Norman Stone - The Atlantic and Its Enemies

The final provocation to Nasser came in July when Dulles indicated in an insulting way that money for the Aswan Dam would not be forthcoming. The Americans too were hostile to Nasser, but they were also not anxious to support British imperialism in the area, and CIA men were even encouraging Nasser, to their own ambassador’s dismay (Eisenhower later said that what happened at Suez was his greatest regret). On 26 July Nasser suddenly announced that he would nationalize the Suez Canal, and his men took over the offices of the international (and mainly Anglo-French) company that ran it. This was in breach of an old convention, but these old conventions had been agreed back in the days when such countries were helpless before British strength, and the Egyptian public was delirious.

What followed was a disaster, in all respects including the fact that the disaster was limited. The French went on to a disaster, to do with North Africa, but it delivered such a shock to their system that they abandoned it, and experienced an economic miracle to rival Germany’s. Suez did not have such an effect in England, and marks the start of a national decline that continued for the next generation. Whitehall still thought imperially: an often quoted comment, and not from Eden alone, was that England could not possibly go the way of Holland. As things turned out, she should have been so lucky: Holland indeed lost an empire, but hers had been a low-wage and heavily agricultural economy, and after the loss of Indonesia she became rich, a major exporter and a well-managed place.

Reservists were mobilized (the Queen signed the document, squaring it on a horse’s rump at Goodwood). Then — in such situations, a very bad move — they were kept waiting around, away from employment and family. Delays mounted. The Americans were consulted, and wartime solidarity was invoked between an Eisenhower and an Eden who had known each other in the old days of glory. Dulles sometimes encouraged, but more often the American line was that force should not be used — instead, a process of negotiation should start, and subversive methods tried. Eden said that Nasser’s hands were on the West’s windpipe and he seems to have thought that if he presented the Americans with a fait accompli , they would have to support him, and he went ahead with military plans. The French, enraged at Nasser’s appeal to Arab nationalism in Algeria, joined in. As negotiations dragged on the two governments reckoned that they needed a pretext for intervention, and a ghost in the machine came to their rescue. There were constant tensions and skirmishes on the Egyptian-Israeli border, as on the Jordanian-Israeli one. The Israelis had a plan to strike, and had bought up-to-date French fighter aircraft with a view to this. They and the French got together: Israel would attack, and claim she was merely anticipating an Egyptian attack; a French admiral came to London looking to give ‘those damned Arabs the lesson they long needed’, and on 19 September, just as Dulles’s backing appeared to weaken, the French and Israelis appeared ready to go ahead on their own. Eden jumped in, and an absurd plot took shape, the British Foreign Secretary wearing a false moustache and a French general suggesting that the Israelis should bomb one of their own cities to give a pretext for Anglo-French intervention. In the event, a secret ‘Sèvres Protocol’ established an agreement: the Israelis would attack on 29 October and the British and French would pretend to intervene to keep the peace and guarantee the Canal’s workings.

The Israelis staged a very clever operation, carried out with panache. Four Mustangs, flying only twelve feet from the ground, cut Egyptian telephone connections, and a few hundred paratroops secured the essential desert pass. By 5 November the Israelis were on the Canal, occupying, also, the entrance to the Gulf of Aqaba from which their shipping had been banned. It no doubt helped that, on 31 October, the British bombed Egyptian air bases. The day before, Eden had told the House of Commons that the Israelis and Egyptians would be told to stop while an Anglo-French force occupied the Canal Zone. He even tried to claim that this was not ‘war’, but ‘armed conflict’, and of all absurdities suspended deliveries of arms to Tel Aviv. Almost at once, problems emerged. The dollar reserves were declining, and in any case mobilization was a very slow business: the British had put resources into nuclear weaponry, and had run down the effectiveness both of their army and of their navy. They could not get troops to the Suez area inside a month, and though they did have troops at a base in Libya, they shrank from using these, for fear of offending wider opinion. In fact the Chiefs of Staff objected to an immediate action, threatening resignation: they were just not ready. A British force did eventually leave from Malta and Cyprus — bases both too far distant, given that speed was so essential: the world, confronted by the fact on the ground of an immediate occupation, might have accepted it (as Dulles later said, ‘Had they done it quickly, we’d have accepted it’ and Eisenhower shook his head: ‘I’ve just never seen Great Powers make such a complete mess’). Four days’ delay occurred, while British and American diplomats had a public wrangle. The First Lord of the Admiralty, Lord Mountbatten, showed his usual instinct for the possible, and was only narrowly stopped from resigning as he sensed the unfolding fiasco. The Americans became incensed at being told such obvious lies by men whom they imagined they could absolutely trust, and as the Anglo-French force steamed forth, the American fleet in the area disrupted its radio communications and used submarines to shadow it. Then disaster went ahead. The Canal was blocked by the Egyptians, and oil imports dwindled, prices rising. Junior Foreign Office people threatened mass resignation. The Americans at the United Nations denounced the expedition, and that body produced a resolution in which all countries but a faithful few condemned the British and French: Eden even received a letter from Moscow on 5 November, vaguely threatening retaliation, just as the paratroops at last landed. That was bluster, but a further move was not bluster. The pound sterling was an artificially strong currency, and now the Americans refused to support the pound. It fell — reserves dropping by $50m in the first two days of November, and by 5 per cent of the total in the first week. At that rate, there would be none left by the early weeks of 1957. The end was humiliating, as the American Secretary of State told the United Nations that he could not support his allies. Just as he said so, the landings at Port Said finally occurred on 5 November, but by then it was far too late, and a ceasefire had to follow by the evening of the next day. The broken Eden retired ill to the house on Jamaica where Ian Fleming wrote his James Bond books — one imperial fantasy meeting another. The conclusion at once drawn in London was that never again would the Atlantic link be risked.

The conclusions drawn in France were rather different. She had entered upon Suez because she blamed Nasser for problems in North Africa: he supported, and inspired, an Arab nationalism there, and especially in Algeria. French governments after the war faced colonial troubles. Burke had remarked that political life was a partnership of the dead, the living and the yet unborn, but in France the dead predominated. The theory — very theoretical — behind French republicanism had been that, regardless of origin, all citizens of the republic were French. This was very far from being senseless, and even went back to the Revolution itself, when Robespierre had declared that the colonies might perish, provided that justice survived. The rising socialist François Mitterrand himself talked of a France ‘from Flanders to the Congo’, and representatives of the overseas departments or colonies sat as of right in the chamber, sometimes attaining cabinet rank. Determined, after the terrible experience of German occupation and liberation by the Americans and the British, to reassert France’s status in the world, post-war governments let themselves be dragged into a hopeless struggle to retain Vietnam. That ended with the defeat of Dien Bien Phu in May 1954, after which a (brief) sensibly run government, under the Radical Pierre Mendès France, gave up. But far worse was to come in Algeria. North Africa had been taken over by the French at various stages. Tunisia and Morocco were taken over in 1881 and 1912 as protectorates, their native rulers kept intact, though controlled by the French. They were not colonies in the strict sense, nor were there many French colonists. For France to give independence in return for useful economic and cultural links was therefore not very difficult, and in 1956 this duly happened. Algeria was different. French rule went back to 1830, and the country at that time had been both vast and empty. It was also quite varied in composition, and the French could divide and rule easily enough. They developed the country, and by 1950 there were a million colonists, known as pieds noirs , apparently because their feet, after trampling the grapes for the wine harvest, turned black. Many of these pieds noirs were not French at all but came from all over the Mediterranean coasts and islands. There was much Arab immigration as well, and as medical improvements got under way, that part of the population greatly expanded (as it has continued to do). In republican ideology, Algerians were French citizens, but on the ground matters were very different: the natives — by origin in many cases no more native than the pieds noirs — had far less political weight, and in the 1930s French governments were dilatory about reform. In effect they were captured by the pieds noirs , and very few of these were prepared to concede anything to the Algerians. As often happens in such situations, from the United States through Ottoman Greece and British India, the opponents of change did have some right on their side: once the empire went, the way would be open to slavery, or ethnic cleansing, or absurd religious divisions. In any case, almost all Frenchmen were convinced that they were carrying out a civilizing mission in Algeria, and even the Communists supported Algérie française , though of course expecting that differences between Moslems and others would be vastly reduced in scale once the revolution applied, as in the Soviet Union, its solutions to the national question. Governments in Paris were overthrown just for suggesting reform, which came tardily. Riots and repression followed and educated Algerians, rebuffed, looked to Arab nationalism, to the example of Egypt, where Nasser had established himself at Anglo-French expense in 1952.