The Churchill Factor: How One Man Made History

CHAPTER 20

CHURCHILL THE EUROPEAN

It is a measure of Churchill’s prophetic numen that people will still try to invoke him as the arbiter of various modern political dilemmas. Out of his voluminous sayings a text will be found to legitimate some opinion or validate some course of action—and that text will be brandished in a semi-religious way, as though the project had been posthumously hallowed by Churchill the sage and wartime leader.

There is no question upon which his departed spirit has been more regularly consulted than the intractable business of Britain’s relations with ‘Europe’. It is a controversy that has bedevilled every one of his successors as Prime Minister. In some cases the problem has become so toxic as to lead to their political assassination, or attempted assassination.

Revolving as it does around the lofty questions of national sovereignty, democracy and British independence in the face of a great continental alliance, ‘Europe’ would seem to be an exquisitely Churchillian dispute: just the sort of thing, you might think, that could be settled by appeal to the example of the hero of 1940.

The trouble is that he is claimed by both sides. Europhiles and Euro-sceptics: both factions believe in him. Both factions hail him as their prophet—and sometimes the argument as to his true meaning and intentions takes on the frenzy of a religious schism.

In November 2013, for instance, Manuel Barroso, then President of the EU Commission, made a speech in which he accurately quoted what Churchill had said in 1948 (and earlier, and passim) about the need to create a united Europe. This provoked a hail of abuse from the myriad denizens of the Euro-sceptic internet.

Some of them attacked Churchill, in one case calling him a ‘fat, lying scumbag’. Some of them defended Churchill, and bashed Senhor Barroso. Perhaps we could sum up the general mood by quoting one of the anonymous Euro-sceptic correspondents, who on one newspaper website, at least, goes by the nom de guerre of ‘stillpoliticallyincorrect’.

We don’t need advice from this second-rate, unelected, unaccountable foreign politician [said stillpoliticallyincorrect of Barroso]. The sooner he is dangling from a Brussels lamp post the better. Why doesn’t he clear off back to his own country and stop bossing us about? I hate the man and hope he dies soon, along with the rest of the EU commissars and most MEPs—including all the foreign ones! Then we can chuck out all the scrounging foreigners who have no real right to be here.

Leaving aside the merits of the points he (I bet it’s a he) makes, there is a palpable rage here—a choking bile—at the very notion of this Portuguese fellow invoking the memory of Winston Churchill, to justify the programme of European integration.

In the imagination of most such people, Churchill is surely the embodiment of rock-ribbed British bulldoggery and independence. How can he be claimed by the Euro-federalists?

To see the origins of the feud, we need to probe the mind of the man himself, and to understand what he meant by European integration, what he wanted from it—and what role he saw for Britain. Let us go to the famous debate in the early days of June 1950, when the House of Commons is struggling to come to terms with the Schuman Plan—a sudden and audacious offer from the eponymous former French Prime Minister.

The UK has been challenged by France to join talks, with Germany, Italy and Benelux, on creating a new supranational body, to oversee the common European markets in coal and steel. This body will have a High Authority—the embryonic European Commission. It will have an assembly of national parliamentarians and a council of national ministers—the prelude to the eventual European Parliament and Council. It will have a court of justice, the beginnings of the all-powerful European Court in Luxembourg.

Here is Britain, in other words, being asked to assist at the very birth of the European Union. The clay is wet. The mould has yet to set. Now is the moment when Britain could have intervened decisively; accepted the invitation from France—and jointly seized the steering wheel.

Instead, the Labour government is suspicious, if not hostile. Britain is still the biggest coal and steel producer in all Europe—why should these industries submit to some inscrutable system of European control? ‘The Durham miners won’t wear it,’ says one Labour cabinet minister; and so the Attlee government has told the French to hop it.

A letter has been dispatched to M. Schuman, thanking him for his interesting ideas, but politely declining to take part in the talks. In the minds of many on both sides of the English Channel, this is an absolutely critical turning-point in the history of Britain and Europe. This was when we missed the European bus, train, plane, bicycle, etc. It was to be almost a quarter of a century before Britain finally joined—by which time the structures of the EU had been fixed in a way that was uncongenial to Britain, and to purist concepts of national democratic sovereignty.

What Churchill says now in this debate on the Schuman Plan—as Leader of the Opposition—is clearly vital to an understanding of his instincts. The first thing you notice about his parliamentary performances during this period is that he absolutely fizzes with energy. He is still zapping round the world making enormous, well-thought-out speeches on geopolitics. He is churning out his war memoirs, and indeed he will shortly receive the Nobel prize for literature.

He is almost seventy-five years old, and yet he is making countless interventions in Parliament, virtually every day, on every subject from railway freight charges, to Burma, to Korea, to the fishing industry, to the efficiency of the microphones they have just installed in the House.

It is fascinating to read the Hansard parliamentary record of the Schuman Plan debate, and see that age has done nothing to muffle his general irrepressibility. The Chancellor of the Exchequer is Sir Stafford Cripps (the austere figure ludicrously touted as his rival during the war), and it falls to Cripps to defend the government’s negative response to Schuman. Churchill heckles him exuberantly. ‘Utter rubbish!’ he shouts. ‘Nonsense!’

At one point poor Cripps has to ask him to have the politeness to be quiet, or else go and continue his conversation outside—like a badly rattled chemistry teacher confronted by the naughtiest boy in the class. When Churchill stands up to speak at 5.24 p.m., he has heard a debate that is virtually identical to the European debate today.

Labour Euro-sceptic MPs have denounced the suggestion that this ‘High Authority’ could have some bureaucratic control of the emerging common market, and that they could act without the strict approval of national governments. Who are these people? asks one Labour MP. What right would they have to tell us what to do?

‘They would be an oligarchy imposed on Europe, an oligarchy which, with arbitrary power and with enormous influence, would be able to affect the lives of every person in this country.’ There speaks the voice of the British Euro-sceptic, in words that might equally be used of M. Juncker and the EU Commission today.

To all of which the Tory Europhiles have responded, on this afternoon in 1950, with arguments that have become equally traditional.

‘Do we really want to be isolated?’ asks Bob Boothby, Churchill’s former PPS. ‘When all is said and done, unbridled national sovereignty remains the prime cause of the hideous disasters that have befallen us in this nightmare century.’ Boothby ends by urging his Right Honourable Friend—Churchill—to lead the way and save western Europe for a second time, by helping the creation of a united Europe.

It is time for the Leader of the Opposition to sum up. Which side will he come down on? Churchill begins safely enough. He attacks the Attlee government for their incompetence: the French would never have been so rude as to spring this on us unawares if he had been Prime Minister, says Churchill. But on the key question, he soon makes himself clear. Yes, he thinks Britain should be there at the Schuman talks, and he lays into Attlee for his failure of leadership.

‘He seeks to win for himself and his party popular applause by strutting around as a Palmerstonian jingo,’ says Churchill, adopting the usual line of attack upon all British prime ministers who have sought in some way to distance Britain from the European project. Then he essentially takes Boothby’s line: that Britain should not be left out.

. . . It will be far better for us to take part in the discussions than to stand outside and let events drift without us . . . The French have a saying: ‘Les absents ont toujours tort’. I do not know whether they learn French at Winchester [this is presumably a joke at the expense of Richard Crossman, the intellectual Labour MP, who has just made an anti-European speech] . . . The absence of Britain deranges the balance of Europe . . .

. . . and so on.

If Britain fails to engage, he warns, then there is a risk that the European bloc will become a neutral force, equidistant between Moscow and Washington; and that, he believes, would be a disaster. Would Britain have accepted Schuman’s invitation, if he had been Prime Minister? Yes, is the resounding answer.

He addresses full-on the basic question of sovereignty, and he ends the speech with typical Churchillian internationalism. He makes the classic argument of the British Europhile: that the UK already shares sovereignty over defence with NATO and with America. Why should it be so unthinkable to share sovereignty with Europe?

The whole movement of the world is towards an inter-dependence of nations. We feel all around us the belief that it is our best hope. If independent, individual sovereignty is sacrosanct and inviolable, how is it that we are all wedded to a world organisation? It is an ideal to which we must subscribe. How is it that we have undertaken this immense obligation for the defence of Western Europe, involving ourselves as we have never done before in the fortunes of countries not protected by the waves and tides of the Channel? How is it that we accepted, and under the present Government eagerly sought, to live upon the bounty of the United States, thus becoming financially dependent upon them? It can only be justified and even tolerated because on either side of the Atlantic it is felt that inter-dependence is part of our faith and the means of our salvation . . .

. . . Nay, I will go further and say that for the sake of world organisation we would even run risks and make sacrifices. We fought alone against tyranny for a whole year, not purely from national motives. It is true that our lives depended upon our doing so, but we fought the better because we felt with conviction that it was not only our own cause but a world cause for which the Union Jack was kept flying in 1940 and 1941. The soldier who laid down his life, the mother who wept for her son, and the wife who lost her husband, got inspiration or comfort, and felt a sense of being linked with the universal and the eternal by the fact that we fought for what was precious not only for ourselves but for mankind. The Conservative and Liberal Parties declare that national sovereignty is not inviolable, and that it may be resolutely diminished for the sake of all the men in all the lands finding their way home together.

It is this sort of text which has been taken up and waved around as proof that Churchill was a rampant federalist—a believer in a United States of Europe. There is plenty more. He first seems to have articulated a vision of European union in 1930, after he had been travelling in the USA—and been much struck by the lack of borders and tariffs, and the way a single market helped economic growth. He wrote an article called ‘A United States of Europe’; indeed, he is credited with coining the phrase.

In October 1942, in the depths of the war, he wrote a letter to Anthony Eden, in which he sketched out a vision for the post-war world. The best hope was a ‘United States of Europe’, excluding Russia, in which the barriers between the nations of Europe would ‘be minimised and unrestricted travel will be possible’. After the war he made a series of rhapsodical speeches about this union of Gaul and Teuton, the foundation of the Temple of Peace, and so on.

At Zurich in 1946, Churchill said,

We must build a kind of United States of Europe . . . The structure of the United States of Europe, if well and truly built, will be such as to make the material strength of a single state less important . . . If at first all the States of Europe are not willing or able to join the Union, we must nevertheless proceed to assemble and combine those who will and those who can.

But who were these states? Did he think that Britain should be part of it? Sometimes it seems that he did. In May 1947 he gave a speech at London’s Albert Hall—addressing the crowd as the Chairman and Founder of the United Europe Movement, to ‘present the idea of a United Europe in which our country will play a decisive part’. He concluded with what looks like an unmistakable commitment that ‘Britain will have to play her full part as a member of the European family’.

By May 1950 he was making a speech in Scotland, and claiming credit for the very genesis of the Schuman Plan; and again he seems clear that Britain must be part of the programme.

For more than forty years I have worked with France. At Zurich I appealed to her to regain the leadership of Europe by extending her hand to bring Germany back into the European family. We have now the proposal which M. Schuman, the French Foreign Minister, has made for the integration of French and German coal and steel industries. This would be an important and effective step in preventing another war between France and Germany and lay at last to rest that quarrel of 1,000 years between Gaul and Teuton. Now France has taken the initiative in a manner beyond my hopes. But that by itself would not be enough. In order to make France able to deal on proper terms with Germany, we must be with France. The prime condition for the recovery of Europe is Britain and France standing together with all their strength and with all their wounds; and then these two nations offering their hands to Germany on honourable terms and with a great and merciful desire to look forward rather than back. For centuries France and England, and latterly Germany and France, have rent the world by their struggles. They have only to be united together to constitute the dominant force in the Old World and to become the centre of United Europe around which all other countries could rally. But added to this you have all the mighty approval of the great world power which has arisen across the Atlantic, and has shown itself in its hour of supremacy anxious only to make further sacrifices for the cause of freedom.

A united Europe, in other words, is not only good for France and Germany and Britain: it’s what America wants, too.

I could cite other texts, from other speeches—at Brussels, Strasbourg, The Hague (many of them ending in tears from Churchill, ovations from his continental audiences, and at least one of them delivered in his own superb version of French); but I hope the point is nearly made. If you close one eye, and you listen with only half an ear, you can understand why Churchill is one of the presiding divinities of the European Union.

He is up there on his couch in the Euro-Olympus—alongside European Union architects Monnet, Schuman, Spaak, De Gasperi—with Common Agricultural Policy grapes being dangled into his mouth. No wonder he has roundabouts and avenues named after him in Brussels; and no wonder you will find his face on the walls of the Strasbourg Euro-parliament.

So much for the case that Churchill was a visionary founder of the movement for a united Europe. It contains a very large dollop of truth. It is also true that he believed Britain should play a leading role in this process of unification. It is not, however, by any means the whole story, as the Euro-sceptics know full well.

That is what makes them so furious—because they, too, can point to Churchillian texts that plainly offer a different vision for Britain and the rest of the united Europe. Right back there in 1930, when he first had his brainwave about imitating America and creating a single European market, he entered this crucial reservation about his own country.

But we have our own dream and our own task. We are with Europe, but not of it. We are linked, but not comprised. We are interested and associated but not absorbed. And should European statesmen address us in the words that were used of old: ‘wouldest thou be spoken for to the King, or the Captain of the Host?’, we should reply with the Shunammite woman, ‘I dwell among my own people’.

Sometimes this is a little bit misquoted, for the sake of emphasis, and the words ‘Nay, sir,’ are put first into the mouth of the Shunammite woman—a rich lady who used to provide a spare room for the prophet Elisha; though not even the prophet Elisha could have prophesied that his generous female friend was to become most famous as the world’s first British Euro-sceptic.

But the point stands. Churchill saw Britain as somehow dwelling apart from the European congeries; and in the course of one of his many bust-ups with General de Gaulle, he said that if Britain had to choose between Europe and the open sea, she would always choose the open sea.

In Churchill’s universe, Britain was of course a European power—perhaps the greatest European power. But that was not the limit of her global role. Yes, he wanted a united Europe, and yes, he saw that Britain had an important role to help bring about that happy union—upon a continent that had seen such misery. But his role was to be a sponsor, a witness, rather than a contracting party.

Britain was certainly meant to be there in the body of the church, but as an usher or even as the priest rather than one of the partners in the actual marriage. If you want proof that he never saw Britain as a part of that federal union, it is there in his actions. It was only a few months after that 1950 debate on the Schuman Plan that he again became Prime Minister. If he had really wanted Britain to join the Coal and Steel Community, he could surely have entered an application then. He had the prestige; he had the support from men such as Macmillan and Boothby and the young Edward Heath, who made his maiden speech in that debate, with a powerful call for participation in the plan.

Some say Churchill effectively did a U-turn on gaining power, and dropped his fervent Europeanism as soon as it was obvious that it wasn’t so popular with Anthony Eden and other Tories. On this analysis, there is a touch of the John Major about Churchill—trimming to appease the Euro-sceptics. I don’t think this does justice to him, or to his vision. Go back to that crucial speech to the Commons of 27 June 1950, where he sets out his European views in full.

He comes to the nub of our anxieties today: the precise role of Britain.

. . . The question that we have to decide for ourselves—and there is certainly plenty of time for mature consideration of it—is, what association should Britain have with the Federal Union of Europe if such a thing should come to pass in the course of time?

It has not got to be decided today, but I shall give, with all humility, a plain answer. I cannot conceive that Britain would be an ordinary member of a Federal Union limited to Europe in any period which can at present be foreseen. We should in my opinion favour and help forward all developments on the Continent which arise naturally from a removal of barriers, from the process of reconciliation, and blessed oblivion of the terrible past, and also from our common dangers in the future and present. Although a hard-and-fast concrete federal constitution for Europe is not within the scope of practical affairs, we should help, sponsor and aid in every possible way the movement towards European unity. We should seek steadfastly for means to become intimately associated with it.

There you go: he wants the UK to be ‘intimately associated’ but cannot conceive that Britain will be ‘an ordinary member’. There was no U-turn; there was no flip-flop. That was exactly the policy that he took with him into government.

It is not that he is against Europe, or inherently hostile to any continental power. On the contrary, he loved France with a passion, and was perhaps the most uninhibitedly Francophile prime minister Britain has ever had. It is just that he had an idea of Britain that transcended Europe, and which involved keeping Britain turned to face the rest of the world.

In this he was remarkably consistent all his political life. He ended his 1930 article with a vision for Britain as the intersecting set in a three-circle Venn diagram. ‘Great Britain may claim, with equal justification, to play three roles simultaneously, that of an European nation, that of the focus of the British Empire, and that of a partner in the English speaking world. These are not three alternative parts, but a triple part . . .’

The empire has long gone, but the promiscuous internationalism of the approach seems ever more sensible today. In a world where the EU’s share of global GDP is steadily diminishing, where the USA remains the world’s largest economy, and where there is startling growth in former Commonwealth countries, Churchill’s circles are still a reasonable way to look at Britain’s place and role.

It is hard to know how Churchill would have handled the Schuman Plan, if he had won the 1945 election. But one thing we can be sure of: he would never have made Labour’s mistake. He would certainly have been there. Perhaps with his fearsome energy in debate, he might have persuaded the other Europeans to go for an intergovernmental approach—dropping the idea, which remains so difficult and occasionally so infuriating to this day, that national and democratically elected governments can be routinely overruled by a ‘supranational’ body.

If Churchill had been in power in 1948; if he had insisted on being at the table; if the Churchill Factor had been at work in those very early European talks—who knows, we might have a different model of the EU today; more Anglo-Saxon, more democratic.

By 1950 it was probably already too late. Yes, Labour missed the boat—and that was a mistake. But the truth is that Monnet and Schuman didn’t really want Britain at the table: otherwise they would have given London a reasonable time to respond, rather than convening the talks at such breakneck speed, and they would not have made agreement to supranationalism a condition of taking part.

When Churchill looked at what was unfolding in Europe in the 1950s, he didn’t have any particular feeling of rancour, or regret, or exclusion. On the contrary, he looked at the developing plans for a common market with a paternal pride. It was his idea to bring these countries together, to bind them so indissolubly that they could never go to war again—and who can deny, today, that this idea has been a spectacular success?

Together with NATO (another institution for which he can claim joint credit) the European Community, now Union, has helped to deliver a period of peace and prosperity for its people as long as any since the days of the Antonine emperors. That is not to deny the many inadequacies and excesses of the system. Nor is it to minimise the strain—clearly foreseen by Churchill in 1950—of incorporating an ancient and proud democracy such as Britain into a type of ‘supranational’ government.

What would he have done today? What would he have made of the euro? What would he have thought of the working time directive? What would he have said about the Common Agricultural Policy? In a sense all these questions are absurd.

We cannot tax the great man in this querulous way. He cannot hear us. The oracle is dumb.

What we can do is examine his considerable and notably consistent body of thinking on this kind of question, and adduce some general principles.

He would have wanted a union between France and Germany as long as there was the slightest risk of conflict, and as a lifelong liberal free marketeer he would have supported free trade across a giant tariff-free zone.

He would have wanted the European organisation to be strongly and closely allied to America, with Britain actively helping to cement the relationship.

He would have seen the importance of that united Europe as a bulwark against an assertive Russia and other potential external threats.

He would have wanted to be personally involved at the head-of-government level. Knowing him as we do, it is impossible to imagine him allowing an important summit of world leaders to take place without him.

He would want as far as he possibly could to protect the sovereignty of the House of Commons, the democracy that he defended and that he served all his life.

On the evening of 5 March 1917, he left a darkened Commons Chamber in the company of Alexander MacCallum Scott, a Liberal MP. He turned and said: ‘Look at it. This little place is what makes the difference between us and Germany. It is in virtue of this that we shall muddle through to success & for lack of this Germany’s brilliant efficiency leads her to final disaster.’

Of course those desiderata now look self-contradictory. But if Churchill had been spared by the electorate in 1945—if he had helped paint the fresco when the plaster was still wet on the wall—then it seems possible that those contradictions would never have arisen.

Churchill’s legacy on the continent of Europe is phenomenal and benign. Whatever exact role he meant Britain to play, he was one of those who created a seventy-year era in which there has been no war in western Europe—and the very idea seems ever more absurd.

And the impact of Churchill is felt to this day in places far beyond Europe—and many would say for the better.