Britain in the Cold War

9 Key excerpts on "Britain in the Cold War"

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  The British Way in Cold Warfare

  Intelligence, Diplomacy and the Bomb 1945-1975

  • Matthew Grant(Author)
  • 2009(Publication Date)
  • Continuum

    (Publisher)

  As mentioned above, British overseas policy is incomprehensible if one does not take into account the prevailing economic circumstances of the British state. 31 This then, is how Britain confronted the Cold War: as a paradigm in which its interests INTRODUCTION 5 were threatened by ideologically opposed forces on a global scale and ambivalently aided by its main ally. Of course, the Cold War was not Britain’s only concern in this area; the twin concerns of Empire and Europe were major issues that have tended to dominate the historiography of British overseas policy. 32 But the Cold War was the organizing factor of these years and Britain’s geo-political choices were shaped by the wider international conflict; Malaya and European integration make little sense without their Cold War backdrop. 33 As the essays in this volume will show, activities traditionally considered to be part of the Cold War were very often utilized to advance British interests in other arenas. The importance of the Cold War cannot be overstated: power was sought to protect national interests against superpower infiltration; prestige was measured primarily by Britain’s relations with the United States and the Soviet Union; indeed, British decline can perhaps be encapsulated by the process which the Big Three of 1945 became the British-less ‘Superpowers’ in short order. Much effort was expended in maintaining, achieving and displaying Britain’s global reach and diplomatic clout. Thus the Cold War was ‘fought’ in a manner to shore up a relative global position that seemed endangered, to maintain British security, and to do so with the minimum effort. Three quick examples can be used to illustrate this. First, Britain was committed to maintaining the security of Western Europe.

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  Developments in British Public Policy

  • Peter Dorey(Author)
  • 2005(Publication Date)
  • SAGE Publications Ltd

    (Publisher)

  (For an account of Britain’s central role in the development of the Cold War, and recognition of this after an initial tendency to portray it as an exclusively US–Soviet affair, see Deighton, 1990, and Maier, 1996). The onset of this Cold War helped determine the contours of British foreign policy for decades to come. It delimited Britain’s geo-strategic sphere of action and provided a beguil-ing rationale for a continuing global role that maintained Britain’s traditional sense of spe-cial status, and allowed the containment of communism to be seen as synonymous with the Foreign Policy 69 1 This was the collective name, following the entry into force in 1967 of the Merger Treaty, for the European Coal and Steel Community, European Economic Community and the European Atomic Energy Community. preservation of British overseas interests and commitments. In some respects, it also accorded British foreign policy more influence, especially vis-à-vis the US, than would have been the case had the envisaged post-war peace been co-operatively established and successfully maintained. For instance, Germany’s potential power was limited following its division after the 1948 Berlin crisis, and the spectre of the Soviet threat enabled successive British governments to justify to the electorate the peacetime allocation of considerable proportions of stretched resources to rearmament and military strength. Moreover, British foreign policy became locked into maintaining commitments well beyond Britain’s capa-bilities by the combination of genuine concern about the Soviet threat, and the need to con-vince allies and enemies alike of British determination to uphold their interests and honour their overseas obligations. As was observed in a Cabinet paper in the summer of 1952, ‘once the prestige of a country has started to slide, there is no knowing where it will stop’ (PRO CAB 129 C(52) 202, ‘British Overseas Obligations’, 18 June 1952).

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  Geopolitical Change, Grand Strategy and European Security

  The EU-NATO Conundrum

  • L. Simon(Author)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  détente and the end of the Cold War gave way to greater British engagement in the EC/EU. Finally, while during the Cold War most of Britain’s military energies were devoted to the defence of Europe, the stability that the end of the Cold War brought to the continent led Britain to emphasise the importance of expeditionary warfare to expand the West’s clout (and its own) globally.

  Britain’s post-war strategic vision

  Facing a daunting financial horizon, with the war bodies still warm and the war wounds fresh, Britain’s primary concern in the immediate aftermath of World War II was the preservation of the regional and global milieus it had thoroughly crafted during the previous three centuries, namely a balance of power in the European continent and the maintenance of a global free trade system (Kent 1993).

  Britain’s pivotal geopolitical position, straddling the Atlantic and Europe and commanding the continent’s maritime access routes, meant it would be difficult for a maritime power like the US to realise its geostrategic objectives in Europe unless in close collaboration with London (Spykman 1942/2007: 103–120, 123–124). World War II and the Cold War would be two eloquent illustrations of this fact. Inspite of its palpable material inferiority in relation to the emerging superpowers, its pivotal geopolitical position, its spectacular war effort, its status as occupier in Germany and a long-standing tradition as an effective manager of the regional balance of power earned Britain the right to substantially shape the West’s policy of containment and the configuration of the European post-war settlement (Greenwood 2000, Milward 2002).

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  The Cold War's Odd Couple

  The Unintended Partnership between the Republic of China and the UK, 1950 - 1958

  • Steve Tsang(Author)
  • 2005(Publication Date)
  • I.B. Tauris

    (Publisher)

  For example, Alexander Cadogan, the permanent under-secretary at the Foreign Office, admitted in private that it would be more appropriate to describe them in terms of the big two and half. 44 Such a view was tempered by the, in retrospect, mistaken belief that the UK’s weakness was simply caused by economic exhaustion and was temporary. 45 Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin spoke for most of his colleagues across the political spectrum when he stated in the House of Commons that ‘we regard ourselves as one of the Powers most vital to the peace of the world.’ 46 The real weakness of the UK was not exposed until the debacle over the seizure of the Suez Canal in 1956. Until then the UK continued to play the role of a global power. 47 Gladwyn Jebb of the Foreign Office summed up the underlying attitude of the British towards the cold war when he said that ‘the phrase “cold war” so far as we are concerned, really involves the whole question of the maintenance of the United Kingdom’s position in the world, and can therefore in the long run be equated with our general foreign policy.’ 48 With the effective collapse in 1945 of the Anglo–American– Soviet wartime alliance, the UK was in an important sense torn between the reality that its future and security were tied to IN THE CONTEXT OF THE COLD WAR 11 Europe and the call of the Empire/Commonwealth, which could provide the resources with which the UK could be head of an alternative independent power bloc in the world. 49 The importance of Europe was self-evident, as Clement Attlee fully recognized even before he become prime minister. As he rightly pointed out, the UK was ‘not a semi-detached country, free if we will to turn our backs on Europe … but a continental Power with a vulnerable land frontier’. 50 Europe was, however, in no shape to rally around a British core to form an independent power bloc to match the might of the Soviet Union.

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  Twentieth-Century Anglo-American Relations

  • J. Hollowell(Author)
  • 2001(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  needed Great Britain above everything else. . . . All these things must be taken into consideration 143 when studying the problem of how far to press Britain in . . . European integration.' 3 At the outset, Britain waged the cold war vigorously, but soon saw the confrontation in less pressing terms than the USA. In weighing up both domestic economic factors and the Soviet atomic threat as potentially more immediate and more devastating to Britain than to the USA, the British came to favour less provocative strategies than those of its ally. A Foreign Office official in December 1951 noted US `impatience with the more cautious British approach to . . . containment of Communism. . . . This contrasts with British anxiety that the impetuous ``all or nothing'' tendencies in the United States will prematurely expose this country to the first onslaught of Communist aggression.' 4 However, these differ- ences did not diminish the importance of the special relationship for the British. In fact they sought to formalise it to increase their influence, but the Americans resisted that for a variety of reasons including reluctance to offend other important allies, a desire not to be too closely associated with British colonialism for fear of alienating newly independent coun- tries from the Western camp, and fear that it might tie US hands too tightly in policymaking. The British suffered their first rebuff in 1950 during a series of allied conferences in London where British and US officials agreed on the vital importance of their relationship for NATO and the West in general, but the Americans cautioned that by strength- ening each other they must take care not to weaken other members of the alliance. 5 The second came in the Truman±Churchill talks of Janu- ary 1952, when the Americans again refused to formalise things, though they acknowledged de facto special relations in some policy areas and with this the British had to be content.

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  Britain and the Economic Problem of the Cold War

  The Political Economy and the Economic Impact of the British Defence Effort, 1945-1955

  • Till Geiger(Author)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Taylor & Francis

    (Publisher)

  26

  To some extent, the curious history of the term cold war illustrates the changing perception of the relations between the victorious powers in the immediate post-war period.27 The compilers of the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) attribute the first use of the term to George Orwell in an article for Tribune in 1945. The reference in the article, however, does not directly refer to the cold war as the ideological confrontation between the Soviet Union and the western powers.28 In March 1946, The Observer described recent changes in Soviet foreign policy towards Britain as starting “… to make a ‘cold war’ on Britain and the British Empire.”29 However, the term entered common usage in the American public debate through Walter Lippmann’s book on current American foreign policy entitled Cold War and published in early 1947.30 Indeed, the next British usage cited by the compilers of the OED occurs in a speech by Anthony Nutting, the Conservative Member of Parliament for Melton, during a debate on foreign affairs in the House of Commons on 22 January 1948, which attributed the term to American commentators.31 The manner in which the usage of the term evolved suggests that British policymakers became convinced much earlier than did their American counterparts that the Soviet government had become impossible to deal with. As D. C. Watt has suggested, British policy-makers formed this conviction by early 1946 which coincides with the reference to the cold war in The Observer article in March of the same year.32 To some extent, the learning process of British foreign policy-makers reflected not only Soviet actions, but also the open anticommunism of the Foreign Secretary, Ernest Bevin, and the majority of Foreign Office officials at the time.33 The present analysis underlines the fact that the cold war emerged after 1945 but drew on a much older historical conflict between the East and the West.34

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  The Changing Face of Military Power

  Joint Warfare in an Expeditionary Era

  • A. Dorman, M. Smith, M. Uttley(Authors)
  • 2002(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  33 The government hoped that with the European balance of power restored, Britain could once again look beyond Europe to preserve its wider interests. This shift in emphasis was attempted in the 1957 defence review, which made significant reductions in Britain’s conventional forces deployed in support of Europe in favour of the deployment of forces East of Suez. 34 However, changing patterns in trade, de-colonization, fear of the Soviet Union and continuing financial pressure on the defence budget resulted in Europe, once again, becoming the focus of British foreign and defence policies with the large-scale withdrawal from Andrew Dorman 185 the Empire. 35 Even under the leadership of Margaret Thatcher this policy remained substantially unaltered. British defence policy, epit- omized by the Nott review of 1981, remained almost entirely focused on Europe with only token gestures to the world role. 36 Throughout the Cold War Britain’s defence policy sought to pre- serve the special relationship with the United States and preserve NATO as the main defensive alliance for Europe. This two-pronged approach was underpinned by the strategic nuclear deterrent, which allowed Britain to have a unique relationship with the United States and gave it a predominant position amongst the European members of NATO. Europe, therefore, remained at the core of defence policy although the desire to focus beyond Europe remained. 37 Since the commitment of British forces to Germany, Britain’s close relationship with America and its nuclear status gave it a high standing within NATO’s command structure the end of the Cold War inevitably meant that this position would be challenged, as these elements became less important and NATO’s security agenda broadened. Post-Cold War – the Conservative legacy Although the end of the Cold War transformed the situation in Europe, British defence policy took far longer to adapt to the changed environment as British foreign policy floundered.

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  Constrained Balancing: The EU's Security Policy

  • D. Peters(Author)
  • 2010(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  Already in the mid-1950s NATO had emerged as the prime security institution through which Britain pursued this goal. Toward the end of the Cold War, the bulk of the UK defense effort in terms of troops and financial resources was linked to NATO. At that time around 95 percent of the British defense budget was devoted to NATO-related tasks (Rees 1991: 88). Four out of Britain’s five ‘defense roles’, which organized British defense policy, were directed toward NATO: providing a contribution to NATO’s nuclear deterrent; defense of the British mainland; contributing to the forward defense of mainland Europe; maintenance of a maritime capa- bility. The only exception was the role still reminiscent of Britain’s former global involvement, that is the task of employing troops outside the NATO area (as in the Falklands War, for instance) (McGrew 1988: 106). Through its strong involvement in NATO, Britain became a key ally. The United Kingdom was the only European state that contributed to all three legs ‘of the triad of strategic nuclear, theatre nuclear and conven- tional forces’. 15 Concerning the first two of these, Britain’s nuclear force was Britain and Germany at the End of the Cold War 93 completely devoted to the defense of the NATO area and assigned to the Supreme Allied Commander Europe (SACEUR). As noted above, it could in principle be withdrawn from NATO control and be employed nationally, yet only under extremely exceptional conditions. In terms of conventional forces Britain’s contributions to the defense of the central front and the Eastern Atlantic were of particular importance. Britain had made its major commitment to stationing troops on the continent already in the 1950s. To encourage France to accept Germany’s rearmament and membership of NATO, Britain had pledged in 1954 to station four divisions and a tactical air force in Europe (Dockrill 1988: 55–6).

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  Consumed by War

  European Conflict in the 20th Century

  • Richard C. Hall(Author)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • The University Press of Kentucky

    (Publisher)

  For Britain, the sole remaining enemy of German expansion plans, simple survival became paramount in the face of German domina- tion of the European continent. Origins of the Cold War 191 Stalin had two major objectives. One was ideological: he sought to preserve and spread his version of accelerated Marxist Leninism. The other was political: he wanted Soviet power to survive. These two objec- tives combined in his domestic program. In 1928, upon assuming power, he had imposed on Soviet Russia a policy of development through his Five-Year Plans for industrialization and the collectivization of agricul- ture, enforced by terror. These efforts succeeded in industrializing Russia, but at the cost of millions of lives lost through starvation, impression into labor gangs, or deliberate brutality. The human costs of Stalin's dictator- ship were well known in Europe and the United States. Both his ideology and his politics were abhorred everywhere. For many Europeans, Stalin's alignment with Hitler in 1939 simplified the European political conflict to one of democracy versus dictatorship, civility versus brutality, and good versus evil. The German attack on Soviet Russia on 22 June 1941 offered Britain some respite at last. An arrangement with Soviet Russia provided Brit- ain with a means to expand its isolated and thus far largely unsuccessful struggle against Nazi Germany. Overcoming considerable qualms about the Stalin dictatorship and its previous relationship with Germany, Brit- ish Prime Minister Winston S. Churchill proposed an arrangement to the Soviets soon after the German invasion. This Anglo-Soviet alliance further complicated the issue of war aims. Soviet Russia had, after all, participated in the invasion and division of Poland, Britain's first ally. The Anglo-Soviet alliance caused the British prime minister profound unease. He had long been an opponent of Soviet communism and was aware of the horrific Stalinist excesses of the 1930s.

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