Britain in Global Politics Volume 2

From Churchill to Blair

J. Young, E. Pedaliu, M. Kandiah, J. Young, E. Pedaliu, M. Kandiah

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781349347728, 9780230360396
• eBook ISBN: 9781137313584
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: British History
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This collection of essays focuses Britain's role in global affairs since the Second World War. The essays cover a broad field, from relations with Japan and China, through European and African developments, to defence planning in Whitehall.

1

Britain and the Origins of the Religious Cold War, 1944–47

Dianne Kirby

The study of religion in the international arena has exponentially increased in the course of the past decade to the point of establishing its own subgenre, not least in the study of the Cold War. Saki Dockrill’s role in the latter process was key. She accepted an edited book on Religion and the Cold War for her Palgrave Macmillan series long before scholarly recognition had been accorded to the subject. A decade later, a book of the same name noted that it was built on the foundation established by the original book.¹ This chapter is a token of gratitude for Saki’s commitment to what was at the time a pioneering work.

Today, American scholars lead the way in emphasising the importance of religion to their nation’s Cold War and in its assumption of world leadership.² Elizabeth Edwards Spalding argues that the origins, early decisions and policies of the Cold War cannot be satisfactorily explained without reference to religion. She suggests that neglect of the personal piety of the first Cold War president, Harry Truman, meant scholars missed ‘the unique post-war liberal internationalism’ he fashioned.³ William Inboden, a former White House staffer who also worked in the State Department’s International Religious Freedom Office, supports Spalding’s argument. He attributes great importance to Truman’s personal religious convictions and believes religion was a key causal factor leading to the Cold War. Conceding the importance of other causal factors – balance of power realities, security concerns and ideology – Inboden’s thesis is that, taken apart or even together, they do not explain why the United States, so shortly after the Second World War, was prepared to step into ‘yet another cataclysmic global conflict’.To understand that, consideration must be given to spiritual factors. Truman and subsequently Dwight D. Eisenhower instinctively recognised the Soviet regime’s inherent evil: ‘It would be hard to conceive a more stark division in the world than between those nations who believed in God and those nations who outlawed such belief.’ Inboden argues that the prospect of a world dominated by the godless Soviets not only prompted America to assume the mantle of world leadership, but also meant other nations rallied to the cause:

Differences over political structures and economic systems and even national interests, though important in their own right, paled in comparison with the prospect of a world ruled by evil, a world devoid of spiritual values, a world without God. If ever there was a cause to fight, this was it.⁴

A belief in American exceptionalism is implicit in the approaches of both Spalding and Inboden. However, by focusing exclusively on the US, both miss the wider dynamic of the religious dimension of the Cold War. This chapter explores the way in which the origins of the ‘religious cold war’ have roots in British policies, reflecting not so much an instinctual aversion to evil, such as Truman felt, but a more mundane vying for power in strategic locations between two European powers, which brought into play all the traditional instruments of state, religion included.

Religion and the Soviet state

Secular modernity supposedly relocated religion out of the public and into the private sphere to domesticate and de-politicise religious faith. The extent to which this remained an un-realised project was tellingly revealed during the Second World War, when Christianity was invoked by all the belligerents for political and military purposes.⁵ The British played a key role, owing to links between the Church of England and the Russian Orthodox Church, in facilitating the rehabilitation of the image of the Soviet regime in the religious sphere.⁶ Within British ruling circles, there was some reluctance to present too positive an image of the Soviet regime. The Foreign Office (FO) wanted the Soviet Union to appear an acceptable wartime ally for the sake of the anti-Axis alliance, but was concerned not to endorse or legitimise the communist state. Marxist atheism had been a crucial component in demonising the Bolsheviks and government officials were wary of wartime propaganda that might have unwelcome repercussions once hostilities ceased. The FO was deeply conscious of the extent to which, by its persecution of religion, the Soviet regime had inflicted more damage on itself than western propaganda could ever hope to do. The FO carefully monitored Soviet attitudes toward and treatment of religion, including the 1934 Congress, which accepted the policy of popular front governments and collaboration with Christians ‘of revolutionary temper’. Subsequently the new 1936 Soviet Constitution theoretically allowed full civil rights of citizenship for priests and freedom for the conduct of religious cults.⁷

The Church of England Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), with which the FO enjoyed cordial relations, also discussed the significance of these changes.⁸ It noted that Stalin had taken it upon himself to clarify their importance. Claiming that the Soviet Union was in a stage of socialism in which the class struggle was over and in which minds and habits were to be modelled by education, not by force or administrative measures, Stalin had repudiated previous calls for decisive and merciless struggles with religious prejudices. The necessity now was patiently to explain their harm. The report observed how, at peace conferences, Soviet spokes-people were keen to present a positive perspective on the Soviet attitude toward religion. Ignoring the huge numbers of religious people being oppressed in the course of the Great Purge, it denounced the ‘most absurd and ridiculous rumours’ about religious persecution, a ‘poisonous weapon of lies for the purpose of preparing war against the only socialistic state in the world’. Rather, it was posited, communists esteemed those with religious belief and took care not to offend them. Acknowledging that the USSR was willing to ‘soft-pedal’ on world revolution and make a truce with religious bodies abroad, the CFR report recognised that Stalin was: ‘more favourable to collaboration with capitalist states than to stirring up revolution in them’. The report’s conclusion is of particular note. It observed that Stalin was presenting Soviet achievements as a model to be copied, not owing to compulsion but to appeal. In addition to the more obvious implications, it revealed Stalin’s grasp that his religious policy was counterproductive at home and abroad.⁹

In 1903, although the Second Congress of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party had demanded separation of church and state, and church and school, it had insisted on unrestricted freedom of conscience.¹⁰ In October 1917, the Bolsheviks declared the new Soviet State to be non-religious, not anti-religious, whilst the Bolshevik decree of 1918 ‘on freedom of conscience and religious societies’, theoretically safeguarded ‘free practice of religious customs’.’ Religious believers were not denied admission to the party because opposition to religion was subordinated to the class struggle. Nevertheless, Bukharin and Preobrazhensky’s ABC of Communism, which popularised the party programme of 1919, still advocated attacking religious institutions and popular religious prejudices.¹¹ Still, it remained the case that some religious bodies, Christian and Muslim, managed to flourish under the new regime. Indeed, the Bolshevik separation of Church and State was welcomed by the Roman Curia as a blow to Russian Orthodoxy and revived Vatican aspirations to convert Russia to Roman Catholicism. Hence, the spectacle at the 1922 Genoa conference, where the Bolshevik Foreign Minister and the Pope’s representative toasted one another in public. The Vatican was less celebratory about the progress of the various Protestant bodies.¹² Evangelical Christians, for example, increased their adherents from about 100,000 to over a million in the first decade of Soviet rule.¹³

Research into attitudes toward religion amongst the Bolshevik elites has revealed, not simply a distinct failure to understand Russian religion in all its manifestations, but, most significantly, the lack of an agreed religious policy. Fierce opponents of religion, moderate sympathisers toward it and even believers existed at all levels of the Communist Party. Political and economic considerations mattered more than ideological imperatives. There was no single office overseeing religious policy. Instead, there arose a series of overlapping initiatives and commissions, all subject to wide local and regional variations, as well as bureaucratic confusion.¹⁴ Policies were inadequately resourced and vacillated between repression and concession. In addition to proving ineffective, they were often counter-productive.¹⁵ The enthusiastic implementation of campaign-like initiatives often produced outcomes at variance with what was intended by central planners. The defective and contradictory anti-religious institutions such as the Central Standing Commission on Religious Questions and the League of the Militant Godless are indicative of the extent to which the Soviets lacked a coherent, intelligible plan to construct an atheist state.¹⁶ That the eradication of religion was far from a government priority was discernible from the low value placed on the work of such institutions, their under-resourcing and lack of direction. Nonetheless, the maltreatment inflicted on the faithful under Stalin horrified the wider world and became a key component in the propaganda attacks on the Soviet experiment. When Hitler invaded the Soviet Union, a British survey, which covered ‘the more intelligent members of all sections of the population’,’ demonstrated that of all those who felt there were obstacles to a proper understanding between Great Britain and the Soviet Union, 72% named Soviet treatment of religion as the chief difficulty.¹⁷

The Anglo-Soviet ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• 1 Britain and the Origins of the Religious Cold War, 194447
• 2 Journey into a Desert: British Perceptions of Polands Western Territories, 194548
• 3 British Propaganda and Countering Illegal Immigration into Palestine: The President Warfield or Exodus 1947
• 4 Britain, the United States and the Issue of Limited War with China, 195054
• 5 To Stay or to Walk: The British and the Defence of Domestic Jurisdiction at the United Nations, 195056
• 6 A Cardinal Point of Our World Strategy: The Foreign Office and the Normalisation of Relations with Japan, 195263
• 7 AngloAmerican Diplomacy and the Congo Crisis, 196063: The not so Special Relationship
• 8 The US Embassy in London and Britains Withdrawal from East of Suez, 196169
• 9 We Were always Realistic: The Heath Government, the European Community and the Cold War in the Mediterranean, June 1970February 1974
• 10 At the Top Table: British Elites Perceptions of the UKs International Position, 195091
• 11 The British Embassy in Washington and AngloAmerican Relations during the Blair Governments, 19972007
• 12 Beyond the Horizon
• Index