The Suez Crisis: 50 years on

The Suez Crisis - www.navyphotos.co.uk

30 June 2006

The 1956 Suez Crisis revealed the fragility of Britain’s claim to be seen as amongst the first rank of world powers after the Second World War, and demonstrated the limits of its ability to act independently and without prejudice in matters of foreign policy. By the time that British paratroopers landed at Port Said on 5 November 1956 it had become a diplomatic, military, economic and moral crisis that delivered a psychological shock not just to the Prime Minister, Anthony Eden, and his Government, but to the nation at large.  As Eden noted soon afterwards, “Suez had not so much changed our fortunes as revealed realities.”

The similarities between the recent war in Iraq and the Suez Crisis of 1956 are striking. In both cases the marginalising of the United Nations was for many a shocking example of the damaging lengths to which the British Government in collusion with its allies was prepared to go in pursuit of ‘regime change’. The forceful removal from power of Gamal Abdel Nasser in Egypt and Sadam Hussain in Iraq became imperatives to action when these charismatic, but problematic, Arab leaders stood in the way of key strategic interests. At home, British public opinion was divided as never before on the justification for war with the integrity of the Government, and the Prime Minister in particular, called into question.

While the current British policy towards Iraq and the Middle East has caused major problems for the Government, in 1956 military action against Egypt nearly brought it down:
• What role was played by British intelligence in the run up to the Crisis and did the chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee keep the JIC in the dark as to what was really going on during the final preparations for action?
• Did the electoral ambitions of the US President really influence his decision to force Britain into a humiliating climb-down over Suez, or did the most significant rift in UK/US relations in the Twentieth Century have more to do with the underlying and enduring differences between their plans for the Middle East?
• With the economy running out of control, did the Chancellor of the Exchequer inflate fiscal concerns as a means of undermining and ousting the man whose job he wanted – the Prime Minister?
• Did the British Government’s inability to understand the Middle East in anything other than in own strategic terms, doom its policy from the start?

Leading academics and broadcasters answered these questions at a one day colloquium held at Queen Mary, University of London on 29 June 2006.

Sessions:

Session One: Suez: A Wider Perspective
Speakers: Frédérique Schillo, Institute of Political Sciences, Paris  
Chair:  Dr Saul Kelly, King’s College London 

The story of the Suez Crisis is very much determined by the national perspectives from which it is viewed.  This session will attempt to knit into the established British historiography of the Suez Crisis - Israeli, French and Egyptian analyses of it - both in terms of the events of 1956 and the wider context of Arab/Israeli relations and the geopolitical environment in which they were played out.

Session Two: Intelligence, Propaganda and Political Warfare
Speakers: Professor Scott Lucas, University of Birmingham
Dr Philip Davies, Brunel University
Alban Webb, Queen Mary, University of London
Chair:  Brian Hanrahan, BBC Diplomatic Editor

British involvement in the near and Middle East was long established by 1956 and so too were the activities of its intelligence agencies.  From plots to remove Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser from power, to psychological and political warfare operations aimed at the Egyptian nation, Britain employed a range of tactics to achieve its regional objectives.  Yet despite the chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee, Sir Patrick Dean, signing the Sèvre protocol on behalf of the British Government – the document that bound Britain, France and Israel to the secret agreement to start a war in Egypt with the aim of recapturing the Suez Canal Zone - it would seem that Britain’s central intelligence machinery was bypassed and its expertise ignored on the grounds of political expediency.

This session will look at the involvement of the British intelligence agencies in the Middle East after the Second World War and examine their activities in relation to Egypt and the Suez Canal in the run up to 1956 and during the Crisis, as well as analysing other means of persuasion in the region available to British policy makers.

Session Three: The Political Economy of a Crisis
Speakers: Dr Nigel Ashton, LSE
Dr Lewis Johnman, Westminster University  
Chair:  Dr James Ellison, Queen Mary, University of London

The Suez Crisis resulted in the resignation of the Conservative Prime Minister, Anthony Eden, a break-down in relations between Britain and America and a near crippling of sterling.  This session examines the factors behind these outcomes and analyses the political, diplomatic and economic influences on the British Government’s ability, or lack of, to manage the Crisis.

Session three followed by Professor Peter Hennessy in conversation with Keith Kyle

Ends

Notes to Editors:

Queen Mary, University of London

Queen Mary, University of London is one of the UK's leading research-focused higher education institutions with some 15,000 undergraduate and postgraduate students.

Amongst the largest of the colleges of the University of London, Queen Mary’s 3,000 staff deliver world class degree programmes and research across 21 academic departments and institutes, within three sectors: Science and Engineering; Humanities, Social Sciences and Laws; and the School of Medicine and Dentistry.

Queen Mary is ranked 11th in the UK according to the Guardian analysis of the 2008 Research Assessment Exercise, and has been described as ‘the biggest star among the research-intensive institutions’ by the Times Higher Education.

The College has a strong international reputation, with around 20 per cent of students coming from over 100 countries.

Queen Mary has an annual turnover of £220 million, research income worth £61 million, and generates employment and output worth £600 million to the UK economy each year.

Queen Mary, as a member of the 1994 Group of research-focused universities, has made a strategic commitment to the highest quality of research, but also to the best possible educational, cultural and social experience for its students. The College is unique amongst London's universities in being able to offer a completely integrated residential campus, with a 2,000-bed award-winning Student Village on its Mile End campus.

Speakers

Professor Peter Hennessy FBA
Queen Mary, University of London

Professor Peter Hennessy is Attlee Professor of Contemporary British History at Queen Mary, University of London.  Before joining Queen Mary’s Department of History in 1992, he was a journalist for twenty years with spells on The Times as a leader writer and Whitehall Correspondent, the Financial Times as its Lobby Correspondent at Westminster, and The Economist.  He was a regular presenter of the BBC Radio 4 Analysis programme from 1987 to 1992.  In 1986 he was a co-founder of the Institute of Contemporary British History.  His books include Cabinet (1986), Whitehall (1989), Never Again: Britain 1945-51 (1992), The Hidden Wiring: Unearthing the British Constitution (1995), The Prime Minister: The Office and Its Holders since 1945 (2000), and The Secret State: Whitehall and the Cold War (2002).  He is currently working on Having it so Good: Britain 1951-64.

Dr Saul Kelly
Kings College London

Dr Saul Kelly joined the Defence Studies Department in September 2001. He is currently working on a study of the role of the British Embassy in Washington in Anglo-American relations, as well as an account of the intelligence war in the Middle East from 1939-45. He will also be involved in a joint collection of essays on the Mediterranean and the origins of the Cold War. His publications include: Ed. with A. Gorst, Whitehall and the Suez Crisis (Frank Cass, 2000); Cold War in the Desert (Macmillan, 2000); with C. Douglas-Home, The British Monarchy in the Twentieth Century (Claridge Press, 2000) and The Hunt for Zerzura (John Murray, 2002).

Professor Scott Lucas
Birmingham University

Scott Lucas is Professor of American Studies at the University of Birmingham. He is the author of numerous books and articles on aspects of Suez, including Divided We Stand: Britain, the US, and the Suez Crisis. He thought he had escaped Suez with works such as Freedom's War: The US Crusade against the Soviet Union, 1945-1956; George Orwell: Life and Times; and The Betrayal of Dissent: Beyond Orwell, Hitchens, and the New American Century and his current project, a re-interpretation of US foreign policy from the Cold War on the War of Terror. He finds, however, that the Crisis never lets go - he is currently developing a documentary for Radio 4 and working with the organisers of a major French conference on Suez.

Dr Philip Davies
Brunel University

Dr Philip Davies is a political sociologist who specialises in the institutional development of national intelligence agencies and communities.  With Professor Anthony Glees, he set up the Centre for Intelligence and Security Studies (BCISS) in late 2003. His current research project is a comparative study of British and American intelligence institutions to be published by Greenwood Press, funded by a Leverhulme Research Fellowship. Dr Davies has also published extensively on emerging intelligence and security trends such as information warfare and infrastructural security. His publications include: MI6 and the Machinery of Spying (Routledge, 2004) and The British Secret Services (ABC-Clio, 1996).

Alban Webb
Queen Mary, University of London

Alban Webb is the BBC Austen Kark Memorial Scholar at the Department of History, Queen Mary. He is a PhD student under the supervision of Professor Peter Hennessy and is writing a history of the BBC World Service during the Cold War. His research interests include: Cold War cultural diplomacy, Britain’s strategic nuclear deterrent and post-war civil defence plans. His forthcoming publication is: Auntie Goes to War Again: The BBC External Services, the Foreign Office and the early Cold War, Media History Journal (2006)

Brian Hanrahan
BBC Diplomatic Editor

Brian Hanrahan has been a BBC foreign correspondent for 20 years. He was the BBC correspondent during the Falklands War and covered Asia from a base in Hong Kong during the 1980s - observing the reforms of Deng Xioping in China, the assassination of Mrs Ghandi and the succession of her son as Indian Prime Minister. He moved to Moscow when Mikhail Gorbachev became the Soviet leader and reported on the country's struggle to reform.
In 1989 he was present in Tiananmen Square, he was in Poland for the installation of the first non-communist government in Eastern Europe and at the fall of the Berlin Wall and the Romanian revolution. Since then he has become a diplomatic correspondent - interpreting international affairs from London and travelling the world, particularly during the Balkan Wars and the Middle East peace process. He is currently one of the presenters of The World, the BBC's daily current affairs programme, which is transmitted internationally on BBC World television and domestically on BBC Four.

Dr James Ellison

Dr James Ellison’s research interests focus on the history of Britain’s relationships with Europe and the United States after 1945 and, more widely, on the history of the Cold War and European integration. He is a member of the editorial board of the journal Contemporary British History, and a co-convenor of the International History Seminar at the Institute of Historical Research, London. His publications include: Threatening Europe: Britain and the Creation of the European Community, 1955-58 (Macmillan, 2000), Defeating the General: Anglo-American Relations, Europe and the NATO Crisis of 1966, Cold War History, Vol.6, No.1 (2006), Britain and Europe, Paul Addison and Harriet Jones (eds), Blackwell Companion to Contemporary Britain: 1939-2000 (Blackwell, 2005). His forthcoming publication is: Dealing with de Gaulle: Anglo-American Relations, the Atlantic Alliance and Europe, 1963-1969.

Dr Nigel J Ashton
LSE

Dr Nigel J Ashton is Senior Lecturer in International History at the London School of Economics and Political Science. He is the author of Eisenhower, Macmillan and the Problem of Nasser: Anglo-American Relations and Arab Nationalism, 1955-59 (Palgrave, 1996), and Kennedy, Macmillan and the Cold War: The Irony of Interdependence (Palgrave, 2002). The latter study won the 2003 Cambridge Donner Foundation book prize, which recognises excellence in the advancement of scholarly understanding of transatlantic relations. He is currently working on a new book, Contested Destiny: The Life of King Hussein of Jordan, which is due to be published by Yale University Press during 2007-8.

Dr Lewis Johnman
Westminster University

Dr Lewis Johnman is the Principal Lecturer in the School of Social Policy & Policy Sciences at the University of Westminster. His research focuses on Twentieth Century British and international economic history and on British business, industrial and maritime history. His publications include: British Shipbuilding and the state since 1918: A political economy in decline (University of Exeter Press, 2002), Playing the role of a Cassandra: Sir Gerald Fitzmaurice, senior legal adviser to the Foreign Office, Saul Kelly and Anthony Gorst (ed.) Whitehall and the Suez Crisis (Cass, 1999), Opportunity Knocks: Macmillan and the Treasury, 1955-57, Richard Aldous and Sabine Lee (ed.) and Harold Macmillan: Aspects of a political life (Macmillan, 1999).

Keith Kyle

Keith Kyle is the author of the highly respected and influential Suez (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1991). Its publication heralded a renaissance in research on the subject based on new and ongoing document releases and increasing access to official records. His other publications include: Suez: Britain’s end of empire in the Middle East (IB Taurus, 2003), The Mandarin’s Mandarin: Sir Norman Brook, Secretary of the Cabinet, Saul Kelly and Anthony Gorst (ed.) Whitehall and the Suez Crisis (Cass, 1999) and The Politics and Independence of Kenya, Contemporary British History, Vol.11, No.4 (1997).

The Mile End Group

The Mile End Group (MEG) was established at Queen Mary in 2003 by postgraduate students under Professor Peter Hennessy.  It takes the form of a seminar series, blending both postgraduate students' current research findings and outside luminaries' personal reflections.  The seminars concentrate on issues concerning contemporary British history, with particular emphasis on politics and Whitehall past and present.

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