ignored spokesman in wartime London. His grasp of military reality kept him from expressing the pain that he shared with other Frenchmen at the British sinking of France’s proud Mediterranean fleet at Mers-el-Kebir in July 1940; but the symbolism of the act rankled nonetheless.
De Gaulle had particular cause to feel ambivalent towards Washington, where Franklin Roosevelt never took him seriously. The United States maintained good relations with the wartime Vichy regime far longer than was decent or prudent. France was absent from the wartime Allied negotiations; and even though this allowed De Gaulle in later years cynically to disclaim responsibility for a Yalta agreement of which he privately approved, the memory rankled. But the worst humiliations came after the war was won. France was effectively shut out of all major decisions over Germany. Intelligence-sharing between Britain and the US was never extended to France (which was rightly assumed to be dangerously leaky). The nuclear ‘club’ did not include France, reduced thereby to unprecedented irrelevance in international military calculations.
Worse still, France had been utterly dependent on the USA in its colonial war in Asia. In October 1956, when Britain, France and Israel conspired to attack Nasser’s Egypt, it was President Eisenhower who pressured the British into withdrawing, to France’s impotent fury. A year later, in November 1957, French diplomats fumed helplessly when British and American arms were delivered to Tunisia, despite French fears that these would end up in Algerian rebel hands. Shortly after taking office in 1958, De Gaulle himself was bluntly informed by General Norstad, the American commander of NATO, that he was not entitled to learn details of the American deployment of nuclear weapons on French soil.
This is the background to De Gaulle’s foreign policy once he assumed full presidential powers. Of the Americans he expected little. From nuclear weapons to the dollar’s privileged international status as a reserve currency, the US was in a position to impose its interests on the rest of the Western alliance and could be expected to do so. The US could not be trusted, but it was at least predictable; the important thing was not to be dependent on Washington, as French policy had been in Indo-China and again at Suez. France must stand its ground as best it could—for example, by acquiring its own nuclear weapon. De Gaulle’s attitude to Britain, however, was more complicated.
Like most observers, the French President reasonably and correctly assumed that Great Britain would strive to maintain its position halfway between Europe and America—and that, if forced to chose, London would opt for its Atlantic ally over its European neighbors. This was brought home very forcibly in December 1962, when the British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan met President Kennedy at Nassau, in the Bahamas, and accepted an arrangement whereby the US would furnish Britain with Polaris submarine-based nuclear missiles (as part of a multilateral force that effectively subsumed Britain’s nuclear arms under US control).
De Gaulle was furious. Before traveling to Nassau, Macmillan had held talks with De Gaulle at Rambouillet; but he had given the French President no indication of what was to come. Nassau, then, was yet another ‘Anglo- American’ arrangement cooked up behind France’s back. To this injury was added further insult when Paris was itself offered the same Polaris missiles, on similar conditions, without even having been party to the discussions. It was against this background that President De Gaulle announced, at his press conference on January 14th 1963 that France was vetoing Britain’s application to join the European Economic Community. If Britain wished to be a US satellite, so be it. But it could not be ‘European’ as well. Meanwhile—as we have seen—De Gaulle turned towards Bonn and signed the highly symbolic if utterly insubstantial Treaty with the Federal Republic.
The idea that France could compensate for its vulnerability to Anglo-American pressure by aligning with its old enemy across the Rhine was hardly new. Back in June 1926 the French diplomat Jacques Seydoux had minuted in a confidential note to his political bosses that ‘it is better to work with the Germans to dominate Europe than to find ourselves against them… a Franco-German rapprochement will allow us to get out all the quicker from the Anglo-American grip’.[109] Similar thinking had lain behind the calculations of conservative diplomats who backed Petain in 1940. But in the circumstances of 1963 the Treaty with Germany made little practical difference. The French had no plans to leave the Western alliance, and De Gaulle had not the least intention of being dragged into any German schemes to revise the post-war settlement in the East.
What the Treaty of 1963 and the new Franco-German condominium really confirmed was France’s decisive turn towards Europe. For Charles de Gaulle, the lesson of the twentieth century was that France could only hope to recover its lost glories by investing in the European project and shaping it into the service of French goals. Algeria was gone. The colonies were going. The Anglo-Americans were as unsympathetic as ever. The serial defeats and losses of the past decades left France with no other option, if it hoped to recover some of its past influence: as Adenauer had reassured French Prime Minister Guy Mollet on the day that the French were forced by US pressure and British compliance to halt their operations at Suez, ‘Europe will be your revenge.’
With one important exception, the British retreat from empire was very different from that of the French. Britain’s colonial inheritance was larger and more complicated.The British Empire, like the Soviet one, survived the war intact, if battered. Great Britain depended heavily on imperial growers for basic foodstuffs (unlike France, which was self-sufficient in foodstuffs and whose overwhelmingly tropical imperial territories produced very different commodities); and in certain theatres of the war—North Africa in particular—Commonwealth troops had outnumbered British soldiers. The residents of Britain itself were, as we have seen, far more conscious of Empire than their French counterparts—one reason why London was so much bigger than Paris was that it had thrived on its imperial role as port, commercial entrepot, manufacturing center and financial capital. The BBC guidelines in 1948 advised broadcasters to be mindful of their predominantly non-Christian overseas audience: ‘Disrespectful, let alone derogatory, references to Buddhists, Hindus, Moslems and so on… may cause deep offense and are to be avoided altogether.’
But the British after 1945 had no realistic hope of holding on to their imperial heritage. The country’s resources were hopelessly overstretched, and the costs of maintaining even the Indian empire were no longer balanced by economic or strategic advantage: whereas exports to the Indian sub-continent in 1913 were nearly one-eighth of the British total, after World War Two they were just 8.3 percent and falling. In any case it was obvious to almost everyone that the pressure for independence was now irresistible. The Commonwealth, created by the 1931 Statute of Westminster, had been intended by its framers to obviate the need for rapid moves to colonial independence, offering instead a framework for autonomous and semi-autonomous territories to remain bound by allegiance and obedience to the British Crown, while relieving them of the objectionable trappings of Imperial domination. But it was now to become instead a holding club for former colonies, independent states whose membership in the British Commonwealth constrained them only to the extent of their own interests and sentiments.
India, Pakistan and Burma were granted independence in 1947, Ceylon the following year. The process was hardly bloodless—millions of Hindus and Muslims were massacred in ethnic cleansing and population exchanges that followed—but the colonial power itself withdrew relatively unscathed. A Communist insurgency in neighboring Malaya, however, led the British government in June 1948 to declare a State of Emergency that would only be lifted twelve years later with the rebels’ decisive defeat. But on the whole, and in spite of the accompanying retreat from India and its neighbors of thousands of colonial residents and administrators, Britain’s departure from South Asia was both more orderly and less traumatic than might have been expected.
In the Middle East, matters were more complicated. In the British Mandate territory of Palestine, Great Britain abandoned its responsibilities in 1948 under humiliating but (again, from the British point of view) relatively bloodless circumstances—it was only after the British had quit the scene that Arabs and Jews set upon one another in force. In Iraq, where Britain and America had common oil interests, the US progressively displaced the UK as the dominant imperial influence. But it was in Egypt, paradoxically a country that had never been a British colony in the conventional sense, that Britain experienced the ironies and drama of de-colonization and suffered a defeat of historic proportions. In the Suez Crisis of 1956 Britain underwent for the first time the sort of international humiliation—illustrating and accelerating the country’s decline—that had become so familiar to the French.
The British interest in Egypt stemmed directly from the importance of India, to which was added in later years the need for oil. British troops first seized Cairo in 1882, thirteen years after the opening of the Suez Canal, administered from Paris by the Suez Canal Company. Until World War One Egypt was ruled in fact if not in name by a British Resident (for much of this period the redoubtable Lord Cromer). From 1914 to 1922 Egypt was a British Protectorate, after which it became independent. Relations between the two countries remained stable for a while, formalized in a 1936 Treaty. But in October 1952 the new government in Cairo, led by army officers who had overthrown the Egyptian King Farouk, abrogated the Treaty. In response the British, fearful for the loss of their
