The FCO: Policy, people and places - Some officials, policies and principles

Throughout much of the nineteenth century the staff of the Foreign Office were more concerned with the administration than the formulation of foreign policy. Their primary function was to assist rather than advise the Foreign Secretary. Recurrent international crises in Africa and Asia during the 1890s and the consequent increased pressure of business did allow senior officials in Downing Street greater opportunities for taking initiatives, and some of the more determined of them began freely to volunteer their views on general policy in minutes and memoranda. Nevertheless, Sir Thomas Sanderson, the Permanent Under-Secretary from 1894 until 1906, displayed more interest in the smooth running of the Office than in encouraging the preparation of long policy papers by subordinates. His sharp wit and cultured intellect probably appealed to Lord Salisbury, but Cecil Spring Rice, a rising star in the Diplomatic Service, echoed a common complaint when in January 1903 he wrote to a former foreign secretary that 'so long as he (Sanderson) is there the officials at home and abroad are simply useful as machines and the Foreign Office is like Johnson's definition of fishing: a line with a fool at one end and a worm at the other'. Such criticism was not wholly just, especially as Sanderson was in part responsible for initiating the reforms of 1906 which eventually freed many of the junior staff from the more mundane and tedious of their clerical duties. It is, however, perhaps not without some significance that on 1 January 1907, the year following Sanderson's departure, Eyre Crowe, a senior clerk in charge of the Western Department, submitted his celebrated memorandum on relations with France and Germany - one of the most comprehensive and poignant analyses of Britain's international position ever prepared by a Foreign Office official.

The memorandum derives much of its importance from what Crowe had to say about Anglo-German relations in the wake of the Morocco crisis of 1905-6. But it is also of historical interest because of the way in which Crowe tried to define certain general principles underlying British foreign policy. He asserted that Britain's interest as a European and imperial power lay in the preservation of the 'independence of nations' and the freedom of commerce, and he reasoned that it had 'become almost a historical truism' to identify England's secular policy with the maintenance of the balance of power. It was in a similar vein that seven years later on the eve of the First World War Crowe, by then an Assistant Under-Secretary, contended that Britain must be prepared to participate in a major conflict because a 'balance of power cannot be maintained by a state that is incapable of fighting and consequently carries no weight'. Whether the preservation of the balance of power was as consistent a principle of British foreign policy as Crowe assumed is debatable. It could be argued that during the previous century a more obvious feature of Britain's foreign relations had been readiness to seek a modus vivendi with those powers which were perceived as posing the greatest immediate threat to her interests. That after all was the original motivating force behind Britain's pursuit of ententes with France and Russia. And it was in the logic of Sanderson's 'Observations' on the Crowe memorandum, a document in which the former Permanent Under-Secretary advocated a more conciliatory approach towards German aspirations and opposed a policy based upon the assumption that every change in the status quo was a menace to British interests. As Foreign Secretary between 1905 and 1916 Sir Edward Grey sought and often heeded the advice of his officials. Nevertheless, during the First World War other ministries encroached increasingly upon the Foreign Office's bureaucratic terrain, and David Lloyd George displayed a penchant for Prime Ministerial diplomacy which further limited the department's role in policy making. In the meanwhile, advocates of the so-called 'new diplomacy' poured scorn upon such notions as the balance of power, which they held in part responsible for the war, and urged its replacement by a community of power and collective security. Lloyd George's pursuit after 1919 of what he termed the 'general appeasement of Europe' was not, however, a policy alien to the Foreign Office, and after his fall from power in 1922 diplomats and officials were actively engaged in trying to promote a reconciliation between former enemies and in attempting to overcome the divisions created by war, revolution and the peace treaties. The accords concluded at Locarno in October 1925 were one manifestation of this. The aim now was to achieve stability and security in western Europe through mutual agreement on a common frontier without any reversion to alliances and alignments of the pre-war type. Yet a wide-ranging memorandum on British policy and interests which J.D. Gregory, an Assistant Under-Secretary, submitted in the spring of 1926, seemed to reflect a desire to marry this new diplomacy with older precepts. It stated in terms of which Crowe would surely have approved:

We keep our hands free in order to throw our weight into the scale on behalf of peace. The maintenance of the balance of power and preservation of the status quo have been our guiding lights for many decades and will so continue ... At first sight it would seem that British foreign policy is altruistic, but in truth His Majesty's Government cannot lay this unction to their souls. The fact is that war and rumour of war, quarrels and friction, in any corner of the world spell loss and harm to British commercial and financial interests. It is for the sake of these interests that we pour oil on troubled waters. So manifold and ubiquitous are British trade and British finance that, whatever else may be the outcome of a disturbance of the peace, we shall be the losers ... This is the explanation and the reason for our intervention in almost every dispute that arises, and the justification for the maintenance of the armed forces which enable us to intervene prominently and with authority. Without our trade and our finance we sink to the level of a third class Power. Locarno and the unemployed have an intimate connexion.

Enthusiastic supporters of the ideals of the new diplomacy might have found Locarno and balance of power policies less compatible. Indeed, when just four years later Sir Robert Vansittart, the newly-appointed Permanent Under-Secretary, drafted his 'Old Adam' memorandum, 'An Aspect of International Relations in 1930', he drew a clear distinction between the 'new order' based on the League of Nations and disarmament which British governments had been trying to encourage, and the old diplomacy: 'The Old Adam' - with its 'alliances, insurance and reinsurance treaties, balance of power, military virtues, and economic theories represented by tariff wars and tariff combinations'. At a time when Europe seemed on the point of liquidating so many of the problems of the early post-war era Vansittart feared a return, particularly on the part of Germany, France and Italy, 'to those pre-war conceptions of international policy which are in direct contradiction to the spirit of the League and the ideal of disarmament'. Vansittart's prediction was soon proved to be correct. During the next four years the Foreign Office had to grapple with the consequences of Japan's military intervention in Manchuria, Italy's invasion of Abyssinia, and the rise of National Socialist Germany. A memorandum by Orme Sargent and Ralph Wigram of 21 November 1935 reviewed the alternative courses that Britain might pursue towards the new Germany and concluded that the best strategy would be to work for some kind of Anglo-German understanding. 'This', they observed, 'is the only constructive policy open to Europe - the alternatives of drift and encirclement are avowedly policies of negation and despair'. It was also, they noted, a matter of proceeding with Britain's 'traditional policy'. Yet senior officials were eventually too weary of trying to find a satisfactory basis for an Anglo-German accord. Hitler's pre-emptive diplomacy seemed so often to rob them of their bargaining counters, and his conduct led them to doubt his word. It was, nonetheless, in the spirit of this 'traditional policy' that Neville Chamberlain embarked on his valiant but ultimately fruitless endeavour to find solutions to Germany's grievances. Even officials who no longer believed that such a policy could appease Europe found it difficult, given Britain's lamentable strategic position, to recommend alternative courses. Thus, on 31 December 1936, Vansittart summarised a classical dilemma of British diplomats when forced to make up for the shortcomings of other departments of state. In a memorandum entitled 'The World Situation and British Rearmament', he observed: 'Time is vital and we have started late. Time is the material commodity the Foreign Office has to buy. Our aim must be to stabilise the situation till 1939.'

As in the First World War, so in the Second, diplomacy seemed to play second fiddle to grand strategy. It was therefore hardly surprising that the Foreign Office was in the words of one of its historians, Sir Llewellyn Woodward, 'often disquieted at the subordination of long-term British political interests to immediate military considerations'. Its officials had to reckon with the emergence of new and competing governmental agencies and the increased readiness of Ministers to resort to more direct and para-diplomatic channels of communication. They had also to plan for a post-war world whose political contours appeared more likely to be determined by the United States and the Soviet Union than an exhausted British Empire. Nevertheless, there was a tendency to regard Britain's enfeeblement as a temporary phenomenon, and in any case something that could be overcome by the proper application of diplomatic skills. Accordingly, in his famous paper 'Stocktaking after VE-Day', produced at Anthony Eden's request in July 1945, Sir Orme Sargent argued that Britain had to increase her strength diplomatically, economically and militarily:

We must not be afraid of having a policy independent of our two great partners and not submit to a line of action dictated to us by either Russia or the United States, just because of their superior power or because it is the line of least resistance, or because we despair of being able to maintain ourselves without United States support in Europe.

And again, Sargent appealed to tradition. Britain's foreign policy must, he contended, be in keeping with British 'fundamental traditions', here interpreted as support for liberal against totalitarian regimes. 'In pursuance of this policy of liberation', he continued, 'we shall have to take risks, and even live beyond our political means at times ... (not hesitating) to intervene in the internal affairs of other countries if they are in danger of losing their liberal institutions or their political independence'.

Sargent hoped that Britain might be able to maintain her position as a global power through continued co-operation with the Soviet Union and the United States - or in effect through the operation of a modus vivendi with the two nascent superpowers. He also recognised that Britain was unlikely to be treated as an equal in such a combination unless she could enrol the Dominions and other western European powers as collaborators in this tripartite system. But even if it had been possible to achieve these preconditions it is doubtful if Britain's post-war plight would have permitted her to play the role that Sargent anticipated. 'Big Three' co-operation did not, in any event, long survive the advent of peace, and in his 1947 update of Sargent's memorandum (FO 371/66546) Gladwyn Jebb, then an Assistant Under-Secretary, argued that while the necessity of an independent foreign policy remained valid, too great an independence of the United States was a luxury Britain could not afford. And although the Foreign Secretary, Ernest Bevin, stressed that Britain could 'no longer stand outside Europe' and worked successfully for 'a consolidation of Western Europe' ('The First Aim of British Foreign Policy', 4 January 1948), his officials looked increasingly towards Washington for diplomatic and military support at a time when Britain's interests in Europe and Asia seemed threatened by the Soviet Union and the advance of communism. This was apparent in Britain's role in the setting up of and membership of NATO. But it was also evident in the papers prepared by the Permanent Under-Secretary's Committee, a body established in 1949 under the chairmanship of the new PUS, Sir William Strang, with the express purpose of considering long-term questions of foreign policy. Thus a paper entitled 'A Third World Power or Western Consolidation', the final draft of which was completed in May 1949, rejected the notion that the Atlantic Pact should be considered merely as a temporary phase and that Britain's real object should be to organise Europe as 'Middle-Power' co-equal with and independent of the United States and the Soviet Union. It maintained, that for the present, the closest association with the United States was essential not only to meet the Soviet threat but also in the interests of Commonwealth solidarity and European unity. Likewise, two further papers, 'Anglo-American Relations: Present and Future' and 'British Overseas Obligations', which were prepared in March and April 1950, argued that the 'special relationship' with the United States was dependent on the Americans not losing faith 'in the power or the will of the British people to restore and maintain their strength' and that the United Kingdom could not afford to 'divest herself of her position as a World Power'.

A close, though not invariably cordial, association with the United States remained an essential feature of Britain's foreign relations throughout the following decade. Moreover, when officials in Whitehall frequently had to pay more attention to the balance of payments than the balance of power, and when indigenous nationalisms challenged British interests and influence in Africa and Asia, Britain's ability to play a global role steadily diminished. International politics seemed in any case to be set in a bipolar mould. British diplomats still, however, found time to ruminate over the condition and future of the new world order. Gladwyn Jebb, in August 1959 in a speculative memorandum entitled 'East-West Relations: is 'tension' necessary?' argued presciently that there was little chance of any profound change taking place in East-West relations. He could foresee no general political or territorial settlement between the 'two worlds' for the next twenty or thirty years, although he thought there might be some progress towards arms limitation and some form of 'live and let live' arrangement between the blocs. But until some new equivalent force emerged - probably China, conceivably a United Europe - he considered that 'the tension creating the situation (could) only be changed by the defeat of one side or the other'. In these circumstances, he concluded: 'What ... our generation has to do is to see to it that the present world balance of power remains unchanged until the emergence of new factors presents the basis for an agreed plan for changing it.' This in Jebb's view implied 'long and agonising' negotiations with the Soviet Union. 'Strength of purpose as regards the essentials', he observed, 'suppleness as regards the negotiations themselves, if the West sticks to these principles, then problems of 'tension' will solve themselves'. Such styles and principles would not have been foreign to either Crowe or Sanderson.