THE FOUNDATIONS OF BRITISH POLICY
TO seek peace and ensue it is the basic principle of British foreign policy. Any tendency which this fact may engender towards national self-applause or gestures of moral superiority over less enlightened peoples will, however, quickly be checked by two reflections. In the first place, the explanation—or at any rate one amply sufficient explanation—is-as; simple as the fact itself. There is no British ambition which could be realised, and no British interest which could be served, by the most successful or least costly of wars. Indulgence in the dangerous pleasures of economic self-sufficiency has not altered the fact that Great Britain, far more than any other country in the world, is dependent for her well-being on inter- national trade, of which peace and goodwill among the nations is an indispensable condition. Secondly, there is the sobering shadow of our enormous and growing armaments bill. Armaments are, however little we may like to face the fact, made to be used; and Mr. Eden in his garden-party speech last Saturday seized the occasion to insist, in ,terms which had evidently been well meditated, that there is nothing self-denying about our pacificism. " Nobody should imagine," he said, " because we in Great Britain wish passionately. for peace, that that fact presents an opportunity for inducing us to abandon direct and vital British interests as the price of peace." The issue must be faced. Recent events have rendered obsolete the formula which has in the past so often saved us from the necessity of clear thinking—the assertion that we are ready to fight for " collective security " or for the League of Nations. It is now plain that that readiness, in . so far as ,it exists, both in this and in other countries, is so hedged about . with reservations, conditions and restrictions as to be an altogether unreliable touchstone of policy in moments of crisis.
During. the next few weeks prominent public men, representing different political parties or no party at all, will state in the . columns of The Spectator their views on the question what, in the last resort, Britain should fight for. But before looking into the future and examining the ideals of British policy advocated by various shades of contemporary opinion, it may be fitting to pause and consider what British policy has been during- the past few months, and what it is at the present moment. What are the " direct and vital British interests " which the Government, whose spokesman Mr. Eden is, are prepared to defend even alt the cost of peace ? .
It is common ground for all except the pacifists— whose increasing influence in . this country is a note7 worthy phenomenon—that defence of British terri- tory, including the areas under British .mandate, is such an interest. This admission will carry us a ,good deal further than .appears at first sight. Naval and military opinion is presumably as emphatic as ever on the necessity of the Suez Canal for our communica-. tions, if our ovcrsea possessions are to be defended ; and our vital interests therefore comprise both the independence and integrity of Egypt and the freedom of the Mediterranean. The Egyptian treaty negotia, tions, which are still in progress, ;give reason to hope that the first of these interests will soon be secured on a permanent basis, and that the intermittent friction of the last fifteen years, due to the anomalous nature • of our position in Egypt, will be finally removed. The second of these interests—the freedom of the Mediterranean—was perhaps the one which Mr; - Eden had More particularly in mind when he spoke last Saturday. One of the many unhappy legacies of the defeat of Abyssinia and the League by Signor Mussolini was a marked decline in BritiSh prestige in the Eastern Mediterranean. Mr. Eden's firm declaration at Geneva that the naval under- takings, given by Great Britain in the sanctions period to Jugoslavia, Greece and Turkey, still remain in force did something to mitigate the impression that Great Britain must in future take second place as a Mediterranean -power. His Words on Saturday will no doubt be -carefully-noted in the same quarters. Meanwhile, it may be 'observed that the agreement signed last Monday at Montreux relieves us of one specific commitment in the Mediterranean—the obli- gation, shared with the other signatories of the 1923 Convention, to keep open the Straits. That is certainly not, in the twentieth century, an interest worth preserving if peace is at stake.
So far, the present Government's conception of British interests worth fighting for is straightforward enough, and even those who disagree with it have no doubt what it is. But when we turn to the European situation, all is confusion. The failure of the Dis- armament Conference with its inevitable consequence, the rearmament of Germany, seems to have struck British statesmanship with a paralysis from which it has not yet recovered. When Herr Hitler repudiated the military clauses of the Versailles Treaty, the British Government first dispatched Sir John Simon to Berlin for a friendly conversation, then sent Mr. MacDonald and Sir John Simon to Stresa and Geneva to condemn Germany's action and drop a broad hint of sanctions next time, and finally concluded the. AnglorGerman - Naval Agreement-L-- all this within three months. Nor have the present Prime Minister and Secretary. of State for Foreign Affairs been innocent of the same diversity of voices. Mr. Eden has in the past done lip-service to M. Litvinov's formula of the indivisibility of peace. Abyssinia was the answer. Mr. Baldwin found one of his happy and telling phrases when he spoke of the British frontier on the Rhine. The answer came on March 7th, when the British . Government showed that they scarcely took even an academic interest in the demilitarised zone on the west bank of the Rhine. ,. Successive British Ministers have declared that any. threat - to the Low Countries and • Northern France is a threat to Britain herself. Here there is and can be no answer. • Here, at any rate, we reach the minimum definition, sanctioned by the tradition of two centuries, of those " direct and vital British interests in Europe " which the present British Government—and indeed any British Government—, must defend by force of arms. This, too, may have been in Mr. Eden's mind.when he spoke on Saturday.
Broadly speaking, therefore, the policy for which Great Britain stands in Europe at the present moment is Locarno, minus the demilitarised . zone, and negotiations with Germany, in Mr. Eden's words, " on terms of complete equality." The full-dress meeting. of British, French and Belgian Ministers which, as these lines are being written, is about to . assemble in London, has—we are officially given to understand—for its main purpose to make arrange- ments for tt five-Power Conference in September. If it achieves this purpose, and refrains from com- mitting itself to one of those embarrassed communiques which leave the world to speculate what the British Government really wants, it will have made a modest contribution to the clarification of British foreign policy.
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