British Intellectuals and the European Idea After the Suez Crisis (1956): Narrating Europe Between History and Politics

Journal of British Identities 1 (September 2017), pp. 1-18 ISSN: 2515-7000

British Intellectuals and the European Idea after the Suez Crisis (1956): Narrating Europe between History and Politics

Marzia Maccaferri

Europe as an idea as well as a political and cultural project has been a vast subject of scholarly interest, but in the British context this attention has often been restricted to the analysis of the diplomatic policies that accompanied the UK’s reluctant approach to the process of European unification. According to the recent historiography, intellectuals and intellectual public discourse have been an essential condition for forging, shaping and (re)creating the idea of ‘politics’ and ‘identity’ in Britain during the post-WWII phase. After the Suez crisis and the first referendum about European membership (1975), the international roles of Britain changed dramatically (from world-imperial power and main actor in the Concert of Europe to middle-ranking European state), while the international scene as well as the European economic miracle forced intellectuals to rethink themes and categories by which public discourse perceived and interpreted Europe – perceived here as a historical as well as a political subject. This article draws attention to the debate on Europe in Britain from 1957 to the 1970s, fostered by intellectuals – understood as cultural actors engaged in public and/or political debates developed in journals or newspapers. It considers, on the one hand, how intellectuals narrated Europe as an autonomous cultural subject; on the other, it deals primarily with the response to the profound transition taking place in the intellectual environment. The article illustrates how British intellectuals pursued a new international role for Britain as a champion of freedom and as an example of democracy. In this discourse British identity and the idea of the European political project are central, and the contradictory debate about the role of Britain in Europe is a striking example of how national and European identities can interact and, eventually, collapse. Key-words: British intellectuals; European Community debate; 1975 referendum.

Introduction Perhaps the most common assumption about any consideration of ‘British intellectuals and Europe’, to paraphrase Stefan Collini, is that it will be very

1 British Intellectuals and the European Idea short.1 This very idea is well encapsulated in the caustic remarks offered by the Nobel Prize-winning English playwright Harold Pinter on the subject. When asked to comment on British membership of the European Community during the debate following Prime Minister Harold Macmillan’s first attempt to join in 1961, Pinter affirmed: ‘I have no interest in the matter and do not care what happens.’2 The non-existence of (proper) British intellectuals, on the one hand, and the Euro-scepticism, if not anti-Europeanism, on the other, are certainly two of the most mistreated and at the same time tenacious themes of British history and post-WWII public debate (not to mention the recent political agenda). On the first theme of the ‘question of British intellectuals,’ although John Naughton still wrote in 2011 in The Observer that ‘As far as the Brits are concerned intellectuals begin at Calais and gravitate to Paris,’3 the historian Collini, however, has masterfully challenged this cliché. According to him, the ‘absence thesis’ – i.e. the inexistence of a ‘proper British intellectual’ – is the expression of the ideological belief in British ‘exceptionalism’: an obstinate Whig interpretation of history, which sees the course of British history as being exceptionally smooth – with its adaptable aristocracy, (relatively) tolerant Church, apolitical military and reformist bourgeoisie, constitutional monarchy willing to accept institutional transformations, a precocious party system, and a political and electoral system able to accept and incorporate new classes. 4 Therefore, the peculiarities of English society and culture, and their historical developments have effectively blocked the emergence of classical (meaning ‘continental’) intellectuals and prevented the creation of an oppositional intelligentsia. A recent application of this argument can be observed in the last book of Robert Skidelsky, though the most noteworthy example is John Carey’s study on literary intelligentsia.5 As for the second point, the European ‘affair’ and political ambitions, the scholarship hitherto produced is possibly more overwhelmed by clashing interpretations than the literature on intellectuals. In some respects, it could be similarly argued that the discourse on Europe has been portrayed as a form of trial in absentia. Vernon Bogdanor confirmed this: ‘Popular enthusiasm on European matters has been noticeable in Britain only by its absence;’6 and also historical accounts as Skidelsky’s book or Paul Addison’s No Turning Back lack extensive analysis on the relationship between Britain and Europe.7 What in fact has generated and reinforced in the last decades the supposed anti-European British identity has not been a lack of interest in Europe as a subject, but the

2 Journal of British Identities relative waning of an impassioned debate on ‘the European issue’. Starting from the 1990s, according to David Marquand, Europe as an idea and especially as a political project has been taken off the agenda, establishing a sort of moratorium, which the leaderships of main political parties have been trying to impose on public discourse. Certainly, this situation changed dramatically during the months of the 2016 Brexit referendum campaign. However, apart from the ‘transient infatuation’ with Europe of the first Blair government, divisions over European questions had become so bitter in the late 1980s and 1990s, leading to a sort of Westminster version of Pax Europaea whose principal condition was ‘not to talk about Europe.’8 There is no doubting the perceptions of Britain’s past and the national historical narrative – whether Liberal-positivist or conservative-traditional reconstructions or whether Marxist or post-colonial historiography – have both played a major role in the tormented relationship between the United Kingdom and Europe. The belief that Britain (meaning, more often, England) was the quintessentially liberal and democratic nation surrounded by, if not inferior, at least very different countries and cultures, first shaped by the Reformation, the industrial revolution and later framed by the Victorian values, was then extensively reinforced by the experiences of WWII.9 Nonetheless, when we link the intellectual discourse with the idea of Europe in the post-WWII years, and even before, the English ‘isolationism’ and its sense of ‘uniqueness’ should not be exaggerated. First, England (not to say Scotland) was very much part of European movements, developments, and networks in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. 10 Ideas and projects aiming at different form of federations, supra-nationalism or European unity date back to nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and British politicians and intellectuals have had their part in it, either as a federalist European project or, unsurprisingly, as a way to preserve Britain’s influence in a post-imperial world.11 Although Europe as an idea as well as a political and cultural project had been a vast subject of scholarly interest, in the English context however this attention has often been limited to the analysis of the diplomatic policies that accompanied the UK reluctant approach to the process of European unification.12 And so the dominance of positive or empirical social sciences, mainly functionalist sociology, has had hardly any distorting effects in the narration of the European question.13 Europeanization – a concept adopted by anthropology and critical studies, and recently introduced in historical research14 – has been described as

3 British Intellectuals and the European Idea an asymmetrical and pluriverse process, rather than a unidirectional and teleological progression. It is a process that denotes a complex, multidirectional degree of entanglement, exchange and cooperation, which also comprises counter-tendencies and that cannot be adequately analysed without taking the ‘non-European’ dimension or ‘non-pro Europeanism’ into account. Building upon the concept of ‘imagined community,’15 the intellectual narration of and response to the political and cultural idea of Europe, thus, appears as a ‘category of practice,’ which has been projected and performed, experienced and exported, labelled and legitimized in a range of contexts. In this sense the British intellectual debate on ‘the European issue,’ once a concrete and real prospect of European unity of some form was on the political agenda is entirely part of the process of Europeanization as well as part of the re-shaping of British identity occurred in the post-WWII era. In the following pages I will offer a concise overview of British intellectual discourse from the time when the European issue acquired political concreteness (at the end of the Suez crisis) to the 1970s, the time when the turning point of the first referendum took place and, therefore, when the idea of Europe intertwined with the notion of national identity experienced a dramatic shifting in meaning and values.16 Regarding periodization the terminus a quo, 1957, is certainly self-explanatory: on the one hand, from the perspective of the European historical reconstruction 1957 coincides with the Treaty of Rome and, on the other, for the British context 1957 is the first year of the ‘post-Suez era.’ Periodization always threatens to be arbitrary, above all in intellectual and cultural historiography, but the reasons upon which I build as a starting point for my reconstruction the aftermath of Suez debacle are well-defined by International Relation studies and British historiography.17 I will focus on intellectual debate in the pages of key journals from the period: Encounter, New Left Review, Twentieth Century and Marxism Today. With the term ‘intellectuals’ I mean cultural actors engaged in public and/or political debates developed in journals or newspapers. The emphasis here is on interaction and transmission – and of course on obstacles – between the conceptualization of Europe in the public sphere and the formulation and implementation of a coherent notion of post-WWII and post-imperial British identity. This discursive re-semiotisation of the idea of Europe started in the debate following the Suez crisis, through which a new Britain’s geopolitical position and role was shaped; moreover, it was framed by the tension between

4 Journal of British Identities the discourse on economic decline and the ideology of ‘declinism’, on the one hand, and the politics and discourse of affluence on the other. Within this discursive construction a central role has been played by the longevity of imperial and Commonwealth ideas. In the European society within which Britain should be understood, intellectuals contribute to democratic life and their vital hermeneutic role is that of enabling a society to understand itself, sometimes stimulating action too. Being an intellectual is therefore an ideological activity whose function is to exercise discursive power into ‘the political’. According to Freeden (drawing from Mannheim), 18 intellectuals’ main function is to participate in the distribution of significance to values, ideas, ends, and policies. In this respect, the definition of ‘public intellectuals’ – commonly used by US scholarship – seems rather deceptive, implying that there could also be a kind of private intellectual. More valuable for understanding the British intellectual narrative of the European idea and its outcome towards British identity and self- representation is the introduction of the concept of the ‘politically minded intellectual,’ identifying with it those intellectuals with a clear ideational agendas by which to address the question either in national or transnational contexts.19 A very apt definition is the one offered by Edward Said in the 1993 Reith Lectures, and later published with the title Representations of the Intellectual: ‘At bottom, the intellectual, in my sense of the word, is neither a pacifier nor a consensus-builder, but someone whose whole being is staked on a critical sense, a sense of being unwilling to accept easy formulas, or ready-made clichés, or the smooth, ever-so-accommodating confirmations of what the powerful or conventional have to say, and what they do. Not just passively unwillingly, but actively willing to say so in public.’20

From Suez to 1975 Referendum: building up a ‘British Europe’ At the time when the Suez crisis broke out, and within fifteen years of Allied victory in WWII, the UK would be cut off from all but a few fragments of its colonial empire and dislodged from its preeminent global position. Though the decline in British world power had begun long before,21 it was the Suez crisis that made it unmistakably evident at all political and public levels. Nevertheless, Britain’s loss of global power and influence went hand in hand with the rise in domestic living standards and the establishment of the affluent society and affluent politics, further complicating the relationship between intellectuals and the idea of Europe. Whether these changes made Britain ‘successful’ and ‘never

5 British Intellectuals and the European Idea having had it so good’ or whether they were a propaganda tool whose aim was to compensate for the loss of international position, is still a matter of intense historiographical and public debate.22 Still, what is important for the intellectual history of the post-WWII period is not the falling-off in itself, but whether contemporaries perceived it to be taking place and whether solutions existed in order to find a new sense of identity and a replacement for ‘having lost an Empire and not yet found a role’, to quote the famous catchphrase by the US Secretary of State Dean Achenson. Debates about Europe in the interwar years had been already framed by a sense of catastrophe and labelled as a ‘cultural’ or ‘identity crisis’; nonetheless in the British context an overall idea of decline supported by a sort of ideology of ‘declinism’ started as early as in the mid 1950s.23 Starting from the Suez crisis, almost all the British intellectuals were convinced that Britain – and ‘Western civilization’ more generally – was in some kind of decline, be it international, political, moral, cultural, economic or even spiritual.24 Moreover, the inadequacy of British foreign policy exposed during the Suez crisis and the perception of no longer having a hegemonic geo-political role had been worsened by the loss of that ‘moral suasion’ which Britain believed to have regained thanks to the efforts of the WWII: ‘We could, with time, reacquire a part of the influence that we once exerted’, stresses for instance the editor of the New Statesman, Paul Johnson, in 1957 ‘but never reacquired that unique and honourable role of custodians of the world’s conscience.’25 Equally, Sir Michael Howard, military historian, in his memoires written in 2006: ‘It was not so much that the affair marked the end of Britain as a Great Power; it marked our end as a good power, one that could normally be expected to act honourably. It was for me what Munich had been for a slightly older generation and Iraq would be for a younger.’26 Max Beloff was therefore extremely accurate as early as 1957 when he wrote that ‘The Suez-Sinai episode caused a “crisis of conscience” in Britain’ and that it was ‘very much an affair of the intellectuals.’27 Whether Suez had been the Dreyfus case for English intellectuals, as Paul Johnson stated in the New Statesman – ‘Never in modern history has the intellectual element in a nation been so united, militant, and […] successful’28 – or just another example of ‘political romanticism,’ as Kingsley Amis admitted in his Socialism and the Intellectuals,29 this episode tells us more about the question of British intellectuals and their ‘complex of inferiority’, to use Stephen Collini’s words, than it does about the transformation of Europe’s narrative. For my

6 Journal of British Identities purpose, nevertheless, the interesting point is how intellectual discourse appropriated and elaborated what was interpreted as the inevitable political consequence of the Suez crisis: looking to ‘Europe.’ In January 1957, The Economist wrote that ‘The Europeans will have to be convinced that Britain’s new interest in them is not a passing political distraction from less pleasant matters, but real and lasting change of heart.’30 Even the Marquis of Salisbury, one of the most traditionalist conservatives inside the Cabinet, accepted the option to ‘turn a little towards Europe.’31 Accordingly, in the lapse of time from the Suez crisis to the Treaty of Rome (25th of March, 1957) and to the first of Britain’s attempts to join the EEC in 1961, Europe undeniably assumed the configuration of a political project, presenting itself as a potential alternative in terms of international and national politics.32 Therefore, what did British intellectuals think of the question of ECC membership, now that the option of joining seemed to be taking shape? Did Europe become a feature of refashioned post-colonial British identity? Or was Britain’s self-defined role as ‘balancer located outside Europe’ re-designed in the framework of a new kind of ‘isolationism’? As soon as the government’s decision to apply came out and even before its circulation, a declaration in support of ECC membership made by the Campaign for the Common Market chaired by the former Acting Secretary- General of UN Lord Gladwyn was underwritten by several academics and writers, providing the first of countless forthcoming lists of pro- and anti- European British intellectuals. Published in The Times on 26th of May 1961 the Campaign for the Common Market was joined by Isaiah Berlin and A.J. Ayer, Noel Annan, T.S. Eliot and Rebecca West, Hugh Trevor-Roper and Michael Howard, Max Beloff and Woodrow Wyatt, Roy Jenkins and Anthony Crossland, Shirley Williams and John Strachey, Alain Peacock and Lord Robbins. The pro-European movement in the UK as well as in other parts of Europe has in general been an elite movement, as Bogdanor has correctly underlined.33 In this appeal as well as in the few articles published in the journal The Twentieth Century in the same years, the kind of Europe to which people wished to aspire replicated the traditional argument of the contribution of British civilization to European culture. Within this perspective, the aim was to ‘bring Britain back to her true European heritage, and to exploit her national genius for Europe’s benefit.’34 It was, however, the ‘first New Left,’ and precisely Stuart Hall and Perry Anderson, although they would change their minds in the 1970s, which took

7 British Intellectuals and the European Idea the lead in the discourse on the new European question, de facto establishing the main pillars upon which left-wing political culture interpreted and, for some of its parts still read, the European issue. One decade before, Stephen Spender had already argued that the Cold War had ‘suddenly confronted all thinking people with the question of what they really stand for’ and called upon to ‘take a stand.’36 But it was, I argue, the concrete option of Europe emerging after the Suez shambles that energised the debate. Hall and Anderson in an article published by the New Left Review emphasized the closed links between the US role as a global, if not imperialist, player and its involvement in Europe, highlighting how distant from socialist principles was the idea of Europe upon which the founding Six’s project was constructed, and how very small was the representation of socialist political forces and positions inside the European project. From this perspective, therefore, the point was strictly political: a Labour or left-wing British government – whether there would be one in the future – would not be able to resist the pressure coming from all other European countries which were explicitly capitalist-oriented. Consequently, the hegemonic US position would lead to the creation of a sort of Euro-America.37 Anxieties over an underlying process of the Americanization of European society and politics, and specifically British politics, were not new and had been already expressed in other contexts.38 What it is interesting here is the fact that the ‘positive neutralism’ advocated by the New Left in this phase led to the same assumption voiced by one of the fiercest opponents of the European project, Enoch Powell. According to the MP for Wolverhampton South West, the threat posed by the harmonisation of foreign policies between European partners could have nullified the potential ‘moral suasion’ of the British tradition. In addition, the perception of Europe as the ‘desperate relief from stagnation’ was intrinsically erroneous and misplaced because Britain did not share the same state and economic traditions with the other European countries. 39 Of course, Powell’s vision was built upon a very different interpretation of the British national identity to that advocated by the New Left: commitment to civilization for the former; commitment to democracy for the latter. However, both positions started from the perspective of ‘splendid isolation’ and added strength to it. Although not all Left-wing intellectual interpretations were unanimous – see, for instance, the development of Raymond Williams’ narration of Europe, who started opposing the supposed EEC’s capitalist integration, to become a moderate pro-Europeanist in 1971 seeing the Common Market as an alternative

8 Journal of British Identities to the US capitalism and ending in the late-1970s defending the ‘Western European Identity’ 40 – at the time of actual British entry (1973) and the subsequent referendum (1975), however, the EEC was still being vociferously opposed by some of the old guard of the New Left, notably the historian Edward P. Thompson.41 Of course, bi-partisan Eurosceptical constellations similar to the ones of the British Left and Right were also present in other national intellectual discourses (see, for instance, the Communist debate in Italy).42 In the British case study, however, the noteworthy observation is that the narratives on the European question elaborated in these years thanks to the encounter between discourses of decline, on the one hand, and the politics of affluence on the other, performed as the main pillars through which the future debate and agenda would be set up. A clashing and enduring narrative that in some way has not matured yet and is still in place today which, as we will see, has provided the arena for the interpretation placed on British European policy by historiography and political science: the ‘missed opportunities’ narrative.43 An extraordinary source to get closer to the dyad British intellectual discourse on Europe in the 1960s and 1970s is the forum conducted by the journal Encounter. The importance of this highbrow journal for British intellectual discourse has been repeatedly stressed, along with its role in the cultural Cold War.44 Encounter dedicated two major symposia to the question of ‘going into Europe,’ in 1962-63 and 1971, cross-culturally and bipartisanly asking writers and intellectuals their positions and opinions. Participants included Leonard Woolf, Kingsley Amis, John Osborne, Michael Young, A.J.P. Taylor, Iris Murdoch, Bernard Crick, Hugh Seaton-Watson, David Marquand, Nicholas Kaldor, Richard M. Titmuss, Arthur Koestler, the editor of the Financial Times Samuel Brittan, Michael Shanks, and Ernest Gellner. Most respondents were in favour of joining.45 In part, this list replicates the one made by the Campaign for the Common Market. In Encounter’s case, intellectuals vehemently raised the argument of the contribution that England (notice, not Britain), in accepting its proper ‘geography’ as part of Europe, could give to the idea of Europe. Encounter cited Tennyson and the thesis of ‘how England saved Europe in the Napoleonic wars’ and, of course, the WWII struggle. Also, the journal fairly admitted that ‘the consciousness of having once been heroes can be as great a handicap as the consciousness of having once failed to rise the occasion.’46

9 British Intellectuals and the European Idea

As it was for Stuart Hall, Perry Anderson and the New Left Review, the issue at stake here was cultural, political and concerning questions of identity, and not merely economic. Setting aside some common understandings – if not stereotypes – that can be read here and there (as, for instance, the historian A.J.P. Taylor’s final remark: ‘I don’t believe it will make the Germans peaceful or the French democratic just by having us around to keep them in order. We are far more likely to catch revisionism from the one and dictatorship from the other’),47 Europe was seen as a tool by means of which to bring to an end not only the political and international ‘isolationism’ in which the Suez crisis had put Britain, but also a way to overcome cultural conformism and parochialism. Iris Murdoch and the economist Nicholas Kaldor, who would become one of the most influential figures of ‘the case against’ during the second round of the debate in 1971, still remained anchored to the idea of the Commonwealth as a real and better viable alternative to the European Community. In addition, Kaldor predicted that Britain would be incapable of coping with Europe’s miraculous economies and would be relegated to a kind of northern Sicily.48 However, most of those who had already been asked in 1962 had not changed their mind in 1971, with the remarkable exception of Raymond Williams.49 Raymond Williams’ U-turn was not the only one: Tom Nairn was soon to look upon the EEC much more favourably. This was in the context of New Left’s culture and discourse on ‘declinism,’50 and their reading of British history, whose interpretation presumed that Britain’s polity was unique for the absence of a truly bourgeois revolutionary moment and, consequently, the aristocracy absorbed the emergent industrial class and ruled within a state form that remained ancien régime in essence. By the 1960s, the incapacity of the British state to modernise its institutional and constitutional architecture was seen by the New Left intellectuals as a clear indication of pathological ‘isolationism.’ In this context, then, ‘Ukania’ – the name coined by Tom Nairn to indicate the UK’s archaic status – should have looked to Europe as a better terrain and opportunity for radical reforms.51 As the referendum loomed, the intellectual debate on the idea of Europe and the British role in it was soon replaced with a discourse more focused on policies and economic issues. However, writers and journalists and artists organized another public intervention in the press à la française shortly before the vote. On June, 2nd 1975 The Times published another long list of ‘writers for Europe.’ The Yes campaign was organized and chaired by the historian Hugh Thomas and signed by more than two hundred authors and

10 Journal of British Identities academics. Among the new entries: Karl Popper, Charles Percy Snow, Asa Briggs, Harold Pinter (who changed his mind), and John B. Priestley.

Some final remarks: Europe as a ‘missed opportunity’, and intellectual discourse between history, politics and identity Central to Britain’s tortuous attempt to carve out a role for itself in the post-war and post-Suez (meaning post-colonial) world, the idea of Europe has been – to use the words of Hugo Young – ‘long-drenched in opinionated emotion’53 and, as we have seen, entangled with the discourse/culture/ideology of ‘declinism.’ Starting from the late 1970s, the ‘convergence’ between the anxiety over Britain’s international and economic future, on the one hand, and the apprehension surrounding the debate of the very substance of Britishness, on the other, was epitomized in Tom Nairn’s expression ‘the break-up of Britain,’54 which occurred in the same years that produced self-contradictory and confrontational narratives of the Europe-Britain dyad.55 The Europe narrated in the 1960s, 1970s and in the so-called ‘winter of discontent’ (1978-79) was perceived as the only condition to confront the new modernity, to grant reforms, to welcome the new century and so on and so forth. Of course, the bitterness of not being ‘in’ from the very start of the project and the awareness that the Community was a much more successful political and economic venture than the Commonwealth persisted in British public debate and worked its way into historiography and political science. By the late 1960s and early 1970s what was described in the Encounter as ‘knocking at France’s door to ask for admittance to the Common Market’56 had led to the ‘missed opportunities’ interpretation of the British relationship with the European project and to the British historiographical orthodox school. According to Daddow those very phrases ‘missed opportunities’, ‘missed boats’, ‘missed buses’ or ‘last chance’ were incorporated and gained such a wide following that they crept almost without notice into public and political discourse about Britain’s future and cemented a self-destructive dichotomy between Britain and Europe, 57 which would be soon, thanks to Margaret Thatcher’s antagonising European discourse, become Britain versus Europe.58 In 1973, for instance, the realist international relations’ scholar Joseph Frankel, whose approach to the discipline had always sought to be ‘academically neutral,’ nonetheless, regarding Britain’s role in the world asked himself ‘how are we to explain Britain’s neglecting to take a lead in Western European affairs when it was open to her in the late 1940s and 1950s?’. He replied: ‘In retrospect, this

11 British Intellectuals and the European Idea seems to be the fundamental and most costly mistake in post-war policies.’59 According to Ian Hall, what distinguished British thinking on world politics in the post-war period is a sort of ‘retreat of power.’ As the institutionalisation of the discipline proceeded (IR was formally established only in the late 1960s, i.e. when the post-Suez re-elaboration proved to be irreversible), British scholars and intellectuals moved further and further away from making any pronouncements on how Britain ought to conduct its foreign policy. Whether this progression, which according to Hall is quite unique because, for instance, French intellectuals retained some concern with influencing its country’s foreign policy,60 had or had not the power to fortify the ‘isolationism’ of British culture should be the subject of further research. In my reading, this process has something to do with the intellectual discourse that originated from the contradictory interpretation of ‘Europe after Suez’ and is a marked example of how national and European narratives can interact and, eventually, collapse. The other corner of this narrative is, naturally, Britain’s position vis-à- vis (or between) America and Europe. It is in the confrontation with the USA’s new hegemonic role, which incessantly reminded people of how the international position of Britain had changed dramatically (from being a global- imperial power and main actor of the Concert of Europe to a middle-ranking European state), that Europe as an idea became Europe as a (surrogated) world project from the perspective of British national identity. Accordingly, Michael Young wrote in Encounter: ‘After contracting for so long, our immediate world may begin to enlarge. There may be a larger stage on which Englishmen could play their parts.’61 In the context of the so-called ‘special relationship,’ then, Europe was perceived as a necessary, though delayed, substitute through which intellectual discourse pursued a new international role for Britain as a champion of freedom and as an example of democracy. This process got under way in the aftermath of the Suez crisis, when the emergence of the European idea had been shaped trough the searching for a new geopolitical role vis-à-vis the tension between declinist discourse and the politics of affluence. 62 In some respects this interpretation proves to be persistent: see for instance, the Blair- Bush relationship during the Iraq war and the temptation to ‘play Greeks to the Romans’ and, moreover, when focusing on the cultural relationship between America and the UK.64 In August 1985, Encounter published the last article of the historian Hugh Seton-Watson, based on the text of the Eleventh Martin Wight Memorial

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Lecture, which he had prepared to give at the Royal Institute of International Affairs just before his death. In a wide-ranging essay, Seton-Watson traces the roots of European culture, from Christendom to the EEC bureaucratic threat, acknowledging that in the last century European culture was ‘under attack’ from American culture, though it would be superficial to see this supposed contrast in black and white terms. But when he turned towards the demarcation of British identity – ‘do the British belong to Europe’ theme – quite surprisingly he quoted de Gaulle: ‘When de Gaulle inveighed against les anglo-saxons, he was speaking of something real. I do not see how any citizen of this country, who knows something of international affairs and is concerned for the future of Britain can doubt that Britain belongs both to Europe and to the English- speaking world. For my own part, I know that my roots are in both, that I cannot give up either, that I cannot cut my minds or brain in two.’ There was no sign, continued Seton-Watson, of a consciousness of a European cultural heritage in Britain or any effort on the part of political or cultural authorities to develop one. More revealingly, it is the reason the historian indicates to account for the British reluctance to accept their ‘dual identity:’ ‘This may be partly due to the prevalence in a large part of our cultural élite of a hangover from empire in the form of a guilt-complex towards the peoples of Asia and Africa. For a long time the word “European” was associated with arrogant assertions of cultural, and racial, superiority. But if “Europe” is associated with this arrogance in Asian and African minds, does this mean that Europeans should reject their own heritage?.’ 65 Starting from this quotation, I believe that the intellectual relationship between the idea of Europe and the European project with post- colonial thinking is a direction that scholarship should follow. The intellectual discourse of the ‘missed opportunities’ had reached its apex at the beginning of 1980s. Two examples: first, Ralf Dahrendorf, who at that time was director of the London School of Economics, when he was asked in the early 1980s to help the BBC produce a series about the past, present and future of Britain, he offered his very dim vision: since WWI Britain had been a country in relative decline, but now (i.e. during the rioting of the Thatcher years) a distinct and accelerating deterioration has been marked. Not only was Britain moving back ‘from a civilised contract of good behaviour to the hard core of power and obedience which always was its foundation,’ but the ‘British have an identity crisis because they don’t recognize that British identity is essentially European.’66 Second, the short but very profound and extremely influential infatuation with Euro-communism experienced by the group of

13 British Intellectuals and the European Idea intellectuals orbiting around the Leftist journal Marxism Today. Between 1977 and 1991, Marxism Today represented perhaps the most influential journal of the British Left, but equally attracted and solicited interventions from individuals of the Centre and Right. Marxism Today launched cultural debate as well as political arguments (chiefly a critical account of what Stuart Hall first called ‘Thatcherism’) and was notable for its attempt to transcend class or industrial warfare versions of the 1980s.67 Within European discourse, Marxism Today had a major role because it was the conduit for the introduction of the concept of Euro-communism and related developments in the European Left to British intellectual, cultural and political life. The Euro-communists of Marxism Today got some of their inspiration from the ideologies and policies of the Italian Communist Party of the 1970s and 1980s, and ideological and intellectual endorsement from the works and on-going reinterpretations of the legacy of Antonio Gramsci.68 Marxism Today’s intellectual discourse advocated that a ‘new hegemony’ could not be built on yesterday’s radical policies. New policies were needed to cope with ‘New Times’ of globalism and post-Fordism. 69 It is through this prism, then, that we should understand British Euro-communism as a projection of the Left’s ‘missed opportunities ideology.’ If what Enrico Berlinguer, the leader of the Italian Communist party, was trying to achieve with his project of Euro-communism was a ‘third way, to prove that socialism and freedom could co-exist’ and that it ‘could not be purely national [but] it had to find an international point of reference,’ as Marxism Today stated,70 thus it would be a fatal error for the Labour party remain, in European terms, an irrelevancy because ‘it will have a failed, once again, to define Britain’s wider role in Europe.’71 Language and discourse play powerful roles in the development of historiographical and political interpretations; in a cultural context such as Britain where ‘history’ embodies knowledge par excellence, the discursive semiotization of Europe and ‘the invention of tradition’ easily overlapped.72 ‘Missed opportunities’, by dint of repetition, became one of the most common critiques for Britain as a whole. It was not until the end of the Cold War that a new wave of intellectuals and historians managed to break decisively from that thesis, refocusing the idea of Europe on new sets of questions and reshaping the relationship between Britain and Europe by using new categories of ‘bureaucratic despotism,’ 73 ‘sovereignty,’ 74 ‘progressive nationalism,’ 75 and the ‘European social model.’76 Only Perry Anderson persisted with his Left ‘missed opportunities’ doctrine, updating it with the new category of ‘Hayekian

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Europe.’ 77 Intellectuals, nonetheless, are not the main story-tellers in their society: story telling is an act of the imagination and interpretation, less of rational critique. The function of the politically-minded intellectual – to quote Freeden again – is to employ the meaning of concepts and the transfer and reception of ideas in the context of ‘the political.’78 In this light, thus, the British intellectual discourse on Europe has been an essential condition in forging, shaping and (re)creating the idea of ‘politics’ and ‘identity’ in the post-WWII phase. At the Selsdon group Speech (11th of October 1994) Norman Lamont said that the ‘idea of Europe to some European politicians is more important even than democracy.’79 British nationalists were not able to prevent Britain’s inclusion or to obtain Britain’s exit from the European project – until 2016. Neither were Scottish nationalists able to achieve withdrawal from the Union in 2014. In both cases, British political culture in general, and British intellectual discourse on Europe in particular, might be a marginal and idiosyncratic case, but they cannot be intellectually refuted, as ‘continental Europeans’ and Brussels politicians have learnt in the recent referendum on Brexit.

Marzia Maccaferri is Lecturer in Politics at Goldsmiths, University of London. She has previously worked at the University of Bologna, the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia, and held visiting research positions at the University of Cambridge and the Institute of Historical Research, London. Marzia is currently working on a project concerning the intellectual discourse developed in the 1980s in the English journal Marxism Today. Her recent publications include article in Modern Italy and Memoria e Ricerca. [email protected]

1 Stefan Collini, Absent Minds: Intellectuals in Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), p. 1. 2 ‘Going into Europe,’ Encounter, December 1962, p. 59. 3 John Naughton, ‘Why don't we love our intellectuals?’, The Observer, 8 May 2011. 4 Collini, Absent Minds, pp. 45-65. 5 See Robert Skidelsky, Britain since 1900: A Success Story? (London: Vintage, 2014), pp. 47-91; John Carey, The Intellectuals and the Masses: Pride and Prejudice among the Literary Intelligentsia 1880- 1939 (London: Faber and Faber, 1992). 6 Vernon Bogdanor, ‘Footfalls Echoing in the Memory. Britain and Europe: The Historical Perspective’, International Affairs, 81:4 (2005), p. 700. 7 Skidelsky, Britain; Paul Addison, No Turning Back: The Peacetime Revolutions of Post-War Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010).

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8 David Marquand, Britain since 1918: The Strange Career of British Democracy (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2008), pp. 310-15; 323-8. 9 For instance, among others according to Kenneth O. Morgan, Britain since 1945: The People’s Peace (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001); and Kevin Jefferys, Politics & the People: A History of British Democracy since 1918 (London: Atlantic Books, 2013). 10 See, among many others Stuart Woolf, ‘Europe and its Historians,’ Contemporary European History, 12:3 (2003), pp. 323-37; Jonathan Parry, The Politics of Patriotism: English Liberalism, National Identity and Europe, 1830-1886 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006); Brendan Simms, Europe:The Struggle for Supremacy, 1453 to the Present (London: Allen Lane, 2013). 11 See for instance Duncan Bell, The Idea of Greater Britain: Empire and the Future of World Order, 1860-1900 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007); Mark Gilbert, ‘Il futuro socialista dell’Europa. Gli intellettuali progressisti britannici e il federalismo europeo, 1935-1945’, Contemporanea, 11:1 (2008), pp. 23-45; Mark Mazower, Governing the World: The History of an Idea (London: Allen Lane, 2012). 12 Oliver J. Daddow, Britain and Europe since 1945: Historiographical Perspectives on Integration (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004), pp. 1-21. Also, from the Scottish and Irish perspectives Andrew Devenney, ‘Joining Europe: Ireland, Scotland, and the Celtic Response to European Integration, 1961-1975’, Journal of British Studies, 49:1 (2010), pp. 97-116. 13 Mark Hewitson and Matthew D’Auria, ‘Introduction,’ in idem (eds), Europe in Crisis: Intellectuals and the European Idea, 1917-1957 (London: Berghahn Books, 2012), pp. 1-10. 14 See Martin Conway and Kiran Klaus Patel (eds), Europeanization in the Twentieth Century. Historical Approaches (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2010). 15 Bo Stråth, ‘Introduction: Europe as a Discourse,’ in idem (ed.), Europe and the Other and Europe as the Other (Brussels: Peter Lang, 2000), pp. 13-43. 16 Ulrike Liebert, ‘Contentious European Democracy: National Intellectuals in Transnational Debates’, in Justine Lacroix and Kalypso Nicolaïdis (eds), European Stories: Intellectual Debates on Europe in National Contexts (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), pp. 50-73. 17 See among many others David Kynaston, Modern Britain: Opening the Box, 1957-59 (London: Bloomsbury, 2013); Simon C. Smith, ‘Introduction,’ in idem (ed.), Reassessing Suez 1956: New Perspectives on the Crisis and its Aftermath (Aldershot, Ashgate: 2008), pp. 1-12; and Dominic Sandbrook, Never Had It So Good: A History of Britain from Suez to the Beatles (London: Little Brown, 2005), pp. 1-63. 18 Karl Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia (New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co, 1936). 19 Michael Freeden, ‘On Europe and Other Intellectuals,’ in Lacroix and Nicolaïdis, European Stories, p. 81. 20 Edward W. Said, Representations of the Intellectual (New York: Vintage Books, 1996), p. 23. 21 See among others Ronald Hyam, Britain’s Declining Empire: the Road to Decolonisation, 1918-1968 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). 22 Lawrence Black and Hugh Pemberton, ‘The Uses (and Abuses) of Affluence,’ in idem (eds), An Affluent Society? Britain’s Post-War ‘Golden Age’ Revisited (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004), pp. 1-13; Peter Hennessy, Having It So Good: Britain in the Fifties (London: Penguin, 2006), pp. 574-622. 23 See Jim Tomlinson, ‘Thrice Denied: “Declinism” as a Recurrent Theme in British History in the Long Twentieth Century,’ Twentieth Century British History, 20: 2 (2009), pp. 227-51; Ian Hall,

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Dilemmas of Decline: British Intellectuals and the World Politics, 1945-1975 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012), p. 170-83. 24 George L. Bernstein, The Myth of Decline: the Rise of Britain since 1945 (London: Pimlico, 2004). 25 Paul Johnson, The Suez War (London: MacGibbon & Kee, 1957). 26 Michael Howard, Captain Professor: a Life in War and Peace (London: Continuum, 2006), p. 155. 27 Max Beloff, ‘Suez and the British conscience. A personal report,’ Commentary, April 1957, pp. 309-315. 28 Paul Johnson, ‘Lucky Jim’s political testament,’ New Statesman, 12 January 1957, pp. 35-6. 29 Kingsley Amis, Socialism and the Intellectuals (London: Fabian Society, 1957), p. 10. 30 ‘Britain into Europe’, The Economist, 26 January 1957. 31 Quoted in Hennessy, Having It So Good, p. 463. 32 This thesis has been portrayed in Brian Harrison, Seeking a Role: The United Kingdom 1951-1970 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009). 33 Bogdanor, ‘Footfalls,’ p. 694. 34 John Ardagh, ‘What Britain Can Do for Europe,’ The Twentieth Century, 170:1011 (1961), pp. 148-57. See also W. Pickles, ‘The politics of EEC. European Union?,’ The Twentieth Century, 163:972 (1958), pp. 99-111; R. Pryce, ‘Britain’s failure in Europe,’ The Twentieth Century, 166: 991 (1961), pp.131-41. 36 Stephen Spender, ‘The English Intellectuals and the World of To-day’, The Twentieth Century, 149:412 (1951), 482-8. 37 Stuart Hall and Perry Anderson, ‘The Politics of the Common Market,’ New Left Review, 1:10 (1961), pp. 1-14. 38 Victoria De Grazia, Irresistible Empire: America’s Advance through Twentieth-Century Europe (Cambridge MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2005). 39 Enoch Powell, ‘Britain and Europe,’ in idem, The Common Market: The Case Against (Kingswood: Elliot Right Way Books, 1971). 40 Lin Chun, The British New Left (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1993). 41 Georgios Varouxakis, ‘Mid-Atlantic Musings: The “Question of Europe” in British Intellectual Debates, 1961-2008,’ in Lacroix and Nicolaïdis, European Stories, p. 152. 42 Silvio Pons, Berlinguer e la fine del comunismo (Turin: Einaudi, 2006). 43 Oliver J. Daddow, Mark Bevir and Pauline Schnapper, ‘Interpreting British European Policy,’ Journal of Common Market Studies, 53:1 (2015), pp. 1-17. 44 Frances Stonor Saunders, Who Paid the Piper? The CIA and the Cultural Cold War (London: Granta, 1999). 45 According to the Editors the results were: ‘in favour: 77; against: 17; indifferent or undecided: 16’. See ‘Going into Europe.:A Symposium IV’, Encounter, March 1963, p. 68. 46 ‘Saving England’, Encounter, January 1962, p. 8. 47 ‘Going into Europe: A Symposium’, Encounter, December 1962, p. 62. 48 Nicholas Kaldor, ‘The Dynamic Effects of the Common Market’, New Statesman, 12 March 1971, p. 205. 49 In 1971 the results were: ‘in favour: 46; against: 17; indifferent and undecided: 4’. See ‘Going into Europe-Again? A symposium III’, Encounter, August 1971, p. 18. 50 Jim Tomlinson, The Politics of Decline: Understanding Post-war Britain (Harlow: Pearson, 2001).

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51 Tom Nairn, ‘British Nationalism and the ECC’, New Left Review, 1:69 (1971), pp. 3-28; ‘The Left Against Europe’. New Left Review, 1:75 (1972), pp. 5-120. 53 Hugo Young, This Blessed Plot: Britain and Europe from Churchill to Blair (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1998), p. 3. 54 Tom Nairn, The Break-up of Britain: Crisis and Neo-nationalism (London: New Left Books, 1977). 55 Tony Wright and Andrew Gamble, ‘The End of Britain?’, Political Quarterly, 71:1 (2000), pp. 1- 3. 56 Arnold J. Toynbee, ‘Saving England,’ Encounter, January 1962, p. 9. 57 Daddow et al., ‘Interpreting British European Policy’, pp. 58-113. 58 Martin Holmes, The Eurosceptical Reader (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2001). 59 Joseph Frankel, British Foreign Policy 1945-1973 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), p. 233. 60 Hall, Dilemmas of Decline, pp. 170-83. 61 Michael Young, ‘Going into Europe: A Symposium,’ Encounter, December 1962, p. 61. 62 Marzia Maccaferri, ‘A Splenetic Isolation. Dibattito pubblico e intellettuali inglesi di fronte all’Affair Suez’, Ventunesimo Secolo, 2 (2009), pp. 109-26. 64 Brian J. C. McKercher, Britain, America, and the Special Relationship since 1941 (Oxon: Routledge 2017). 65 Hugh Seaton-Watson, ‘What is Europe, Where is Europe? From Mystique to Politique’, Encounter, July-August 1985, p. 15. 66 Ralf Dahrendorf, On Britain (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1982). 67 Herbert Pimlott, ‘Marxism Today, 1957-1991,’ Journalism Studies, 7: 5 (2006), pp. 782-806. 68 Alessandro Carlucci, Gramsci and Languages: Unification, Diversity, Hegemony (Leiden: Brill, 2013). 69 Donald Sassoon, One Hundred Years of Socialism: The West European Left in the Twentieth Century (London: I.B. Tauris, 2010), pp. 692-94. 70 Donald Sassoon, ‘Berlinguer: Architect of Eurocommunism,’ Marxism Today, July 1984, p. 15. 71 Donald Sassoon, ‘Europe’s Left: A New Continental Blend,’ Marxism Today, May 1986, p. 26. 72 Richard J. Evans, Cosmopolitan Islanders: British Historians and the European Continent (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). 73 Larry Siedentop, Democracy in Europe (London: Allen Lane, 2000). 74 Noel Malcolm, Sense on Sovereignty (London: Centre for Policy Studies, 1991); Timothy Garton Ash, ‘Is Britain European?,’ International Affairs, 77:1 (2001), pp. 1-13. 75 David Goodhart, Progressive Nationalism: Citizenship and the Left (London: Demos, 2006). 76 Anthony Giddens, Patrick Diamond and Roger Liddle, Global Europe, Social Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006). 77 Perry Anderson and Peter Gowan, The Question of Europe (London: Verso, 1997). 78 Freeden, ‘On Europe and Other Intellectuals’, p. 81. 79 Norman Lamont, Selsdon Group Speech, 11 October 1994, in Holmes, The Eurosceptical Reader, p. 97.