All at Sea
BY ALAN BULLOCK NO department of State in our time has been more exposed to criticism than the Foreign Office. The heads of the indictment are familiar enough, have been indeed since John Bright and the Radicals first gave them currency a century ago. The case for the defence, however, has largely gone by default or been presented in such con- ventional terms that it has failed to carry conviction. A volume of memoirs* by a man who has served in the Diplomatic Service and Foreign Office for thirty-four years, held many of the key posts and ended his career as Permanent Under- Secretary is bound, therefore, to raise expectations.
In his preface Lord Strang does everything he can to discourage such expectations. He disclaims any intention of disclosure. Far from chafing under the restrictions of the Official Secrets Acts, 'their influence,' he writes, 'has been in line with my own inclination.' This is to be neither a full- dress autobiography nor even a continuous narrative of his public career. By the time I had finished reading these cautionary sentences, I began to wonder why the author had ever written a book at all.
Nor does a first inspection of the book's contents do much to revive the reader's expectations. The first twenty-five years of the author's life are dealt with in thirty pages, his thirty- four years' service in even less. The remainder of the book is taken up with the discussion of four set pieces of diplomatic negotiation, three briefly described journeys, a chapter on the duties of a permanent under-secretary and a portrait of Ernest Bevin as Foreign Secretary.
However, reviewers who confine their attention to preface, table of contents and index are notoriously liable to be misled. On a second reading, I found my respect for the author's quality of mind and judgement steadily growing. Lord Strang avoids the firework display of more brilliant accounts of these years; he prefers to feel his way towards a conclusion rather than to sweep it up into an epigram, but he is free from the historian's vices of rationalisation and over-simplification.
Of course, Lord Strang had the advantage of being there, but this is not a decisive advantage. After the war Admiral Leahy published a book with the title I Was There of which the obvious criticism was that nobody would have thought so from what he had written. Lord Strang was not only there, but he has used the interval since the events he recounts to reflect. It is this capacity for disinterested reflection, uncon- cerned with the justification of his own or other people's actions, which gives his book a quality not always found in political memoirs.
The two chapters certain to arouse most interest are those which deal with Czechoslovakia in 1938 and the Moscow negotiations of 1939.
Lord Strang's account of Munich and the negotiations lead- ing up to it offer cold comfort to those who still defend the policy of appeasement. A Prime Minister, he insists, has the right and the duty to intervene in foreign policy, but Mr. Chamberlain misjudged both the character of the man with whom he had to deal and the real issue at stake. This was not the grievances of the Sudeten Germans, but Hitler's foreign policy and the balance of power in Europe. But the fault went deeper than this
In the later nineteenth century, the United Kingdom had a foreign policy suited to her position in the world and to the character of the world in which she lived. . . . The United Kingdom has since 1945 evolved another foreign policy, very different from the old, but suited to our relative decline in power. . In the inter-war years, however, no clear policy was framed. . . . Our position in the world had altered for the worse and we did not seem to recognise this in our actions. We behaved as though we could play an effective part in international affairs as a kind of umpire without providing ourselves with the necessary arms and without entering into firm commitments.
Could Czechoslovakia have been saved, if Britain and France had sought the co-operation of the Soviet Union? Lord Strang is sceptical but he goes on to ask why the attempt was not made, for surely the grounds were as compelling in 1938 as in 1939 'The obstacle was that the Western Powers thought in 1938 that it was a better and more hopeful policy to try to satisfy Germany than to call in the Soviet Union against her ' After Prague British policy was reversed and Mr. William Strang (as he then was) was sent to Moscow to reach a belated * HOME AND ABROAD. By Lord Strang. (Andre Deutsch, 21s.) agreement with the Russians. He reconstructs the negotiations in detail, pointing out that they broke down, not on the question of the Baltic States, but on Poland. The British Government in fact had never faced up to the problem of how they were to give military assistance either to Russia or for that matter to Poland. The hastily improvised guarantee to Poland (the responsibility for which Lord Strang lays squarely on the Ministers concerned) tied Britain's hands in negotiating with the Russians. 'Cold reason suggests that we should have gone straight to the Russians and left the Poles to their fate if they would not come with us. I am quite sure that Mr. Chamberlain's government could not have done this.'
After experience covering twenty years of negotiating with the Russians, Lord Strang writes of their policy with insight and understanding. The Russians, he believes, hesitated a long time before they decided between the Western Powers and Hitler: the Nazi-Soviet agreement was neither improvised nor long premeditated, although there was enough in the post- war history of Soviet-German relations to provide a founda- tion for it, if it had to come.
A few years later Lord Strang renewed his experience of negotiating with the Russians, this time M. Gusev, in the European Advisory Commission. This is an important, if little-known, chapter in the diplomatic history of the war, not only because the Commission settled the terms for the German surrender and for the occupation of Germany and Austria, but because it was almost entirely successful in reaching agreement between the three major allies. Lord Strang's analysis of the conditions in which it was possible to come to agreement on such controversial subjects makes a classic study of the art of diplomacy, worth a volume of diplomatic `revelations.'
The odd thing is that the author ever became a diplomat at all. When William Str,ang entered the service in 1919 he corresponded to none of the traditional notions about the Foreign Office. The son of a Scots farmer who had migrated to Essex, educated at a country grammar school and University College, London, his ambition was to become a university teacher until the war interrupted his studies in Paris and sent him to the Western Front for four years. His applica- tion to join the Foreign Service was prompted by no more than the chance sight of a notice in The Times on the eve of demobilisation.
Nearly forty years later what emerges from these discreet pages half unconsciously is the self-portrait of a shrewd and devoted public servant who has succeeded in preserving his individuality and independence of judgement under the subtle erosion of official life.
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