During the twentieth century, the perspectives adopted by historians of the United Kingdom naturally changed. In 1900 the existence of the British Empire had dominated, or at least framed, the picture; and the mood of the picture itself was that of triumphalism, albeit tinged with apprehension. Imperial history was to modify its stance as liberal historians, from Ramsay Muir in the 1920s to Nicholas Mansergh in the 1960s, presented a vision of the evolution of the Empire into the Commonwealth; though this version was itself renounced as Whiggish by a new generation of revisionist historians. The history of England long continued to be written in ways that silently subsumed Scotland and Wales, as shown in the original series for the Oxford History of England and the Pelican History of England, both completed in the 1960s. G. M. Trevelyan, often called the last of the Whig historians, was Regius Professor of Modern History at Cambridge from 1927 to 1940. He owed his pre-eminence, however, not to exact scholarship but to a fine literary sense and an imaginative broadening of the scope of history for the general reader. His English Social History (1944), which notched up staggering sales, captured a sense that 1940 had vindicated the robustness of British society as well as a tradition of enlightened liberal leadership. ‘Tout va très bien Madame l’Angleterre,’ commented one French review, in a prickly admonition to Trevelyan’s Anglocentric complacency.
If this was still a Whig interpretation, presenting the story of the past as a benign progress towards an increasingly enlightened present, it was deeply rooted among British historians. Accounts of social policy, for example, often orchestrated a variation on the same theme, with poverty submitting to a painfully achieved but finally successful conquest by beneficent state intervention. It was as though the rise of the welfare state simply compensated for the decline of the British Empire. When Α. J. P. Taylor, a diplomatic historian by training and a political radical by conviction, turned his hand to the volume English History, 1914–45 (1965), he did not mourn his country’s downfall as a great power but celebrated the fact that ‘England had risen all the same’.
If Taylor meant that life expectancy at birth for men had increased by seventeen years since the beginning of the century – and nineteen years for women – or that GDP per head in 1948 was 35 per cent higher in real terms than in 1900, he was quite right. But these snapshots were of a dynamic, continuing process. By 2000 life expectancy for both men and women was to lengthen by a further eleven years, with official estimates showing that men in England and Wales could expect to reach their seventy-fifth birthdays and women their eightieth – projections which some now regarded as too low, given the continuing improvement in life chances through diet, exercise and medicine alike. By the end of the century, the level of per capita GDP, after allowing for inflation, was about 175 per cent higher than in 1948. On this showing, Britons had never had it so good as after their finest hour. Yet, writing at the beginning of the twenty-first century, it is difficult to escape the issue of decline, as the titles of numerous books immediately confirm.
Relative decline in Britain’s position during the century was, of course, inevitable; and since relative power is what matters in a military or political sense, that issue is clear. But economic decline is relative in more complex ways, and can indeed be absolute. Two World Wars radically depleted Britain’s assets, thus extorting a high price for victory in both blood and treasure. It should be noted, however, that the war economy, by requiring full use of resources, also brought some benefits. The Second World War thus mopped up the unemployment left by the years of recession which preceded it. Moreover, in the period from 1945 to 2000 there were only five years of absolute decline – all of them between 1974 and 1991. In the twenty years 1959–79, the economy grew at an average of 2.8 per cent; and in the next twenty years, 1979–99, at 2.2 per cent. It is thus indisputable that in the second half of the twentieth century – and notably in its third quarter – the British economy enjoyed secular growth unprecedented in its history, albeit less than that of some major competitors.
The question is, therefore, whether the British people could in some way have done better, had they seized their historical opportunities by making different collective choices. Economically, the relevant comparison is surely with other major European countries, like France and Germany. In 1950 the British economy was still larger than that of either; only later did both overtake Britain. It is difficult to resist the conclusion that both of them bounced back from the setback of the Second World War more effectively than the only combatant European country to remain unconquered throughout. Yet it would be bizarre to suppose that Britain would have benefited from defeat, and naive to think that accommodation with Nazi Germany offered a means of preserving British power and prosperity – still less national self-respect. In the end these remain choices with a moral dimension, not simply alternative strategies in maximizing immediate material self-interest.
Given that Britain did the right thing in 1939–40, did the country take the wrong course after 1945? At home, the post-war settlement involved a commitment to implementing a welfare state and to maintaining high levels of employment. Again, the relevant comparison is with similar European countries, most of which were soon spending at least as much as the United Kingdom on social services, albeit organized in different ways. It is odd to suppose that in Britain alone such provision inhibited economic growth: more reasonable to think that the welfare state and virtually full employment were interdependent. The long era of economic expansion which followed the Second World War provided ample resources for social security – so long as unemployment remained low. Britain’s experience here, as in much else, was not so different from that of other European countries.
It is easy now to see that Britain’s pretensions as a great power in the post-war world were unsustainable; that defence spending was a crippling burden; that imperial geopolitical thinking was outmoded. Yet it should not be forgotten that a potential power vacuum existed for some years after 1945, before the USA adopted a clear role in the sort of Atlantic alliance apparently necessary to guarantee the security of western Europe. Nor should it be overlooked that British decolonization was to prove relatively successful, leaving few of the scars suffered by other ex-colonial powers in their own extrication from empire. Whatever its other deficiencies, the continued existence of the Commonwealth showed that British governments had not wholly lost their talent for appeasement, when this was the appropriate strategy for accommodation to the reality of declining power. Only after Suez did France more purposefully turn from post-imperial illusions to the constructive pursuit of its national objectives within a framework of European integration.
Here is the most obvious missed opportunity. For by the time Britain joined the European Community, the once-for-all boom was already exhausted and the British people were to be denied an economic object lesson in the benefits of the Common Market. More crucially, the developing European institutions had already been moulded in many ways that ill suited British traditions and interests. This was the penalty for (British failure to participate in laying the foundations, arguably from the time of the Schuman Plan in 1950, certainly after the Messina conference in 1955.
Why views on European integration came to play such a prominent role in British politics surely requires little explanation; what really needs explanation is why this happened so belatedly. Maybe party managers, in suppressing earlier debate, sensed the scope for dissension once this bottle was uncorked and the genie of Europe was let loose in insular politics, which certainly reeled under the collision of incompatible commitments, priorities and prejudices. Until the mid-1980s it was the Labour Party that was most sceptical and most divided about the emerging European Union; after that, in a curious reversal, the Conservative Party. Within the span of a generation, the fracture lines in politics increasingly stemmed from issues concerning the country’s relationship with Continental Europe – issues which seemed all the more intractable in view of Britain’s persistent incapacity to resolve them in the twentieth century.