The Limits of US power: Transatlantic Financial Diplomacy under the Johnson and Wilson Administrations, October 1964–November 1968

Edge of Darkness: British ‘Front-line’ Diplomacy in the Spanish Civil War, 1936–1937

‘Living the Blackshirt Life’: Culture, Community and the British Union of Fascists, 1932–1940

Europe and its Historians

Historians' views of the transatlantic financial diplomacy of the later 1960s have been dominated by the idea of a secret deal made between President Lyndon Johnson and Prime Minister Harold Wilson in 1965, which traded US financial help for a continuation of the United Kingdom's world defence role. This notion has become extremely widespread, and is often taken for granted in historical writing. There was a high level of co-operation between the two men: as a number of writers have made clear, Wilson and Johnson shared a number of unspoken objectives which may have tied the interests of the two leaders together without any formal pact. However, the difficulty with arguments focusing on their ‘deal’ is that such work often underestimates the extent to which Britain was able to manipulate the relationship to its own ends. The United States still required British help, and needed therefore to support Britain in a number of fields – diplomatic, economic and military.

British policy during the Spanish Civil War was seen by many at the time as dishonest and dishonourable, and this is a criticism that has survived the opening of the official records to historical scrutiny. Research by Jill Edwards, Douglas Little and, most recently, by Enrique Moradiellos has presented the policy pursued by the British government as cynical, callous and objectively pro-Franco. Understandably, however, the literature on this subject, exemplified in the work of these scholars, has focused primarily on establishing how policy decisions were reached within the Foreign Office and other interested branches of government. What has tended to be neglected by historians (with some notable exceptions) has been the experience of British diplomatic and consular officials in the field. These were the men who carried the triple burden not only of being the eyes and ears of the Foreign Office in Spain, but also of negotiating with government and local authorities and of protecting British lives and interests amidst the chaos of civil war. This article seeks to redress the balance by placing the focus on these ‘front-line diplomats’. It concentrates on the experiences of those British diplomatic and consular staff in the main Republican zone who were most directly exposed to the war, although reference will also be made to officials in the Nationalist zone and in the relative tranquillity of the British embassy in exile at Hendaye. The article is concerned more specifically, although not exclusively, with George Ogilvie-Forbes's tenure as chargé d'affaires in Madrid and Valencia (August 1936–March 1937). For this period Ogilvie-Forbes's own papers offer an unparalleled insight into the private opinions of British diplomats in the front line of civil war, and provide a new perspective on their relationships both with each other and with the Foreign Office. The article concludes with the recasting of the British diplomatic presence in Spain in autumn 1937, with the relocation of the British embassy from Valencia to Caldetas, outside Barcelona, and the appointment of an agent to represent British interests in Nationalist territory. The first part of the article describes the development of the British diplomatic presence in Spain during this period, while the second examines the civil war's impact on individual British diplomats, and how their experiences affected their relationship with their superiors in London.

The perennial struggle to fix the meaning of fascism has recently entered a phase which might best be described as, if I dare, palingenetic, one of rebirth after a period of crisis or decline. If there is any consensus to be reached from this debate, recently relaunched by Roger Griffin, it might be that fascism is more than simply a variety of political ideology or a category of state system. As recent scholarship has increasingly emphasised, not least Griffin himself, the cultural dimensions of fascist movements, in their many European manifestations, are as significant as their organizational development, their electoral successes and failures or their political programmes. Some have attributed this shift towards considering fascism as a cultural system to George Mosse's anthropologically informed interpretation of fascism. A closer reading of these ‘culturalist’ studies reveals that the euphemistically described ‘linguistic turn’ and social anthropologists, such as Victor Turner and Clifford Geertz, have played a far more significant role in reconceptualising the problem of fascism than has Mosse's work.

Histories of Europe have a long genealogy, whose origins can probably be found in the defence of Christian Europe, above all in humanist circles, against the threat of Muslim Ottoman expansion. In the course of the Enlightenment and the Napoleonic years, earlier elements that were regarded as characterising all Europe crystallised into a sense common to European elites – described as ‘civilisation’ – of the distinctiveness and superiority of Europeans and Europe from all other regions of the world. If we analyse what was understood by this ‘idea of Europe’, as I have argued elsewhere, we can identify a number of constituent elements of Europe's progress that, for their authors, explain its distinctiveness, particularly when compared with the historical experiences or contemporary condition of states and societies elsewhere in the world. These elements can be summarised as: (i) a secular cultural tradition, originating in classical antiquity, that revived (after the ‘barbarian’ interlude) with the Renaissance and culminated in contemporary France; (ii) individual entrepreneurship as the motor of European economic dynamism and strength; (iii) liberty as the defining quality of governance; (iv) the balance of power between a limited number of leading states; and (v) civilised manners, or civilités, understood (in Norbert Elias's sense) as publicly accepted regulatory mechanisms of the forms of social relationships. The Restoration, as Federico Chabod has clarified, extended this corpus of values attributed to Europe through a recovery of the Middle Ages and Christianity.

I read Professor Woolf's erudite and ambitious article with great interest. The central argument of the piece – that writing a history of Europe is an impossibly complicated, but still worthwhile, enterprise that would involve the interrelation of many different kinds of history – is one that we would probably all accept. I am more more sceptical about three subplots in Woolf's essay.

It is possible, as Richard Vinen claims, that I arrange historians into categories that are too neat and selective. But I am puzzled by the relationship of his examples to the particular point that I was making. My argument was that the two world wars were experienced as a crisis that placed in doubt the assumptions underlying the interpretation of the long-term progress of European civilisation. I limited my illustration of this to historians who – during these thirty years – wrote histories of Europe that seemed to me to exemplify their responses, either through their vindication of what Europe had offered to humanity until its self-destruction, or, in Toynbee's case, through a comparative study of the cycle of civilisations. Marc Bloch was not included because his Strange Defeat was specific to France; whereas Braudel (whom I should have included) seems to me to strengthen my case, as his Mediterranean certainly carries the message of European civilisation. The fact that Pirenne's great work was only published posthumously is interesting, but it is when he wrote it that matters. His age, like Fisher's, seems to me irrelevant, or possibly even confirms the importance for historians of an earlier liberal period of the identification of Europe's history with progress.

A number of recent events have shown that finance still has an important part to play in the modern economy: banks may take excessive risks; accounting and supervisory systems may prove inadequate; stock-market prices may collapse and leave rash undertakings perilously over-indebted. The stagnation of the Japanese economy from 1990 onwards is a stark reminder that such events may have a real impact. Can a knowledge of financial history help to make them better understood? The plethora of recent works in the field at least gives some background against which to measure the rapid changes now occurring. In this article I shall attempt an overview of the field, with particular attention to the recent works listed above. First I shall trace the evolution of the notion of ‘financial systems’ as a coherent and stable set of financial relationships and organisations, as it has emerged from cross-fertilisation of work by economists and historians. One difficulty about analysing such systems is that they can be long-lived (often forty years or more) and so change only slowly and in a way that can be hard to grasp. As a result, many historians tend to neglect the striking differences between countries, whereas economists like to compare snapshots of systems in different countries at a given moment. My object in this article is to alert the reader to the risk that recent advances in the study of the American financial system may become a stumbling block to the study of very different European models. On the other hand, some directions in the study of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European history may throw fresh light both on contemporary European financial systems and on some dark corners in the financial history of the United States.

The history of intellectuals, as developed in France, is now venerable enough to have a history of its own. From the early 1980s its development signalled the end of the heroic age of the French intellectual and the beginning of a critical review of French intellectual practice, hitherto overshadowed by a ‘history of ideas’ stigmatised as inclining towards abstraction and idealism. Debray, Bourdieu, Hamon, Rotman and others have variously rhapsodised over the beauty of the intellectual ‘corpse’. At the beginning of the decade the tragic fading of the revolutionary adventure, the bitter retreat into a recrudescent professionalism and the surrender to the perceived invasion of mass culture were together bringing about fundamental changes in intellectual attitudes and created a new set of circumstances which the optimistic could interpret as a redefinition, and the pessimists as a laying to rest, of the function and figure of the intellectual.

The past few years have seen the publication of a number of important contributions to the historiography of the Prague Spring of 1968, the Soviet-led invasion of Czechoslovakia in August that year and the process of so-called ‘normalisation’ in the country and the wider communist world. The Czechoslovak crisis of 1968–9 has never really ceased to inspire either scholarly research or passionate public and political debate. It has attracted even more attention, though, since its thirtieth anniversary in 1998, and a state-of-the-art essay seems appropriate.

Glen O'Hara is Lecturer in Modern History at New College, Oxford. He is the co-author, with Niall Ferguson, of ‘The Myth of the Feelgood Factor’, in N. Ferguson, The Cash Nexus: Money and Power in the Modern World Since 1700 (London, 2001). He is currently working on a book on British economic and social planning in the 1960s.