Decolonisation after Suez: Retreat or rationalisation?

Did the Suez crisis mark the end of empire in Britain and France, their sub mission to the political domination of the United States and the beginnings of a 'new Europe'? Or did it stimulate a rethinking and reformulation of t he meaning of empire, its utility and costs? This article argues that the ' retreat from empire' was not so much a simple, reflexive response to demand s from below but a conscious effort by those from above to find new ways of exploiting the opportunities that the world beyond Europe offered them. De colonisation, it is argued, is best understood in terms of contemporary bus iness thinking, i.e, a conscious design on the part of managers to 'downsiz e', 'restructure', and 're-engineer' the imperial project. And, as in the c orporate world, what might appear to the naked eye as retreat and abandonme nt may, on closer examination, turn out to be something more ambitious, an attempt to divest the imperial enterprise of unprofitable ventures and to r einvigorate those that are deemed to have untapped potential. After Suez, Britain attempted to demonstrate to the Americans that maintain ing their access to middle eastern oil was vital both strategically and eco nomically. They attempted to persuade them that 'Nasserism' was second only to communism as a danger to the western alliance, to have them drop their 'anticolonialist' rhetoric and to support the Bagdad Pact. In order to comb at the anticolonial movement they established a 'colonial' bloc at the UN. Assuming that the Suez crisis marked the end of empire has hidden the strug gle between Britain and France to redefine its meaning and has concealed th e extent to which ambitious designs continued to persist in the contest to determine the future shape of a 'united' Europe - a struggle in which neith er the British nor the French regarded themselves as pawns of the Americans in the Cold War, but rather one in which they attempted to move the powerf ul new American piece around the chess board in the middle east, Africa and Asia.