Abstract
Lecturing to new Foreign Office recruits in 1958, Strang drew attention to the disjunction between academia and Whitehall:
Those of you who have read history or politics at the University will probably know a great deal about the matters dealt with by diplomatists, as seen from the outside. You are now about to see them from the inside, and I am pretty sure that they will wear a rather different aspect for you. It is one thing to pass Olympian judgments upon the past acts of one Foreign Secretary or another: it is quite another to have to advise him, in precise terms, with adequate reasons given, what exactly he ought to do next in a developing crisis.1
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Notes
David Parrott, ‘European history from the inside looking out’, The Guardian, 7 Nov. 1996; ‘Obituary: Rohan Butler’, The Times, 14 Nov. 1996.
Keith Kyle, Suez: Britain’s End of Empire in the Middle East (London: I.B. Tauris, 2003), pp. 7–9.
When Nasser informed ministers about the forthcoming decree nationalizing the Suez Canal Company, several drew analogies with Iran’s action in 1951: ‘More than one minister mentioned Mossadeq.’ Reportedly, Nasser referred to the Western boycott thwarting Iranian marketing of its oil to demonstrate how he had learnt the importance of maintaining free passage through the canal to limit external opposition: Mohamedh Heikal, Cutting the Lion’s Tail: Suez through Egyptian Eyes (London: Andre Deutsch, 1986), pp. 124–6, 133.
D.C. Watt, ‘Introduction’, in J.T. Emmerson (ed.), The Rhineland Crisis 7 March 1936: A Study in Multilateral Diplomacy (London: Maurice Temple Smith, 1977), p. 13.
Strang, BBC Overseas Service, ‘This day and age’, 2 Mar. 1960, STRN3/8; Strang, Diplomatic Career, pp. 12, 71–4; John Young, ‘Conclusion’, in S. Kelly and A. Gorst (eds), Whitehall and the Suez Crisis (London: Frank Cass, 2000), p. 228. See Nailor, Learning from Precedent, pp. 25–29, 33–9; Khong, Analogies at War, pp. 3–18, 174–205; Record, Making War, pp. 11–18, 146–55.
The culture and mentality of post-1945 British diplomats is a topic in need of further research building upon studies on the interwar years: Donald C. Watt, Personalities and Policies: Studies in the Formulation of British Foreign Policy in the Twentieth Century (London: Longmans, 1965)
Donald Lammers, ‘From Whitehall after Munich: the Foreign Office and the future course of British policy’, The Historical Journal, 16 (1973), 831–56
Raymond Smith, ‘Introduction’, in J. Zametica (ed.), British Officials and British Foreign Policy, 1945–50 (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1990), pp. 1–5
Michael J. Hughes, ‘The peripatetic career structure of the British diplomatic establishment, 1919–39’, Diplomacy and Statecraft, 14 (2003), 29–48; Kelly and Gorst, Whitehall and the Suez Crisis.
Donald N. Wilber, Adventures in the Middle East: Excursions and Incursions (Princeton, NJ: Darwin, 1986), pp. 155–71.
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© 2006 Peter J. Beck
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Beck, P.J. (2006). Using History in the Foreign Office. In: Using History, Making British Policy. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230501287_12
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230501287_12
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