facing down the old colonial powers—as the French had feared, his moral influence and example upon Arab nationalists and their supporters now reached new heights. The failure in Egypt presaged more trouble for the French in Algeria.
For the United States, the Suez adventure was a reminder of its own responsibilities, as well as an opportunity to flex its muscles. Eisenhower and Dulles resented the way Mollet and Eden had taken American support for granted. They were annoyed with the French and British: not just for secretly undertaking so ill- conceived and poorly executed an expedition, but also for their timing. The Suez crisis coincided almost to the hour with the Soviet occupation of Hungary. By indulging in so patently imperialist a plot against a single Arab state, ostensibly in retribution for the exercise of its territorial sovereignty, London and Paris had drawn the world’s attention away from the Soviet Union’s invasion of an independent state and destruction of its government. They had placed their own—as it seemed to Washington, anachronistic—interests above those of the Western alliance as a whole.
Worse, they had given Moscow an unprecedented propaganda gift. The USSR exercised almost no role in the Suez crisis itself—a Soviet note of November 5th, threatening military action against France, Britain and Israel unless they accepted a cease-fire, played little part in the proceedings, and Khrushchev and his colleagues had no plans to follow through on the threat. But by allowing Moscow to perform, even if only symbolically, the role of protector to the injured party, France and Britain had initiated the Soviet Union into a role that it would improvise with gusto in the coming decades. Thanks to the Suez crisis, the divisions and rhetoric of the Cold War were to be imported deep into the Middle East and Africa.
It was on Britain that the impact of the Suez miscalculation was felt most acutely. It would be many years before the full extent of the conspiracy against Nasser was made public, though many suspected it. But within weeks, Anthony Eden was forced to resign, humiliated by the incompetence of the military strategy he had approved and by the very public American refusal to back it. Although the ruling Conservative Party itself did not especially suffer at the polls—under the leadership of Harold Macmillan, who had somewhat reluctantly taken part in the planning of the Suez expedition, the Conservatives won the general elections of 1959 quite comfortably—the British government was forced into a radical re-appraisal of its foreign policy.
The first lesson of Suez was that Britain could no longer maintain a global colonial presence. The country lacked the military and economic resources, as Suez had only too plainly shown, and in the wake of so palpable a demonstration of British limitations the country was likely now to be facing increased demands for independence. After a pause of nearly a decade, during which only the Sudan (in 1956) and Malaya (in 1957) had severed their ties with Britain, the country thus entered upon an accelerated phase of de-colonization, in Africa above all. The Gold Coast was granted its freedom in 1957 as the independent state of Ghana, the first of many. Between 1960 and 1964, seventeen more British colonies held ceremonies of independence as British dignitaries traveled the world, hauling down the Union Jack and setting up new governments. The Commonwealth, which had just eight members in 1950, would have twenty-one by 1965, with more to come.
When compared to the trauma of Algeria or the catastrophic consequences of Belgium’s abandonment of the Congo in 1960, the dismantling of the British Empire was relatively peaceful. But there were exceptions. In eastern and, especially, southern Africa, the unraveling of empire proved more controversial than it had in West Africa. When Harold Macmillan informed South Africans, in a famous speech at Cape Town in 1960, that ‘the wind of change is blowing through this continent, and, whether we like it or not, this growth of [African] consciousness is a political fact,’ he did not expect a friendly reception and he did not get one. To preserve the system of apartheid rule in force since 1948, the white settlers of South Africa declared themselves a republic in 1961 and left the Commonwealth. Four years later, in neighboring Southern Rhodesia, the white colonists unilaterally pronounced themselves independent and self-governing. In both countries the ruling minority succeeded for a few years longer in ruthlessly suppressing opposition to their rule.
But southern Africa was unusual. Elsewhere—in East Africa for example— comparably privileged white settler communities accepted their fate. Once it became clear that London had neither the resources nor the appetite for enforcing colonial rule against majority opposition—something that had not been self-evident as recently as the early fifties, when British forces conducted a brutal and secretive dirty war of their own against the Mau-Mau revolts in Kenya—the European colonists accepted the inevitable and went quietly.
In 1968 the Labour government of Harold Wilson drew the final, ineluctable conclusion from the events of November 1956 and announced that British forces would henceforth be withdrawn permanently from the various bases, harbors, entrepots, fuelling ports and other imperial-era establishments that the country had maintained ‘East of Suez’—notably at the fabulous natural harbor of Aden on the Arabian peninsula. The country could no longer afford to pretend to power and influence across the oceans. By and large this outcome was met with relief in Britain itself: as Adam Smith had foreseen, in the twilight of Britain’s first empire in 1776, forsaking the ‘splendid and showy equipage of empire’ was the best way to contain debt and allow the country to ‘accommodate her future views and designs to the real mediocrity of her circumstances.’
The second lesson of Suez, as it seemed to the overwhelming majority of the British establishment, was that the UK must never again find itself on the wrong side of an argument with Washington. This didn’t mean that the two countries would always agree—over Berlin and Germany, for example, London was far more disposed to make concessions to Moscow, and this produced some coolness in Anglo-American relations between 1957 and 1961. But the demonstration that Washington could not be counted on to back its friends in all circumstances led Harold Macmillan to precisely the opposite conclusion to that drawn by his French contemporary De Gaulle. Whatever their hesitations, however ambivalent they might feel about particular US actions, British governments would henceforth cleave loyally to US positions. Only that way could they hope to influence American choices and guarantee American support for British concerns when it mattered. This strategic re-alignment was to have momentous implications, for Britain and for Europe.
The lasting consequences of the Suez crisis were felt in British society. Great Britain, and England especially, was distinctly optimistic in the early 1950s. The election of a Conservative government in 1951, and the first intimations of an economic boom, had dispersed the egalitarian gloom of the early post-war years. In the first years of the reign of the new Queen, the English basked in a cozy Indian summer of self-satisfied well-being. Englishmen were the first to conquer Everest (1953)—with the help of an appropriately colonial guide—and to run the mile in under four minutes (in 1954). Moreover it was Britons, the country was frequently reminded, who had split the atom, invented radar, discovered penicillin, designed the turbo-jet engine and more besides.
The tone of those years—somewhat over-enthusiastically dubbed a ‘new Elizabethan age’—is well caught in the cinema of the time. The most popular British films of the first half of the Fifties—comedies like
In addition to benign social comedy, English cinema in these years flourished on a steady diet of war films:
From 1956, however, the tone began to darken discernibly. War films like
