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Churchill and the Nation-State: Ukraine and Hungary Today
- By ANDREW ROBERTS
- | April 6, 2022
- Category: Churchill and Europe Churchill for Today Resources
Reader note: Because this is a speech transcript, we publish it verbatim without reference to the usual rules for internet publishing (shorter sentences and paragraphs etc.). With the exception of subheadings and endnotes supplied by us, it is as Dr. Roberts delivered it. Reproduced by kind permission of the author and the National Conservative Conference. Civil debate is most welcome. – Richard M. Langworth
The Nation-State and Sovereignty
Sir Winston Churchill was a powerful advocate for the nation-state and the concept of national sovereignty, especially for those of smaller countries. He fully appreciated that states might occasionally need to band together—he was a keen supporter of the foundation of NATO in April 1949, for example—but saw the post-Westphalian nation-state as the essential building block of civilized international relations. In his writings, especially his History of the English-speaking Peoples, Churchill traced the way that the nation-state evolved over time. He saw it as a prerequisite for a rules-based existence for citizens. “The underlying idea of the sovereignty of law, long existent in feudal custom, was raised by it into a doctrine for the national State,” he wrote.1
It was not just the nation-states of the English-speaking world that Churchill sought to promote and protect. In his famous Zurich speech of September 1946, he said, “Small nations will count as much as large ones and gain their honour by their contribution to the common cause..”2 Churchill was the father of the concept of the United States of Europe. Delivering inspiring speeches in the mid to late 1940s in Zurich, The Hague and Strasbourg, he promoted the idea that the nation-states of Western Europe band together in a free trade Zollverein that would hopefully make war impossible between states whose enmity had led to the loss of so many of his friends’ lives, not once but twice that century. “Let Europe arise!” he said repeatedly.3
NATO and the EEC
Of course NATO was already in existence eight years before the European Economic Community was founded in 1957, but the Common Market was to be the economic pillar of Western European unity where NATO was the military one. As such, the United States fully supported it, little recognizing that the ultimate ambition of many of the founders of the EEC was to become a superpower that they hoped would one day come to rival America herself. It was part of Churchill’s essential magnanimity in victory—which many rightly see as the single most powerful aspect of his political creed, after defiance in seeming defeat—to support the economic revival of a ravaged continent after the Second World War. That was both the most idealistic and also the most rational thing to do after Germany had started no fewer than five wars of aggression in the three-quarters of a century after 1864.
It is good to be here in Brussels—inside the belly of the beast as it were—where I can explode the myth put about Europhiles that Winston Churchill ever wished his own nation-state, the United Kingdom, to be a member of this European project. This was regularly alleged by Jean-Claude Junker, the president of what had by then become the European Union in its long march towards becoming a super-state. It was expressed by many other Europhiles—including Britons who ought to have known better—especially during the Brexit debate and its long aftermath, when every organ of the British State tried to stymie the will of the people as expressed in the referendum.
Even the most cursory glances at what Churchill actually said in his three great speeches on Europe makes it clear that he considered Britain and her Commonwealth to be politically outside the structure of the United States of Europe, rather than integral to it. As he himself said in his Zurich speech, “Great Britain, the British Commonwealth of Nations, mighty America, and I trust Soviet Russia—for then indeed all would be well—must be the friends and sponsors of the new Europe and must champion its right to live and shine.”4 Friends and sponsors; but not joiners.
Britain and Europe
Churchill never envisaged Britain weakening any of her own ties with what was still until 1949 called The British Commonwealth, let alone with the rest of the English-speaking peoples, and primarily her “Special Relationship”—itself a phrase that Churchill invented—with the United States. He didn’t mind Britain even joining the discussion forums—opponents described them as “talking shops”—such as the Council of Europe, but the surrender of any British national sovereignty never so much as crossed his mind.
That was why when Churchill became prime minister again in October 1951, he did not involve Britain in the discussions that led to the Treaty of Rome, which was signed less than two years after he left office. He actively opposed any British involvement in the European Coal and Steel Community and the European Army concept during that final premiership. Indeed he kept the British nation-state a “friend and sponsor” of the European project rather than an integral member of it, which as an historian he knew would have flown in the face of over 400 years of highly fruitful national independence and sovereignty.
“We are with them, but not of them”
The idea of a European Army—which is always brought up by Europhiles during crises such as the present one in Ukraine—was described by Churchill as “a sludgy amalgam,”5 and he recognized that it could only undermine NATO. The European parliament similarly attracted his ire, and in March 1948 he told his friend Lady Violet Bonham Carter that he considered a Parliament of Europe quite impracticable.
Just one month after he came to power in October 1951, Churchill addressed the question of Britain joining the Schuman Plan for placing French and German coal and steel under a single authority. Churchill stated in a memo to the Cabinet: “We help, we dedicate, we play a part,” he stated in a memo to the Cabinet,
Our attitude towards further economic developments on the Schuman lines resembles that which we adopt about the European Army. We help, we dedicate, we play a part, but we are not merged with and do not forfeit our insular or Commonwealth character. Our first object is the unity and consolidation of the British Commonwealth…. Our second, “the fraternal association” of the English-speaking world; and third, United Europe, to which we are a separate closely—and specially-related ally and friend.”6
In 1953 he told the House of Commons:
We are not members of the European Defence Community, nor do we intend to be merged in a Federal European system. We feel we have a special relation to both. This can be expressed by prepositions, by the preposition “with” but not “of”—we are with them, but not of them.7
These are words that are never quoted by Europhile historians.
When Field Marshal Montgomery visited Churchill in hospital in 1962, he afterwards told the press that he had found him sitting up in bed smoking cigars, drinking brandy, and “protesting against Britain’s proposed entry into the Common Market.”8 The EEC began as a free trade agreement, providing practical and beneficial commercial arrangements for member nations, but it has since morphed into what its founders had wanted all along—the kind of interfering, top-down, one-size-fits-all bureaucracy that Churchill so despised when he found it elsewhere in politics.
Hungary, 2022
A classic example of this interference in the domestic affairs of a smaller nation-state can be found today in Brussels’ arrogant attempted bullying of Hungary, where I have recently been staying as a visiting fellow of John O’Sullivan’s splendid think-tank, the Danube Institute.
A conservative and Christian country that does not share—in matters as far removed as transgenderism and mass Islamic immigration—the same point of view as Ursula von der Leyen and the EU officialdom, Hungary is effectively being accused of not being a proper democracy. Seven billion euros have been withheld from it by Brussels until it falls into line, and changes its society into the kind of which Mrs. von der Leyen approves. This at a time when Hungary is spending tens of billions taking in and finding employment and healthcare for hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian refugees.
Surely the status of Hungary as a functioning democracy is proven by the fact that Victor Orbán’s government faced a general election in April, whereas Mrs. von der Leyen has become President of Europe despite never having faced an election for the job in which ordinary voters have had a say. Mr . Orbán’s victory will be marked for the rebuke it will send to Brussels. for its naked interference in a sovereign nation-state in areas far beyond the economic. In Brussels, subsidiarity breeds contempt, which is one of the reasons that 17.4 million Britons were right to vote for Brexit.
Vladimir Putin supported Brexit, but I suspect that he’s regretting it now, as it has given Britain a new sense of independence, whereby it has supported Ukraine much earlier and more generously than the large countries of the EU, such as France and Germany.
Zelenskyy and Ukraine
No speech on Churchill would be complete without a reflection on the Churchillian leadership that is being shown today by President Vlodomyr Zelenskyy. Zelenskyy saw the Afghan president flee when the Taliban advanced on Kabul, and decided he would not be that kind of leader. Instead, he summoned up his inner Churchill and decided to stay in his capital city and fight it out.
If he were to die in Kiev, Zelenskyy would become a martyr to Ukrainians for centuries, and could be even more of a threat to Vladimir Putin in death than he presently is in life. Zelenskyy is living in the white heat of history, and is proving that he is capable of being up to what Churchill called “the level of events.” Like Churchill, he endures nightly attacks on his capital city for weeks on end, speaks to his people without ever sugaring the pill, appeals for the tools to finish the job. In a direct paraphrase of Churchill’s 4 June 1940 speech after Dunkirk, he promised to fight in the forests and the streets and not to surrender. Moreover, although they were both bombed in their capitals, Churchill never had to face enemy ground troops in London’s suburbs and assassination hit-squads. Zelenskyy’s career has spanned those twin extremes of Ancient Greek theatre—comedy and tragedy, It seems there is much more of the latter to be unleashed on his poor country.
President Putin has described Zelenskyy as a neo-Nazi and a drug addict. The neo-Nazi jibe stretches credulity for many obvious reasons, not least Zelenskyy’s Jewishness. But with regard to Zelenskyy’s drug addiction, I wish Putin had revealed what actual drug it was, so that I could try to get some. Any drug that gives you eloquence, good humour and wit, the courage to fight for your beliefs, the leadership skills to keep morale high despite terrible setbacks, and a relentless concentration on the job in hand, is one that I think we’d all like to get over-the-counter.
“What free men can do”
Winston Churchill said of Finland in January 1940: “…superb, nay, sublime. In the jaws of peril, Finland shows what free men can do. The service rendered by Finland to Mankind is magnificent.”9 Today he would apply those same words to Ukraine. So I would like to end with a heartfelt plea.
I know there are people in the conservative movement who do not support President Zelenskyy and continue to attack him on websites, tweet negatively about him, and so on. Intellectually I understand their arguments—some of which are ideological, others to do with Second World War. Others go back to Catherine the Great, and others as recent as events during the Trump Presidency. But I would like to take advantage of this bully pulpit to beseech them to recognize that as of 24 February 2022 everything has changed, not only due to the fact of Putin’s invasion, but also due to its manner—the brutal way that it has been carried out. We live in a different world now. For all our sophisticated appreciation of Realpolitik, we must not blind ourselves to the fact that an evil man has done a terribly evil thing.
There are of course times when conservatives need to stand up and say things that hardly anyone wants to hear, and which run counter to the overwhelming opinion of the world. Churchill himself did that over Appeasement during his Wilderness Years, after all. Yet sometimes I feel that there are some in our movement who enjoy saying the opposite of what everyone else believes for its own sake—out of perversity, or a love of the limelight that being a contrarian gains them—regardless of the cost to the wider movement and how it looks to ordinary people. They little heed the enormous damage done to the Right in denouncing the favourable opinion of Zelenskyy that is strongly held by many millions—perhaps billions—of people around the world who have been profoundly moved by Ukraine’s plight.
If you want an example, consider David Stockman, Ronald Reagan’s former director of the Office of Management and Budget, who only last week wrote: “We were already getting sick and tired of this Zelenskyy clown,” and that “Zelenskyy should resign and make way for a collaborationist government that will sue for peace.” He described Ukraine’s government as being made up of “anti-Russian fascists and oligarchs.” (At least he didn’t mention drug-addicts.) He went on to argue that Ukraine was not a real country and had no genuine sovereign independence.
Ladies and gentlemen, day after day, in their streets and suburbs and forests, ordinary Ukrainians are showing that they believe theirs is a real country. They would not be fighting and dying if they did not believe this. The EU is not a real country—no-one would fight and die for its flag and anthem and leaders. But Ukraine has shown that it is a nation-state.
The martyrdom of Ukraine and the Churchillian leadership that Zelenskyy and his people are showing has changed the whole political landscape. If we do believe in uniting the Right—which was one of the prime motivations behind the foundation of the National Conservative Conference—and especially if we want to do it when the Left is so disunited—now is the time to show an open-hearted and full-throated support of Ukraine and her leader. Zelenskyy might indeed have been a comedian in an earlier career, but in the one that History will now always remember him, he is just the kind of freedom-fighter that conservatives should applaud.
Now is not the time to continue fighting the struggles that seemed to matter before 24 February. Just as Charles Lindbergh and so many of the America First isolationists quickly and patriotically came round to the overwhelming need for the United States to join in the struggle against Japan and Germany—and thus largely escaped the contempt of history which would otherwise have been their lot. So Zelenskyy’s critics on the Right should heed the courage of a people who are battling against a more massive and naked display of barbarism by a Great Power than can be remembered by almost any one of us in this hall today.
Endnotes
1 Winston S. Churchill (hereinafter WSC), A History of the English-Speaking Peoples, vol. 1, The Birth of Britain (New York: Dodd Mead, 1956), 257.
2 WSC, Zurich University, 19 September 1946, in Robert Rhodes James, ed., Winston S. Churchill: His Complete Speeches 1897-1963, 8 vols., New York: Bowker, 1974: VII: 7381.
3 Martin Gilbert, Winston S. Churchill, vol. 8, Never Despair 1945-1965 (Hillsdale, Mich.: Hillsdale College Press, 2013), 321.
4 WSC, Zurich University, 19 September 1946, in Complete Speeches, VII: 7382.
5 WSC, Cabinet Memo No. 32, 29 November 1951, in Martin Gilbert & Larry P. Arnn, eds., The Churchill Documents, vol. 23 (Hillsdale College Press, 2019). 82. WSC wrote: “I should doubt very much the military spirit of a ‘sludgy amalgam’ of volunteers or conscripts to defend the EDC [European Defence Community] or other similar organisations. The national spirit must animate all troops up to and including the divisional level. On this basis and within these limits national pride may be made to promote and serve international strength.”
6 Ibid, 82-83. In several versions the following words are mistakenly added: “It is only when plans for uniting Europe take a federal form that we ourselves cannot take part, because we cannot subordinate ourselves or the control of British policy to federal authorities.” These were in fact from Antony Eden’s memorandum to the Council of Europe in Strasbourg, 6 December 1951. See Richard M. Langworth, “Churchill Red Herrings on a Federal Europe,” 2019, accessed 4 April 2022.
7 WSC, House of Commons, 11 May 1953, Complete Speeches, VIII: 8481.
8 Montgomery’s remarks concerned the Churchill family, who did not wish an aging Sir Winston to be drawn into current political hurly-burly. His private secretary, Anthony Montague Browne, released a earlier opinion from WSC to calm any roiled waters, but notably did not say that Montgomery had entirely misrepresented him. The incident is described in Richard M. Langworth, “EU and Churchill’s Views,” 2015, accessed 4 April 2022.
9 WSC, House of Commons, 20 January 1940, in Complete Speeches, VI, 6184.
The author
Andrew Roberts is a biographer and historian whose books include George III: The Last King of America); and Napoleon the Great (winner of the Grand Prix Fondation Napoléon). His Churchill: Walking with Destiny (2018) was acclaimed as “the best single-volume life of Churchill ever written” (Sunday Times). He is currently Visiting Professor at the Department of War Studies at King’s College, London, the Roger and Martha Mertz Visiting Research Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, and a contributor to the Hillsdale College Churchill Project.
Further reading
Antoine Capet, “Abstracts: Churchill and Europe” (2018)
Paatrick Garrity, “Churchill Britain and European Unity” (2016)
Andrew Roberts, “Churchill Favored a United Europe, Provided It Didn’t Contain Britain” (2018); “Churchill on Europe, by Felix Klos” (2016)
Richard M. Langworth, “On Sovereignty: Churchill on the UK and Europe, 1933-1953” (2020); “EU and Churchill’s Views” (2015)