Britain, the Brussels Pact and the continental commitment

Abstract

Apart from the question of the future of Britain's nuclear weapons, the most important issue in British defence policy in the mid-1980s is the debate between those supporting a continentalist strategy and those advocating greater stress on a maritime/air strategy. As students of British military policy know only too well, this is hardly a new controversy. The question of 'the continent' or 'the open seas' has recurred again and again in defence planning circles throughout the twentieth century. The debates which characterized the 1920s and 1930s have been ably described in numerous books and articles, most notably those by Michael Howard and Brian Bond.' Much less attention, however, has been given to the discussions and negotiations which took place in Britain during the war and in the immediate postwar period.2 Despite the obligations entered into with the signing of the North Atlantic Treaty in 1949 and the Paris Agreements of 1954, it was the Brussels Treaty and the decisions made by political and military leaders in mid-1948 which ushered in a radical change in traditional British defence policy. It was this 'continental commitment', firmly established in 1948, which forms the backdrop to the contemporary debate about the future of British defence policy. The purpose of this article is to chart the process by which, after the experiences of the 1920s and 1930s, as well as the Second World War, Britain decided to reorient its traditional, essentially maritime, defence policy and to commit itself, in political and strategic terms, more closely to its West European allies than ever before in peacetime. The article, however, attempts to go a little further than simply providing the background to the contemporary debate, important as this may be. Consideration is also given to the contribution made by Britain, and especially by the Foreign Secretary of the time, Ernest Bevin, to the formation of the West European security system. The importance of this lies in the tendency exhibited in the growing body of historiography on the formation of NATO to play down somewhat Britain's leading role in the organization of Western security after the end of the Second World War.3 Given the scope of this article, judgements