By Guillermo Thomas
Internationalism has a specific meaning for the left, with the brigades of foreign volunteers who supported the Spanish Republican government in its battles against Franco’s fascists in the 1930s right up to today’s weekly marches in central London in solidarity with the Palestinian people.
Daniel Gorman’s book (Uniting Nations: Britons and Internationalism, 1945-1970) uses the word for a comparative study of Britons who worked in the United Nations and volunteered in international non-governmental and civil society organisations in 1945-1970, a period of dramatic changes to the world order marked by decolonialisation struggles, the end of the British Empire, the Cold War and fears of a nuclear conflict between the superpowers of the USA and the Soviet Union.
Through scores of personal histories and the mix of inter war, Second World War, colonial, and voluntary experiences of international civil servants and civil society activists, the author attempts to plug a gap in a field focussed on institutions and structures and to show that international policy is ‘personal’, that international public policy often emerged ‘from the ground up’.
It is arguable whether he proves that, at least when it comes to major policy issues. But the book provides interesting detail on the Britons active in the early years of the UN and its various arms and programmes, at a time when Britain refused to apply to its colonies the Atlantic charter it had signed up to: one that provided for the ‘right of all peoples to choose the form of government under which they will live’ (alongside other colonial powers, London abstained from the vote in the General Assembly on December 14 1961 on the Declaration Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples). Certainly, their influence was significant. The author highlights Western hegemony in the UN and other international bodies in the immediate post second world war period, with the ‘over-representation of Britons (and Americans) in the international civil service becoming ever more stark as UN membership grew’.
The World Parliament movement is also given attention but does it deserve a whole chapter? The author tells us it envisaged a ‘world deliberative democratic forum wherein questions of shared national concern could be addressed’, such as international peace, nuclear war, world food shortages, and international development. The idea of world government ‘attracted serious and sustained international interest’ from the mid-1940s until the late 1950s; for example at the 1958 world parliament conference Du Gaulle declared it should become ‘a reality today’ and Nehru, Nasser and the prime ministers of Burma, Canada and New Zealand, and the chancellor of West Germany sent declarations of support.
Yet, he argues, it foundered on three main weaknesses: a perception among proponents that sovereignty was the ‘central problem’ in international affairs in a period when nations in the Global South were just forming and struggling to liberate themselves from empire and the elites of neither Britain – still trying to hold onto a disintegrating empire – nor America were interested it relinquishing it; its model was parliamentary democracy when almost half the world was experimenting with other socialism as a means for the expression and debate the popular will; and rejecting broader public education and mass membership strategies in favour of lobbying parliamentarians, primarily in the West, it opened itself up to charges it that it ‘pursued liberal internationalist values through undemocratic and non-transparent means’. Such has been the history of UK governments for decades up to and including the horrors of Blair and Bush’s Iraq war.
The most interesting section of the book for Liberation members, supporters and progressive internationalists is on the Movement for Colonial Freedom, and the central role figures within it, played to support anti-colonial struggles in Africa, Asia, the Caribbean and other peoples, like the Cypriots, under the yoke of imperialism. It points out how ‘colonial societies themselves ultimately secured their own freedom, but organisations like the MCF helped by offering material and moral support and delegitimizing imperialism in Britain politics.’
The books traces MCF’s history from its immediate antecedents, the British Centre against Imperialism formed in 1939 by Fenner Brockway MP and George Padmore, the Trinidadian Marxist, and the foundational spark of Britain’s suspension of British Guiana’s constitution following the 1953 election victory of Cheddi Jagan’s leftist People’s Progressive Party. It goes into some detail of the extra-parliamentary and parliamentary actions (by Tony Benn, Barbara Castle and Harold Wilson among others) around Congo, Kenya, Suez and Southern Africa. We also learn about the pioneering anti-racism work it undertook following the Notting Hill race riots of 1958, including the annual African Freedom Day concerts, the first of which in 1959 attendees heard Paul Robeson sing.
Gorman is critical of the role of British communists, whose influence grew in the organisation as its links with the Labour Party weakened, and MCF’s radicalism more generally, which accelerated in the last years of the MCF, and (without a serious attempt to evidence his argument) dismissive of its subsequent reinvention as Liberation in 1970 that confirmed a shift in focus away from supporting struggles for decolonialisation (by then complete) to the fight against neo-colonialism that continues to this day. He shows his political colours a little too obviously, favouring reformism over revolt, even while he admits that it was the very radicals that he thought MCF shouldn’t have supported who were the ones who ultimately overthrew their colonial oppressors and formed sovereign states run and answerable to their peoples, not foreign masters.
Despite a conventional organisational structure of Central Council, regional committees and standing committees to work on different issues, the author observes that, as the name suggests, MCF operated as a social movement, rather than voluntary society or NGO. And as such, its leaders and activists co-founded and co-operated with an array of organisations in the UK and abroad, including a great many that went on to become highly influential such as the Anti-Apartheid Movement.
This theme in the book of the centrality of the individual in the development and activities of international organisations and structures carries through to the MCF: ‘In 1955 there were over 10,000 colonial subjects studying in Britain, many from Africa’ and a number of them ‘found their way to a non-descript building on the Gray’s Inn Road’, its ‘series of attic rooms’ and a ‘nexus of a transnational network of anti-colonial activists’ where ‘members represented the broader personal engagement of Britons with international causes and allies in the 1950s and 1960s…and their growing awareness of the interconnection between domestic and colonial subjects.’ It goes on: ‘The personal connections, and the transnational anti-colonial network to which they contributed were one of their lasting successes.’ The author highlights in particular Brockway’s links with many African leaders including Kwame Nkrumah, Joshua Nkomo and Kenneth Kuanda.
One downside of a book that covers the roles and careers of hundreds of people is that you are left feeling you’d have like to know more about this or that person. One is not so interested in former colonial officials who took up roles in the UN and its agencies, unable to fit back in Blighty and needing gainful employment, and often, as the author notes, holding on to paternalist, racist ideas and behaviours, or doing the bidding of British and US imperialism. But what of the many, many people whose commitment in MCF made it such a powerful force in the 1950s and 60s? What were their back stories, what were their experiences?
If Fenner Brockway, Tony Benn, Stan Newans and other MPs wrote extensively about their own lives and their role in MCF, or were the subject of biographies, relatively little is published about characters in the MCF story such as general secretary John Eber, who was jailed by Singapore’s Special Branch under Emergency Regulations in 1951-52 for his revolutionary activities, including ties with anti-colonialists in London. Or Leon Szur, ‘a radical Polish-born radiotherapist, African rights campaigner, and founding member of MCF.’ We learn Szur’s ‘anticolonialism was inspired by his service in the South African Medial corps during the war’ and his ‘active role’ in the African Relations Council, ‘a coalition of liberals and radicals formed in 1950s to ‘raise public support for multi-racial cooperation in Africa and between Black and White activists in Britain’.
Daniel Gorman is a professor history at the university of Waterloo who has published multiple works in this field and his command of the subject shows. It is an academic work and so it is sometimes rather a dry read. The notes section are a reminder of the extensive MCF/Liberation SOAS archive that he so heavily relied on writing about MCF (about a third of the 150 notes) and which Liberation has a ongoing project to digitise in order to widen access. Despite its weaknesses, the chapter on MCF alone makes it worth a read.
Uniting Nations: Britons and Internationalism, 1945-1970. By Daniel Gorman. Published by Cambridge University Press and Assessment. ISBN 9781316512975, Hardback.
Guillermo Thomas is a Liberation member.
The views expressed in the articles published on this website do not necessarily represent those of Liberation
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