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Looking more broadly, in the mid-fifties Britain was still a world-wide player, connected and modern. Her major companies were global leaders in oil, tobacco, shipping and finance. The Empire was not quite gone, even though the new name of ‘Commonwealth’ was more widely used in official circles. Britain was not a country closed to foreign influence, whether from America or Italy or Scandinavia. Something first promoted as ‘Italian Welsh rarebit’, later known as ‘pizza’ was in evidence. The idea of a powerful, self-confident Britain, independent of American cultural influence, seemed not only possible but likely. Per capita, Britain was still the second richest country in the world.

However, after the Suez Crisis, Britain would no longer possess independent power or influence in the Middle East. The age of American power there, based on support for Israel and the oil alliance with the Saudi Royal Family, took the place of British hegemony. Suez also provoked the arrival of the Mini car, designed in the wake of the petrol price shock caused by the seizure of the canal. Macmillan replaced Eden as PM and decided to remain in the tiny nuclear club as a cheaper alternative to imperial swagger. He authorised the first British H-bomb explosion at Christmas Island in May 1957. It was partly a fake, a hybrid bomb intended to fool the US into thinking its ally was further ahead than it really was. The next year, at a crucial showdown between British and American scientists in Washington, the British Aldermaston team persuaded Edward Teller’s Los Alamos men that Britain was just as far advanced as the US in the field of nuclear weaponry.

The major international event of 1957 was the signing of the Treaty of Rome, the beginning of what we know today as the European Union.The continental negotiators were shocked and disappointed by Britain’s lack of serious interest, but the six founding members shrugged off Britain’s attitude. They were still rebuilding shattered cities and healing torn economies, and for them the coming of the ‘community’ was manifest destiny. Coming so soon after Suez it provoked increasingly agitated head-scratching in Whitehall.

For Britain, the world was still differently shaped. The Commonwealth was then more than a worthy outreach programme for the Royal Family. Its food and raw materials poured into Britain and there was an illusion that Britain’s manufacturing future would be secured by selling industrial goods to South Africa, New Zealand, Australia and Canada. Out would flow engines, cars, clothing, aircraft and electronics, in exchange for butter, oil, meat, aluminium, rubber, tobacco and wood-pulp. The poorer members of the sterling club kept their reserves in London, so Britain acted as banker as well as manufacturer for much of Africa and parts of Asia. Most people believed that to cut adrift the Commonwealth and join a new club would be economically ruinous as well as immoral. For Labour, Harold Wilson told the Commons that if there has to be a choice, we are not entitled to sell our friends and kinsmen down the river for a problematical and marginal advantage in selling washing machines to Dusseldorf. Later, Hugh Gaitskell told the Labour Conference that membership of the European Economic Community would mean an end to a thousand years of history:

How can one seriously suppose that if the mother country, the centre of the Commonwealth, is a province of Europe… it could continue to exist as the mother country of a series of independent nations?

At the same time, the European market, thirsting for new consumer goods, was growing spectacularly fast, while the Commonwealth trading group was by comparison falling behind. Most of the smaller countries did not want Britain anyway and the richer nations of the Commonwealth would soon turn to the United States for their consumer goods.

Yet membership of the EEC would subordinate Britain to the continent in other important ways. It was recognised from this earliest date that sovereignty and independence would be lost. Other forms of subordination and loss of independence had already happened, however. The foundation of the United Nations and the establishment of NATO had involved the relinquishing of traditional freedoms of action. Nevertheless, Europe was something different. Those who had looked clearly at the Treaty of Rome were struck by its overwhelming ambition. Lord Kilmuir, Macmillan’s Lord Chancellor, told him that Parliament would lose powers to the Council of Ministers whose majority vote could change British law; that the Crown’s power over treaties would partly shift to Brussels and that British courts would find themselves in part subordinate to the European Court of Justice. Macmillan himself tended to brush these concerns aside with reassuring words, trying to keep everyone happy, but Kilmuir was joined by Lord Home, the future  PM, in giving outspoken warnings.

Had Britain been involved in the European adventure from the start, as the French had initially wanted, the EEC and the EU might well have evolved differently. There would certainly have been less emphasis on agricultural protection and more on free trade. ‘Europe’ might have appeared to be a little less mystical and a little more open and democratic. Even after the shock and humiliation of Suez, the Commonwealth and Anglo-American relations still took precedence for London. Macmillan’s team, centred on Edward Heath, hoped that somehow the trading system of the Commonwealth supporting English-speaking farmers from across the world could be accommodated by the protectionist system in Europe. They seem to have thought that any loss of sovereignty would be tolerable if such a deal could be struck. Macmillan had nothing like the reverence for the House of Commons felt by Enoch Powell, on one side of that House, or by Hugh Gaitskell on the other. Meanwhile, Britain’s struggle to keep up in the nuclear race led to private Anglo- American negotiations which infuriated the French. After the Treaty of Rome took effect at the beginning of 1958, French attitudes hardened with the return of General de Gaulle as President, determined that the new continental system would be dominated by France and would exclude the Anglo-Saxons.

1957 was also the year in which some Tories first began to break with the Keynesian economics of the post-war consensus in favour of a return to their older doctrines of economic liberalism. Antony Fisher, a chicken-farmer and utterly self-certain individualist and anti-socialist, had made enough money to found the Institute of Economic Affairs, undoubtedly the most influential think-tank in modern British history. Set up by Fisher and the Liberal, Oliver Smedley, the IEA was intended to combat the socialist influence of the Fabians. It first began to influence British politics during the winter of 1957-8, when inflation was rising above 4% and wage settlements were in double figures. Macmillan was worried about the confrontation which might emerge from cut-backs and unemployment, and he had many spending ministers, taking care of the armed forces, hospitals and welfare who were strongly opposed to cutting back. On the other side of the argument were the Chancellor, Peter Thorneycroft, and his two junior Treasury ministers – Nigel Birch and Enoch Powell. They insisted that it was vital to control the money supply, a position advocated by the IEA. They put together a planned series of cuts which included a fifty per cent rise in the cost of school meals, freezes on pay rises and the removal of family allowances for the second child.  It would have hit five million families, including millions of middle-class mothers whose support the Tories needed. In the end, the Treasury team lost the battle in cabinet and all three resigned. Macmillan dismissed the whole matter as a little local difficulty. Yet it marked a turning point, away from the ideas of free marketeers and towards the last phase of the planning economy and, eventually, to Thatcherism. In the Thatcher Government, Lord Thorneycroft became Chairman of the Conservative Party.

Source:

Andrew Marr (2007), A History of Modern Britain. Basingstoke: Macmillan.

 

I have already voted in the Referendum on the UK’s membership of the European Union. Tuesday 7 June was the last day for registering to vote in the EU referendum. However, if you are a Brit living abroad and you voted in the 2015 General Election, you will almost certainly still be registered to vote in your former constituency (only). Or if you’re away from the UK/ unable to get to the polling station on 23 June, you still have time to request a postal vote from your local authority, via http://www.gov.uk.

When your envelope arrives, inside you will find a ‘postal voting statement’ which you complete with your date of birth and signature. You don’t need a witness for this. You then fill in your ballot paper by putting a cross next to one of the two statements, based on ‘Leave’ and ‘Remain’. You then put this into an envelope, marked A, seal it and place it, together with your completed postal voting statement, into the pre-paid postage envelope (B). You then simply post this (you don’t need to pay postage whether in the UK or abroad, neither do you need to register it or  ask for recorded delivery) or you can deliver it by hand at any time before polling day to the local electoral services office, or on the day, 23 June, at any polling station within your electoral area, up until 10 p.m. Given that a small number of problems have arisen with the German Post Office (wrongly) not accepting pre-paid IBRS envelopes, it may be an idea to pass it over the counter, rather than putting it in the box, if you are posting from abroad.

Voting by post is as simple as A, B, C, and it’s important that everybody eligible to vote within the EU does so. Unlike in a General Election, expatriates from the UK have even greater reason to vote in the Referendum than residents. Apart from the EU citizens from other countries living in the UK who don’t have a vote (unlike in the Scottish Referendum), UK subjects in the EU are the group of Brits most directly affected by the result, especially if it goes in favour of the UK leaving the EU. The decision to restrict voting rights to those who have been resident abroad for fifteen years makes it even more necessary for those of us who do have a vote to use it both for ourselves and our children, but also on behalf of people who may have been disenfranchised.

Deciding how to vote may not be so simple, just as it wasn’t in the 1975 Referendum (see the picture below). This came just before my eighteenth birthday, so I didn’t have a vote, but many of my school mates did, and I well remember the debates and discussions which led up to polling day, even though I was doing my A Level exams at the time.

The result is as important now as it was in 1975, perhaps more so, especially for today’s young Britons. Then we were joining an Economic Community, now we are considering leaving a Union which offers them major cultural and educational opportunities as well. While the economic reasons for remaining in are as clear as they were in 1975, my reasons for voting to remain are far broader and deeper, as they were back in the mid-seventies. I’ve set them out below.

 

1. Integration is not assimilation:

‘‘Visit the great churches and cathedrals of Britain, read our literature and listen to our language: all bear witness to the cultural riches which we have drawn from Europe and other Europeans from us.”
– Margaret Thatcher 1988 in Bruges –

When Mrs Thatcher made this speech, she also spoke very determinedly of the need to reunite all the countries of Europe, at a time when the Berlin Wall was still standing and Warsaw, Prague, Budapest and all the old capitals of central-eastern Europe, still lay behind the ‘iron curtain’. Two years later, the dictatorships in those countries had fallen, along with the walls and fences dividing them from their western European ‘siblings’ and cousins. Mrs Thatcher had departed from office too, following the fallout from the Maastricht Treaty debácle in the Tory Party. It was this departure which came as the greatest surprise to many in central Europe, where the ‘Iron Lady’ was regarded with great affection for her steadfast support for their peoples’ bringing down of the old Soviet-style regimes.

Above: Margaret Thatcher with G7 Heads of State at Paris in 1989

Although it’s true that the Maastricht Treaty marked a period of deeper integration in western Europe and a transition from an economic community into a more political union, it is easy to forget that it also came just before the end of the Cold War and the beginning of a period of transition in central-eastern Europe which led to the political reintegration of the European continent as envisaged by Margaret Thatcher had envisioned in her Bruges speech. Over the following quarter century, the two processes have worked in tandem, so that the broadening of the Union to 27 countries has been rooted in institutions which have evolved, not always easily, to accommodate more divergent needs.

This process has been one of integration, not assimilation. The EU is not some giant Leviathan trying to swallow up all countries great and small. Countries seeking accession have had their terms of entry negotiated on an individual basis, and existing countries like France have been able to opt out of the arrangements for freedom of movement from these new member states. Since 2004, their intake of migrant workers from Poland, Hungary and (more recently) Romania has thus been far less than that of the United Kingdom. The UK is now able to apply an ’emergency brake’ on these migration streams itself, and to add conditions to the entry of future migrants, while still remaining at liberty to withdraw from any arrangements involving new accessor states like Croatia or Serbia.  The fact that David Cameron has been able to maintain and extend the very different terms of the UK’s membership shows that sovereignty and self-government can be maintained as well as, in chosen circumstances, pooled by individual member states.

2. Freedom of Movement can be managed for everyone’s benefit:

The voluntary movement of Labour within an internal market has long been a feature of successful economies, including Britain’s. A hundred years ago, the majority of the working population was concentrated in the industrial areas of Scotland, the North of England and South Wales. Some of these areas in 1911-1921 were continuing to attract labour from impoverished rural areas at a net in-migration rate second only to that of the United States. When the older industries which attracted these workers then went into decline, many of them moved to the light engineering centres of the Midlands and South-East of England. This included a mass migration of half a million coal-miners and their families from South Wales alone in the twenty years between the wars. Most of these workers fulfilled a need for their skills and capacity for hard manual work, adapted to their new environment and integrated into their new neighbourhoods. From the 1950s, they were added to by streams of migrants from the Empire and Commonwealth, again bringing their own cultural traditions to integrate themselves into their new environment. Again, these were, economically, ‘internal migrants’ from within Britain’s traditional trading areas overseas who were actively invited and recruited to come to Britain. Now that trading area is determined largely by  the decision taken by the British people in 1975, when the UK decided by 2:1 to remain within the European Economic Community.

The logic of joining a ‘free trade’ union has always been that it would lead on to ‘free movement’ not simply of goods, but of services and therefore of people as well. This basic economic ‘mechanism’ of free markets cannot be denied by economists and economic historians, but it can be managed by politicians. There is nothing to stop British politicians doing what the French ones did in 2004. All they have to say is that they want to be able to channel the migration streams from both EU and non-EU countries to match demand, given that, like France, they have strong ties to the latter. The idea that the EU does not allow us to control our own borders and our own immigration policy is a myth (convenient for many), but belonging to a single trading market does mean, in principle, that the British government accepts and upholds both the rights of people from elsewhere in that market to work in the UK and of British people to work abroad. At the moment there are 1.2 million EU migrants who have moved to Britain since 2010, compared with 600,000 moving out, a rate of 2:1. This gives an average of a hundred thousand per year. Last year, this number increased but was still less than the number of those longer-distance migrants coming to the UK to settle permanently from non-EU countries, out of total net in-migration of 330,000.

The rights of EU migrants have nothing to do with the rights of illegal immigrants to the EU from the Balkans and the Middle East, or with the very distinct rights of the Syrian Refugees. We don’t know yet how many of the EU migrants are intending to settle in the UK permanently, but anecdotal evidence both from the UK and from Hungary tells me that, for home-loving Hungarians at least, they will be in a small minority. The majority of EU migrants, by contrast with those from further afield, are on temporary contracts and are intending to return when their contracts expire, many having done so already, to be replaced by others.  They arrive in the UK often with jobs already to go to, or with clear intentions in finding employment. They rarely claim unemployment benefit, at least not until they have paid into the National Insurance system, and then only for short periods. Nearly all make a net contribution in taxation as soon as they start working. In the future, they will not be able to claim either unemployment benefits or in-work tax relief for four years, as a result of David Cameron’s renegotiation. The Poles who are fruit-picking in Kent, the Hungarians in restaurants in London, and the doctors and nurses working in Bristol are all making up for shortages in local labour.

In terms of their impact on local services, evidence also suggests that, while language problems have a temporary implication for schools, most EU children settle quickly into a fairly familiar system, and learn/ acquire English very quickly, so that they are not as ‘high impact’ as students from other continents and cultures. Once they have learnt the medium of their education, these ‘bright’ children, from traditional European school backgrounds, more often than not go on to gain better GCSE results than their British peers. Health services are funded differently in the UK than in other EU countries, where workers pay into a National Insurance scheme, but since most migrant workers in the UK are young and single, it is unlikely that they are making disproportionate demands compared with the ageing native population.

Far from being a drain on resources, EU migrants are major contributors to maintaining and extending economic growth in Britain. Indeed, politicians in their home countries frequently express their fears that the temporary loss of these young workers means, for them, a loss of skills, talents and revenues which are much in need back home. English teachers from Hungary are washing-up in London restaurants because, even at minimum wage rates, they can earn more in a forty-hour week in the kitchens than they can in their schools. It is the UK which is benefiting from EU migration, whereas the ‘donor’ countries are dealing with the negative impact, but progressive politicians seem unwilling to make this case in the face of populist scare-mongers in UKIP and elsewhere.

 

Freedom of movement also includes many things that we take for granted, like freedom from work permits and work visas, intrusive medical tests, transit visas, unfair phone tariffs, border checks, currency exchange charges, etc. It also encourages cheaper and cleaner travel options.

3. Peace and Security are continuous processes which have to be worked on:

John F Kennedy once remarked that ‘peace is a process’ which requires the daily, weekly, monthly breaking down of barriers and the building up of new bridges. That image has much to commend it, but too often people regard peace as ‘a period of cheating between battles’ (at worst) and as an ‘absence of war’ (at best). Yet all the world’s truly great peacemakers have seen it as ‘the presence of justice’. If this is so, why do the Brexiteers bear so much antipathy towards European Courts in general (some of which, like the European Court of Human Rights, are not part of the EU’s institutions) and to the European Court of Justice in particular? Can you think of any organisation or club which allows individual members to set its own their own rules, or which doesn’t try to apply some standard code of conduct for all its members to follow?

Even if we simply take the definition of peace as ‘the absence of war’ we can see that the EU has been instrumental in keeping the peace in Europe over the last sixty years. Of course, NATO, founded a decade earlier, has been more important in overall strategic terms, due mainly to its nuclear capabilities, and despite the fact that on at least two occasions it has led us to the brink of Armageddon. The EU has itself made important strategic contributions in Europe, in the wars of the Former Yugoslav territories in the 1990s and most recently in sending a clear signal through sanctions in response to Putin’s aggression in the Ukraine. This latter situation, together with that in the Baltic states is being watched very carefully by both the EU and NATO. I hear people saying, ‘but why should Britain be concerned about what is happening in far-away European countries?’ I would want to remind them that this was precisely the position of those who appeased Mussolini and Hitler in the 1930s. First they went to war in Africa, and Britain and France took part in a carve-up. Then they went to war in Spain, and Britain actually aided Franco’s troops. Then Czechoslovakia was considered a ‘far-away country’, even though Prague is far closer to London and Paris than Berlin and Vienna. The warning is clear. Appeasement of dictators is not peacemaking.

Little less than a century ago, both the PM, Lloyd George, and the economist John Maynard Keynes pointed out what they predicted The Economic Consequences of the Peace of Paris would be, especially the crippling reparations it placed on Germany, and to some extent Austria and Hungary. By placing such a huge financial burden on these ‘losing’ governments, together with the additional losses of land and resources, the Allies prevented these countries, especially Germany, from becoming a strong trading partner, helping to contribute to the conditions for ‘economic nationalism’ and another war. The peacemakers after the Second World War were determined not to make the same mistake, and the reason that our present-day EU began life as an Iron and Steel Community, followed by the EEC, was precisely because of the recognition that peace cannot be ‘decreed’, but has to be worked at through establishing trading agreements and arrangements. Trading relationships make the antidote to war.   

4. Educational, Language and Cultural Exchanges are essential for all our futures:

The reintegration of Europe has not happened by chance, but by exchanges of goods, services and people. At first, ‘people’ exchanged were instigated by people themselves, run on a shoestring with the help of local councils and charities. These exchanges began in the early 1990s with the help of the EU through its TEMPUS programmes which helped fund universities and colleges from both western and central-eastern Europe who were looking to establish relationships for mutual training and study. More recently, permanent programmes like Erasmus and Comenius have enabled students of all ages to develop their language skills through extended placements in each other’s countries.

I have written about the personal benefits of this to my own family elsewhere, but, again, people have suggested that Britain, through the British Council and other organisations, could easily set up alternative programmes if the UK votes to leave. This ignores the fact that multilateral, if not bilateral cultural exchanges would be much harder to establish from scratch, and would not be as effective as centrally funded networks, whether at student level or among academic researchers. The impact on schools, colleges, universities and young people in general of these programmes is impossible to measure simply in financial terms. There is a huge multiplier effect in the pooling of linguistic skills alone, apart from the inter-cultural benefits which exchanges  can bring to the creation of long-term, peaceful cooperation.

5. The European route is the way to a broader internationalism:

One of the long-standing criticisms of the EU, heard since at least 1975, is that it is a ‘rich man’s club’. Having experienced the re-integration of the poorer, ex-Communist countries of Eastern Europe at first hand over the last 25 years, this is easier for me to dismiss as an argument than it was in 1975. However, the current Migration Crisis in south-eastern Europe reveals that the EU is on the cusp of an almost ‘tectonic’ shift in human resources and relations. Just as the twentieth century has moved Europe on from a patchwork of nation states and land empires to a continent-wide confederation of inter-dependent states, the twenty-first century will be one in which our common identity as Europeans – whether we are Christian Democrats, Social Democrats or Liberal Democrats – must serve as the basis for reaching out to create fuller and fairer trading relationships with other continents, and especially with our neighbours in Africa and the Middle East. Britain has its own historic responsibilities in the world, through its Commonwealth, but it can do far more to address the major inter-continental issues in the twenty-first century by working ‘in concert’ with its European allies to produce joint, caring foreign policies.

6. Britain is at its best when leading, not when leaving:

Much has been made in this campaign of Britain’s ability to stand alone in Europe, as it did from the Fall of France to Operation Barbarossa. However, even then, it could not have stood for as long as it did without American supplies of food, yes, but also of key military equipment, not to mention the help forthcoming from its Empire and Dominions. By December 1941, Britain was fighting a in global war, the first shots of which were fired in the Far East in 1937. The first American troops arrived in Britain at the beginning of 1942, and when the ‘Second Front’ was finally opened in May 1944, the British Army, composed in large part of Indian troops, fought its way back across the continent with our friends. Despite the wartime propaganda which metamorphosed into popular mythology, Britain never really stood alone, neither before nor during the Second World War.

Even in the Blitz propaganda of 1940-41, Coventry was thinking not just of its own suffering, but of that of other cities around the world, many of which became twin cities after the war. The Cross of Nails has become an international symbol of peace and reconciliation, present even when we feel most separated from the Light. I believe in this version of national mythology, that Britain has a destiny among nations, proven down the ages. Its vocation is to lead where the Light takes it, to extend its peaceful influence through language, trade and culture.  True Britons don’t leave. In Churchill’s words, they ‘never, never, never give up!’ They are sometimes called upon to ‘give way’ voluntarily, however, to make compromises. The European Union is, in part, a product of this other, much-admired facet of British character. It is also a work in progress, with many unresolved conflicts, and the UK is an integral element in this joint endeavour.

If you believe, like me, that ‘Endeavour and Endurance’ are good English words which contain true British values, join me in voting for the UK to remain in the European Union after 23 June. Help keep the ugly word ‘Brexit’ out of the English language for good!

Andrew James

3 October 2015 marks the 25th anniversary of the reunification of Germany…

In the early summer of 1990, the conditions to be attached to German reunification were hammered out. The Soviet Union failed to secure a transitional period in which the military forces in East Germany retained “associated membership” in the Warsaw Pact, an obvious nonsense, or an agreement on a hard-line plan whereby for three to five years the other powers would oversee Germany’s conduct. In London in early July, a NATO summit made a declaration of non-aggression with the Warsaw Pact nations. That helped the cause of German reunification, and Germany, meanwhile, helped itself by confirming its borders with Poland, promising to limit the future size of a German army, agreeing not to station nuclear weapons in East Germany and offering to pay the costs of removing half a million Soviet troops from the former DDR and resettling them in Russia. Kohl and Genscher went to Moscow together, and at a press conference on 16 July, Gorbachev declared, “whether we like it or not, the time will come when a united Germany will be in NATO if that is its choice. Then, if that is its choice, to some degree and in some form, Germany can work together with the Soviet Union.”

West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl (second from right), with Mikhail Gorbachev in Moscow.

This extraordinary statement was, as Chancellor Kohl put it, “a breakthrough, a fantastic result.” A fortnight earlier, at the Twenty-eighth Party Congress, Gorbachev had been ferociously attacked by party hard-liners for letting the Baltics go, for weakening the Warsaw Pact, and for undermining the ideological foundations of the Soviet Union and its ruling Communist Party. He was, nevertheless, re-elected its general secretary, and continued to commit the Soviet Union to uproot the cornerstone of its security policy since the end of the Second World War. On 3 October, East and West Germany were joined; Germany was reunited.  The crowds and flags in the pictures below show that this was a popular political reunification, at first, within the European Union. The security and economic issues would be addressed later.

Berlin’s Brandenburg Gate, 3 October 1990. Crowds celebrate as Germany is reunited.

Some historians say the Cold War ended when the Berlin Wall came down in October 1989: others say it was when the Soviet Union publicly reconciled itself to seeing a reunited Germany, whose invasion and defeat in 1941-45  had cost the Union more than twenty million dead, in a military alliance with the West. Since Germany had always been at the epicentre of the Cold War in Europe, Gorbachev’s statement in Moscow on 16 July has a strong claim to be considered the decisive moment of the Cold War’s ending. However, there was still a great deal of unfinished business, both in Eastern Europe and the Middle East. Just as the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 marked the beginning of what has become known by historians as the ‘Second Cold War’, so too the summer of 1990 also marked the beginning of two conflicts which still remain to be resolved, one in the Persian Gulf and the other in what, then, was still part of the USSR, in the Ukraine.

Gorbachev had, almost immediately, to cope with two desperately difficult tasks at home, in what was still, just, the USSR. He was trying, as fast as he could, to reform an economy and system of government that had become a way of life. Just the prospect of radical economic restructuring threatened social chaos and caused immediate fear and distress. To go from a command economy, where everyone did as they were told by the centre, to one that operated without central planning and control, leaving prices to market forces, was to travel a pathless route into unknown territory. Not many wanted to go that way, and the few who did had no route map by which to arrive at a clear destination.

On 20 July a “five hundred day” economic programme to move the USSR towards a market economy was published. It proposed the sale of large numbers of state enterprises, the dissolution of state collective farms, currency reform and a new banking system. But Gorbachev’s nerve failed him, and the reforms were not introduced. Uncertainty was only making matters worse, and the Bush administration steadfastly refused to provide aid to fund the programme up front, saying that it would only give it as a reward for implementing reform, not as an inducement. Moreover, concerned that Gorbachev might be deposed, the US continued to maintain a state of full military preparedness.

Above: Ukrainians protest at continued Soviet domination.

At the same time, Gorbachev was also trying, against all the odds, to hold the Union together, when it seemed that every single member state, in turn, was seeking independence. On the very same day that he was declaring German reunification and NATO membership a foregone conclusion, Ukraine declared its sovereignty, followed by Armenia, Turkmenistan, and Tadzhikistan in August, and Kazakhstan and Kirghizia in October. In October, too, both Russia and Ukraine declared their state laws sovereign over Union laws.  The Supreme Soviet declared this invalid in November. Gorbachev proposed to set up a new central government that would have in it representatives from the fifteen Soviet republics. By the end of November, he proposed a new Union Treaty: a Union of Sovereign Soviet Republics, with loosened ties between each republic and the central Soviet government. In other crucial matters the Supreme Soviet had taken giant strides; on 1 October it passed a law guaranteeing freedom of worship and on 9 October legislation was brought in to set up a multiparty system.  The media too were freed from state control.

While Gorbachev was dealing with these ‘domestic’ issues, the superpowers’ commitment to peaceful collaboration was severely tested by events in the Persian Gulf region. On 2 August the army of Saddam Hussein, Iraq’s brutal Baathist dictator had overrun neighbouring Kuwait, a small but oil-rich nation to the southern end of the region. Iraq was a Soviet ally, but it had also enjoyed the tacit support of both Britain and the US in its war with Iran and had secretly been provided with arms by them while it continued to torture and oppress both its Shi’ite and Kurdish minorities, as well as many dissidents. Several thousand Russians worked in the country. The invasion and annexation of Kuwait had taken the Kremlin, the White House and the world by surprise. On 2 August, BBC journalist John Simpson, who had been an eye-witness to most of the tumultuous events of 1989-90, was on holiday in southern France. Within three hours of hearing on the radio that Saddam Hussein had invaded Kuwait, he was on a plane back to London. Not for another six months was he able to take another day off.

Above: August 1990. The Iraqi army invades and annexes Kuwait.

James Baker and Eduard Shevardnadze, who had been meeting in Irkutsk, had flown to Moscow. Baker had been anxious to ensure that the Soviet Union would stand with the United States in its condemnation of the invasion and support whatever action it eventually would take against it. Although Iraq had long been an ally of the Soviet Union, and the initial reactions of Gorbachev and some of his colleagues against an alliance, Shevardnadze stood with Baker at Vnukovo Airport the next day. Together they told the press that the two great powers were “jointly calling upon the rest of the international community to join with us in an international cut-off of all arms supplies to Iraq.” Superpower confrontation had become co-operation. For James Baker, this was the Cold War’s ending: for others, it was the first joint act of security policy in the post-Cold War world.

By the end of August, the United States had begun to despatch land, sea, and air forces to Saudi Arabia in Operation Desert Shield, to discourage Iraq from a further invasion. The UN Security Council voted the first of a dozen resolutions demanding Iraq’s withdrawal from Kuwait. However, by the end of the year, Shevardnadze had personally paid the price for the USSR’s concessions in Eastern Europe and on Germany, and support for the United States in the Persian Gulf. He had been offered up as a scapegoat by Gorbachev to the conservatives. Knowing that he was about to be kicked upstairs as vice president, he resigned and returned to his native Georgia.

In September 1990, John Simpson returned to Britain from Baghdad for a short break, if not a holiday. The first poster he saw was Thatcher Warns Evil Saddam. He commented that some of us have been writing and broadcasting about the unpleasantness of Saddam Hussein’s regime for years, while the British government regarded Iraq as a good customer for weaponry of all kinds. He went back to Baghdad after about a week and was there until November 1990. He commented:

Iraq seemed to me like a hijacked plane, being flown to an unknown destination. A man whom scarcely anyone wanted as their president was holding a gun to the pilot’s head, and the passengers and the rest of the crew were terrified to say a word or stop him. The fact that British industry, with the enthusiastic encouragement of the British government, had supplied the hijacker with his gun and the bullets for it made it all the worse. 

In November (19-21), NATO and Warsaw Pact leaders met in Paris to sign a historic treaty setting reduced levels of conventional forces in the whole of Europe (CFE) from the Atlantic to the Urals. Disarmament was no longer simply about the ‘superpowers’ controlling the numbers of nuclear warheads. Negotiations had become multi-lateral and multi-faceted.

Following a visit to Brussels by Hungarian Foreign Minister Géza Jeszenszky at the end of June (see picture above), on 16 July, József Antall had become the first Prime Minister of a Warsaw Pact country, Hungary, to meet with the Secretary-General of NATO. He met Manfred Wörner at NATO Headquarters in Brussels. From that point on, the Hungarian Ambassador in Brussels maintained permanent contact with NATO’s relevant authorities. As democratic reform began to take hold in Hungary and elsewhere in central Europe, the United States and other Western Countries agreed to help with the tremendous financial burden of restructuring the former ‘satellite’ countries and preparing them for global integration. In October 1990, Prime Minister Antall made an official working visit to Washington, during which President Bush noted the resumption of American business investment in Hungary. He asked Congress for 300 million dollars in economic aid for Eastern Europe. He also asked the IMF to extend five billion dollars in loans to Eastern European countries to compensate them for increased oil prices following Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait. Bush also announced the end of travel restrictions on Hungarian diplomats in the US, and that a Hungarian Consulate General would be opened in Los Angeles.

It was against this background that, in Paris, the sixteen member states of NATO and the six member states of the Warsaw Pact countries published a Joint Declaration on non-aggression in which they stated that they no longer considered themselves as enemies. This was immediately followed by a visit by the Secretary-General to Hungary where he held talks with President Árpád Gönz, PM József Antall and members of the government. Wörner also gave a presentation to the Foreign Relations Committee and the Defence Committee of the Hungarian National Assembly. By the end of November, Hungary had been accorded the status of associate delegation by the North Atlantic Assembly (NATO’s ‘Parliament’, meeting in London), together with other Central European countries.

On the same day, 29 November, the United Nations passed Security Resolution 678, authorising the use of force in the Gulf if Iraq was not out of Kuwait by 15 January 1991. As the Cold War ended with the former ‘satellite’ states freely placing themselves under the NATO umbrella, the conflict in the Middle East was about to go up in flames, quite literally. Together with the break-up of the Russian sphere of influence and the Balkan wars, this was to dominate the next generation of international relations.

Sources:

Jeremy Isaacs & Taylor Downing (1998), Cold War.  London: Transworld Publishers.

Rudolf Joó (ed.) (1999), Hungary: A Member of NATO. Budapest: Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Hungary.

John Simpson (1998), Strange Places, Questionable People. Basingstoke: Macmillan.

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Just as the disciples hearts were now on fire, ready to spread the gospel to the ends of the earth, so too the ruling priesthood of the Sanhedrin were possessed by an evil, brooding passion for vengeance. Their plan to blame the disappearance on the disciples, sneaking into the tomb while the soldiers slept had not worked. Who would believe that trained guards could sleep through the massive rumbling which the rolling and removal of such a huge stone would have caused? The disciples would have had to murder them as they slept in order to get away with the body. And, if the Sanhedrin themselves had removed the body and dumped it in the pit reserved for common criminals, why not reveal this now, and even produce the body now that the festival was over. The consequences of not doing so were too great for them to try to cover a plan which had backfired, as rumours were now spreading like wildfire throughout Judea about the Galilean carpenter’s disappearance and appearances.

In secret conclave, they therefore plotted and planned a campaign of unremitting persecution against the followers of ‘The Way’. They determined to exterminate all those who could not, or would not, escape their bloody hands. The chief ‘persecutor’ was Saul who wasted no time in striking down the followers of ‘The Way’ he found in Jerusalem, be they Greek, Roman or Judean. No mercy was shown and the records of that time show that the prisons were overcrowded with his victims. His first notable victim was Stephen, who had courageously led the brilliant defence of Jesus on the night of his appearance in the court of the Sanhedrin. Stephen had taken up the preaching of the Word throughout the holy city, together with Peter, John and the other disciples. Thousands were being converted every day and later, according to Luke’s account in The Acts of the Apostles, the numbers reached between three to five thousand daily. This goes against the age-old lie that the ordinary Jews were unresponsive to the gospel. The citizens of Jerusalem were the first converts, further infuriating the Sadducean Priesthood. The Sanhedrin’s ‘shock troops’ caught up with Stephen as he preached at the gate still bearing his name, and stoned him to death with Saul looking on.

So fierce was Saul’s vindictive purge that he wrought havoc within the Church at Jerusalem and throughout Judea. Neither was it contained within the boundaries of the semi-autonomous province. Illegally, he hounded out the devotees of ‘The Way’ in the other Jewish territories under direct Roman rule. Coming from Tarsus, Saul had Roman citizenship and, as Pilate had done, the Romans continued to wash their hands of the Sanhedrin’s hatred, no doubt because they felt Saul was doing them a service too, ridding them of an undesirable virulent new religion which was spreading throughout the Jewish enclaves and communities within their Empire. Throughout this reign of terror Joseph of Arimathea remained a fearless protector of the disciples, both men and women. His position on the Sanhedrin and his status as a Roman official meant that Saul’s fury, which otherwise knew no bounds, could not touch him personally or those whom he defended with his person. However, within four years of Jesus’ death and resurrection, the first Christians were scattered out of Jerusalem and Judea. There is little doubt that Joseph’s ships carried numerous of them, as refugees, to safety in other lands. Joseph used his wealth to create an underground network which could evade Saul’s men. He was probably helped in this by converts in the Roman Army in Palestine, like Cornelius, an officer in the Italian Regiment stationed in Caesarea in the North, the first recorded foreigner, or ‘gentile’ to become a Christian. Peter was at Joppa, the port to the south of Caesarea, where there was a strong Christian community, possibly helped by Joseph, who had ships there, and the port from which many of the Judean Christians could make their escape on one of them. It was in Caesarea that Peter began his mission to the gentiles, converting and baptising Captain Cornelius, his relatives and friends, to the amazement of the Judean Christians accompanying him from Joppa (Acts 10 vv 1-48).

Even the hardened Roman soldiers in Palestine were shocked by the atrocities carried out in the name of the Sanhedrin. The Romans later followed the example set by these ‘state’ terrorists, not only persecuting Christians, but also turning their attention to the Jews themselves. Saul himself, after he was converted on the road to Damascus, eventually met a cruel death at the hands of his Roman captors, despite the protection he had enjoyed as a citizen of Rome, and which had allowed him to continue to lead the scattered Christian communities from his prison cell with the power of his pen. From his imprisonment, Paul reflected on what the love of Jesus had driven him to do:

‘Let me tell you what I’ve had to face. I know it’s silly for me to talk like this, but here’s the list. I’ve been beaten up more times than I can remember, been in more than one prison, and faced death more than once. Five times I’ve been thrashed by a Jewish court to within an inch of my life; three times I’ve been beaten with rods by city magistrates; and I once was nearly stoned to death. I’ve been shipwrecked three times; and once, I was adrift, out of sight of land, for twenty-four hours. I don’t know how many roads I’ve tramped. I’ve faced bandits; I’ve been attacked by fellow-countrymen and by foreigners. I’ve met danger in city streets and on lonely country roads and out in the open sea.’ (2 Corinthians 11 vv 23-26)

We know something of what happened to Peter, Paul, Andrew, and the gospel-writers, but very little about the other apostles. They are ‘the lost disciples’, including two of the most outstanding characters, Joseph of Arimathea and Mary, the mother of Jesus. The pages close on them in 36 A.D., the year when many of the Palestinian Christians were driven into permanent exile. Thirty-five years later the iron-clad fist of the Roman Empire destroyed the holy city and dispersed the remaining Christians in Judea, together with the Judeans as a whole. The temple was reduced to rubble, so that while Christianity had its birth in the Holy Land, it did not continue to grow to convert the world from that root, but, as Jesus had promised the Greeks on Palm Sunday, from the scattered seeds around their world. It flourished in far-flung lands to which the apostles were sent as missionaries by Paul, Barnabas and Timothy, and not just in the centre of the Empire which it took another three centuries to convert. In the meantime, the Roman rulers remained the greatest persecutors of the Christian Gospel. How did the Church continue to grow in the face of such oppression? This question deepens the mystery that revolves around ‘the Lost Disciples’, though they were not, of course, lost to their leader.

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