Decolonisation after Suez: Retreat or Rationalisation?

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, i.e. 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. 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’ rhetoric 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 Britain and France to redefine its meaning and has concealed the extent to which ambitious designs continued to persist in the contest to determine the future shape of a ‘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 powerful new American piece around the chess board in the middle east, Africa and Asia.

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