The Suez Crisis and the End of the British Empire

The Suez Crisis of October–November 1956 was the moment when the British Empire finally admitted, in front of the whole world, that it was no longer a great power. The Americans refused to back the invasion; the Russians threatened rocket strikes on London, Paris, and Tel Aviv; the pound sterling came under speculative attack; the United Nations passed resolution after resolution demanding a ceasefire; and the British government of Anthony Eden was forced to withdraw within a week of the invasion’s start. The thesis of this article is that Suez was not just a foreign-policy disaster but the visible collapse of the assumption on which British policy since 1882 had been built: that Britain was still a power capable of acting independently in the Middle East. Eden was the last British prime minister to believe it; Harold Macmillan, who replaced him in January 1957, was the first to act on the new reality.

The Background

The British had occupied Egypt in 1882 and had been the principal power in Cairo ever since. The 1922 declaration of Egyptian independence, the 1936 Anglo-Egyptian Treaty, and the post-war negotiations had all been attempts to find a constitutional framework for a British position that was becoming harder to defend. The Free Officers Movement of 1952, led by Gamal Abdel Nasser and his associates, overthrew King Farouk in July 1952 and established the Egyptian Republic. Nasser was, from the start, determined to achieve the full Egyptian independence that the 1936 treaty had denied: the British evacuation of the Suez Canal Zone, the end of the British military presence, and a foreign policy that was not subordinate to London.

The 1954 Anglo-Egyptian Agreement, by which the British agreed to withdraw their forces from the Canal Zone within twenty months, was the major British concession. The agreement was unpopular in Cairo, where the Muslim Brotherhood and the Free Officers’ more nationalist members wanted an immediate withdrawal, and the agreement was also unpopular in London, where Eden and the Foreign Office saw it as a humiliation. The agreement was the consequence of Nasser’s diplomatic pressure and of the British inability to maintain a major military presence in Egypt in the post-war climate. The 1955 Czech-Egyptian arms deal, in which Egypt acquired a substantial quantity of Soviet military equipment through Czechoslovakia, was the response to the Western refusal to supply Egypt with arms, and the deal marked a serious deterioration in the Western-Egyptian relationship. The 1956 withdrawal of the Anglo-American offer to finance the Aswan High Dam was the proximate cause of the nationalisation of the Canal.

The Nationalisation of the Suez Canal

On 26 July 1956, Nasser nationalised the Suez Canal Company. The nationalisation was a deliberate response to the withdrawal of the Aswan financing and to the British and American attempt to discipline Egypt for the Czech arms deal. The British government, led by Eden, was determined to reverse the nationalisation, and the British and French governments, having been unable to obtain the support of the United States, began to plan a military operation. The Israeli government, which had its own grievances with Egypt over the fedayeen incursions from Gaza and over the Egyptian blockade of the Straits of Tiran, was prepared to cooperate with the British and French.

The most controversial element of the British response was the secret collusion with Israel, known as the Sèvres Protocol, signed on 24 October 1956. The protocol committed the Israelis to attack Egypt, and the British and French to intervene as a supposed neutral force to separate the two sides. The collusion was a substantial deception of the international community, and it was a serious violation of the British obligations under the 1954 agreement. Keith Kyle, in Suez (1991), is unsparing on the moral and political failure. The British government’s decision to proceed with the collusion, against the advice of the US government and without the support of the Commonwealth, was the most consequential British strategic error of the post-war period.

The Invasion and Its Failure

The invasion of Egypt began on 29 October 1956, when Israeli forces attacked Egyptian military positions in the Sinai. The British and French, having issued an ultimatum to both sides to withdraw from the Canal Zone, began to bomb Egyptian military targets on 31 October 1956, and the British and French forces began to land at Port Said on 5 November 1956. The Egyptian resistance was substantial, and the Egyptian government refused to negotiate. The military operation succeeded at the tactical level — Port Said was occupied, the Egyptian forces in the Canal Zone were destroyed — but the political consequences were immediate and severe.

The American response was decisive. President Eisenhower, having been informed of the collusion only at the last minute, was furious. The American government, in cooperation with the Soviet Union, demanded an immediate ceasefire. The United Nations General Assembly, meeting in emergency session, passed a series of resolutions demanding withdrawal. The most serious pressure was economic: the run on the pound sterling that began on 30 October 1956 was the worst financial crisis in the post-war history of the British economy, and the British government was forced to apply to the International Monetary Fund for assistance. The IMF’s conditions — the immediate withdrawal from Egypt, the abandonment of the military operation — were accepted by the British government on 6 November 1956. The ceasefire was declared the same day. The British and French forces, having been in Port Said for less than a week, began the withdrawal that would be completed by 22 December 1956.

The Political Consequences

Eden resigned on 9 January 1957, citing ill health, and was replaced by Harold Macmillan. The Conservative Party, having been damaged by the crisis, lost the 1959 general election (although Macmillan’s personal popularity allowed the Conservatives to win in 1959, the post-Suez recovery was not enough to keep them in office after Macmillan’s resignation in 1963). The Labour Party, having returned to opposition in 1951, came back to power under Harold Wilson in 1964, and the post-Suez political settlement was the major element of the British political reorientation of the late 1950s and 1960s. The political scientist D. R. Thorpe’s biography of Eden (2010) and Scott Lucas’s Divided We Stand (1991) are the most thorough accounts of the political consequences.

The international consequences were more substantial than the domestic. The American position in the Middle East was strengthened; the Soviet position was strengthened; the United Nations, having played the principal role in the resolution of the crisis, was strengthened. The UN Emergency Force (UNEF), established in November 1956, was the first UN peacekeeping force, and the precedent set in November 1956 was the basis of the subsequent UN operations in Cyprus, the Congo, and elsewhere. The Anglo-American relationship, which had been the principal element of the post-war British position, was severely damaged. The American refusal to support the invasion, and the British realisation that the United States would not back a British operation that the Americans had not approved, was the moment when the post-war British illusion of an independent foreign policy was destroyed.

The Crisis and the End of Empire

Suez was the moment when the British recognised that the imperial future was over. The British withdrawal from Egypt, the failure of the Anglo-Jordanian treaty, the Iraqi revolution of 1958, the Kuwaiti independence of 1961, and the British withdrawal from the Persian Gulf in 1971 were all major elements in the British withdrawal from the Middle East. The withdrawal from Aden in 1967, in the face of a sustained insurgency by the National Liberation Front, was the most expensive of the post-Suez withdrawals; the British involvement in the East of Suez in 1964–1968, in the face of Indonesian confrontation with Malaysia, was the last major British military commitment in the Indian Ocean.

The most important consequence of Suez, in the longer view, was the political transformation of Britain itself. The British, having been forced to recognise the limits of their power, were forced to rethink their position in the international system. The British application to join the European Economic Community, in 1961 and again in 1967, was a major step in the post-imperial reorientation. The decision to apply, and the application, was the consequence of the realisation that the British were now a middle power, dependent on the Americans for security and on the Europeans for trade. The British, in the words of the historian David Reynolds, had to “find a role.” The role they found was the European one, and the European role has, ever since, been the principal element of the post-imperial British position in the world.

Historiographical Note

The historiography of Suez has been transformed since the 1990s. The older tradition, of which the work of Anthony Nutting and the early accounts by D. R. Thorpe is representative, treated the crisis as a major failure of British foreign policy and Eden as the principal author of the failure. The revisionist work of the 1980s and 1990s, of which Keith Kyle’s Suez (1991) and Wm. Roger Louis’s The British Empire in the Middle East (1984) are the most distinguished examples, situated the crisis in the broader context of the post-war British position. The most recent generation — David Reynolds in Britannia Overruled (1991), Scott Lucas in Divided We Stand (1991), and James Barr in A Line in the Sand (2011) — has produced a more integrated picture in which the British, French, American, Soviet, and Egyptian governments are all treated as participants in a process whose outcome was not predetermined. The current debate is over the question of agency: how much of the crisis was the consequence of Eden’s personal misjudgement, how much of the structural weakness of the British position, and how much of the American determination to assert the post-war order. The most recent work, of which Barr’s A Line in the Sand is the most thorough, has moved towards a more cynical reading: the crisis was the moment when the British Empire was forced to admit, in front of the whole world, that it was no longer a great power.

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