose further immigration from Asia. And, even though he was privately critical of this community and their leaders, his stance caused considerable offence in India. But his abiding belief, set out in a keynote address in 1922, was that colonial officials should combine firmness with a sensitivity to local situations and sentiments. He continued to indicate publicly that he did not believe that the goal of introducing democracy was necessarily the right approach to take for many African and Asian peoples, a stance that was to put him on a collision course with American opinion at a later date.
Empire also crossed his path much closer to home. As the Irish question returned once more to the forefront of British politics, following the Easter Rising of 1916 and the war of independence that began in 1919, Churchill acquired a reputation for pragmatism and moderation on this front. He was trenchantly opposed to the Conservative Party's flirtation with Ulster Unionist militarism before 1914 and became an articulate advocate of Home Rule for Ireland in this period. However, as war secretary in 1919, he put his faith in the Royal Irish Constabulary's reserve force – the notorious ‘Black and Tans’ – which was responsible for a series of atrocities that served to inflame nationalist sentiment in the North. Once a ceasefire was agreed he played a notable role in the negotiations with the Irish leadership and was a strong proponent of the notion of Ireland retaining its dominion status.
Churchill was also required to deal with the unexpected crisis that developed as a result of the defeat of Greek troops by the Turks, which opened up a real threat to the British position at Chanak in 1922. He sided with Lloyd George in calling for a military response to the Turkish threat, a stance that was not supported by other European nations, or by Canada, and was not popular at home. His clumsy handling of this situation confirmed to some – not least his critics in the dominions – that he was an insensitive centraliser when it came to imperial relations. The Chanak incident was an important factor in triggering Arthur Balfour's subsequent definition of Britain and the dominions as ‘autonomous Communities within the British Empire’. Rather ironically, Churchill, the great advocate of the shared destiny of the English-speaking peoples, helped propel the politicians of a number of these countries towards support for independence. More generally, the support he expressed privately for the idea of using chemical weapons in warfare, particularly in the context of the Iraqi revolt in the 1920s, reveals much about the depth and character of his commitment to British imperial interests in this period.11
After 1945, Churchill remained obdurately reluctant to countenance the winding up of empire and was sharply critical of the Labour government's moves towards decolonisation. His reputation as a diehard on this front now returned, prompted by the repeated accusations of ‘scuttling’ that he threw at his Labour opponents. He was particularly aggrieved and disappointed by the rapidity with which the prospect of Indian independence became inevitable in the late 1940s, and, with this development, Britain lost what he viewed as its strategic lynchpin and economic jewel. This turn of events created immediate strategic dilemmas for the UK, making it harder to relinquish its position in the Middle East, which now assumed greater importance because India was lost. Nehru's announcement in 1947 that India would become a republic looked like it would jeopardise the prospect of Indian participation in the newly formed Commonwealth. However, this was offset by Labour's swift announcement of dominion status for the country, a decision shaped by the determination to shore up what remained of British influence.
India's independence represented a huge blow to Britain's confidence in its own imperial mission and dented long-established ideas about its global reach and influence. And it opened up an important fault line in political life between those who urged a new statecraft, based upon an acceptance of the need to manage an orderly retreat from empire, and diehards – mostly in the Conservative Party – who preached the case for assertive attempts to maintain Britain's remaining imperial positions; Churchill was in the latter camp. These differing perspectives reflected two increasingly divergent visions within the Tory Party about the nature and future of the British Empire.12 During the 1930s, figures such as Stanley Baldwin and Neville Chamberlain had come to view it as a growing strain upon British resources and asserted the merits of indirect forms of control, working with local elites to ensure order where possible, and supporting indirect forms of rule. Churchill, on the other hand, was one of a number of voices in the Conservative Party who tended to view with suspicion signs that the British state was softening its commitments to empire.
Yet Churchill's thinking about empire was more fluid than is typically acknowledged. And his linguistic flexibility enabled him to shift between references to empire, Britain's Commonwealth and the Commonwealth of Nations, as the occasion demanded. Over time, and with some reluctance, he gradually came to accept that the British state needed to accommodate the drive to self-government in the colonies in pragmatic ways, and that it needed a statecraft designed to protect its core interests. And one of the main reasons for the pragmatic note that crept into his political thinking on this score was his first-hand experience, during wartime, of the forces eroding Britain's imperial position – its diminished economic strength and growing reliance upon the United States.
Following the outbreak of the Second World War and Germany's initial military successes in the Low Countries and France, Britain was isolated in Europe, its own national security was at risk, and its colonies were increasingly vulnerable. In this situation, it was imperative that the USA be persuaded once more to join a war in the European theatre, and Churchill, as prime minister, did all he could to ensure that this happened.
Victory for Britain came at a heavy price, as the war took a major toll upon its economy and public finances. And the outlines of a new international order, based upon American pre-eminence, began to emerge in the final years of this conflict. Britain found itself diminished as an international power and heavily dependent upon its American ally, especially in fiscal terms. From 1941 onwards, American offers of financial support to Britain (primarily through the Lend-Lease scheme) were seen as necessary resources to sustain the British war effort but also as sources of leverage as the United States sought to promote its vision of a liberal international order, as well as to ensure that the principle of self-determination, which was set out in the Atlantic Charter of 1941, would be respected by the European imperial powers, especially Britain. As the war progressed, Roosevelt and other American leaders repeatedly raised the prospect of colonies being replaced by new forms of international control and trusteeship.
Churchill came under considerable pressure to renounce the UK's imperial ambitions in exchange for enough money and goods to make it through the war. He managed to avoid making any such commitment, but the UK's growing indebtedness ensured growing dependence on the USA and increased vulnerability to the latter's hostility to the British Empire. As Christopher Hitchens observed, ‘almost from the declaration of war against Nazi Germany, Churchill was engaged in a sort of “Second Front,” to protect the British Empire, against his putative ally’.13 At times, disagreements over the hostile stance which Roosevelt and other American politicians adopted towards Britain's imperial interests soured relations between the two leaders. Churchill's repeated rhetorical references to the shared history and future unity of the English-speaking peoples was intended, in part, to elide these differences of outlook and interest.
The Roosevelt administration subscribed to the vision, which had first emerged in the 1930s, of a new economic order which would tear down the tariff barriers and remove the protectionist practices that had inhibited capitalist development in the interwar period. These issues were thrown into relief by the deal struck with the Americans at the Bretton Woods negotiations of 1944, which sought to establish the template for a new economic settlement based upon the convertibility of the dollar and the American ambition to build new global institutions – notably the IMF and the World Bank – under their own tutelage, and indeed on their own soil. The British delegation, led by the celebrity economist John Maynard Keynes, proved unable, in the face of their American counterparts' support for a more extensive liberalisation of the international economy, to make headway with their proposals for an open, world trading system suitably modified to protect Britain's imperial interests: ‘At every step to Bretton Woods, the Americans had reminded [the British], in as brutal a manner as necessary, that there was no room in the new order for the remnants of British imperial glory.’14 The deal agreed at this summit lasted only a short period of time, giving way in 1947 to the Marshall Plan launched by the USA with the goal of reconstructing Western Europe's shattered economies.
The international summits of the final years of the war appeared, symbolically, to place Britain – through the presence of its wartime leader, Churchill – alongside the two other great world powers. But the actual talks, and the deals reached at them, tended in practice to confirm the second-tier status of the UK. The sense that a new balance of power was emerging – in Europe and the wider world – as a result of the pre-eminence and rivalry of these two ‘superpowers’ was now a defining theme in international relations and was accentuated by the onset of the Cold War.15 It was increasingly apparent that Britain required American support to maintain some of its key commitments, especially in the Middle East and Asia. But the broader US ambition to peg the economies of the Western world to the dollar, and the attempt to promote an economic order based upon the depth, liquidity and openness of US financial markets, shaped the subsequent era of market-led growth.
This economic vision was closely intertwined with the political imperative from 1943 onwards to contain the Soviet Union and its allies. These goals necessitated American pre-eminence within a newly constructed bloc of Western states, and this required the rapid rehabilitation, after 1945, of West Germany as a key bulwark against Soviet influence. Another by-product of the formation of the ‘West’ – in direct competition with the USSR-led ‘East’ – was that Britain now found itself within an international system which significantly restricted its own room for manoeuvre. Any prospect of maintaining a leading role in world affairs was contingent upon establishing a close relationship with the United States. And so the British stood back and watched the baton of world leadership pass to its ally, the culmination of a lengthy process which had first gathered pace during the nineteenth century, and which had at different moments threatened to result in military conflict between these states.
That it was Churchill who, despite his imperialist proclivities, effectively presided over the early process of the dissolution of the British Empire is an irony that was not lost on his political opponents, or on later historians. In his notable revisionist account, John Charmley suggests that Churchill's idealistic invocation of Anglo-America shaped the fateful decision to bind the UK too tightly to American policies and, as a result, helped accelerate the liquidation of its own empire.16 Other historians disagree, stressing the insuperability of the forces that Churchill was facing and the overwhelming need to ensure American support; he was, in the words of one leading historian, ‘trapped in historical processes that they could not control’.17 A more pertinent question is whether the grandiloquent presentation of Anglo-America served to accentuate tensions with the other English-speaking community that Britain nurtured – the ‘white dominion’ peoples. Decisions about military strategy, as well as the negotiation of the post-war settlement, threw up acute political dilemmas about whether, and how, these countries should be consulted and how much autonomy they had in relation to the imperial metropole. For the most part Churchill sought to achieve a balance between these attachments, but, in the exigent circumstances of the war, it was to the American relationship that he turned most assiduously, and anxiously.
Born into a family with roots on both continents, Churchill championed Anglo-American unity across the different phases of his career,18 but it came to acquire much greater prominence first during the Great War, as he urged the USA to join with Britain, and then as war loomed in the 1930s. He framed this deep historical relationship as the basis for a contemporary partnership that could not only win the current conflict but also proceed to shape a new international order within which British imperial interests would be protected and American ambitions respected. These two states were now destined to work closely together and serve as guardians of the security and prosperity of the Western world, building a new era of liberal civilisation.
These ideas were given iconic expression in his Harvard graduation speech of September 1943, delivered as the tide of war was beginning to run in the Allies' favour. On this occasion Churchill not only made the case for close strategic cooperation between the two powers but also called for a reimagining of their historic relationship, presenting this as the basis for a more collaborative future. The speech elicited a mixed response in the United States, a reminder that Anglo-America did not have quite the same traction on the other side of the Atlantic. During the course of his visit Churchill floated to sceptical US officials the idea for a scheme to enable a common form of citizenship for residents of the USA and the British Commonwealth countries who might, after a period of residency, come to acquire voting privileges in each other's countries19 – an idea that has, interestingly, resurfaced in recent Conservative thinking.
The Harvard address forms one part of a pair of notable speeches on Anglo-America. It was followed by his keynote oration at Fulton, Missouri, in 1946. Primarily known for its dramatic depiction of the ‘iron curtain’ falling across Europe, this also offered an occasion for grand rhetoric about the shared lineage and bright future of the Anglosphere and included the same idealistic call for the reunification of its constituent peoples. They were, Churchill insisted, bound together by a common inheritance – the English tradition of government and the key values of representative government and liberty – which had evolved across several centuries and been transported far and wide by the migration of earlier generations. He now connected this familiar theme with the pressing requirements of the new international situation, presenting the Soviet Union as the paramount threat to democracy and liberty throughout the world. And so he urged the Anglosphere countries, under American leadership, to join the Western alliance. And he employed the phrase that has come to haunt British political thinking ever since as he talked of its ‘special relationship’ with the United States.
To understand what Churchill meant by this term, and to appreciate why he set so much store upon the prospect of a newly constituted alliance between the USA and Britain after the war, it is necessary to consider carefully how he depicted the English-speaking peoples. This phrase was first aired among a broad community of politicians and thinkers in the USA and Britain who engaged in a broadly liberal debate on the changing role of government in the context of industrialisation during the late nineteenth century.20 Churchill acquired the habit of depicting this form of imagined community during the 1930s, but he had on various earlier occasions talked up the future unity of the Anglophone races. In 1917, for example, he hailed the decision of the United States to join the Great War as the prelude to the reunification of the Anglo-Saxon world. From an early point in his career it was his habit to invoke the ‘English-speaking races’, a coinage which reveals the Victorian antecedents of his ideas, and one which was widely employed until the First World War.21
It was at this very point that Churchill resumed working on the books which supplied the fullest and most reflective exposition of his thinking on this score – his History of the English-Speaking Peoples, published between 1956 and 1958. These volumes represented a concerted attempt to reach a much wider audience on this topic. They were motivated too by his own straightened financial position.22 The work for them began in 1932 and drew upon the efforts of various historians across these years. Despite the various commitments that distracted Churchill from its completion, and the various hands responsible for the research and drafting it involved, the text bears the clear imprint of his own outlook, historical imagination and prose style.
The volumes provide an accessible and well-paced account of the key episodes and events that form the story of the ineluctable rise of Britain as an exceptional polity and the hub of an expansive, liberal empire. They are replete with dramatic tales of the journeys and achievements of the various settler peoples who carried these political and constitutional ideals across the globe and the countries they formed in England's image. This unusual set of historical volumes, produced under the editorial hand of a living former prime minister, represents the most extensive – and perhaps the most influential – elaboration of the ideals of the Anglosphere produced during the last century. Their impressive sales and the enthusiastic plaudits they elicited testify to their contemporary impact and the celebrity status of their author.
As a contribution to an evolving pattern of Anglospheric discourse, Churchill's contribution was distinguished by his commitment to chart the historical contours of this lineage and his firm belief that the past, properly understood, could undergird a new era of joint Anglo-American hegemony. He stressed both the enduring ties associated with this common inheritance and interconnected history of these peoples and the deep cultural linkages – not least a shared language – which meant that the countries had naturally tended to remain allies and partners. These profound connections occluded the points and periods of disagreement and conflict between them. Despite the war it fought to rid itself of British rule, the USA had forged democratic institutions and a legal system that were broadly congruent with the English lineage, and it had remained faithful to the cultural and political ideals that stemmed from this inheritance. But, Churchill observed, it was now about to take its place in the sun and was the lead partner in the furthering of the civilisational enterprise which the English had begun.
Churchill's volumes were not entirely retrospective in their ambition and were written with one eye on their author's desire to cement the Anglo-American alliance in the post-war period. He implicitly urged the USA not to overlook its deep bonds to its special ally as it sought to establish a new, Western order; and he aimed to remind Britain that its future lay, as in its past, in a close, if informal, relationship with the USA and the ‘white dominions’.
The sense of ethnic community evoked in this grand narrative was undoubtedly anchored in the racialised thinking about nations which Churchill had imbibed in his early years. But these works also supplied an updating and reworking of this heritage for the distinct challenges and new sensibilities of the middle years of the century. The replacement of ‘races’ by ‘peoples’ is one small, but telling, illustration of Churchill's sensitivity to aspects of the changing cultural environment of mid-century Britain. Yet, in other respects, the books reflected an imperial outlook and geo-political vision which landed in a world that was far more sceptical towards both than it had been when he began working on them. In the mid-1950s, the principle of the equality of races and an abiding scepticism about empire were increasingly prominent themes in official British circles and high politics. And the upbeat, unashamed assertion of Britain's cultural influence in the world, and the celebration of its imperial heritage, tended to strike nostalgic chords that many now disavowed.
From a contemporary vantage point, Churchill's works are notable in part for what they do not acknowledge – deepening worries about Britain's relative decline. The UK's public policy was still firmly directed to the retention of the protected imperial economic area, which had been a cornerstone of its approach before the war. But a growing chorus of voices from the manufacturing sectors began to call this stance into question, and the increasing prominence of multinational corporations in the UK economy increased the weight of argument for free international trade as opposed to imperial protection. The orthodoxy that had prevailed up to the late 1940s – that the empire was the cornerstone of British economic strength – was now increasingly open to debate. And a growing current of opinion at elite level began to promote the embryonic economic union of Western Europe as a plausible alternative option for Britain. Churchill was an important, though also somewhat ambiguous, contributor to these early debates.
As the question of the UK's membership of a European union became a source of major political disagreement fifty years later, it was to Churchill that leading critics and proponents of Britain's membership of the EU turned, with protagonists from both sides claiming him as a posthumous supporter of their cause. This renewal of interest in his thinking reflects his iconic status among Conservatives in the years after his death and also says much about the desire for legitimation on a decision of crucial national importance. The appearance in mainstream Conservative circles, from 2010, of a reinvigorated version of the Anglosphere idea was a particular spur to this recent interest. This dynamic was taken to somewhat absurd lengths by Boris Johnson MP, whose hagiographic account of Churchill was widely viewed as an artless attempt to align himself with the wartime hero's ‘brand’.23
Whether today's sceptics can credibly claim Churchill as progenitor and inspiration is the source of much disagreement among contemporary historians. Some of his best-known pronouncements on this issue were offered in the unique circumstances of the 1940s, yet references to a United States of Europe pepper his speeches and writings from a very early stage in his life and were typically framed as compatible with some kind of alliance of the English-speaking peoples. His official biographer notes his reference to this idea in a speech he gave in 1929 in New York and in an essay he penned in 1930.24 Yet he was notably ambivalent about this prospect from the outset. In 1932 he urged an American audience that it should ‘have no fear of the United States of Europe … As long as the United States and England grow closer together. Any sinister result could then be properly dealt with.’25
According to some historians, far from being the father of Euroscepticism, Churchill is more accurately seen as one of the architects of European Union: ‘After the Second World War … Churchill became the greatest pioneer of the European ideal.’26 Various pieces of evidence are summoned in support of this judgement. These include his call in Zurich in 1946 for a Franco-German partnership as the first step in building ‘a kind of United States of Europe’, his founding of the United Europe Movement in 1950, his organisation of the unofficial, but important, Congress of Europe in The Hague, the role he played in lobbying European governments to create the Council of Europe, and his championing of the European Convention on Human Rights in Strasbourg.
Churchill's speech to the Tory Party conference in 1948 also figures prominently in these arguments and is cited by some as a prophetic statement of the importance of the European dimension for the UK.27 In it he famously identified Britain's unique position as the point where ‘three majestic circles’ in international relations intersected. He described these in the following terms: ‘The first circle for us is naturally the British Commonwealth and Empire, with all that that comprises. Then there is also the English-speaking world in which we, Canada, and the other British Dominions and the United States play so important a part. And finally there is United Europe.’28
The terms Churchill selected to characterise these allegiances are telling. For Britain – ‘naturally’ – empire came first, though he also notably referenced a term of increasingly common usage in the mid-1940s – the ‘British Commonwealth’ – a tacit recognition that the empire itself might be turning into a rather different entity, with the UK still at its head. Then he referenced the Anglophone world, as a single circle, but with special mention in it of the US relationship. And he finished by asserting the importance of an entity that was not yet in existence – the United States of Europe. The punchline for Churchill was that Britain was the only country that ‘has a great part in every one of them’ and which is ‘the very point of junction’. And, as ever, he rounded off his powerful metaphor with a providentialist assertion of British destiny. If these circles of influence could all be joined together, ‘there is no force or combination which could overthrow them or even challenge them.’ History provided the basis for Britain's role as a conduit to all of these transnational communities, but so too did geography and the unique way in which empire had allowed the outward-facing and seafaring characteristics of the ‘world island’ to prosper. It was because Britain was ‘at the centre of the seaways and perhaps of the airways’ that it had the chance to join these circles.
The vision set out in this speech has shaped the ways in which policy-makers in Britain have thought about its place in the world more than any other delivered since 1945. But its fundamental ambivalence about which of these communities would be most important in the post-war world, and in particular about Europe, are also notable. For critics, Churchill's abiding legacy on this subject was a studied, debilitating ambiguity, which stands in marked contrast to the certitude and consistency of his commitments to the affiliations associated with the Anglosphere.29 His 1948 speech exudes confidence that Britain could be outside Europe but also deeply engaged with it, and that its tradition of statecraft would ensure that it could manage the tensions bound to arise between these different blocs. In these speeches Churchill presented a vision of European integration which seemed to stretch beyond the economy, encompassing the prospect of military cooperation as well.
But there are good reasons to be wary of the Europhile image of Churchill. There was, as one leading historian has put it, ‘a lack of depth in his commitment to European co-operation’.30 For Churchill, involvement with a prospective European union was secondary to the fundamental focus upon British security and the Anglo-American alliance. And his particular interest in this question in the 1940s most probably reflected his growing concern about whether the USA would remain committed to providing defensive cover to Western Europe in the context of potential Soviet aggression – hence his support for the idea of a common European military capacity. Nothing that Churchill wrote or said in this period committed Britain to substantive economic or military cooperation. Equally, what exactly he meant – in institutional terms – by ‘Europe’ remained shrouded in ambiguity in these years. Churchill was notably disinclined to offer practical support to the idea of the UK cooperating with the European idea during his final term of office, from 1951 to 1955, when he had several opportunities to do so.31
It would appear that the Eurosceptic claim upon Churchill has some foundation. But this too should not be overstated. The kind of stark binary choice between Europe and the Anglosphere, which has become a hallmark of latter-day Euroscepticism, was entirely alien to the Churchillian mindset. For good or ill, he believed that the strategic priorities of the special relationship with the United States and the retention of imperial influence could – indeed, should – be seen as congruent with a friendly disposition towards, and possible cooperation with, an emerging European bloc. The largely hypothetical conjectures of these years soon gave way in British politics to a much more concrete discussion of the pros and cons of the UK's membership of the EEC. During the 1960s a good deal of this debate focused upon the economic worth of the UK's reliance upon Commonwealth markets, which were no longer as profitable as they had previously been. And, increasingly, the European choice emerged as a more sharply defined option in the context of a developing concern about the relative under-performance of the UK economy in comparison with its West European counterparts. Increasingly, the imperial lineage which Churchill had so powerfully championed came to be seen as outmoded and as one source of the kind of golden ageism which was increasingly blamed for holding Britain back. As modernisation – of both economy and society – became the watchword in British politics, the European option found a growing number of supporters, especially in Churchill's own party, as the route to greater economic opportunity and geo-political clout for the UK after empire.
Loyalty to the Commonwealth idea was still a key point of reference and a meaningful attachment for many and was widely referenced in the campaign against the UK's membership of the EEC in 1975. But it was a diminishing force as a carrier of the ethos of the Anglosphere. Over time, as the various ties with former colonies began to weaken, the case made by those arguing for Britain to reinvent and modernise as a European power grew stronger, even though the Commonwealth and the English-speaking peoples remained an important residual source of imagined community for many Britons.
But from the late 1940s, as growing numbers of people from Britain's former's colonies began to make their way to Britain, invoking the reciprocal implications of imperial citizenship, the empire moved back home. Successive waves of immigrants from Africa, Asia and the Caribbean arrived, and this gradually engendered profound concerns in the host population about whether Britain needed to detach from the Commonwealth in order to preserve its English heritage and identity. Increasingly, it came to be seen as a portal through which various alien peoples could enter the country, and a reactive current of sentiment began to gather around a more tightly drawn, insular sense of the nation. Towards the end of his own career, Churchill was troubled by the emergence of immigration as a popular concern in Britain and expressed considerable scepticism about whether the indigenous population would tolerate mass immigration from the non-white peoples of the Commonwealth. In conversation in 1954 he remarked about the problems that ‘will arise if many coloured people settle here. Are we to saddle ourselves with colour problems in the UK?’32
During the middle decades of the last century, the decline of the British Empire was widely viewed as irreversible, although politicians and political parties continued to argue, often sharply, over how quickly decolonisation should happen, how the British state should manage this process, and how its relationships with its former colonies should be arranged. But this gathering realisation injected two broad questions into high politics. What was the scope and basis for British power in the world if empire was gone? And what role should Britain play in the new world order that was emerging out of the ashes of the Second World War? Churchill played an immensely influential role by providing influential answers to these questions and by informing the strategic thinking and geo-political assumptions of subsequent generations of politicians. The vision he set out in 1948 of the concentric circles which Britain alone could join together proved beguiling and elusive for a political establishment both dealing with the ongoing fallout from the gradual end of empire and preoccupied by the prospect of relative economic decline. His conviction that the UK could gain leverage and influence as the bridge between the USA and Europe while also nurturing its Commonwealth ties became the unspoken, governing framework shaping the foreign policy outlook of most of the party leaders and prime ministers who came after him.
But Churchill's legacy has been paradoxical in two particular respects. First, he oversaw Britain's contribution to victory in a punishing world conflict. Being on the winning side served to obscure the underlying truth that the expansion of England was now in reverse, a process that had been in motion for many years, starting with the partition of Ireland in 1921. Churchill's capacity to weave inspiring visions of English-speaking union and Anglo-American hegemony enabled some in the British political establishment to avoid thinking too hard about the radically altered circumstances now facing the UK.
Equally, his thinking on some key issues was notably ambivalent – on European union above all. Making reference to a prospective United States of Europe was as much a rhetorical flourish as it was a grand design on his part – at least until the late 1940s. And, even then, Churchill showed little inclination to involve Britain deeply in this process. Over subsequent decades many in his own party came to believe that the European and Anglophone destinies represented divergent, antithetical paths and that Britain had to choose between them in order to prosper. What to his mind were pillars upon which great power status depended came to look like two alternative lifeboats for a country that was starting to slip down the league table of leading Western states. Staving off decline, rather than asserting the country's standing in the world, was increasingly the preoccupation of Britain's ruling elite.
Out of power after 1945, Churchill attempted to provide a wide-ranging, popular understanding of Britain's place in the world by recycling the ideals and story-lines of Anglo-America and the ‘kith and kin’ relationship with the white peoples of empire. But, even as his idealised portrait of these affiliations hit the bookshops of Britain, the sense of continuity with the pre-war world which he so keenly evoked was starting to fade.