CHAPTER TWO

Churchill and Locarno, Eden and Geneva: the limits and possibilities of diplomacy

‘Appeasement’, where it is not a device to gain time, is the result of an inability to come to grips with a policy of unlimited objectives.

HENRY KISSINGER ¹

The world has achieved brilliance without conscience. Ours is a world of nuclear giants and ethical infants. We know more about war than we know about peace, more about killing than we know about living.

GENERAL OMAR BRADLEY, 1948 ²

To jaw-jaw is better than to war-war.

WINSTON CHURCHILL SPEECH, Washington DC, 26 June 1954 ³

Churchill had returned to office as prime minister on 25 October 1951 with Eden, his heir apparent, as foreign secretary. Since the two had left office in July 1945, the substance of British power had eroded further and the rising costs of Britain’s global commitments were particularity unyielding. Eden, as foreign secretary between 1935 and 1938, had known of the weaknesses in the British economy that had been such a factor in the appeasement of the dictators. Eden had attempted to blame his Labour successors for the wartime concessions to Stalin (confirmed by Attlee and Bevin at Potsdam) but there was now no place to hide. Away from the glamour of international diplomacy, in which he was well versed, Eden was candid with the Cabinet as to the limitations within which Britain found itself in the early 1950s (with a war in Korea, an emergency in Malaya, unrest in the Empire and a fading economy at home).

The essence of a sound foreign policy is to ensure that a country’s strength is equal to its obligations. If this is not the case, then either the obligations must be reduced to the level at which resources are available to maintain them, or a greater share of the country’s resources must be devoted to their support. It is becoming clear that rigorous maintenance of the presently-accepted policies of Her Majesty’s Government at home and abroad is placing a burden on the country’s economy which it is beyond the resources of the country to meet. A position has already been reached where there is no reserve and therefore no margin for unforeseen additional obligations.⁴

Eden recognized that abandoning commitments, however necessary, would have four major drawbacks. First, it would grant an opportunity to the Soviet Union. Second, it would undermine the world power status of the United Kingdom necessary for the maintenance of relations with the Commonwealth, Western Europe and the United States. Third, it would hurt British trade and commerce. And, finally, it would lead to a great ‘loss of prestige’. While it was not possible to ‘assess in concrete terms the consequences . . . of our drastically and unilaterally reducing our responsibilities; the effects of a failure of will and relaxation of grip in our overseas commitments are incalculable. But once the prestige of a country has started to slide there is no knowing where it will stop.’⁵ In addition to the general inability of the United Kingdom to meet its global obligations, it was clear that the Korean War had imbued war weariness in the British people. Churchill thus intended to make good on his electoral peace pledge. All he awaited was the moment and, in 1953, he believed that it had arrived when, on 5 March, Stalin died.⁶ On May 11, Churchill made a major foreign policy speech announcing his belief that the time was right for détente.

The supreme event which has occurred since we last had a debate on foreign affairs is, of course, the change of attitude and, as we all hope, of mood which has taken place in the Soviet domains and particularly in the Kremlin since the death of Stalin. We, on both sides of the House, have watched this with profound attention. It is the policy of Her Majesty’s Government to avoid by every means in their power doing anything or saying anything which could check any favourable reaction that may be taking place and to welcome every sign of improvement in our relations with Russia.

It was thus vital ‘that a conference on the highest level should take place between the leading powers without delay. This conference should not be overhung by a ponderous or rigid agenda.’ Churchill did not ‘believe the immense problem of reconciling the security of Russia with the freedom and safety of Western Europe is insoluble’.⁷ The prime minister therefore proposed a summit to address the issues, including the matter of the ‘provisional’ nature of German frontiers in Eastern Europe. In doing this, Churchill invoked a spirit of détente from another era.

The Locarno Treaty of 1925 has been in my mind. It was the highest point we reached between the wars. As Chancellor of the Exchequer in those days I was closely acquainted with it. It was based upon the simple provision that if Germany attacked France we should stand with the French, and if France attacked Germany we should stand with the Germans.

The scene today, its scale and its factors, is widely different, and yet I have a feeling that the master thought which animated Locarno might well play its part between Germany and Russia in the minds of those whose prime ambition it is to consolidate the peace of Europe as the key to the peace of mankind. Russia has a right to feel assured that as far as human arrangements can run the terrible events of the Hitler invasion will never be repeated, and that Poland will remain a friendly Power and a buffer, though not, I trust, a puppet State.⁸

Churchill’s initiative was bold. It was also doomed from the outset. For a start, Churchill’s own Foreign Office (FO), acutely aware of the danger of being tarred as appeasers, were highly sensitive to charges of horse-trading over German frontiers (a fear shared by Foreign Secretary Eden).⁹ The FO warned the prime minister that he risked neutralizing Germany, wrecking NATO’s posture of forward defence (which was based on the Elbe River) and even driving the Americans out of Europe.¹⁰ Harold Macmillan, then minister of housing, and a staunch anti-appeaser in the 1930s, lamented: ‘Does Churchill know what he wants from a settlement with Russia? Will Central and Eastern Europe be “sold out” in a super Munich? All these things are very worrying. At present I can do nothing in the Cabinet. But I shall not stay if we are now to seek “appeasement” and call it Peace.’¹¹ Although Eden, too, had disliked Churchill’s initiative, not least for its public and vulgar method, the foreign secretary had effectively pointed the way for his prime minister.

A special factor which may . . . compel us to consider some reduction in our forces in Germany is the fact that after June, 1953, we must be prepared to pay in addition to our present expenditure a sum probably amounting to about £100 million a year in foreign exchange in respect of the local costs hitherto borne on the German occupation budget. These should be fully covered by Germany as part of her defence contribution only until June, 1953.¹²

In avoiding such a hike in costs, Churchill’s ‘Eastern Locarno’, whether the foreign secretary liked it or not, would yield instant benefits for the British. It was no coincidence that Churchill’s initiative was launched just months before costs in Germany would rocket. Without détente, any reduction of forces in Germany was impossible: ‘Psychologically the reduction and still more the complete withdrawal of United Kingdom forces from the Continent, even if kept in being in the United Kingdom, would have a serious effect on the will of all our European allies to resist aggression.’¹³ In the event, the ‘Eastern Locarno’ proposal was a stillborn one. While he was no ‘hawk’ on foreign policy, US President Dwight D. Eisenhower rejected Churchill’s proposal as ‘untimely’.¹⁴ One of the reasons for this was apparently lost on Churchill: Munich had made all democratic leaders slaves to the electoral slavery of anti-appeasement. He could never accept anything like the ‘Eastern Locarno’ proposals. Instead, Eisenhower put his name to a draft resolution that rejected ‘any interpretations or applications of any international agreements or understandings, made during the course of World War II, which have been perverted to bring about the subjugation of free peoples’.¹⁵ Such rhetoric was nothing less than a feeble attempt to wrap the Anglo-American appeasement of Stalin at Yalta in high-sounding verbiage.¹⁶ In truth, Eisenhower was a prisoner of his own hard line, imposed by his own electoral rhetoric which had declared the Democrats to be irresolute in the face of Communism.¹⁷ The attitude of the United States came as a relief to the West’s Cold Warriors, not least West German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer (for it was German territory that Churchill proposed being effectively renounced via any ‘Eastern Locarno’). Adenauer, recently returned from preaching the gospel of anti-Communism in the USA,¹⁸ was diplomatic about the proposed ‘Eastern Locarno’ in conversation with Churchill. Publicly, however, the chancellor made it clear that the question of Germany’s eastern frontiers was the exclusive business of a future all-German government and a ‘free’ Poland.¹⁹ Wholly aware of the propaganda value of pursuing détente, Adenauer called for East–West negotiations in July 1953. But this was mere rhetoric and Washington colluded with the charade for the benefit of world opinion.²⁰

Churchill bemoaned the loss of the opportunity afforded by the demise of the Soviet dictator,²¹ although in reality there was little chance of his prevailing in the face of such determined opposition.²² But his initiative had attracted a great deal of support from many quarters in Britain. The feeling that the death of Stalin was a major opportunity was genuinely felt in Britain. Sir William Hayter (British ambassador to Moscow, 1953–7) recalled that Soviet Premier Georgy Malenkov, one of the collective leadership who had succeeded Stalin, was a man with whom ‘business could be done’.²³ Labour’s popular maverick MP Aneurin Bevan went so far as to make wild claims about Malenkov’s alleged willingness to negotiate the withdrawal of Soviet troops from Germany.²⁴ In a series of Tribune articles, published in July 1953 and entitled ‘In Place of the Cold War’, Bevan advocated a conciliatory policy in order to capitalize upon the opportunity afforded by Stalin’s death. Bevan believed that ‘in the short run or in the long run Russia will get her Reformation. It is for us to see that she is enabled to get it without fear of attack from the outside and to give her every reason to believe that her search for more urbane ways of life are watched with eager sympathy by hundreds of millions of people outside her frontiers.’²⁵

Harold Macmillan later defended Churchill’s ‘efforts to prevent a third world war’ stating that there was no ‘question of “appeasement”, as some people tried to read into his words. This was neither implicit nor explicit in his speech. He wished to move from strength, which the West undoubtedly had, not from weakness, as had been our mistake in the fatal days before the Second World War.’²⁶ But the Economist was perhaps nearer the mark when it commented acidly that Churchill’s ‘musings on Locarno ignore the tragedy of the East’ and had been made in an insensitive ‘spirit of appeasement’.²⁷ During a debate on a proposed treaty with Egypt in 1954, which many Tories viewed as appeasement, Viscount Hinchingbrooke, a right-wing Conservative, referred to

the sea-change in his thinking on foreign policy which began with that great watershed speech of 11th May, 1953; and after which we have had – not ‘appeasement’ because that word has sinister connotations²⁸ – Realism, if the hon. Gentleman likes – pacification; the lowering of tension; ending in the accepted policy of co-existence with the Communist world which now rules the day.

How, pondered Hinchingbrooke, did Churchill square this appeasement with the thermonuclear deterrence he was so passionately advocating?²⁹ In truth, there was no answer (or at least not one that was intellectually coherent). Indeed, and certainly by the standards that he had imposed on other people, Churchill could certainly sound like an appeaser on occasion. The prime minister reacted with a callous fury to an FO protest against the Soviets’ crushing of the East German workers’ rising of 17 June 1953: ‘Is it suggested that the Soviets should have allowed the Eastern Zone to fall into anarchy and riot? I had the impression that they acted with considerable restraint in the face of mounting disorder.’³⁰ Such insensitive attitudes did little to dispel the widespread belief that the British would sell out Germany’s national interests in order to achieve a settlement with Moscow (a view confirmed by British behaviour at the Berlin conference of foreign ministers in January and February of 1954).³¹ Any such deal would effectively implement the Carthaginian peace that Potsdam had seemed a prelude to.³² From the perspective of the West German government this was no way to treat an ally and was fundamentally at odds with the view from Bonn.³³ For Adenauer, Soviet Communism was an irreconcilable enemy and he made little secret of this: ‘The conditioning factor of our policy and the root of historical developments of the past several years has been the aggressive expansionist policy of Soviet Russia.’³⁴ By the mid-1950s, disgruntled Cold Warriors in Bonn, Washington and Paris charged that London remained wedded to the concept of appeasement. This state of mind was even equated with an affliction, unofficially dubbed the ‘English disease’.³⁵ This attitude was regarded as ridiculous by British policy makers, particularly by those with seemingly impeccable credentials as anti-appeasers in the 1930s. Chief of these were, of course, three successive Conservative prime ministers: Churchill, Eden and Macmillan.

At this juncture Eden achieved a series of diplomatic coups. First, he managed to ensure a smooth aftermath to the fall of Mosaddeq in Iran (which had been engineered by SIS and the CIA). Second, the Italian–Yugoslav dispute over Trieste was settled when, on 5 October 1954, representatives of the United States, United Kingdom, Italy and Yugoslavia initialled the so-called London Memorandum. Third, between April and July 1954, the British government played a leading role in the Geneva Conference that ended France’s war in Indochina (although, as Macmillan noted, certain observers compared Eden’s role at Geneva to Chamberlain’s at Munich).³⁶ Fourth, a collective defence organization for Southeast Asia was established by the Manila Treaty of 8 September 1954 (SEATO). Fifth, on 19 October 1954 the Suez Canal Base Agreement was concluded with Egypt (this involved the withdrawal of Britain’s troops from the region, in exchange for the maintenance of the Canal as a British base). Sixth, a treaty of 11 December 1954 associated Britain with the newly created European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC). Seventh, in response to the French Assembly’s decision to ‘set aside’ the proposed European Defence Community (EDC) on 31 August 1954, Eden came up with the ingenious idea of extending the Brussels Pact to include the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) in a Western European Union (WEU) and, in May 1955, for that state to accede to NATO. And, finally, May 1955 saw the signing of the Austrian State Treaty, which ended the Allied military occupation of that country and secured a neutral future for a free Austria. Eden’s private secretary termed the year capped by this achievement as an annus mirabilis.³⁷ Given this, Eden was understandably overwhelmed by hubris, and he later recalled that ‘[p]eace is not something that just happens. At times it is necessary to take risks and even to increase the immediate danger to win a lasting agreement. Trieste was one of those occasions.’³⁸

ILLUSTRATION 2.1  Churchill and Eden: The elder statesman and his successor. Prime Minister Winston Churchill and Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden in the United States, 5 January 1952. When Eden became foreign secretary in 1935, Churchill had written: ‘Eden’s appointment does not inspire me with confidence, I expect the greatness of his office will find him out.’

In 1955, an ailing Churchill finally conceded that it was time to resign as prime minister. In Cabinet on 14 March, the possibility of a four-power summit was discussed.³⁹ Such a meeting would have provided a fitting swansong for Churchill. Alas, superpower disinterest killed off any such hopes and Churchill quietly stepped down on 5 April 1955.⁴⁰ The ten years since the Second World War had seen three British governments make a significant contribution to the construction of a viable anti-Soviet global alliance. The embrace of containment as a ‘third way’ between war and appeasement, while led by the United States, had been adopted with skill and alacrity by the British. In his last years as foreign secretary, Eden had demonstrated, by his adroit negotiating strategy, a degree of diplomatic competence that fully justified his reputation. Yet, the high-profile successes of Eden’s diplomacy in the mid-1950s were, to some degree, misleading. Just as he was handing the premiership over to Eden, Churchill, at the end of one evening, had told his private secretary: ‘I don’t believe Anthony can do it.’⁴¹ The challenges Britain was to face, with its international status ever more imperilled, called for skilled leadership. But, as the Conservative MP Walter Elliot perceptively observed upon the resignation of Churchill, Eden was ‘a diplomat but Prime Ministers have to give orders’.⁴² Eden nevertheless seemed at the height of his powers. This meant that, when it came, his fall from grace would be all the more tragic and dramatic.