Britain’s Middle Eastern Policy Through the Lens of French Foreign Ministry Documents (1945–1956)

An extensive body of scholarship has examined Anglo-French relations in the period immediately preceding and during the Suez Crisis. Yet certain imbalances remain in the existing literature. British and American sources tend to be cited more frequently than French ones in studies of the events of this period, despite the fact that France was Britain’s main partner in the Suez operation. This article identifies the key features of British policy in the Middle East from the end of the Second World War through the active phase of the Suez Crisis, as perceived by French diplomats. This perspective offers a deeper understanding of the contradictions that characterized relations between the Fourth Republic and the United Kingdom on the eve of and during their military intervention in Egypt. In order to contextualize French diplomats’ assessments of British policy in the Middle East, the author provides a brief overview of France’s key foreign policy priorities during the first decade after the Second World War. This overview highlights a number of contradictions inherent in France’s postwar strategy: its aspirations for great-power status coexisted with a growing recognition of its limited capacity to sustain that status, as well as with concerns about the expanding influence of the Soviet Union and, even more so, of the Anglo-American bloc. These contradictions shaped the assessments of British policy in the Middle East made by representatives of the Fourth Republic. Their objective analysis of Great Britain’s successes and failures was constantly tempered by reflections on the tensions between British and, more broadly, Anglo-American policies and France’s national interests. This conflict between the desire to find common ground with Great Britain in countering the anti-colonial movement and the fear of being relegated to a secondary role in the face of an exclusive Anglo-American dialogue was particularly pronounced in French diplomatic documents during the Suez Crisis. In this regard, the author concludes that relations between Great Britain and France in general, when considered in a broader historical context, are better characterized not so much by the concept of the Entente as by the image of a ‘cordial disagreement’, which evolved into a closer alignment only when the two countries faced a common adversary.