Superpowers, 1947–55

The term ‘superpowers’ was coined by the American scholar William Fox in 1944, to describe states with ‘great power plus great mobility of power’. He included Britain with America and Russia in that category. ¹ Today that seems strange. Conventional wisdom suggests that after 1945 Britain, ‘nearly bankrupt, dependent, and unable to police its empire, was reduced to a resentful second-rate power’, ² ‘a warrior satellite of the United States’. ³ But if we view the mid-1940s from the perspective of a crisis of post-war adjustment, we can see that 1947 did not mark the finale for Britain as a great power. Cutting one’s losses in India, Palestine and Greece did not mean abandoning empire as a whole. Likewise, the payments crisis of 1946–7 reflected the immediate legacies of war – vast overseas commitments burdening an economy not yet re-converted from warmaking to wealth creation. At this time the underlying problem of industrial uncompetitiveness was masked by the wartime devastation and post-war instability of all Britain’s European rivals. By the early 1950s Britain was producing nearly a third of the industrial output of non-communist Europe and more weapons than all the other European NATO partners combined. ⁴ For much of the decade Britain was America’s principal ally, in Europe and globally, at a time when the twin challenges of communism and anti-colonialism were contorting world politics. The idea of ‘the big three’ – or at least the big ‘2½’ as Cadogan of the FO put it in 1945 ⁵ – still seemed credible. If it eventually proved a myth, we should remember that myths derive their power from their plausibility.