REVIEW OF BOOKS
Robert Skidelsky on Hitler and 'high politics'
Mr Maurice Cowling is high priest of a school of political history which concentrates on what it calls High Politics. According to this school, issues of public policy can best be understood as instruments in political conflict. The Impact of Hitler is about Hitler's impact on British politics, not on British security or the Empire. Foreign policy "became the form that party conflict took". It might have been unemployment or Protection. Indeed Mr Cowling implies that one reason party conflict was about Hitler and not about unemployment was that no one had anything very convincing to.•-say about unemployment. • The context of British High Politics, familiar from Mr Cowling's previous books, is the survival problem of the Conservative Party. This arises from the fact that the Conservatives are a natural minority in a society dominated by class conflict. The perennial problem of Conservatism is thus to convert this "natural" minority into an "unnatural" majority. Claims to Conservative leadership have to be staked in terms of themes capable of breaking up the anti-Tory majority. This was the circuit into which foreign policy was plugged in the 'thirties. Once foreign policy became central, or could be made central, the problem was which foreign policy — appeasement or resistance — could best sustain the dominating position — "governing centrality" Mr Cowling calls it — which the Conservatives had so surprisingly won in 1931.
The book opens with Baldwin's search for a "theme" to repair the "electoral dilapidation" suffered by the National Government in the by-elections of 1934. Abyssinia and the Peace Ballot provided it. Hoare's strong speech at Geneva on September 17, 1935, "struck oil in liberal areas where the Conservative Party felt vulnerable and where-itsmanagers wished to generate suppOrt". Baldwin's successful 1935 electoral theme was to link up the Peace Movement with Collective Security. The process of tailoring foreign policy to the requirements of the Conservative Party had begun. But in Baldwin's theme there was a dangerous snag. Suppose Collective Security meant not Peace but War? With his "midsummer of madness" speech of June 10,
1936, Neville Chamberlain identified himself with Peace against Collective Security, leaving the alternative position in the hands of the political Outs, including those of the Tory party. The central political conflict in the later .'thirties is thus between Chamberlain's attempt
to fuseImperical Isolation with the Peace
Movement and the Churchill/Eden attempt to construct an alternative coalition of moderate Labour, Liberal and liberal Tory round Collec tive Security and resistance to dictators. Chamberlain achieved a dominating position at Munich. Thereafter, Hitler undermined his credibility. This convinced Halifax, for whom Conservatism was a "porous container" which had to be filled with liberaldecency, that Chamberlain's policy would destroy the Conservative Party. To save himself, Chamberlain adopted the war policy of his critics in the expectation that war would never have to be fought, even if it had to be declared. It was the destruction of this assumption in Scandinavia early in 1940 which eliminated Chamberlain, and enabled the Tory Party, rather than the Labour Party, to superintend the great historic shift to the Left which occurred in the war years. Without doubt, this is a highly stimulating, original, and intelligent approach to the problems of the 'thirties. Historians are not very good at discussing issues in terms of politics, partly because the documents they rely on are adept at concealing `political' motivations, partly because, not themselves being actively involved in managing power, they tend to minimise its importance for making policy. Mr Cowling's approach is doubly illuminated when applied to the 'thirties since it takes us one stage further still from uncritical acceptance of the Churchill line, which until_quite recently provided a complete substitute for serious historical analysis. I like, too, his insistence on the Conservative strategy of preserving the social structure "by talking about something else". This seems to be to embody a profound truth about the Conservative Party, derived from the logic of its situation. In general, it is refreshing to have a cool and cynical eye cast on democratic myth making; and to be reminded that it is not only dictatorships that are liable to get involved in foreign conflicts to divert people's attention from domestic difficulties. Having said this, there remain serious criticisms.
First, and most obviously, Mr Cowling's view of issues as instrumental works much better for some groups than others. It is probably better for the Conservative Party than the Labour Party (Mr Wilson not -withstanding); it is certainly better for the Outs than for the Ins. To treat all political history under the rubric of High Politics is, therefore, at best a partial view, a corrective to taking what politicians say at face value, but far too limited even in its view of politicians' motivation to offer a generally valid model. It is by no means clear how well it
works even for the 'thirties' leading political actor, Neville Chamberlain. Although Mr Cowling does the best he can with Chamberlain's political skill in capturing the "peace position", he does not seriously dispute the revisionist view that C-hamberlain's foreign policy was dictated by `objective' factors. But his method makes it impossible to deal with those factors except as externalities.
Chamberlain's foreign policy was a desperate attempt to balance the accumulating weaknesses of a declining power — strategic, military, economic and moral weaknesses — against the traditional conception of Britain as upholder of the European balance and its associated freedoms which ran right through the political system. The attempt to do this produced a necessary illusion: that Hitler could be satisfied without altering the balance of power. The occupation of Prague destroyed Chamberlain's policy not because it showed that Hitler wanted world domination, but because it contradicted what Chamberlain had said Hitler wanted. Mr Cowling's methods do little to unravel the Chamberlain enigma. He is clearly by far the ablest and most interesting of the senior governmental figures of the 'thirties. Perhaps his chief offence was not that he failed to pursue a readily.available alternative foreign policy (there was none), but that he pursued with such confidence and self-righteousness a policy which was almost bound to end in disaster.
A second question concerns evidence. One can perhaps talk about groups or nations in terms of logic of situations. But when one is talking about individual motives one needs evidence. Eden's "synthetic jacobinism" (an excellent phrase) is, I think, amply documented here, as it was by Oliver Harvey. But where is the evidence for the view that Churchill took up the anti-dictator cr.usade to get back to the "centre of the scene"? Isn't it just as plausible to say that he genuinely believed in the balance of power; and that he played politics in order to win policies rather than the other way round? Again, where is the evidence for saying that Halifax turned to obstructing Hitler "because Labour could not otherwise be resisted"? I have not found it in the book. Mr Cowling writes that this view came to "embody Conservative wisdom". Yet he actually says very little about Conservative sentiment and nothing to explain how Chamberlain commanded such passionate support right to the end. Mr Cowling prefers to concentrate on exotics and oddballs. More 'low politics' would have helped.
His problems of establishing motivation is compounded by the way he uses evidence. He has been through a splended collection of private papers (the secondary material is much less impressive), but rarely stays long enough with a subject or a document either to establish the point he is making or to bring out the evidence supporting it. The book is in fact extremely wearying to read, both on account of its literary brutalities, and its lack of intellectual shape. It can also be amazingly inaccurate, as though Mr Cowling knows the politics of the period much better than its history. Perhaps the publishers are prudent to ask £15.00 for it. One dreads to think of the cost of his next promised work, The Impact of Inflation.
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