Harold Wilson’s Cold War: The Labour Government and East-West Relations, 1964–1970 (review)

Fueled by the copious records available at The National Archives in London, the history of the Labour government led by Harold Wilson in the 1960s continues to excite considerable scholarly interest. This phenomenon has been especially marked in the areas of economics and external policy. It is not surprising that this should be so. In the declinist teleology, which until recently held a strong grip over much of the writing on Britain after 1945, the Wilson government had a central role. Its “failure” to restructure the economy—symbolized in some way by the devaluation of sterling in November 1967—was seen as a key moment in the supposed ineptitude of postwar British governments. Abroad, this was seen as the government that more or less completed decolonization but then failed to cement the Commonwealth as a meaningful bloc and achieve entry into the European Community. Such perspectives dominated the political and scholarly lives of many historians who, like the present reviewer, were born in or around the Wilson years. Yet they seem today to be old-fashioned. Whatever the state of British national finances, one would be hard pressed to argue that Britain has sustained a permanent economic decline. Similarly, in world councils few states punch so far above their weight as the United Kingdom. One is led back to reflecting on A. J. P. Taylor’s quip that British academics started talking about decline after the war because they finally had to do their own washing up.

The decline of the declinist paradigm has allowed new and more interesting lines of research into various aspects of the performance of British postwar governments to flourish. In this new volume in the Royal Historical Society’s excellent “Studies in History” series, Geraint Hughes adapts his Ph.D. thesis to offer a clear, focused analysis of the place of East-West relations in the work of the 1964–1970 government. Hughes argues that because relations with the Soviet bloc had significantly thawed in the aftermath of the October 1962 Cuban missile crisis, Wilson came to office in propitious circumstances for East-West détente. The Cold War was still a reality, though, and the Labour government had to deal with that reality. As Hughes shows, Wilson came to office with “a consistent interest in Anglo-Soviet relations” (p. 6) and had explicitly indicated, on his election in October 1964, that he wanted to see an improvement in those relations. However, the context was difficult. Taking their toll on the situation were the intensification of Sino-Soviet rivalry, the escalation of events in Vietnam, the development of U.S.-Soviet conflicts over arms control, discord between the United States and Western Europe (especially France), and pressures for reform in Eastern Europe that culminated in the events in Czechoslovakia in 1968. The new Soviet leaders who emerged in 1964 were not easy to deal with. Aleksei Kosygin and Leonid Brezhnev knew relatively little about foreign policy, but they knew plenty about political survival. They realized that, in part at least, their predecessor, Nikita Khrushchev, had fallen because of his foreign policy miscues. In addition, the period also saw the French and the West Germans developing their own distinctive lines of approach toward the Soviet Union. All of this constrained British policymaking, and Hughes effectively shows, through a series of well-researched and closely argued chapters, how frustrated Wilson and his colleagues became. The overall story of the book is how Britain moved from the high hopes of October 1964 to the position whereby, when Labour and Wilson left office in 1970, Britain was regarded within the North Atlantic Treaty Organization as “the Cassandra of the Western Alliance” (p. 10): the least receptive of its members toward détente and the most suspicious of Soviet intentions.

The book is extremely well researched, based heavily in the archives, but also situated within a careful reading of the extant...