Abstract
Like a Shakespearean phantom the idea of the Third Force has haunted the historiography of British foreign policy-making and the origins of NATO in the post-war years. Clearly regarded as a significant symbol, its exact nature and form have remained somewhat obscure, while its importance for the key British performers on the Cold War stage has increasingly been disputed by historians. Some have denied that the Third Force idea ever influenced the thinking of Labour leaders like the Foreign Secretary, Ernest Bevin.1 Others have declined to mention it by name referring merely to one of the many statements made by Bevin in which he talked of developing Britain’s power and influence to equal that of the United States and the Soviet Union.2 The aims here are to examine the different approaches to the ‘Third Force’, to assess what key policy-makers understood by it and to relate these issues to the overriding aims of British policy and the creation of the Atlantic Alliance.
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Notes
A. Sked and C. Cook, Post-War Britain, London, 1982, pp. 55–6.
D. Dilks, ‘The British View of Security: Europe and a Wider World. 1945–48’ in O. Riste (ed.), Western Security: the Formative Years, New York and Oslo, Norwegian University Press, 1985, pp. 25–55.
R. Ovendale, The English Speaking Alliance: Great Britain, the United States, the Dominions and the Cold War, London, Allen and Unwin, 1985, p. 45.
A. Bullock, Ernest Bevin — Foreign Secretary 1945–51, Oxford University Press, 1985, p. 396.
J. Baylis, ‘Britain and the Dunkirk Treaty: the Origins of NATO’, Journal of Strategic Studies vol. 5, no. 2, 1982
F.K. Roberts ‘Ernest Bevin as Foreign Secretary’ in R. Ovendale (ed.), The Foreign Policy of the British Labour Governments 1945–51, Leicester University Press, 1984.
K. O. Morgan, Labour in Power, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1985, p. 276.
Public Records Office (henceforth PRO), FO 371/49069/9595, Record of Foreign Office meeting, 13 August 1945. See Warner’s essay in R. Ovendale, (ed.), The Foreign Policy of the British Labour Governments and S. Greenwood, ‘Ernest Bevin, France and Western Union’, European History Quarterly, vol. 14, 1984.
John W. Young, Britain, France and the Unity of Europe, Leicester University Press, 1984, Chs 4 and 9.
John Kent, ‘Bevin’s Imperialism and the Idea of Euro-Africa’ in John W. Young and M. Dockrill (eds), British Foreign Policy 1945–1956, London, Macmillan, 1989.
John Kent, ‘The British Empire and the Origins of the Cold War’ in A. Deighton (ed.), Britain and the First Cold War, London, Macmillan, 1990.
R. Hyam, ‘Africa and the Labour Government 1945–1951’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, vol. XVI, 1988, p. 149.
A. Adamthwaite, ‘Britain and the World 1945–49; the view from the Foreign Office’, International Affairs, vol. 61, no. 2, 1985.
J. W. Young, France, the Cold War and the Western Alliance, Leicester University Press, p. 172.
On the’ sprat to catch a mackerel’ thesis see for example E. Barker, The British between the Superpowers, 1945–50, London, Macmillan, 1983, p. 127.
Ibid, drafts of broadcast; The Times, 5 January 1948, p. 4, for the final text. The broadcast has already been discussed by G. Warner in J. Becker and F. Knipping (eds), Power in Europe?, New York, de Gruyter, 1986, pp. 34–5.
John Kent, ‘Anglo-French Colonial Co-operation 1939–49’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, vol. XVII, 1988; Kent, ‘Bevin’s Imperialism’.
John Kent and John W. Young, ‘The Western Union Concept and British Defence Planning 1947–48’, in R. Aldrich (ed.), British Intelligence and Security Policy, London, Unwin Hyman, forthcoming 1991.
Documents on this can now be found in A.N. Porter and A.J. Stockwell, British Imperial Policy and Decolonisation Vol. I, 1938–1951, London, Macmillan, 1987.
B. Pimlott, The Political Diary of Hugh Dalton 1945–60, London, Jonathan Cape, 1986, p. 443.
Young, Britain, France and the Unity of Europe, pp. 110–11.
Further attention will be given to these issues in John Kent, British Imperial Strategy and the Origins of the Cold War, London, Frances Pinter, 1992.
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Kent, J., Young, J.W. (1992). British Policy Overseas: The ‘Third Force’ and the Origins of NATO — in Search of a New Perspective. In: Heuser, B., O’Neill, R. (eds) Securing Peace in Europe, 1945–62. St Antony’s/Macmillan Series. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-21810-3_3
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