by Alan Watson
This then was a speech that was careful to stress the compatibility of what he was proposing with other features of the emerging and established international order. It did not threaten the world organisation of the United Nations. It was important to emphasise this given Roosevelt’s urgent advocacy of the UN, which overrode all his other concerns during his last conversations with Stalin. Churchill had, as ever, a close eye on US public opinion. He had shocked many Americans by what he had said at Fulton, a negative reaction influenced, and to an extent, led by, the Roosevelt family.
For the same reason he stressed specifically that he was ‘very glad’ that two days earlier his ‘friend President Truman had expressed his interest with this great project’.
Nor did his call for European unity, based on the reconciliation of France and Germany and indeed led by them, conflict with Britain’s unique alliance with the USA and its ties with the Empire and Commonwealth. Indeed, all was not only compatible but interrelated, even interdependent. Yet no matter how emollient Churchill wished to sound, there was no disguising and no wish to disguise the salient features of the speech that determined the reactions to it both then and since then.
He had proposed that Germany be re-admitted to the family of the European nations despite all the German atrocities and crimes being reported afresh every day. He had proposed that all the hatred engendered by the barbarous behaviour of the Nazis be consigned to ‘oblivion’ once the conspicuously guilty on trial at Nuremberg and elsewhere had been punished. He had proposed a ‘kind of United States of Europe’ but not that Britain should be a member of it. Britain’s posture would be supportive, not participatory.
Above all else he clearly did not see Russia or its satellite states as members. He was urging an alliance capable of containing Soviet ambition.
Churchill’s vision was shaped by two of his most powerful intellectual and emotional instincts. Having witnessed the utter devastation of Berlin in 1945, he confessed that his hatred of the Germans had died within him. But he also knew that the European tragedy had happened because the democracies, including the USA, had appeased evil. His Zurich speech was born of his own emotional accommodation with Germany and the Germans after their defeat, and his intellectual determination to ensure that tyranny not be appeased a second time.
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Reactions II
Reactions to Churchill’s Zurich speech were both immediate and long lasting. One of the first, however, proved less enduring than others. It was the fear that his words were, as The Times put it the next day, based ‘on the assumption that Europe is already irrevocably divided between East and West’. In its editorial opinion it saw this as ‘the peril of his argument and of its enunciation at this moment’.1
This concern was exacerbated by the conviction that Churchill must be speaking on behalf of the British government although, as we have already seen, he neither requested not received any endorsement from either the Foreign Office or Number 10. The Manchester Guardian’s diplomatic correspondent writing from Paris was disapproving:
Great importance is attached here to the speech of the British Opposition Leader. Far too many people seriously believe that the Opposition Leader is expressing the views held by the Government, but which for diplomatic reasons, members of the Cabinet are unwilling to express . . . it seems unfortunate that Mr. Churchill did not take this common misconception into account in drafting his Zurich speech.2
In an echo of Lord Halifax’s dismay after the Fulton speech – that Stalin would be so offended that any hope of maintaining or reviving the wartime alliance would be lost – some commentators deplored its likely effect. The Manchester Guardian was particularly distressed. It wrote: ‘It would seem impossible to convince representatives to the Eastern bloc that members of the opposition [Churchill] play any other function than that of mouthpieces of “British Imperial Policy”!’3
Churchill’s Zurich speech coincided with a series of international conferences attempting to keep the diplomatic interchange of the wartime alliance alive. The last of these was to occur in 1947 in Moscow, attended for the first time by America’s new secretary of state, George C. Marshall. It would set the seal on the rejection by both him and Britain’s foreign secretary, Ernest Bevin, of Moscow’s intransigence over Germany. But Churchill’s initiative in September 1946 was the first clear call for a united Western response to Stalin based on the return of Germany to the European family. To Western commentators committed to the purity of the wartime alliance between the West and the USSR, this was anathema and they declared it so. Ironically they were right in one regard. Churchill was indeed, at that time, only speaking for himself.
Thus this editorial in Britain’s Reynolds News on 22 September 1946, entitled ‘Churchillism’:4
Mr. Churchill, in his Fulton speech, called for an Anglo-American alliance. In his speech at Zurich on Thursday he called for a new European alliance, headed by France and Germany, under the sponsorship of the Anglo-American alliance, and with the atomic bomb as its ‘shield and protection’.
Mr. Churchill does not say so in so many words, but the whole tenor of his Fulton and Zurich speeches makes it clear that he wants this fabric of alliances as a means of isolating the Soviet Union. Between Russia and the West there are many differences still to be settled and a dismal chapter of mutual irritations to be forgotten. Mr. Churchill’s plan will do neither. His persistent peddling of the idea of an American–West European Power Bloc can only deepen Soviet suspicions and make more difficult the task of reconciliation.
The British Government should make it clear that when Mr. Churchill hawks around his new version of the cordon sanitaire he is speaking for himself – and nobody else.
The reason the rejection of Churchill’s approach so trenchantly explained above did not last long was that it was overtaken by events. Stalin’s obduracy and Molotov’s negativity proved beyond doubt to Britain and the USA at governmental level by 1947 that there was no deal available with Moscow on the future of Germany and that the reconstruction of Western Europe was the unavoidable imperative.
Far more problematic, in September 1946, was the French reaction. The Times raised the right questions after Churchill’s Zurich speech. It stated that while the speech demonstrated his ‘familiar characteristics . . . of courage and imagination’, it prescribed a remedy ‘which Europe, in its present condition, showed few signs of accepting’. Why? Its reasoning was clear: ‘Germany today is in no position to offer partnership to anyone’ and ‘it remains to be seen whether French opinion will be prepared to tolerate, even from Mr. Churchill, the suggestion that the first step in the recreation of the European family must be a partnership between France and Germany’. Indeed Churchill’s speech ‘dumbfounded French opinion’ in the judgement of both politicians and the press.5 Indeed as Churchill had predicted, the French were astonished but, more than that, they were appalled.
A powerful reason for this was the confirmation from the trials at Nuremberg and from many other emerging sources of just how horrendous the atrocities perpetrated by the Third Reich had been, including those committed on French soil.
The French had recently executed Pierre Laval, the former foreign minister who had collaborated with the Nazis after the German occupation. He was shot on 15 October 1945. The International Military Tribunal set up by the four wartime allies, by then including France, met the same month. There was no precedent for what they decided. They would put on trial the leaders of the Third Reich whom they had in custody including Goering, Ribbentrop, Keitel, Streicher and Speer, among others. The trial was held in one of the few large buildings still standing in what had been Hitler’s showpiece city for the Nazi movement – Nuremberg. It was an appropriate location as Nuremberg had hosted vast Nazi rallies. Had Hitler won the war it would have been turned into a marble and granite complex of buildings glorifying the Führer and his intended 1000-year Reich. Work had started before the war using Jewish prisoners from nearby concentration camps.
Nuremberg had also been the place where the anti-Semitic legislation known as the Nuremberg Laws had been proclaimed – formalising the legal framework which would lead to the mass murder of the Jews, first deprived of all rights, and then of life itself.
Prominent Nazis who had not already committed suicide like Hitler, Himmler and Goebbels, or who had not disappeared like Bormann, faced four indictments summarised by the pre-eminent historian of the Holocaust, Martin Gilbert. First, ‘a common plan or conspiracy to seize power and establish a totalitarian regime to prepare and wage a war of aggression’; second ‘waging a war of aggression’; third, ‘Violation of the laws of war’; and fourth, ‘Crimes against humanity, persecution, and extermination’.6
The charges were not only unprecedented, they were also controversial. The notorious president of the German Red Cross, the chief surgeon to the SS, shouted on the scaffold, ‘This is nothing but political revenge!’7 He fully deserved his death but of the four indictments only the fourth escaped any criticism. Even Churchill remarked to General Ismay at the time, ‘you and I must take care not to lose the next war’, an observation described wryly by A. J. P. Taylor as ‘a wise verdict on the proceedings at Nuremberg’.
It was their crimes against humanity, including extermination, that utterly revolted the world and turned Germany into a pariah nation. Yet it was this shamed and shameful people that Churchill now proposed should join with France. To the French, shamed by their capitulation and occupation, the concept was profoundly shocking and must have seemed extremely hazardous. Their wish was that Germany remain excluded and occupied in its turn. Their fear was that Germany was inherently stronger than France, larger by population, and once economically recovered, far more powerful.
As we have seen, France, in part, mirrored the Soviet attitude towards Germany. Both feared Germany and both were determined to prevent any restoration of its economic power. No one expressed this view more trenchantly than General de Gaulle. After Churchill had delivered his Zurich speech he penned a letter to de Gaulle seeking to explain why he believed France and Germany had to become reconciled. He entrusted the letter to Duncan Sandys, his son-in-law, who took it to his home in Colombey. What transpired must have been extremely upsetting to Sandys. Indeed, he went on to found the European Movement and to play a leading role in advocating the cause. What de Gaulle had to say to him at Colombey was the opposite of what he wished to hear. Martin Gilbert and others have recorded Sandys’ account. The General said:
that the reference in Mr. Churchill’s Zurich speech to a Franco-German partnership had been badly received in France. Germany as a state no longer existed. The French were violently opposed to recreating any kind of unified, centralised Reich and were gravely suspicious of the policy of the American and British governments.
If this was not clear enough, de Gaulle shared his deadliest fears. He believed that ‘unless steps were taken to reinvent the resuscitation of German power, there was the danger that a United Europe would become nothing else than an enlarged Germany’. General de Gaulle’s solution was brutal – the permanent allocation to France of all coal produced by the Ruhr, the long-term occupation by French forces of North Rhineland, which should be at once incorporated into France’s Zone of Occupation, and the establishment of international control of all the industries of the Ruhr under certain conditions to be agreed by France. In conclusion, de Gaulle threw open his arms, saying ‘Voilà, mes conditions!’8
How was this French attitude changed? The impact of US aid to all Western Europe under the aegis of the Marshall Plan transformed the economic situation in both France and Germany. And at the heart of that strategy of transformation would lie the unique contribution of the remarkable French.
In 1946, Jean Monnet9 was little known to the public in France, Britain or Germany. But he was known to the architects of the emerging Atlantic Alliance – to Churchill with whom he had drawn up plans for a union of France and the UK in the terrible weeks in 1940 before the French surrender made them redundant. Of Churchill, he believed that he was a man with the courage and imagination to create new worlds. In his view, the French owed him an immense debt.
Monnet was also known to de Gaulle for whom he worked in wartime London. After the Liberation, de Gaulle turned to Monnet to develop and implement ‘Le Plan’, the programme of investment and direction that began by early 1947 to modernise the French economy. ‘I told de Gaulle,’ he said, ‘you speak of French strength, of French power, but we have none until our economy is rebuilt as one that is modern and competitive.’
To achieve this, Monnet would depend critically on the other people who knew him well, the power brokers in the USA. Monnet had worked in New York and Washington between the wars, winning the attention of both Roosevelt and George C. Marshall. Of the Americans, Monnet was impressed by ‘their energy, their instinct for a solution, and their optimism’. But the quality he most admired was ‘their generosity . . . whatever people may say, they did not enter the war for themselves. They did it because of their commitment to liberty.’
It was, of course, ultimately their commitment to liberty that drove their resistance to the threat posed by Soviet ambition. It was to that commitment to freedom that Churchill appealed at Fulton and again at Zurich. It is central to the Truman Doctrine enunciated in 1947 and the Marshall Plan’s motivation, both described in the next chapter.
It was Monnet along with the foreign minister of France, Robert Schuman, who would together realise Churchill’s vision of Franco-German leadership by proposing and successfully negotiating the European Coal and Steel Community, linking the industries of both countries and transforming ‘the sinews of war into the bonds of peace’.10
There remains the longest-lasting reaction to the ideas proposed by Churchill in Zurich – the reaction of the British. Nothing was to compare to the protracted, bitter political division that had dominated so much of Britain’s debate with itself and with others ever since Zurich.
In the Zurich speech, Churchill had acknowledged the earlier influence of a quixotic and formidable personality, Count Coudenhove-Kalergi. Churchill had renewed contact with the Count shortly before his Zurich speech and with the former French prime minister, Leon Blum, after the speech. At Zurich he claimed that he had ‘revived the ancient and glorious conception of a United Europe associated before the war with the names of M. Briand and Count Coudenhove-Kalergi which I had supported for many years’.11 In this correspondence, published in their study of ‘British Engagement with the Pan-European Ideal 1929–48’, the historians Richard Carr and Bradley Hart reveal how from the moment of Churchill’s public endorsement of European union, he would find himself immersed in divisive argument. Blum’s criticism was that by championing the idea, Churchill would give the idea of European federalism ‘a character too narrowly Churchillian’, which would result in ‘the embarrassment, circumspection, and hesitation of the Labour Party and, in consequence, of international Socialism’. Churchill retorted that his support for this idea was absolutely not partisan in any political party sense.
The idea of European federalism had become a party political football in British politics, with the reoccurring pattern of British parties being sympathetic to European Union while in opposition, and hostile when in government. The reality is that even British Conservatives who recognised the imperative of European Union if future wars were to be avoided remained ambiguous about British involvement. Long before Churchill’s own reticence about the nature of British participation as opposed to membership, one of the first Tories approached by Coudenhove-Kalergi in the late 1920s rebutted him. Leo Amery wrote to him that the British ‘were much too far from Europe ever to enter wholeheartedly into its policies’.
I had the opportunity to examine this British reluctance with two key figures in the relationship. One was Duncan Sandys who, as we have seen, was sent to Colombey les deux Eglises to try to persuade de Gaulle to soften his attack on Churchill’s Zurich speech. Later Sandys founded the
European Movement. He reminded me that as Britain emerged from the war, largely bankrupt but as a victorious power, its view of European Union would always be different from those defeated and occupied in the war, meaning France and Germany. Jean Monnet admitted to me that he had never tried too hard to persuade the British to join the Coal and Steel Community. Nor was he too dismayed by the UK’s refusal to engage in the Messina Conference which led to the establishment of the Common Market. He knew that it was not ‘natural’ for nations to unite and that they would only do so when such a step became inevitable. That moment did arrive, for Harold Macmillan and Harold Wilson, and subsequently Edward Heath sealed the deal with the French. On the way to that moment in 1973 and ever since, Churchill has been hijacked by Europhiles and Europhobes. For the latter, Churchill epitomises defiance of Europe. For Europhiles, he was the enthusiastic advocate of European union.
So he was, but critically he never advocated British membership. He had not succeeded in saving the Empire but he had saved a global role for Britain. It was based on the alliance with the USA, on the British Commonwealth, and it desperately needed a restored Europe. His two 1946 speeches addressed these themes – acting as a clarion call only just in time to enable the West to counter the Soviet threat.
Returning to London by plane with his wife and daughter, Churchill already knew that his speech at Zurich University would have profound influence. The short flight to Hendon did not match the excitement of his journey back to Washington in the president’s train after his speech at Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri. On the flight there was no non-family member to whom he could declare, as he had on returning from Fulton, that this was ‘the most important’ speech of his life. Yet he deserved to feel that it was undoubtedly the second most important speech he had given in that critical year of 1946. In little more than six months, he had changed perceptions and altered the horizons of the West.
