O! What a fall was there: reflections on the decline of Britain.

• Author: Hartley, Anthony

NEARLY ONE hundred years ago, Brooks Adams published a short essay called "The Decay of England." Basing his views on the poor performance of the British army in the Boer War, the decline of English agriculture, a lack of entrepreneurial spirit ("the slackness of London tradesmen"), and the part played by beer in Dickens's novels, Adams foretold the end of Britain's nineteenth-century preponderance. He did not welcome this, since he regarded England as a "fortified outpost of the Anglo-Saxon race," whose future inability to guarantee the European balance of power would soon require America "to fight her own battle whether she will or no."

A hundred years later this prophecy has largely been realized. Subsequently Britain was to help repel two German attempts at expansion, but the effort was an exhausting one, and, after 1945, the United States took over the uncomfortable business of maintaining the European balance of power, as Adams had foreseen. Britain ceased to be an empire--the most extensive collection of territories ever accumulated by a European power was disposed of in some twenty-five years--and is still criticized for backwardness and sloth, most notably by British journalists. It is also still afflicted by the bitter taste of a national orgy of self doubt. Thirty years after the end of empire the shock is dying away, but it still visibly affects those traditional governing classes who once acted with as supreme a self-confidence as the Achesons and Lovetts who became their replacements in the United States after 1945.

The liquidation of empire was, on the whole, well managed. It did not include any episode as traumatic as France's departure from Algeria. Nor did Britain suffer enemy occupation in World War II. On the contrary in 1940, by a supreme effort and a heroic demonstration of national unity, it enjoyed one of the most brilliant episodes of its history. For any Englishman it seemed in the nature of things that Hitler should join the line of European conquerors--Philip II, Louis XIV, Napoleon--who had unsuccessfully tried conclusions with his country. What happened accorded with the national myth. This apotheosis cast a glow over the subsequent relinquishment of power, which could be attributed to a disinterested moral gesture. As a student in Paris between 1947 and 1951, I felt proud of this record. It seemed that Britain was better governed than France, with its political scandals and its fleeting ministries. Of our moral superiority there was little question.

Later the glow faded. It was borne in on us that there is no such thing as a free lunch. We were left in a cold world, in reduced circumstances, with the fading glow of victory and a sense that something was wrong with the way we were governed. In 1963 I wrote a book, A State of England, where I used the phrase "Loss of power means loss of purpose." Indeed. By then Britain was going through the so-called "Swinging Sixties," and I was appalled by the triviality of intellectual fashion and the irrelevance of what was on offer from the prophets of the media. The "Swinging Sixties"!--Good Lord! In fact, we were preparing to swing from a rope of our own making as we sought to enter the competitive world of the European Economic Community (EEC) while wrecking our schools, and as we burbled about the wickedness of nuclear weapons while Khrushchev had them transported to Cuba. Meanwhile, we were distracted and satisfied by those oh so many brilliant people, those "sound" treasury officials and "dynamic" company chairmen who, somehow or other, never succeeded in pushing the country into earning its living or its people into working harder. It was a horrible time. It is hard to describe the feeling of deep depression that resulted from all this cheery chatter of the new Carnaby Street culture, while England got poorer under a Labour Prime Minister who promised everything that public relations recommended.

The Great Retreat

THE LOSS OF nerve that afflicted the principalities and powers of British life at this time is not perhaps surprising. Already before the First World War a Conservative intellectual, Lord Hugh Cecil, had seen what might be coming:

Losses to a nation may be so great that they change the character of the nation itself. It would be so with us if we lost our dominions beyond the seas.

Indeed it seemed reasonable to suppose that a considerable upheaval in national life would follow a gradual perception of loss of power. But the perception was very gradual. As late as 1960 few people were conscious of the full consequences of what was happening, though their judgments and attitudes were already beginning to reflect the continuous acceptance of an ethos of retreat and the pessimism it engendered.

The process itself was not particularly surprising. Withdrawal from control of the colonies was perhaps the most easily explicable aspect of Britain's decline. It was Sir John Seely who described the British empire as having been acquired "in a fit of absence of mind," but there was also a logic to its extension. Behind those small colonies, those bases and coaling-stations strung out along the world's sea routes, lay a concept of imperial strategy that concerned the road to India and Australia. Even before the Second World War, however, such measures as the Statute of Westminster (1931) and the India Act (1935) had pointed the way towards an evolutionary policy of independence for the colonies. A more remote approach to empire had already been sketched by Lugard's strategy of "indirect rule" in Africa. Indeed, there had always been those who disliked colonies and regarded them as a waste of money. These voices had never been totally silenced even by the drums and trumpets of Disraeli's Imperial Idea, and now Britain's economic difficulties seemed to recommend the cutting down of overseas commitments. Thus the gradual dispersal of the empire appeared less novel than it actually was, when viewed as a cumulative process.

The moment that independence came to the Indian sub-continent, the old imperial strategy disintegrated. There was no longer an Indian army east of Suez at Britain's disposal, and, though brilliantly successful campaigns against Chinese Communist guerrillas in Malaysia and Sukarno's Indonesia in Borneo provided a suitable last hurrah for British colonial administration, a continued British presence in the Indian ocean, during the Sixties was felt to be too much of a military and financial strain. Economic difficulties, a liberal zeitgeist (particularly strong in the United States, Britain's principle ally and successor as leading Western power, during the struggle with Soviet Communism), the strain on military resources of new commitments along the Rhine--these were the proximate causes of the rapidity with which the Empire disappeared. The longer-term cause was perhaps the very brilliance, and therefore fragility, of the achievement itself.

The first problem posed by the retreat from empire was, naturally enough, one of foreign policy. If its priority was no longer the defense of empire, in what direction should it turn? There were those who would have wished to adopt policies demonstrating the superior morality of a power that had divested itself of empire. Should we shun nuclear weapons along with the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND), consort with the non-aligned and spout good intentions at the United Nations? That was always a fringe alternative, really no alternative at all. Or should we stick to the familiar role of the closest and most candid friend of the United States--Greeks to the Rome of America, as Macmillan put it in one of his ironic asides. Self-preservation and the balance of power certainly indicated enthusiastic support for the North Atlantic Alliance as a defense against the ecumenical ambitions of Russian Communism. That support was given. NATO was a satisfactory arrangement for successive British governments, its creation having been an objective of the Labour administration after the war.

But if Britain favored the Atlantic Alliance, would it not be logical for it to join the newly formed EEC which provided an economic base for the alliance and whose immediate motivation had been the Cold War and the urgency of German rearmament? When Acheson said that Britain had not found a "role" he was not so much giving...