October 14, 2008

Reviewed by Warren F. Kimball

CHURCHILL AS PEACEMAKER, edited by James W. Muller, Cambridge & New York: Cambridge University Press with the Wilson and Churchill Centers, 344 pages, $59.95. FH New Book Service price $45

Churchill As Peacemaker – the title suggests that these essays have taken a discrete chunk of Winston Churchill and put it under a microscope. Fortunately, that is not the case. Churchill the relentless, ebullient, engaged geopolitician is not that easily bottled or buried. This collection of essays, taken from papers prepared for the First Churchill Center Symposium in 1994, might better be titled Churchill and the Politics of Empire.

Certainly there are essays for those who view Churchill as someone who transcended his role as a British political leader to become an important political thinker, perhaps philosopher. “He was never simply a partisan for his own country and its way of life,” writes one contributor. (116) There is even a defense of Churchill’s (and Britain’s) commitment to “the Peaceful Purposes of Empire,” a curious sort of Nietzschean argument that the promotion of “political and cultural excellence” is the object of empire. (81) As unpersuasive as I find such arguments, they offer useful pieces in the construction of an intellectual biography.

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But the bulk of the essays adopt, in one form or another, the position so well laid out by Paul Addison of the University of Edinburgh in his essay on Churchill and the Irish question:

More than any other British statesman of his time, Churchill saw the world in terms of conflicts that had to be confronted and resolved; if in his view there was no alternative, he was prepared to resolve them by force or the threat of force. (186)

Perhaps the way to read this book, which any Churchill scholar will find fascinating, is to begin with Manfred Weidhorn’s intriguing attempt to reconcile Churchill the warlord (not “warmonger”) with Churchill the peacemaker. The author, ever aware of his subject’s “Herculean efforts to cope with the challenges presented by the two bloodiest tyrants in history,” finds that Churchill’s “realism” ensured that the “sentimental, naive peace lover” would be set aside for the practical, hard-nosed man of the world albeit a British world, I might add. (41, 53) That theme of practicality (invariably mislabeled “realism”) characterizes most of the other essays, on subjects as varied as Churchill’s life (Churchill and…Zionism, Ireland, South Africa, the aftermath of World War I). Even Martin Gilbert’s sad narrative of Churchill’s ineffectualness in trying to arrange a summit between himself, Stalin’s successors, and Eisenhower presents the Englishman as the practical (realistic) idealist. Almost invariably, Churchill appears as a British rather than a transnational statesman, which is, after all, what Crown and Parliament (and Churchill) required.

But what about Churchill-as-Realist? Was he without ideas or ideals? Did he not have strong views of how society should be structured (what Marx called a political economy)? Was he wrong in dismissing idealism (if he did)? Did he assume that the “realism” of the European leaders whatever their mistakes was the only rational way to make peace?

Answering such questions requires more than a man’s words as evidence, especially with a man of action like Churchill. In fact, while he thought about peace (and war) and frequently observed the making of peace (and war), he had his own chances to “make” peace only twice in his long career. One he either rejected or failed to perceive when, amidst the hot house atmosphere of the Second World War, he had the opportunity to lead Britain toward peaceful and positive devolution of the empire. The very concept proved unthinkable for him and instead he became an obstacle to the inevitable.

But, during World War II, he did seize his other opportunity to play the role of peacemaker. Churchill himself claimed that all his life before he became Prime Minister in 1940 had been but a preparation for that conflict. He evaded and avoided structured planning for peace, but no one expended more energy than he in trying to construct a settlement that would meet the needs and hopes of both Britain and, necessarily, the other Great Powers. Yet the story of that effort is absent from this collection, beyond a few general references in essays written on other subjects.

To understand the essential Churchill on making peace we must examine his actions; examine what he did during the Second World War when he was finally a peacemaker rather than a minor player or an historical observer. A few examples of issues to examine:

1. During World War II, as in 1919, Churchill was unable and often unwilling to choose between overwhelming force and a balance of power (cordon sanitaire) to deal with what he called the Bolsheviks;

2. He firmly supported a great power settlement imposed, however gently, upon the so-called lesser states (although he occasionally seemed to realize that Britain was in danger of being relegated to that “lesser state” status something that is happening only now, with the end of the cold war and the increasing insignificance of being an atomic power);

3. What Churchill liked and recommended what made him comfortable was a kind of narrow, geopolitical Parker Brothers Monopoly board game approach to a peace settlement, whether at Paris in 1919, or in Moscow in October 1944 with his percentages proposal to Stalin.

4. Then there is the question of Wilson’s ghost. History cannot repeat, but it surely imitates, parodies, and parallels itself. Woodrow Wilson initially offered the world (that is, Europe) a choice between the old order, which bred war and violent revolution, and a different way: a choice between reaction, as he called it, and liberalism. With two of the great symbols of the old order, the emperors of Germany and Austria-Hungary, gone from the scene, only America’s erstwhile allies, Britain and France, remained to occupy the “reactionary” right. But the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution presented a third, frightening, seductive option. Instead of moderate, progressive change that permitted the oppressors (entrepreneurs) to retain some if not all of the fruits of their works; in lieu of progressive change that did not throw the baby out with the bath water; rather than moderate reform that harnessed the benefits of modern industrialism to serve the majority (phrasing reminiscent of the 1912 American presidential campaign); why not, asked the Bolsheviks, turn society upside down? Why not have change from the bottom up? Hoping to forestall both extremes, Wilson’s Fourteen Points were aimed as much at Lenin as they were at Clemenceau.

By the time of the Teheran conference twenty-five years later, that trio of choices had reappeared, though in somewhat camouflaged form. Hitler was sui generis neither reaction nor revolution or perhaps a mix of both. Anyway, he was about to disappear. For the postwar world, reaction took the form of Britain, its empire, and European colonialism. (That image was symbolic as much as real, but before snorts of dismissal are heard, remember that Algeria, Vietnam, and the fifty years of conflict in Africa after World War II are attributable, at least in significant part, to European colonialism, the legacy of which is far from benign.) Liberalism the middle way, the golden mean remained seated (at least in Roosevelt’s mind) in the United States.

Revolution still resided in Moscow, even if the Soviet regime was deeply soiled by the brutality of everything from the purges to the persecution of any and all opponents of collectivism. That presence became overwhelming as the Soviet Union first survived, then turned back the German onslaught, and then began to occupy eastern Europe. More frightening, revolution could spread by the very political means that Roosevelt and Churchill professed to support free elections. The initial round of elections in liberated and occupied nations after the war could well bring to power the left socialists and communists.

Churchill faced such issues at a time when he had some influence on their outcome, and without a full discussion of how he thought and acted, the picture of him as peacemaker is incomplete. Consider this my recommendation for the next Churchill Center symposium and book. In the meantime, this is a serious, worthwhile discussion of the prologue (and a little of the aftermath) to Churchill as Peacemaker.