The United Nations Security Council and War:The Evolution of Thought and Practice since 1945 (52 page)

He rejected the British solution of transferring authority from British and French forces to a UN peacekeeping operation. If the British proposal were accepted and the United Nations failed to insist on a ceasefire and a renunciation of force, then the General Assembly would have ‘torn the Charter into shreds and the world would again be a world of anarchy’.
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Dixon had forebodings that Britain would have to withdraw from the United Nations, perhaps even face expulsion.
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The UN part of the problem was only one aspect of the extraordinarily complicated emergency that now faced the British Prime Minister. But it was an important component in attempting to find an end to the crisis and in view of his own reputation as an international statesman. Eden made a television and radio broadcast on Saturday 3 November, the day after the UN resolution condemning the British and their allies. With the Commonwealth torn asunder and the United States alienated, Eden also faced unprecedented public protest, a tempestuous House of Commons, and an economic crisis that threatened to destroy the Sterling Area as well as the British economy. Yet on television he appeared unruffled and decisive. His calm and determined speech ranks along with Dulles’s as one of the most memorable of the Suez crisis. He evoked memories of the 1930s and what appeared to him to be the ineluctable lessons of history. This passage became forever famous:

Eden left unspoken his premise that British self-interest must ultimately prevail, but he developed the theme that British and French action would prepare the way for a UN peacekeeping force. He said that the purpose of the military intervention was to put out the ‘forest fire’ in the Middle East. If the United Nations now wanted to take over from the British and French, ‘we shall welcome it.’

The problem for the British was that there was no forest fire. The contrived rationale for the British and French presence no longer existed. The Israelis completed the conquest of Sinai and Gaza before the British and French invasion. Accusations of collusion were already rampant.
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The suggestion that the British and French forces might now form part of a UN peacekeeping operation had no appeal at all to most members of the United Nations. Lester Pearson, the Canadian Secretary of State for External Affairs, had played a leading part in creating the UN peacekeeping force.
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Although he was eminently successful in this project, Pearson found that even the Canadians were regarded with suspicion.
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The British, French, and Israelis were left with an unqualified ultimatum to evacuate.

The Observer
, always the foremost advocate of the United Nations in Britain, wrote on Sunday 4 November, the day after Eden’s television broadcast, that the British government had ‘flouted the United Nations’ and ‘dishonoured the name of Britain’. At the United Nations, the British noted with alarm the comparisons being drawn between the Anglo-French bombing of Egypt and the Russian attack on Hungary. Dulles himself went so far as to say that he saw no difference between the British and French action in Egypt and the Russian move to crush Hungary.
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Dixon felt the full brunt of such judgements. According to the
New Statesman
, another champion of the UN cause in Britain: ‘The pathetic figure of Sir Pierson Dixon, fighting back his tears … symbolised the dismay of all who had worked to weld the UN into an instrument of peace.’
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The tension continued to mount. In the days following the Anglo-French paratroop drop on Monday 5 November and the landing of seaborne troops the following day, British and French aircraft continued to bomb military targets in and around Cairo. One bomb exploded near the central Cairo railway station. Dixon himself now had a crisis of conscience. He came close to resigning.
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In a series of urgent telegrams and telephone calls to London, he had already warned both the Foreign Secretary and Prime Minister that the bombing of non-military targets would create an atmosphere of moral revulsion against Britain at the United Nations. On 3 November he had emphasized that further air attacks ‘would make a mockery of our repeated assertions that our intervention was an emergency police action confined to the occupation of a few key points along the Canal’.
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On 4 November the Soviet army launched a major attack on Budapest. On 5 November Dixon used the word ‘butchery’ to describe Russian behaviour. The same sort of language, to Dixon’s distress, was now being used in the General Assembly to denounce the British. His moral turmoil spilled over into a telegram to the Foreign Office:

Eden promised that the bombing would stop. On the next day, Tuesday 6 November, he halted the advance of British troops down the canal. Eden announced to the House of Commons that the British and French governments had ordered a ceasefire by midnight.
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The Suez war abruptly ended. Dixon’s warnings were hardly influential in the decision to cease fire, but they certainly alerted the Cabinet to Britain’s condemned position at the United Nations. Dixon himself later reflected in his diary that defending Britain’s case before the General Assembly caused ‘the severest moral and physical strain I have ever experienced’.
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Some of Dixon’s most incisive comments during the Suez crisis focused on Hammarskjöld and the future of the United Nations. Though he reported under emotional stress and at a time of strained relations with the Secretary-General, Dixon always wrote perceptively and realistically. He was relieved, for example, when he wrote on 5 November that Hammarskjöld seemed to be ‘far more pre-occupied and incensed with the Israelis than with us’. It was at this time that Dixon observed, as has been mentioned earlier, that Hammarskjöld seemed fascinated by the emergence of a UN peacekeeping force – ‘a sort of peace brigade to put out world fires under the general direction of the head of the world organization’.
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But the creation of the United Nations Emergency Force (UNEF) proved to be a severe strain on both Hammarskjöld and the organization itself. Dixon wrote some weeks later that the Secretary-General told him that he did not possess ‘the physical stamina or moral conviction’ to continue:

But even Dixon recognized that Hammarskjöld had become a distinguished, creative, and indefatigable Secretary-General. Without him the British position at the United Nations might have been much more hazardous. ‘It may sound absurd but if this man collapses or turns against us our position will become immeasurably more complicated.’
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In such faintly disguised praise, Hammarskjöld emerges, even in British assessments, as the key figure in the transformation of the United Nations of the mid-1950s. Though Hammarskjöld attempted to be even-handed, the members of the General Assembly and Hammarskjöld himself regarded ‘Egypt as the victim’ – with a resulting bias, especially in Dixon’s view, against the Western colonial powers.
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For at least the next decade, anti-colonialism – so marked a feature of the debates during the Suez crisis – not only became the dominant characteristic of the United Nations but one of the principles forever associated with the organization.

This essay has pursued the theme of Britain and Suez at the United Nations. More generally, as has been emphasized, the year 1956 will be remembered for the dual crises of Suez and Hungary. The two crises were inextricably interwoven, but until recently the Soviet side has remained relatively obscure. At the time it seemed entirely possible that the invasion of Egypt by Britain and France contributed to the Russian decision to intervene in Hungary. Historical scholarship has verified the contemporary perception.
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At the United Nations, the Soviet Union denounced the invasion of Egypt in part to deflect attention from the suppression of the Hungarian freedom fighters. Anger at Soviet brutality, however, proved to be comparatively muted. Even though the British and French had already alienated virtually all of the non-Western world, it seemed outrageous to the Colonial Office that the British were held to one standard and the Russians to another. The colonial issue became entangled with power politics. John Foster Dulles’s slogan of rolling back the Iron Curtain, in the circumstances of 1956, caused anxiety about nuclear warfare. Yet in the event the Soviet Union demonstrated the same caution over Suez as the Western powers did over Hungary. The hollowness of Dulles’s slogan became obvious. Short of dropping a nuclear bomb on Moscow, there was not much hope of rescuing the Hungarians. Hammarskjöld feared throughout that the Hungarian crisis or the Suez crisis, or both, might destroy the United Nations. In his own phrase, he believed that catastrophe might degenerate ‘into something worse’.
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Hammarskjöld had an obsessive and sceptical personality, but his immense energy and unparalleled ingenuity contributed greatly towards the creation of the first UN peacekeeping operation, the United Nations Emergency Force (or UNEF, as it came to be known). British and French forces were mostly home before Christmas, but the UN contingent, initially a force of 700 from small if not entirely neutral nations, stayed until the eve of the 1967 war.
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One of the ironies of the Suez crisis is that Eden’s rhetoric had enabled the United Nations to take action. Despite the vetoes in the Security Council, the General Assembly provided the precedent for peacekeeping operations in subsequent decades.

Hammarskjöld was described during the crisis as power-hungry for a world police force, but in fact he scrutinized the peacekeeping proposal with nervous pessimism. As has been mentioned, the Canadian Minister of External Affairs, Lester Pearson, proposed the idea and provided vigorous and inspired leadership in implementing it – and consequently received the Nobel Peace Prize.

Hammarskjöld reacted at first not only sceptically but also apprehensively, yet threw himself tirelessly behind the scheme once he became convinced it had practical potential. Pearson and Hammarskjöld were given this opportunity because the United States wanted the British and French plan to fail. The American aim, which succeeded, was to bring the crisis under control as quickly as possible. No one at the time anticipated the long-range consequences: the enhanced influence of the United States in the Middle East, the transformation of Israel from the plucky survivor of the Holocaust and victorious small state of 1948, the expansion of Israel into the regional superpower of 1967, the momentum of France towards creating a unified Europe, and the gradual fading of the mystique of the British Empire as well as the eclipse of Britain as a world power. For Britain, the defeat in 1956 ranks along with the fall of Singapore in 1942. For the United Nations, the peacekeeping precedent represents a landmark in the history of world order.

The British collapse at Suez can also be viewed in the context of decolonization. The Suez crisis did not cause decolonization but it did reflect the essential issues of asserting independence and claiming unfettered national sovereignty. The fault lines within the Commonwealth revealed the division between those who upheld the primacy of the UN’s Charter and the goal of sovereign independence for colonial dependencies, and those who believed, for example, that the British Empire would or should continue as a principal guarantor of world peace and a trustee of colonial peoples. The contrast was apparent at the time of the maritime conference, halfway through the crisis in September 1956, in the quite different views of India and Australia. Krishna Menon believed that Egypt’s sovereign rights over the canal and its management should be universally recognized. Robert Menzies upheld the view that the management of the canal was a matter of such critical international importance that conditions should be imposed – conditions that seemed to many at the time to amount to a continuation of colonial control. In the famous mission to Cairo to present the British and French demands, Menzies reported that Nasser refused to listen to common sense and rolled his eyeballs towards the ceiling. With the passage of time, it became clear that the implied irrationality belonged as much to Menzies as to Nasser.

The split was not quite along the lines of my country right or wrong, or the United Nations right or wrong, as between those who upheld the principles of the United Nations and those who believed that the future still belonged, or should belong, to the European colonial empires. The outcome of the crisis vindicated the view that colonialism was an anachronism. It also inspired the conviction that UN peacekeeping forces could be used to advantage in resolving future crises.