Bevin’s Imperialism and the Idea of Euro-Africa, 1945–49

Abstract

The historiography of the Labour government’s postwar foreign policy has largely centred on uncritical accounts of Bevin’s attempts to deal with the troublesome Russians and his subsequent determination to involve the United States in the defence of Western Europe against the alleged Soviet threat.¹ Britain’s new world role is therefore portrayed as a response to the changing power political balance and the need to win American support for what Bevin termed the threat to Western civilisation embodied in the ideological and geopolitical challenge of the Soviet Union.² Such accounts fail to give due emphasis to Bevin’s own global strategy, based on an imperial vision of Britain leading an international grouping able to act independently of both the United States and the Soviet Union. The creation of this third world force dominated the Foreign Secretary’s thinking between 1945 and 1949, and the concept of a Euro-African entity had become an important element within this framework by 1947.