Norman Stone - The Atlantic and Its Enemies

He extracted the concessions, and the French interest ensured that the Community would not just spend its money in Brussels, its supposed capital, but in Strasbourg and, for some matters, Luxemburg as well, which, in time, meant absurd amounts of time wasted on travel. At a dramatic turn in the negotiations, Adenauer went to Paris in secret, agreed that the French empire could be associated, and that Germany would contribute to a development fund for it; he then in public overrode the German delegation and told it to make progress on ‘harmonization’, i.e. say ‘yes’. There were further plans for the EEC tariffs to be reduced, and for a common external tariff to be imposed even against other Europeans’ goods within four years. The French peasant was to be looked after by a common policy, i.e. artificially high prices for food, and a Common Agricultural Policy did indeed emerge in 1962. It made food prices inside the EEC greater than outside by half again, and is still with us, making a cow or even a tree more expensive than a student.

When the British representative at Messina had left the discussions early, it was because he could see no future for them as far as his own country was concerned. In the first place the British imperial or ex-imperial territories still looked promising, and they had preferences as regards tariffs. Apart from anything else, this meant that food in England was cheaper than elsewhere, because New Zealand and Australia had low-cost farming. But in any case it was a peculiarity of British history that the rural or village population was vastly smaller than that of any other European country — in 1900 only 8 per cent, whereas in France the figure stood closer to 50 per cent and even in industrialized Germany 40 per cent. It was a decisive difference, explaining everything else, from the weakness of the native culinary tradition to the Industrial Revolution. The English, though not the Scots, had never had formally to abolish serfdom, because it just went, and the last vestige of it, an archaic exchange of labour rent called copyhold, went in 1925 (whereas slavery, in the sense of owning a slave on English soil, had been declared illegal in 1772). In other countries the call for protection of the farmer was loud and clear, and supported by millions of votes. In Great Britain, not. Cheap food came partly from the Commonwealth countries or the Argentine, but British agriculture was more efficient, because it was relatively mechanized, whereas elsewhere the peasant farm prevailed. However, now, in 1956, it was becoming clear to the British that a customs area was emerging in Europe, from which they were to be excluded: exporters would have to pay tariffs and face other obstacles to trade which could be just as effective in pricing them out. They responded, without any sense of urgency, with a counter-proposal: a free-trade area to include all of Europe, including such countries as Denmark and Austria which needed an outlet for cheaply produced agricultural exports, or which, as small and specialized economies, did not want to be cut off from world markets. Britain, and six such countries, now set up the European Free Trade Association, a version of ‘Uniscan’, which was run in a way quite unlike the EEC, without much regulation and with only seventy officials. Left to themselves, Germany and Benelux would probably have been happy enough with such an arrangement. However, the peculiarities of the Franco-German relationship meant that the six EEC countries took a different road. As matters turned out, it was a road to a prosperity that made Britain, a decade later, seem backward. But, in 1955, no-one in high places foresaw this.

Stalin may have backed down in West Berlin but in the short term he had achieved what suited him: the attention of the Americans had been hugely diverted from developments in Asia that were of far vaster significance for the future. The other great European crisis also showed its effects. Greece was proving to be what Lawrence had said of Balzac, a sort of ‘gigantic dwarf’. The British had given up on the extraordinarily complicated but in the end quite simple little country, in February 1947, and Truman had picked up the pieces with his ‘doctrine’ (like most such, civilian or military, in effect a one-liner) a month later. The Americans shouldered up non-Communist Greece. But at exactly the same moments, the British were throwing in their hand over Palestine, over India, even over Indonesia and Vietnam. There was now a general crisis in that huge area of the world that had been dominated, until very recently, by British and Japanese imperial power, and the largest of the problems occurred over China. In the late winter and early spring of 1947, there were terrible headlines, one after another, throughout this region of British implosion, and the Cold War encountered what was to prove the greatest of its dimensions. The British decision of February 1947 over Greece was the pebble announcing the avalanche.

Greece now became symbolic on a worldwide scale once more — a symbol of developments over the next two generations. Empires were to be replaced by nation states, the world over, and an immense problem came with the modernization of the backward places that escaped from empire. Nineteenth-century Europe had introduced as a universal principle the nation state, and Greece had been launched, freed from the Turkish empire, early on, though only as a small kingdom, based on the Morea (a name meaning ‘mulberry’). She was modernized as such things were then understood: a constitution, a Bavarian megalomaniac as king, professors enthusiastically making up words for the new national language, one far beyond anything that the peasants could understand (‘laundry’ was katharsis and ‘foreign travel’ metafora esoterika ). She had, even then, a further pioneering role: she attracted footloose, romantic intelligentsia, obsessed with foreign liberations that they perhaps did not understand any too well. The English (or Scottish) poet Lord Byron, his finances not in good shape, his talents ebbing away, the latest mistress sent back to her elderly husband, betook himself there, was widely stolen from, and was be-scened by a page boy, one Loukas, who extracted from him a coat of gold cloth which he wore when astride the donkey with which he followed Byron around. In 1824 Byron turned his face to the wall and died. The subsequent history of Greece was not very happy, and in 1945, though she had the appurtenances of a nation state, she was in many ways closer to what was soon to be called the ‘Third World’. In that respect, she was, on microscopic scale, a model, and, there, as on the far greater scale beyond Europe, British imperialism came to grief.

‘Third World’ — at one time covering countries as different as Haiti and South Korea (of which, in 1960, the only export consisted of wigs) — was itself an expression that became worse than useless, but after the Second World War large areas of the world were indeed backward and poor, with millions of illiterate and superstitious peasants scratching the soil and making immense families. Running democracy in such countries was a precarious business, and in politics they wobbled between military coups and would-be revolution. Between the wars, Greece had been on the edge of anarchy. A quarter of the population consisted of minorities, themselves very varied, and another quarter had arrived twenty years before as penniless refugees from Turkey. Often enough, they were exploited, not so much by great landowners as by village headmen and especially by middlemen on a small scale who bought and sold for them. The State was a major employer, and clans fought over the resulting jobs, or the meagre fruits from corruption that came with them. There was indeed some industry, mainly to do with ships and tobacco-processing, but not much.