Australian Journal of Politics and History: Volume 46, Number 3, 2000, pp. 403-417. Decolonisation after Suez: Retreat or Rationalisation? GORDON MARTEL History, University of Northern British Columbia Did the Suez crisis mark the end of empire in Britain and France, their submission to the political domination of the United States and the beginnings of a ‘new Europe"? Or did it stimulate a rethinking and reformulation of the meaning of empire, its utility and costs? ‘This article argues that the ‘retreat from empire’ was not so much a simple, reflexive response to demands from below but a conscious effort by those from above to find new ways of exploiting the opportunities that the world beyond Europe offered them. Decolonisation, it is argued, is best understood in terms of contemporary business thinking, j,c. a conscious design fon the part of managers to ‘downsize’, ‘restructure’, and ‘re-engineer’ the imperial project And, as in the corporate world, what might appear to the naked eye as retreat and abandonment may, on closer exumination, tun out to be something more ambitious, an attempt to divest the imperial enterprise of unprofitable ventures and to reinvigorate those that are deemed to have untapped potential, After Suez, Britain attempted to demonstrate to the Americans that maintaining their access to middle eastern oil was vital both strategically and economically. They attempted to persuade them that “Nasserism” was second only to communism as a danger to the western alliance, to have them drop their ‘anticolonialist’ chetoric and to support the Bagdad Pact. In order to combat the anticolonial movement they established a ‘colonial’ bloc at the UN Assuming that the Suez crisis marked the end of empire has hidden the struggle between Bntain and France to redetine its meaning and has concealed the extent to which umbitious designs continued to persist in the contest to determine the future shape of u ‘united’ Europe — a struggle in which neither the British nor the French regarded themselves as pawns of the Americans in the Cold War, but rather one in which they attempted to move the powerfull new American piece around the chess board in the middle cast, Africa and Asia The Suez crisis of 1956 has come to be regarded as one of the turning-points in the history of Europe. The failure of the Anglo-French intervention — in stark contrast to that of 1882, which left the British in power in Egypt for almost seventy years —— is most often seen as the end of the colonial era, as opening the floodgates to anti-colonial movements and the tidal wave of independent states that were created during the 1960s. The failure of the combined British, French and Israeli forces to impose their control over the canal and to bring Nasser to his knees demonstrated that European imperialists no longer wielded the power that was required if they were to continue to act as if the twenticth century was no different than the nineteenth, or that the era after the Second World War was no different than that which had followed the First. In fact, the crisis seemed to symbolise the end of the age of European dominance: if Britain and France, two of the greatest of the world powers since the seventeenth century, could not exert their control when such vital economic and strategic interests as those represented by the Suez Canal were at stake, and in a location that was relatively close to the centre of their power; if they depended on the support of the United States to © Departments of History & Government, The U versity of Queensland & Blackwell Publishers 2000.404 Gordon Martel sustain their position and were forced to back down when this was not forthcoming, surely this marked the end of the Columbian era? The twenty years that followed the Anglo-French condominium of 1882 represented the apogee of the “new” imperialism: by 1900 almost the entire continent of Africa had been divided among European powers, Pacific islands of little apparent value were gobbled up, and states new to the imperial game such as Germany, Belgium and Italy entered the competition. The first great “theory” of imperialism, was constructed by J.A. Hobson as a warning that the Great Powers of Europe would partition China next. ‘The twenty years that followed the failure of the Anglo-French intervention of 1956 appears to represent the reversal of this nineteenth-century phenomenon: the next year saw the independence of Ghana and the Malay states; in the five years that followed French Guinea, Cameroun, Togo, Mali, Madagascar, the Ivory Coast, Dahomey, the Upper Volta, Niger, Chad, Gabon, Nigeria, Tanganyika, Algeria and Uganda smashed the shackles that had bound them to their European masters. A close examination of the record of relations between Britain, France and the United States in the months that immediately followed the Suez débacle makes it possible to propose an alternative explanation to that summed up in the phrase “the era of decolonisation”, an alternative that may explain why the history of the world since the mid-70s has turned out so differently than the one foreseen by those who believed that a new era had begun, who believed thal Europe was finished as a power in the world and would henceforth be reduced to the status of US client, The dominant interpretation of “empire” in the twentieth century, which has viewed the new imperialism as unnatural, artificial and immoral, assumed that it would, inevitably, be supplanted by what was natural and moral: the self- government and independence that constituted the wave of decolonisation. We are easily misled by what we see, by what appears to be real. Thus, when we sce the map changing colour before our eyes, when we witness the withdrawal of colonial governors, bureaucrats, soldiers and policemen and watch them being replaced by indigenous leaders, by the indigenous inhabitants, we may assume that this was a more significant shift than it was. In making the simple equation that territorial expansion represented European power and that colonial rule was the logical concomitant of a modem economy, we are, in fact, overturning the world as those eminent Victorians saw it. Few were the zealots who sought colonies; vastly outnumbering them were those who were not interested or actively opposed expansion. The Victorians knew that being forced to play the colonial game was a symptom not of strength but of weakness. They wanted to trade and to control the carrying-trade; they wanted to invest and protect their investments; they wanted to develop undeveloped estates — and recap the rewards of such virtuous improvements as they were able to bring to the world, They did not wish to be responsible for millions of new subjects; they did not wish to patrol and police millions of miles of new territories; they did not wish — in other words — to pay the price of empire. The idea of colonialism was an afterthought, an ambition generated by those who, finding themselves far from home, surrounded by peoples they thought of as “backward” or “medieval” found it helpful to give their lives a meaning, and thus imbued their existence with a sense of moral purpose, a belief © Departments of History & Government, The University of Queensland & Blackwell Publishers 2000,Decolonivation after Suez 405 that they were fulfilling an ethical duty in protecting, organising and administering peoples who were unable to look after themselves. If the essence of colonialism was an afterthought and the acquisition of vast tracts of unwanted and unprofitable territories a symptom of weakness, can their abandonment be a sign of strength? What had compelled those new imperialists to stake out their claims in the first place? Almost always, the causes were political and European — not economic and colonial. The fear that one great European power would use iis position to threaten the trade of another, that the possession of some strategic site could impose vast expense on a competitor who would have to counter it was usually to be found at the bottom of the memorandum explaining the necessity of territorial acquisition. ‘The business of empire was expensive: no balance-sheet ever showed a profit, and the losses were legendary; it was also an unnecessary irritation: politicians in Britain, France, Germany and Ttaly could all tell tales of how events at Majuba, Khartoum and Fashoda, in Tonkin and Morocco, of how Afghan, Zulu and Sanussi could jeopardise or ruin promising political careers, Much better to apply pressure, exert influence, find natives with whom one could do deals; a reliable margin of profit achieved with slight exertion and without moving from Sussex or Surrey, from Paris or Provence was the ideal of most Europeans who thought about the world beyond their continent. Those who have attempted to superimpose a consistency of design on the expansion of empire in the late nineteenth century have had their theories chewed to pieces by those nit-picking empiricists known as historians — those worker bees who, droning away in the archives, have demonstrated the huge array of interests, of the interplay of personalities, the role of domestic politics and the differences in local conditions. By contrast, the age of decolonisation continues to be treated not only as inevitable, but as one in which the “normal” chaos of human affairs docs not operate. Instead, colonised peoples everywhere from Indo-China to North Africa, from the Caribbean to the Persian Gulf rode the wave of history in demanding their freedom from the Europeans who were compelled to give it to them. In order to understand the phenomenon of imperialism in the era after Suez, four questions may be asked: what interest (or interests) were Britain and France attempting to protect when they intervened at Suez? how did these change when their failure became manifest? by what means did they propose to protect their interests? and finally, did they see their place in the world as diminished, their day in world history reaching its end? By asking these questions it may be possible to consider to what extent decolonisation and its processes were not simply a response to demands from below but a conscious effort by those from above to continue to exploit the opportunities that the world beyond Europe offered them. Decolonisation in fact, best understood in terms of contemporary business thinking, Le, a conscious design on the part of managers to “downsize”, “restructure”, and “re-engineer” the imperial project. And, as in the corporate world, what might appear to the naked eye as retreat and abandonment may, on closer examination, turn out to be something more ambitious, an attempt to divest the imperial enterprise of unprofitable ventures and to reinvigorate those that are deemed to have untapped potential. ‘© Departments of History & Government, The University of Queensland & Blackwell Publishers 2000.