During the years 1945–51, the governments of Clement Attlee took up, and then renounced, a leadership role in the process of European integration. Commentators have spoken of this as a missed chance, an early opportunity to transform a waning global imperium to what—despite pretensions to the contrary—it has now become: a regional power, a European nation. While it is a matter for debate whether the Labour government could or should have acted differently, this was undoubtedly a pivotal point in Britain's recent history.
Historians have been divided over whether foreign secretary Ernest Bevin's proposed “Western Union” of 1948 represented a genuine engagement with European integration or merely an expedient device in the struggle to shore up Britain as a world power.Footnote 1 Interpretations suggesting the latter are not without weight, and it must be stressed that at no point did British foreign policy abandon its global ambitions or its stresses on either the primary importance of the Anglo-American “special relationship” or the Commonwealth to Britain's future.Footnote 2 Nonetheless, alternative outcomes were possible, and Britain's wider alliances did not preclude it from also taking a leadership role in Europe. Hence Western Union should be analyzed not only as a tactical move in a geopolitical game but also as an intervention in the opening stages of European integration.
As Dianne Kirby has shown in relation to the cold war, integral to Western Union was the notion of it as a “spiritual union” or “spiritual federation.”Footnote 3 Bevin also recruited as cold war warriors those institutions whose business was the spiritual: the British churches. However, a detailed examination of the function of the “spiritual,” and the role of the churches in connection with Western Union as a positive project of European integration, has not yet been undertaken. Given that collectively the churches were unmatched in the size and heterogeneity of their membership and were also endowed with the opportunity to exert an influence backed by a rare authority, this neglect is puzzling.
The remainder of this article will outline the part of the churches in the rise and fall of Western Union. In particular, it will analyze the problematic relationship between, on one hand, the potential integrating factors of the historical tradition of Europe as united “Christendom” and Christianity as a supranational religious identity, and, on the other, confessional conflict, particularistic factors of political culture, ideological difference, and national identity.
Western Union as a Spiritual Union
That “spiritual union” was more than a rhetorical ornament is shown by the way in which Bevin—having mentioned the idea of “a sort of spiritual federation of the west” to his American counterpart, George Marshall, after the collapse of the London Conference of Ministers in December 1947—outlined his thinking in detail in the Commons on 22 January 1948.Footnote 4 After summarizing the thwarted attempts to establish a modus vivendi with the Soviet Union, Bevin went on to state that since 1945 the government had “striven for the closer consolidation and economic development, and eventually for the spiritual unity, of Europe as a whole.” The foreign secretary then juxtaposed this form of unity with the “unification” of Eastern Europe by force. The Soviets’ approach was:
not in keeping with the spirit of Western civilisation, and if we are to have an organism in the West it must be a spiritual union. While, no doubt, there must be treaties or, at least understandings, the union must primarily be a fusion derived from the basic freedoms and ethical principles for which we all stand. It must be on terms of equality and it must contain all elements of freedom for which we all stand. That is the goal we are now trying to reach. It cannot be written down as a rigid thesis or in a directive. It is more a brotherhood and less of a rigid system.Footnote 5
Bevin's pursuit of a “spiritual” basis for Western Union was almost certainly not related to any active personal faith and he used the term “spiritual” to refer broadly to the great world religions, and to a general notion of “western civilisation,” rather than narrowly to Christianity. Nonetheless, he was working in sympathy with a significant tendency in public discourse.
The construction of Europe or “the West” as a cultural community opposed to a morally deviant Other had been essential to the rhetorical struggle against Nazi Germany.Footnote 6 Furthermore, this unifying culture was frequently traced to a religious root, as in, for example, Winston Churchill's oratorical references to the defense of “Christian civilisation.”Footnote 7 The representation of the present as a historical moment in which Christianity was a critical force was also central to the publicly prominent historiography of Arnold Toynbee, Herbert Butterfield, and others.Footnote 8 This was history as a grand narrative of the rise and fall of civilizations, of which the West was the highest development; a history where all else served the higher development of religion; in which Providence was the shaper of history and Christians were the leaven in the dough of society. For many, medieval Europe as “Christendom”—united under one Church—was a model for the future too. T. S. Eliot, a prominent Anglo-Catholic and participant in discussions on postwar reconstruction, gave a series of radio talks to Germany on this theme, which were then published the same month as Bevin's Western Union speech.Footnote 9 One consequence of all this was that a space existed in public and political discourse in which the voice of the churches could speak of, and to, the nation.
“Spiritual union” offered a means to link Britain into the Truman administration's representation of the East-West struggle as a clash between Christianity and atheistic materialism but was also important to foreign policy in another way.Footnote 10 The opening of the cold war required that Britain's flank be secured against the Soviet threat by continental Europe being rebuilt and militarily reinforced, and only America had the resources to achieve this. Both practically, and according to the United States’ demands, the reconstruction of continental Europe required Britain's full participation but this was seen to conflict with its wider interests. In terms of political power, economic interest, and cultural identity, Britain was still a global and imperial power. A not unfounded fear was that to draw closer to the continent would send out a signal to the dominions and precipitate a further loss of Britain's world power to the United States. Therefore, foreign policy required some means of drawing Europe together and a conduit for British involvement which did not threaten the political and economic bases of its wider global interests. As Avi Shlaim has suggested, these contending imperatives “created a very low ceiling of European integration beyond which Bevin was not prepared to advance.”Footnote 11
After Bevin's speech one critic noted that “his language was, no doubt purposely, more than usually vague.” The seemingly open quality of Western Union created a space into which every sort of vision could be projected—Maurice Edelman pointed out that “Western Union is no more than a number of widely differing ideas in the mind of the onlookers.”Footnote 12 However, while Western Union might be seized on as a basis for a federation or to create a socialist “third force” between the superpowers, its vagueness served other, alternative purposes. Western Union took as its point of reference the totalitarian Other but also articulated norms of British political culture: a preference for the informal, evolutionary, and gradualistic over the rigid and formulaic, and for intergovernmental structures that preserved national sovereignty over supranational formations that ceded it.Footnote 13
Thus, in addition to juxtaposing the unities of Western Union and the Soviet bloc, Bevin also distinguished Western Union from the federalist vision of European integration, “ambitious schemes of European unity” and “neat looking plans on paper,” which he contrasted with his slow, gradual, and practical approach.Footnote 14 That spiritual union was viewed as offering an acceptable form of “unity,” which left political and economic independence untouched, is suggested in Bevin's cabinet paper detailing Western Union: “our treaty relations with the various countries [of Western Union] might differ, but between all there would be an understanding backed by power, money and resolution and bound together by common ideals. When the idea was ventilated in my speech in the Foreign Affairs debate … this conception of a `spiritual' union of the west met with a very favourable reception abroad.”Footnote 15
Recruiting the Churches
Bevin's seriousness in promoting a “spiritual union” is indicated by the creation of a working party in the Foreign Office's Information Policy Department to study the “spiritual aspects” of Western Union and seek “factors common to the Western Union countries other than political, strategic and economic” that could contribute to building Western Union.Footnote 16 The reason why religion was ignored after the inaugural meeting, might be explained by the comments of Paul Gore-Booth, head of the European Recovery Department, at that meeting. Describing religion as “the most elusive, and perhaps deceptive” of the possible bases for unity, Gore-Booth reflected on the fragmented and fractious nature of European Christianity and suggested that “the religious approach to the question seems to be quite impossible on any denominational basis” and that the “only possible approach to matters of the spirit … is through ideas such as tolerance.” In the end the group failed to get beyond vague references to “tolerance” and “freedom” and “shelved” its search.Footnote 17
However, “spiritual and cultural,” as the third of four “practical steps” to implement Western Union outlined by Frank Roberts, Bevin's principal private secretary, led to a purposive engagement with the churches.Footnote 18 Bevin held discussions with Geoffrey Fisher, the archbishop of Canterbury, and then with Bernard Griffin, cardinal archbishop of Westminster and leader of English Catholicism, who both agreed to do what they could. Similar invitations went to J. M. Richardson, moderator of the Free Church Federal Council and Dr. Matthew Stewart, moderator of the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland, who met with Stafford Cripps.Footnote 19 Cripps, it was agreed, would assume “primary responsibility” for the campaign.Footnote 20 Compared with the foreign secretary—a lapsed Baptist—the chancellor of the Exchequer was much better placed to recruit the churches. A devout Anglican, he was determined that his faith infuse his public role and had close personal contacts among leading churchmen. Obviously this was work outside his usual brief, but, in any case, the intention was that the state would remain in the shadows and that it would appear that these were ecclesiastical initiatives.Footnote 21
Just as there was an affinity between the aims of the state and Cripps's beliefs, the identification of communism with militant atheism and religious persecution inevitably placed Christians—the “Red Dean,” Hewlett Johnson, and a few other examples excepted—in opposition to the Soviet system. By the 1930s, the churches had also rejected totalitarianism as incompatible with Christianity inasmuch that, by claiming that there was no higher authority than the state, it denied the sovereignty of the values and laws that the church held to be God-given, transcendent, and universal.Footnote 22 Christians also had their own historical argument supporting European unity, built around the myth of “Christendom.” The essential claim of this “myth”—that is, an idealization, a distillation of an idea—was that medieval Europe had been united by Christianity. Then “secular” society took Christian values as its point of reference, and all Europe was united under the moral authority of the church. Through schism, apostasy, secularization, and the rise of nationalism and other secular creeds, the authority of the church had been denied in social life and in international relations. The consequence was international anarchy, a problem that could only be remedied by the rebirth of Christendom. Although for some Protestants the ideal of Christendom may have sat uneasily with the belief that it was at the Reformation that the “true” Church was born, even for Presbyterians like William Paton and Joseph Oldham, Christendom represented what the former described as the “first and greatest bond of what we call Europe.”Footnote 23
After the Great War, Christians were prominent in the League of Nations Union and after 1939 joined the debate about the future of Europe in Federal Union and elsewhere.Footnote 24 The growth of the ecumenical movement, leading to the creation of the World Council of Churches (WCC) in 1948, also encouraged Christians to focus on international relations.Footnote 25 When British Christians published their statement on “The Future of Europe” of March 1944, it emerged from the Peace Aims Group formed under the auspices of the World Council of Churches (in formation), chaired by William Temple, archbishop of Canterbury and one of the pioneers of the WCC. The statement favored common social, economic, and political institutions for Europe and spoke of Britain as “bound to Europe by ties of history, culture and economic interdependence.”Footnote 26
Following Bevin's approach, calls for the spiritual unity of Europe figured in the utterances of leading churchmen. For Fisher this was already familiar territory, for as early as January 1946 he had responded positively to Leo Amery's ideas of greater European cultural unity, replying that “intellectual and spiritual affinities” were the necessary basis for progress.Footnote 27 After contacts with Amery and Winston Churchill, the archbishop chaired the inaugural meeting of the United Europe Movement (UEM) at the Albert Hall in May 1947. Whereas the UEM was distrusted by Labour, it shared Bevin's preference for cultural unity over federalist blueprints—Churchill suggested that Fisher's presence at the meeting would “help to emphasize the moral character of the appeal we are making to the spirit of international brotherhood.”Footnote 28 The range of Anglican opinion was suggested at the Convocation of Canterbury in October 1947 when George Bell, a radical voice among the bishops, moved a resolution endorsing the “progressive establishment of a United States of Europe with a common foreign, military and economic policy.” The price for the resolution to be carried unanimously was that its federalist implications be neutralized by Fisher's replacement of Bell's formulation with “the progressive establishment of a United Europe in which the true spiritual values of its past culture will be preserved, developed and expressed in such common organs as may prove to be acceptable or desirable.” As the archbishop explained, the “more general phrase” “United Europe” was preferable to the “United States of Europe” because it could encompass “all those who wanted to see some recovery of the long tradition of European culture without requiring the support of any one political solution.”Footnote 29
After meeting with Bevin, Fisher merely continued in the same vein. His Easter address for 1948 contrasted communism with “the tradition of European civilisation” as described at the time by Lord Pakenham, in the House of Lords. Taking a tone similar to Bevin's apocalyptic memorandum on “The Threat to Western Civilisation,” Fisher declared that “The future good of mankind rests … with those who will not despair of these moral postulates, but will uphold them with a strong and vital faith and hope.”Footnote 30 The archbishop of York, who had marked out for himself a special role in international affairs, also voiced support for European unity.Footnote 31 Later, at the Convocation of Canterbury, Fisher highlighted “Communism's policy of subversion and aggression” and then noted that “unities in Western Europe, in the Commonwealth, and across the Atlantic in the fields of defense and of economic life” would only succeed if they were founded on a “growing unity in clear spiritual values.” To overcome communism it was necessary to “create a new civilisation with the Christian faith at its heart and in all its limbs.”Footnote 32 Fisher continued to actively support this approach to European unity, also becoming a patron of the United Kingdom Council of the European Movement.Footnote 33
Through the subcommittee on International Interests of its Committee on Church and Nation, the Church of Scotland also had an established interest in this question. Apart from its general public influence, the committee circulated its reports to M.P.s and maintained contacts with the Foreign Office.Footnote 34 Although it is unclear whether the Foreign Office's approach to Dr. Stewart precipitated it, once again there was agreement between church and state. The report submitted to the General Assembly referred to Bevin's January speech and suggested that the church had a “special concern for Europe as the traditional bastion of our faith” and that it should “attempt to give a moral and spiritual lead.” The assembly welcomed the government's “efforts … towards closer co-operation with our European neighbours in order to provide a unified Western European Society.”Footnote 35 The Free Churches also had a record of concern on this question. Among the topics of the annual conference of their Federal Council in 1947 was “reconstruction and regeneration in Europe.” Like Fisher, J. M. Richardson, moderator of the Council for 1947–48, spoke on behalf of the UEM.Footnote 36
While it represented only some two and three-quarter million people, the Catholic Church in England was a significant player on this question. In addition to the influence of an articulate elite of Catholics—whose paper The Tablet was an enthusiastic supporter of European unity—the church was the native representative of forces which on the continent and in the world generally were highly significant in the projects of anti-Communism and European integration.Footnote 37 Although Archbishop Bernard Griffin did not join Britain's Protestant church leaders in signing the 1944 statement on the future of Europe, he had been sympathetic to its contents.Footnote 38 Speaking to students at the Newman Association's Summer Conference some months after his interview with Bevin, he commented on his listeners’ future influence on the “intellectual life of the country,” concluding with the statement that “European unity will not come about merely by economics and politics. These are material things. Europe was united through the Faith and the nations of Europe will be re-united through the same Faith.”Footnote 39 Both Barbara Ward—the foreign editor of The Economist—and the historian Christopher Dawson articulated similar themes to a wide audience.Footnote 40 As The Christian Democrat, the journal of the Catholic Social Guild, indicated, English Catholics often followed their federalist cousins on the continent by wishing for economic and political integration far beyond anything suggested by Bevin, calling for Britain to make “a decisive break with the past” and take the “plunge” to become a “European power.”Footnote 41
Christian Action
Statements by church leaders could only be a step in influencing public opinion. The situation in early 1948, with the need to hold the line against communism in Italy and unify Europe, demanded more. Lord (Frank) Pakenham, chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster and minister responsible to the Foreign Office for the British zones of occupation in Germany and Austria, was delegated to approach—unofficially—his friend Canon L. John Collins to organize a meeting at the Albert Hall.Footnote 42 Pakenham's pro-European credentials were impeccable. In addition to his advocacy of reconciliation between Britain and Germany, he knew the leading German Christian Democrat and pioneer of the European movement, Konrad Adenauer, whom he helped to attend the Congress of Europe at the Hague.Footnote 43
Collins was the obvious choice. Dean of Oriel College, Oxford, he had become a socialist in the 1930s. As a Royal Air Force chaplain during wartime, he endeavored to bring Christian faith to bear on public issues through the Fellowship of the Transfiguration of Our Lord and in 1945, worked with Stafford and Isobel Cripps toward the same end. In December 1946, Collins, having returned to Oriel College, organized a meeting under the slogan, “A Call to Christian Action in Public Affairs.” It was out of this that Christian Action (CA) emerged, to encourage “the application of Christian principles in national and international affairs.”Footnote 44 Collins also had an established interest in the fortunes of Europe. The inaugural CA meeting called for Christians to lobby the government to further the reconstruction of, and reconciliation with, Germany, and Victor Gollancz spoke in support of his campaign “Save Europe Now!”Footnote 45 Collins was a member of that campaign and, additionally, of the Oxford Famine Relief Committee.Footnote 46 In March 1947, the Oxford Committee for Promoting Friendship and Understanding with Europe was set up by CA.Footnote 47
Although the suggestion for the Albert Hall meeting came from Pakenham, Collins organized it with Cripps's help, to whom he sent a detailed memorandum detailing its aims.Footnote 48 The extent to which this reflected Collins's rather than the Foreign Office's thinking is unclear, although he had taken advice from someone “in close touch with Cardinal Griffin and the Apostolic delegate”—almost certainly Douglas Woodruff, editor of The Tablet.Footnote 49 In any case, there was no discernible friction between Collins’ thinking and the Foreign Office's and, following “high level” discussions, it was approved.Footnote 50 He called for “a big-scale meeting as soon as possible. … The aim of the meeting would be to stir up Christians to give full support to the policy of a Union of Western Europe and to demonstrate to Europe that such a policy, in the view of this country, needed behind it a Christian ideology to support it and inform it.” He hoped that the event might be “an immediate means of helping towards the defeat of political Communism in Italy and France; and … a step in the direction of getting a United Europe upon sound foundations.” It was also suggested that it might assist anti-Communist forces in the Italian election on 18 April and redress the impression among Catholic-dominated Christian Democrat parties that Labour was snubbing them in favor of socialists.
With the facilities of the state at his command, Collins was able to achieve much of this, although, at such short notice, the Albert Hall was only available after the Italian elections.Footnote 51 Cripps took time out from his busy schedule to persuade Cardinal Griffin to attend, to ask British embassies abroad for speakers, and arrange for the BBC to report the meeting.Footnote 52 The churches also put their resources behind the event. Griffin worked to secure an Italian speaker and encouraged supporters of the Sword of Spirit organization to “make the meeting a magnificent demonstration of our belief in the need for a spiritual basis to European unity.”Footnote 53 The church press and Fleet Street also gave the event considerable publicity.Footnote 54
On the day, the platform was packed with church leaders along with Pakenham and, representing Churchill's UEM, Lord Layton. A conservative, Lord Halifax—also a patron of CA—took the chair and Cripps gave the concluding address. The only major absence was Bevin himself. Collins had agreed with Woodruff that the Foreign Secretary's participation would have demonstrated the support not only of individual Christians in the government, but the government itself.Footnote 55 Divided between Protestant and Catholic, socialist and Christian Democrat, the eight continental and two native speakers indicated the organizers’ attempts to construct a political and religious balance.
Halifax opened the meeting with messages from both Attlee and Churchill. The former, offered a general affirmation of “the absolute moral values on which our Christian civilisation is based”; the latter stressed that the “new Europe” must be built on “moral and spiritual foundations.” Among the speeches, references to the historical heritage of Christendom and to the necessity of a Christian, “spiritual” basis, for social and political life, combined with support for European unity, constituted the major themes. Maurice Schuman's endorsement of Europe as a “Third Force between the blocs” and André Philip's anticipation of the creation of “new economic and social conditions” were rare exceptions to this positive but general message. Not surprisingly, the specter of communism haunted the evening and there was an unmistakable polarization in the speeches between the Christian, democratic West and the totalitarian East.Footnote 56
Although there had been no time to coordinate the speeches, the meeting effectively signified Britain's linkage to the continent and the need for the West to be united against the threat of the East but without the political dangers of specific proposals. As to its success, it was sold out in advance, two thousand persons were turned away, and it drew a “young and attentive” audience of eight thousand. The meeting was reported at length on the BBC and widely in the press and on the day six hundred people committed themselves to the aims of CA and most of the twelve hundred letters received afterward were adjudged to be sincere.Footnote 57
The Christian Movement for European Unity
After the Albert Hall meeting, Bevin's Western Union was progressively eclipsed. It is a matter for debate whether Western Union was dropped by the government primarily because the Marshall Plan and the North Atlantic Treaty made it superfluous or because the increasingly federalist turn in the debate on European integration also made it unattractive. However, while the government's agenda moved away from Europe, it had nonetheless set in train a Christian pro-European movement.
Although Collins later regarded the Albert Hall meeting as “something of a noisy but empty tin can,” at the time he accepted Cripps's urging that he follow it up with more activities. Cripps also persuaded the prime minister to offer Collins a canonry at St. Paul's so that he could relocate from Oxford to better “rouse the public to a serious consideration of European Union.”Footnote 58 CA continued to arrange Anglo-German exchange visits and a tour of the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra went forward with help from the Treasury and the Foreign Office. The tour was cast as playing “an important part in the process of building up a United Europe on Christian lines to become a bastion for world peace.” Meetings in connection with the prointegration forces on the continent were also planned.Footnote 59 Collins joined the European Movement's Cultural Committee and at the seminal Congress of Europe at the Hague in May 1948 worked with other British delegates to modify the cultural resolution of the Congress, so that it referred to the “common heritage of Christian … values.”Footnote 60
He also forged links with, among other bodies, Nouvelles Equipes Internationales (British Section) (NEI-BS) and the UEM.Footnote 61 These two were the most significant of the groups interested in Europe: the UEM had Churchill's considerable political weight behind it, NEI-BS was the British representative of the umbrella organization of continental Christian Democracy.Footnote 62 The British Section, founded in March 1948, on the initiative of the Christian Democratic People and Freedom Group, styled itself as a body of Catholics and Protestants from all parties. A Conservative and member of the Church of Scotland, Katharine, duchess of Atholl, took the chair; Professor George Catlin, a Catholic and Labour party intellectual, became treasurer; Miss Barclay Carter of People and Freedom, its secretary; and Collins participated as one of its vice-chairmen.Footnote 63
However, NEI-BS was dogged by chaotic administration, personality clashes, and conflict over its insufficient representation of Labour opinion. In the end, after becoming the British Group of the Union of Christian Democrats, it collapsed in 1952.Footnote 64 Even without these problems, NEI-BS was poorly adapted to the British political environment, being associated with the Catholic “right” and an umbrella organization for Christian Democratic political parties where no such force was ever likely to exist. On this last point Collins, when asked whether CA might take part in the emerging “European Christian Democratic Front,” described “Christian Democratic parties” as “a complete misuse of the term Christian.”Footnote 65
In view of these problems, it was significant when, in early 1949, Douglas Woodruff suggested the creation of what became the Christian Movement for European Unity (CMEU). A traditionalist and politically conservative, Woodruff took a considerable interest in foreign affairs, writing on European questions in—apart from The Tablet—Free Europe, Soundings and other journals.Footnote 66 He hoped that the CMEU would be a means of securing Christian representation on the United Kingdom Council for United Europe to prevent the European Movement being dominated by secularists.Footnote 67 At first sight, given that NEI-BS was strongly pro-European and was an associate of the European Movement, it is puzzling that a Catholic should propose a competitor, which it was feared would starve the existing body of support and funds. The most likely explanation is that Woodruff hoped to create an organization free of associations with Catholicism and Christian democracy. This is indicated by his later opposition to proposals that NEI-BS and CMEU work more closely and is also suggested by the fact that while Woodruff was on the committee of the CMEU, which met in the offices of The Tablet, the movement was never mentioned in a publication which otherwise promoted European integration enthusiastically. Finally, when the merger of NEI-BS with CA was mooted, Lord Perth, a Catholic and a Patron of CA, opposed the move “from the point of view of upsetting Labour, having regard to the extent to which the Christians on the Continent are organised on a party basis.”Footnote 68
Given that Catholics tended to seek clerical approval before acting in the overlap between faith and politics, it is likely that Woodruff's initiative originated with, or was at least approved by, the Catholic Church's hierarchy as part of its cold war strategy. He was in close touch with the Vatican and, at the time CMEU was being established, visited Rome and met with Dr. Luigi Gedda, Chairman of Catholic Action and a leading supporter of the European Movement.Footnote 69 When Duncan Sandys of the UEM had requested Catholic support for the Congress of Europe, the pope had shown a “keen interest in the European cause” and given his approval.Footnote 70 Pius XII was also aware of Christian Action and in May 1949 discussed with Cripps ways in which “the Anglican and Roman Communions could co-operate in the cause of a united Western Europe.” Given the deep divide between Catholic and Protestant, the pope's concession that the two traditions might work in “parallel” in CA and even share some “non-controversial form of worship” marked a genuine breakthrough. Collins then held extensive discussions in Rome with Gedda that produced an agreed statement which Collins described as going “further than even the famous Malines Conversations in providing a possible basis for a modus vivendi between Rome and Canterbury.” However, he had vastly exceeded his authority in operating without reference to the archbishop or the Church of England's Council for Foreign Relations. Hence these negotiations came to an abrupt end when Fisher heard of them.Footnote 71
Despite this, as chairman of CA, Collins called a meeting that September, to explore the creation of an organization to advance European unity and encourage Christians to play their part in the British section of the European Movement.Footnote 72 Of the fifty-odd leading British Protestants and Catholics invited, twenty attended, and a provisional committee under Collins was established.Footnote 73 In her report to Duncan Sandys of the UEM, Lady Rhys-Williams, who was a member of this new committee and the honorary secretary of UEM, suggested that although “the preliminary meeting was not very auspicious” there were “real forces” behind it that would make it into “something important.” Similar sentiments were expressed by Collins, who suggested that “potentially vast support” existed and by Woodruff who stated that their aim was to create a mass movement.Footnote 74
Most of the finance for CMEU came from a “loan” of £100 from UEM, half of which paid for affiliation to the U.K. Council of the European Movement, the coordinator of pro-European groups.Footnote 75 Major Edward Beddington-Behrens of UEM, pledged “all possible support, including financial, within his power.” Generously financed by British big business and the political and commercial interests represented by Friends of United Europe in America, Churchill's UEM provided funds for most of the pro-European groups in Britain and on the continent. Inasmuch that Friends of United Europe was a conduit for CIA money and Beddington-Behrens worked with MI6, the CMEU was a minor—if probably unwitting—player in the clandestine dimension of the cold war.Footnote 76
At its first meeting the new organization agreed to, “Actively … foster the cause of European Unity as long as it is compatible with Christian principles, by all means within its power: to gain support, within the various denominations, and among sympathetic individuals, for the cause of European Unity: to cooperate as far as possible with all other movements working wholly or partially for European unity in Great Britain; and to assert the observance of Christian principles in their activities and declarations, by examining and criticizing whatever by omission or contradiction appears to be in conflict with those principles.”Footnote 77 The implications of this were later fleshed out in the movement's leaflet drawn up by Woodruff and Collins.Footnote 78 CMEU would provide the churches with a voice to counter the secularist domination of the Council of Europe, but “Christian influence” would also serve as the “cement for unity,” providing a common set of principles transcending the apparently irreconcilable ideological differences then dividing socialists and Christian Democrats.
A continuation committee was selected, with Collins as chairman and as vice-chairmen Woodruff and Rev. Gordon Lang (a nonconformist minister, Labour M.P., member of the executive committee of UEM and chairman of Federal Union). Other members included Atholl, Catlin, Rhys-Williams, the Conservative M.P. David Eccles, and the Labour backbencher Richard Stokes. Walter Matthews, the dean of St. Paul’s, and Edward Myers, Bishop of Lamus, represented the Anglican and Catholic denominations, respectively. Matthews also served alongside the bishops of London, Peterborough, Lichfield, Truro, and Bath and Wells on the general committee of the UEM and Myers was on the U.K. Council of the European Movement.Footnote 79
Soon to be elevated to the cabinet, Stokes was a catch. He had attended Christian Action meetings at the House of Commons and took up the cause in a lecture tour in Italy shortly before becoming minister of works, speaking on “Western Union and the Italian place in Europe.”Footnote 80 He also knew the Pakenhams well and mixed with leading members of the European Movement, for example, dining with Signor de Gaspari when the Italian premier visited Britain. Stokes's close and responsive relationship with Cardinal Griffin indicates the secret voice Catholic church leaders had not only on issues such as education—over which the church claimed a special concern—but also on more “worldly” questions.Footnote 81
However, more negatively, despite many CMEU leaflets being taken after a UEM meeting in November, there was no response whatsoever. Collins wondered if “something more concise and direct” was needed “to capture the public imagination.”Footnote 82 However, after this, although Woodruff and Collins participated in the work of the U.K. Council of the European Movement in its name, the CMEU Committee did not meet until February 1951.Footnote 83 Woodruff attended the European Movement's Social Conference in Rome in June 1950 as the representative of CMEU, and Collins was active in the deliberations of the council.Footnote 84 It was not until 1951 that CA/CMEU intervened publicly again when a meeting to “test public opinion,” in conjunction with the Christian Frontier Council—which had similar aims to CA—and the Christian socialist 1950 Group, was proposed.Footnote 85 The meeting, at the Central Hall, Westminster was chaired by Lord Jowitt, the lord chancellor, and included R. A. Butler and Stokes—by now lord privy seal—and church leaders including the archbishop of Canterbury. The size and response of the audience suggested it was a success, but Collins later felt that it “lacked cohesion” and was “neither sufficiently challenging nor sufficiently down to earth.” Accounts of the meeting indicate wholesome but general pronouncements and that, even in comparison to the Albert Hall meeting, references to European integration were meager.Footnote 86
Although CMEU now petered out, CA's interest in Europe continued a little while longer. In November, at a lunch-hour forum, Stephen Spender spoke on European unity and the following January Collins promoted the Conference of the Central and Eastern Commission of the European Movement. Linking the conference to the Albert Hall meeting, he described it as being to “prepare constructive political and economic policies for the countries concerned with the framework of greater European unity,” while giving “a strong emphasis to the moral and spiritual aspects.”Footnote 87 André Philip, delegate general of the European Movement and a speaker at the Albert Hall returned to lecture on “European Unity: Its Moral and Spiritual Base” at a CA meeting chaired by the Tory, pro-European Robert Boothby.Footnote 88 Collins's energies, however, soon became absorbed elsewhere.
The Churches Turn Away from “Europe”
While the bald facts of the Albert Hall meeting seem to indicate a significant pro-European constituency among British Christians, closer examination throws this into question. One member of the audience suggested that the meeting was preoccupied with Soviet communism and the atomic Armageddon while “European Union” was only “discreetly hinted at.”Footnote 89 It was admitted that most of the correspondence received after the meeting focused on the general conception of Christian action rather than European unity.Footnote 90 Whereas a capacity audience at the Albert Hall could be taken to indicate the basis of a popular movement, in all likelihood the pro-European lobby among Christians was as shallow rooted as the European movement in British society generally. The Manchester Guardian noted that while the meeting should have been “impressive” since the “hall was packed … and the platform … was really notable,” in fact “the enthusiasm was tepid. The audience seemed to consist of middle-class churchgoers innocent of politics.”Footnote 91
Even Collins's leadership had something of this “tepid” quality. Persuaded to move from a humanitarian concern for the peoples of Europe to participation in the politics of European integration, an air of duty rather than conviction marked his involvement. This was detectable in CA's official explanation of its involvement that “whether Christians like it or dislike it, the Union of Western European Nations is a policy to which the government of Great Britain is now committed.”Footnote 92 In contrast, when Collins was awakened to apartheid at the end of 1949, it became a matter of passionate conviction. Writing to Lord Hailsham, Collins commented, “somehow this South Africa business has got under my skin and I feel quite unable to keep quiet.”Footnote 93
In general too, just as the state turned its back on European integration until the late 1950s, so the churches ignored it until the 1960s.Footnote 94 However, given their frequent references to the cultural tradition of European Christendom, and claims that Christians’ religious identity as members of a universal Church and human “brotherhood” put them above the parochial claims of national identity, we might have anticipated that the churches should have been the exception to the general British response.
Part of the explanation for the decline of Christian interest in European unity was that, in Collins's case, he was advocating a notionally “right-wing” project opposed by many socialists. This indicated a deep flaw in Collins's general conception of CA. It was intended to be a nonparty ginger group for Christian influence on public affairs and, thereby, avoid the pitfalls of mixing faith and politics exemplified by Christian democracy. However, at the same time Collins aimed to “get away from generalising” and repudiated clerical hesitation to risk “the scandal of particularity.”Footnote 95 Inevitably this emphasis on specifics made CA a political vehicle for Collins’ own ideals and negated its original aim.
Whereas the Labour government had encouraged the churches to support Western Union, the party was nonetheless deeply divided over the form integration should take or whether it should occur at all. Following Woodruff's suggestion to found CMEU, Collins had explored with Tina Bruce, Cripps's secretary, possible questions to put to the chancellor concerning its relationship to Labour: Was there any chance that the party would change its negative attitude to the European Movement or should Collins go ahead with the creation of CMEU regardless? “The urgency for this action,” Collins argued, was that whereas foreign socialists were cooperating with this influential movement on the continent, the Labour party had remained aloof from what it regarded as a right-wing force, dominated by Churchill and other Conservatives.Footnote 96 Bruce suggested that Collins should put his points to Cripps formally, but this probably did not occur. When the chancellor was asked to endorse CMEU his response was cool, writing that “if we are to butt into Christian politics on the Continent we must consider much more carefully how it is to be done and what we are to say,” and he refused to trespass into the foreign secretary's “domain.”Footnote 97
Collins was equally unsuccessful in courting wider Christian opinion in the party.Footnote 98 This was represented by the Christian Socialist League and, at Westminster, by the Parliamentary Socialist Christian Group, the two of which cooperated together in 1949 to found the 1950 Group. Chaired by Thomas Skeffington Lodge, the PSCG had eighty odd members in both houses, including—besides Cripps—Sir Richard Acland, Stokes, Roy Jenkins, and Harold Wilson, and the Lords Jowitt, Pakenham and Lindsay. However, while Collins’ pro-European moves gained the support of Stokes and Pakenham, other socialist Christians stayed aloof.Footnote 99
If Collins was correct that the group was “very much influenced by Communists, if not actually controlled by them,” then that was a significant element barring cooperation.Footnote 100 However, any wrecking activities by Labour's crypto-communists would have been pretty much superfluous given the approach of the party generally. Fearful of being drawn into a federal Europe and suspicious of the European Movement as Churchill's creature, Labour's attitude was indicated by its ban on party members attending the Congress of Europe in 1948. Even for socialists who favored federalism, there were fundamental political and ideological barriers to their involvement.Footnote 101 Christian socialists identified Christian democracy with “Right and Centre parties which do not look forward eagerly and positively to a new society.”Footnote 102 Concerning the European Movement, Skeffington Lodge was dismissive of “vague co-operation with anti-Socialists” who opposed the principle of social ownership, which Christian socialists believed was essential to Europe's future. Without agreement on fundamentals, they would be committing themselves to a coalition built around anticommunism rather than a positive alternative to it. Skeffington Lodge and three other PSCG members appeared among the signatories of a pamphlet from R. W. G. Mackay's Socialist Europe Group that warned “socialists who join with non-socialists or anti-socialists in a campaign for Western Union” that a union run by “anti-socialist movements” would be doomed to failure and increase the risk of war.Footnote 103
Among the exceptions to this stance were Catholics like Stokes and Pakenham. This raises the linked question of how these men squared membership of a “socialist” party with the teaching of their church. Although many Catholics did join Labour, and the attitude of the church's hierarchy to the British model of socialism was more accommodating than to the more straightforwardly Marxian socialism of the continental parties, as Joan Keating has shown, the paths of Labour and British Christian democracy diverged during the 1945–51 Labour governments.Footnote 104 In any case, Stokes's socialism was not based on the ideas of Marx or the Fabians but on those of Henry George and, his “single tax” beliefs aside, his background and other opinions would have allowed him to cross the floor to the Liberals or even the Tories. One close but critical friend described him as an “avowed non-socialist,” and his anticommunism led him into some very murky waters.Footnote 105 Although Pakenham saw himself as a socialist, The Tablet preferred to describe his stance as “personalism,” and thus compatible with Christian democratic thought.Footnote 106People and Freedom had suggested that figures who bestrode the Labour movement and Christian democracy were tokens that Christian principles could be the basis for a joint political movement. But this was a triumph of hope over what were deep differences.Footnote 107
If these ideological and political cultural differences were not enough, a Protestant suspicion of the “Roman” flavor of European integration also existed: Collins pointed to a vein of “extreme anti-Catholicism” among Christian socialists and this also existed among Protestants more generally.Footnote 108
Religion was a vital aspect of national identity and anti-Catholicism was central to constructions of British national identity from the eighteenth century onward.Footnote 109 However, as Hugh McLeod suggests, by the twentieth century this foundation of Britishness became less important.Footnote 110 France was now an ally, and two wars fought against foes, who were not primarily identified in religious terms, provided new means to construct a common identity. Similarly, imperialism provided another alternative basis for Britishness, in which the Other, if conceptualized religiously, was “heathen” rather than Catholic. In any case, “race” increasingly replaced religion as the primary element for constructions of national unity and difference. Apart from the general effects of the incoming tide of secularism, the growth of Anglo-Catholicism in the Anglican Church during the nineteenth century had diluted the purity of Protestantism and moderated its position. While Irish Catholics remained distanced from full social acceptance, assimilation and the removal of the “Irish question” from mainland politics had taken much of the heat out of that source of anti-Catholicism. On the positive side, during 1939–45 Catholics had worked to show themselves to be playing a loyal part in the “people's war.” In contrast to some leading Anglicans who attracted opprobrium for their critical positions, Cardinal Hinsley in his public statements on the BBC and elsewhere lent an uncomplicated support to the war effort while appropriating the symbols of Britishness as a sport loving Yorkshireman.Footnote 111
However, whereas popular anti-Catholicism was much diminished, this ancient conflict was not negligible among those who were more than nominally Protestant. A significant minority of evangelical Christians remained implacably hostile. From this perspective, Protestants appearing alongside Catholics at the Albert Hall was a “dreadful apostasy.” The English Churchman and St. James Chronicle rejected cooperation to build a front against communism: “in the light of Holy Scripture's teaching, … a working alliance with Romanism under any circumstance would be wrong. What fellowship can light have with darkness?” Catholicism was as much a threat as communism. A reader's letter commented, “The choice is not between Communism and Vaticanism, both are from a common source and are characterised by the same spirit and practices.” Furthermore, national identity remained linked to anti-Popery. An advert for the National Union of Protestants exhorted, “If you are of the john bull breed you will not take these things ‘lying down.’ Romanism is trying to knock out, not only Protestantism, but any suspected revival to world domination.” This way of thinking led to a rejection of integration with continental Europe. The English Churchman warned its readers “that Rome is endeavouring to create a Rome-sponsored bloc of nations.” The linkage of faith, national identity, and the rejection of integration was indicated in the view that the Schuman plan promised “a union between ourselves, a Protestant nation and others, some—not all—Roman or godless.” “Legis” continued, “By all means co-operate, but not amalgamate. For England to surrender her sovereign power to a super-state would be yet another step towards our downfall.”Footnote 112
Opinion among other evangelicals about integration was frequently more positive.Footnote 113 However, alongside was a view of Catholicism that, while expressed more moderately, was not altogether dissimilar.Footnote 114 As the Congregationalist Nathaniel Micklem suggested, although the “bad old rancour” had “practically disappeared,” suspicion of Catholicism remained, and it continued to be seen as a definite threat—“the Roman menace.” Micklem explained that while there was good in the Catholic Church, much of its ecclesiology, doctrine, theology, and aesthetics of worship were repellent to Protestants; its reactionary politics, corruption, and worldly intriguing made it a “terrible menace to freedom and even in many places to true religion itself”; in some countries it brought “a blight upon the political, the intellectual and even the spiritual life.”Footnote 115 Tellingly, when Paul Blanchard's investigation of the threat of Catholicism to democracy in America appeared in a new edition with a first chapter, “It is a British problem too,” the Free Church Federal Council's official organ commended it as a corrective for those who believed there was “no danger of Roman Catholics gaining power in this country.”Footnote 116 As long as such thinking existed, it would be a potential influence on evaluations of Christian Democracy and, therefore, of the European movement. A correspondent to the otherwise prointegration British Weekly noted the “quite remarkable degree of cordiality and unanimity between Catholic and Protestant” at the Albert Hall meeting but questioned the reality of this amity and criticized the presence of Free Church leaders on the same platform as Catholics while church and state in Italy connived to deny non-Catholics full religious freedom.Footnote 117
If these political and religious barriers to involvement in the European movement were not enough, British Christians were also no less subject to the influence of national identity than other groups. From one perspective they might have been expected to be less susceptible to nationalistic sentiment. While they endorsed the world of nations as part of the richness of God's creation, at the same time they represented the community of Christians as supranational and declared that the claims of religious identity preceded all others. However, whereas the churches’ supranationality might loosen the bonds of nationality, and Christendom as a historical formation was European, Christian universalism took a global perspective. Hence, for CA, European unity was not something good in itself, but “a step towards world peace.”Footnote 118 This was typical of Christian ambivalence concerning European, as opposed to, world unity which made any association of a reborn Christendom with “the West” or Europe fundamentally problematic.Footnote 119 It was not accidental that African, Chinese, and Indian Christians were represented at the Albert Hall meeting.Footnote 120
However, Christian cosmopolitanism was no less susceptible to being overridden by national sentiment than the internationalism of secular groups. But this reversion was not to a European consciousness but to formations that were either insular in their Englishness or global in their Britishness. In terms of the former, the Church of England was not only the national church, but also a central part of the pastoral, premodern mythic core of Englishness.Footnote 121 As to the “Britishness” of the churches, comments in the journal of the Christian Frontier Council were typical. Surveying “the British Attitude” to “Europe,” Frontier suggested that if Britain lacked “the same feeling of urgency about Europe, the obvious reason is that her sense of an imperial mission, strengthened through several generations has never been weakened by a major defeat. … It is naturally harder for Britain than for the continental nations to feel conscious of an organic relation to Europe, or to accept a more intimate part in its affairs with positive conviction.”Footnote 122 Certainly the British Council of Churches shared in the allegiances and global focus of British foreign policy. Alongside its commitment to European unity, it stressed that it would also maintain “the close partnership of the Commonwealth countries and the membership of the Atlantic community, based on Anglo-American friendship.” It was telling that its study of “the ‘Future of Europe and the Responsibility of our Churches’” was undertaken by the British members of an “Anglo American group.”Footnote 123
Given that anti-Catholic feeling was particularly strong among Protestants in Scotland,Footnote 124 the sustained support of the Church of Scotland for a project generally identified with Rome is perhaps surprising.Footnote 125 However, despite its stance on Catholicism, and being an established church tied closely into the British imperial project, the Church of Scotland was also denominationally joined to continental Calvinism, such that it could stress “its historic links with European countries.” Among the factors that its Committee on Church and Nation identified as being behind the British rejection of integration, included “commonwealth responsibilities” and “insular traditions.”Footnote 126
In this respect, Christian attitudes paralleled those in the wider debate around the question, as posed by the Conservative, Sir Harold Butler: “Can We Be European Patriots?”Footnote 127 Butler's answer—he was involved in the Economic League for European Co-operation—was yes, but all the evidence suggests no. As Hugh Dalton explained when the Labour conference debated the formation of a “United States of Europe,” the difference between the Commonwealth and the continent was that “if you go to those countries you find yourself at home in a way that you do not if you go to a foreign country as distinct from a British community overseas.”Footnote 128 Such sentiments may even have been stronger among the churches than elsewhere. The Church of England was at the head of a worldwide communion that was almost completely extra-European—not until 1980 was a Diocese of (continental) Europe created, jurisdiction over that area being formerly divided between the Bishops of London and Gibraltar. While the Empire was only occasionally at the forefront of the British imagination, it was deeply implicated in the underlying assumptions and emotional economy of Britishness. Through their overseas missions, the churches had been at the heart of imperialism from beginning to end and their continuing commitments and denominational links to the “young” churches in the Commonwealth meant that they had more reason to still think in global terms than perhaps any other domestic institution. As late as 1964, the general secretary of the British Council of Churches would state, “We British feel we only belong in a very partial way to Europe. It is not only our island state. … It is that our lines have gone out to Canada and Nyasaland, to New Zealand and India every bit as much as across the narrow straits of Dover.”Footnote 129
For a brief moment in the late 1940s, it seemed that the aims of the churches and the British state were aligned to take a leading and positive role in the building of a new Europe with Britain at its head. When, some years later, Harold Macmillan began what was effectively a forced turn toward European integration, the influence of both parties in the process was no longer what it was. Britain was now a weakened supplicant and the social role and influence of the churches in the life of the nation was advanced further in its decline. But could it have been any different? Beneath the surface of spiritual union, be it in the vague secular form envisioned by Bevin's Western Union or as the churches’ reborn Christendom, lay barely repressed differences of ideology, theology, history, culture, and identity, which any move from the rhetorical to the concrete brought to the surface. In a society that lacked an emotional identification with Europe, and had no compelling reason yet to turn away from the fading dream of world power, both spiritual union and Western Union were seeds sown on stony ground.
