Setting the Stage: Longer-Term Implications of Suez

Abstract

Even though British foreign policy shifted to emphasize the Indian Ocean role in the years following Suez, the questioning and uncertainty which became most apparent in 1956 would return. The Macmillan government suffered a string of political setbacks in the early 1960s: the failed bid to enter the European Economic Community in 1963, the costly failure of Blue Streak and dependence on American missile technology, by-election defeats, and a series of spy scandals which culminated in the Profumo affair. Added to this, Britain’s economy ran into trouble again after 1961. Production and exports stagnated, and the country endured a series of balance of payments crises from 1961 to 1964. The economic satisfaction which characterized the late 195Os rapidly dissolved. Worse still, signs of the country’s relative economic decline were becoming more difficult to ignore, with, for example, West Germany’s postwar GNP first outstripping Britain’s in 1960. The country’s share of exports from the 11 major manufacturing countries fell from 20 per cent of the total to well under 14 per cent from 1954 to 1964.¹ Britain was feeling the pinch of increased economic competition in the early 1960s, perhaps in an acute form. As the 1960s wore on, legitimate questions about what Britain’s rightful place in the world was, and what it should be, became increasingly widespread and germane Eventually, such changes, along with the tremors which were working their way through the political system after the Suez débâcle, would create a mood of apprehension and expectant change in the mid-1960s.