Keep the Peace at Home to Shape the Peace Abroad: A Study of Elite Influence on Winston Churchill and British Foreign Policy at the Yalta Conference, 1945

ABSTRACT

As the end of World War II and a parliamentary election approached, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill’s wartime authority diminished. The erosion of influence at home could not have come at a worse time for Churchill abroad, who sought to rebuild a postwar world order at the February 1945 Yalta Conference to resurrect Britain’s global influence. Exploiting the erosion of Churchill’s unprecedented wartime powers, formal and fringe political elites pressured Churchill to align his postwar preferences at Yalta with prevailing elite views on major geopolitical issues. In doing so, these elites – which included senior government officials, newspaper editorialists, and members of Parliament – ultimately compelled Churchill to advocate for the United Nations and a free and democratic Poland at Yalta, despite his belief that both plans would undermine Britain’s postwar influence. In examining the critical role elite-leader relations played in shaping Cold War history, this paper seeks to improve the study of democratic foreign policy analysis by emphasizing Kenneth Waltz’s “first image” (the role of a leader’s motivations and intentions) and the role of non-government (or “fringe”) elites. Finally, it concludes that parliamentary democracies are more receptive to elite influence because elites have greater opportunities to drive policy debates and challenge political authority.

KEYWORDS:

• Interstate conflict
• Cold War
• democratic institutions
• foreign policy decision-making
• domestic politics

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Clifton Daniel, “Londoners Show Little Emotion Over Upset of Conservative Rule,” New York Times, July 27, 1945, 2.

2. Herbert L. Matthews, “British Turn Left,” New York Times, July 27, 1945, 1.

3. Stanley Baldwin to Richard Austen Butler, August 12, 1945, quoted in John Ramsden, The Age of Churchill and Eden, vol. 5, The History of the Conservative Party (London: Longman Group Ltd., 1995), 86.

4. Winston S. Churchill, Triumph and Tragedy (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1953), 392.

5. Although the election did not officially begin until King George VI dissolved Parliament on June 15, 1945, Churchill knew before the Yalta Conference that Labour would leave the wartime coalition government and trigger an election once the Allied powers defeated Germany and Japan. War Cabinet conversations about the next election began in early 1944. See Jonathan Schneer, Ministers at War: Winston Churchill and His War Cabinet (New York; Basic Books, 2015), 223.

6. Bohlen Minutes, February 10, 1945, Foreign Relation of the United States Diplomatic Papers. The Conferences at Malta and Yalta, 1945 (hereafter, FRUS) (Washington D.C: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1955), 923.

7. Bohlen Minutes, February 10, 1945, FRUS, 923-924.

8. Edward R. Stettinius, Jr., Roosevelt and the Russians: The Yalta Conference, ed. Walter Johnson (Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1949), 277.

9. Martin Gilens and Naomi Murakawa, “Elite Cues and Political Decision Making” in Political Decision Making, Deliberation and Participation, eds. Michael X. Delli Carpini, Leonie Huddy, and Robert Y. Shapiro (Amsterdam: Elsevier Science, 2002), 15-49, https://scholar.princeton.edu/sites/default/files/mgilens/files/elite_cues_and_political_decision_making.pdf; Alexandra Guisinger and Elizabeth Saunders, “Mapping the Boundaries of Elite Cues: How Elites Shape Mass Opinion across International Issues,” International Studies Quarterly 61, no. 2 (2017): 425-441; Matthew Baum and Tim Groeling, “Shot by the Messenger: Partisan Cues and Public Opinion Regarding National Security and War,” Political Behavior 31, no. 2 (2009): 157-186.

10. Fraser Harbutt, Yalta 1945 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 408.

11. Diane Clemens, Yalta: The Price of Diplomacy (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1978), 267-268.

12. For Roosevelt’s style of foreign policy decision-making, see Thomas E. Cronin and William B. Hochman, “Franklin D. Roosevelt and The American Presidency,” Presidential Studies Quarterly 15, no. 2 (1985): 277-286 and Warren F. Kimball, “Franklin D. Roosevelt and World War II,” Presidential Studies Quarterly 34, no. 1 (2004): 83-99. Although James Lacey, The Washington War: FDR’s Inner Circle and the Politics of Power That Won World War II (New York: Bantam Books, 2019), argues that Roosevelt and his closest advisers waged a war in Washington to win the wars in Europe and the Pacific, which entailed numerous power struggles among advisors, Lacey’s study still puts Roosevelt firmly in control of U.S. foreign policy decision-making. For a seminal study on Stalin’s decision-making, see E. A. Rees, “Stalin as Leader, 1937-1953: From Dictator to Despot” in The Nature of Stalin’s Dictatorship: The Politburo, 1924-1953, ed. E. A. Rees (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 200-235. From 1937 onward, according to Rees, “Stalin exercised despotic power, shaping all major policy changes, and a great many of the very minor ones as well. It required people of strong will and nerve to stand up to him in policy disputes. It was a situation stacked in Stalin’s favor” (235).

13. The idea that domestic politics affects foreign policy has existed since the early 1960s. Seminal works include Fritz Fischer, Germany’s Aims in the First World War (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1961) and William Appleman Williams, The Tragedy of American Diplomacy (Cleveland, OH: World Publishing Company, 1959).

14. Robert D. Putnam, “Diplomacy and Domestic Politics: The Logic of Two-Level Games,” International Organization 42, no. 3 (Summer 1988): 427-460.

15. Putnam, “Diplomacy and Domestic Politics,” 434.

16. Andrew Moravcsik, “Introduction: Integrating International and Domestic Theories of International Bargaining” in Double-Edged Diplomacy: International Bargaining and Domestic Politics, eds. Peter B. Evans, Harold K. Jacobson, and Robert D. Putnam (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1993), 23-44.

17. John Fisher and Antony Best, eds., On the Fringes of Diplomacy (London: Routledge, 2011), 1-5; Donald C. Watt, Personalities and Policies: Studies in the Formulation of British Foreign Policy in the Twentieth Century (South Bend, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1965); Paul Kennedy, The Realities Behind Diplomacy: Background Influences on British External Policy (London: Fontana Press, 1981), 52-65; 328-350.

18. The “relational” definition is sketched in Elizabeth N. Saunders, “Elites in the Making and Breaking of Foreign Policy,” Annual Review of Political Science 25 (May 2022), 223. Cognitive and behavior characteristics are based on J. W. Davis and R. McDermott, “The Past, Present, and Future of Behavioral IR,” International Organization 75, no. 1: 147-177; Joshua Kertzer and Dustin Tingley, “Political Psychology in International Relations: Beyond the Paradigms,” Annual Review of Political Science (2021): 319-339.

19. Elizabeth N. Saunders, “Elites in the Making and Breaking of Foreign Policy,” Annual Review of Political Science 25 (May 2022), 219-240.

20. Jonathan Bendor and Thomas H. Hammon, “Rethinking Allison’s Models,” American Political Science Review 86, no. 2 (June 1992): 301-322.

21. Elizabeth N. Saunders, “Leaders, Advisers, and the Political Origins of Elite Support for War,” Journal of Conflict Resolution 62, no. 10 (2018): 2141.

22. Elizabeth N. Saunders, “Elites in the Making and Breaking,” provides a succinct literature review of elite influence in foreign policy, 222-228.

23. Jennifer Cunningham and Michael K. Moore’s findings in “Elite and Mass Foreign Policy Opinions: Who Is Leading This Parade?” Social Science Quarterly 78, no. 3 (September 1997): 641-656, the relationship between “mass and elite foreign-policy opinions is nonrecursive.”

24. Churchill met with Roosevelt at the Atlantic Conference (1941), First and Second Washington Conferences (1941-1942), Casablanca Conference (1943), Third Washington Conference (1943), First Quebec Conference (1943), First and Second Cairo Conferences (1943), Second Quebec Conference (1944), and Malta Conference (1945). Churchill met with Stalin at the Second Moscow Conference (1942) and Fourth Moscow Conference (1944). All three leaders only met twice: Tehran in 1943 and Yalta in 1945.

25. Brian Lai and Dan Reiter, “Rally ‘Round the Union Jack? Public Opinion and the Use of Force in the United Kingdom, 1948-2001,” International Studies Quarterly 49, no. 2 (April 2005): 255-272.

26. Robert Tombs, The English and Their History (London: Penguin Books, 2014), 707.

27. Churchill’s wartime coalition government included 612 of 615 MPs; three “Independent Labour” MPs refused to join the coalition.

28. Martin Gilbert, Winston Churchill’s War Leadership (New York: Random House, 2003), 304, Kindle.

29. Andrew Roberts, Eminent Churchillians (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1994), 202.

30. During most of World War II, the House of Commons considered approximately 60 bills per session – two-thirds less legislation than pre-war Parliaments. Meetings rarely achieved full attendance because most MPs were either serving in uniform or serving in other bureaucratic or administrative wartime functions.

31. Andrew Roberts, Eminent Churchillians (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1994), 202.

32. Winston S. Churchill, Hinge of Fate (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1950), 30.

33. Winston Churchill, “War Situation,” January 27, 1942, Hansard Parliamentary Debates, HC Deb, 5th ser., vol. 377 (1942), col. 601.

34. Churchill, Hinge of Fate, 30-61; “War Situation: Motion of Confidence in His Majesty’s Government,” January 29, 1942, Hansard Parliamentary Debates, HC Deb, 5th ser., vol. 377 (1942), col. 1019.

35. “War Situation,” January 29, 1942, Hansard, col. 1018.

36. Churchill, Hinge of Fate, 61; 54; 351.

37. Churchill, Hinge of Fate, 54.

38. In July 1940, after less than a month as prime minister, Churchill told former Admiral of the Fleet Roger Keyes: “There are no competitors for my job now.” Churchill to Sir Roger Keyes, letter, 30 July 1940, quoted in Martin Gilbert, Winston S. Churchill: Finest Hour, 1939-1941, Volume VI (London: C&T Publications, 1983), 697.

39. Charles Waterhouse diary entry quoted in Andrew Roberts, Eminent Churchillians (London: Phoenix, 1995), 146.

40. Roberts, Eminent Churchillians, 137.

41. Churchill, Their Finest Hour (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin Company), 1949, 238.

42. Einzig Papers quoted in Roberts, Eminent Churchillians, 169.

43. Paul Einzig, In the Centre of Things (London: Hutchinson, 1960), 221 quoted in Roberts, Eminent Churchillians, 170.

44. This diary entry excerpt comes from Cuthbert Headlam, MP for Newcastle, quoted in Roberts, Eminent Churchillians, 165.

45. Cuthbert Headlam Diaries quoted in Roberts, Eminent Churchillians, 165.

46. Schneer, Ministers at War, 223.

47. In February 1944, at a War Cabinet meeting, Churchill pondered: “When Hitler was defeated, it might be that the parties would feel that the time had come when they should … have an election. On the other hand, they might well feel that they ought to hold together for, say, another couple of years?” from Minutes of the War Cabinet, February 1, 1944, CAB 65/35, The Cabinet Papers, UK National Archives (UKNA). Attlee rejected Churchill’s offer.

48. Churchill, Closing the Ring (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1951), 155.

49. Winston Churchill, “Prolongation of Parliament Bill,” October 31, 1944, Hansard Parliamentary Debates, HC Deb, 5th ser., vol. 662 (1944), col. 667.

50. “Coalition and Compromise,” Economist, March 24, 1945, 365.

51. Clive Bean and Anthony Mughan, “Leadership Effects in Parliamentary Elections in Australia and Britain,” American Political Science Review 83, no. 4 (1989): 1165-1179.

52. Michael R. Tomz and Jessica L. P. Weeks, “Public Opinion and the Democratic Peace,” The American Political Science Review 107, no. 4 (2013): 849-865.

53. Bohlen Minutes, February 10, 1945, FRUS, 923-924.

54. Churchill, Closing the Ring, 340.

55. Record of Conversation at a Luncheon at the British Embassy in Washington, May 22, 1943, PREM 4/30/3, Churchill’s Prime Ministerial Office papers, 1940-1945, Churchill Papers, Churchill College, Cambridge, England. Accessed through Harvard University Archives’ Microfilmed Manuscripts and Archival Collections, Cambridge, Massachusetts.

56. Churchill’s Personal Minute M.474/2 to Anthony Eden, October 21, 1942, PREM 4/100/7.

57. Klaus Larres, Churchill’s Cold War: The Politics of Personal Diplomacy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002), 78.

58. Albert Resis, “The Churchill-Stalin Secret ‘Percentages’ Agreement on the Balkans, Moscow, October 1944,” The American Historical Review 83, no. 2 (April 1978): 368-387.

59. Prime Minister’s Minutes (PMM) (44)220 quoted in Llewellyn Woodward, British Foreign Policy in the Second World War, vol. 5 (London: Her Majesty’s Stationary Office, 1971), 89.

60. January 16, 1943, War Papers WP(43) 31, CHAR 23/11.

61. Bohlen Minutes, November 29, 1943, Bohlen Collection, FRUS: The Conferences at Cairo and Tehran, 1943, 530.

62. Anthony Eden, The Memoirs of Anthony Eden: The Reckoning (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1965), 423.

63. Eden, Reckoning, 424; PMM(44)4 quoted in Woodward, British Foreign Policy, 116.

64. All dominions of the British Commonwealth, barring Ireland and Newfoundland.

65. Eden, Reckoning, 513-514.

66. Eden, Outline Scheme for the Establishment of a Permanent World Organization, PREM 4/30/7.

67. Notes of Meeting of Prime Ministers, May 9, 1944, PREM 4/42/5. Author italics.

68. Eden, Reckoning, 514.

69. Notes on the Meeting of Prime Ministers, May 9, 1944, PREM 4/42/4.

70. Post-War World Settlement, Notes on the Meeting of Dominion Prime Ministers, P.M.M. (44) 12th Meeting, May 11, 1944, PREM 4/30/7.

71. Eden, Reckoning, 514.

72. Prime Minister to Foreign Minister, June 17, 1944, PREM 4/30/10.

73. “Peace a Common Interest,” London Times, August 22, 1944, 3.

74. “Peace for the World,” Aberdeen Journal, August 30, 1944, 2.

75. “Machinery for Peace,” Economist, October 12, 1944, 498, The Economist Historical Archive, 1843-2013.

76. “Framework of Peace,” London Times, October 12, 1944, 5.

77. Somerset Struben De Chair, “Foreign Affairs,” May 25, 1944, Hansard Parliamentary Debates, HC Deb, 5th ser., vol. 400 (1944), col. 981.

78. Eden, The Reckoning, 424.

79. Alger Hiss, “Excerpts from Handwritten Notes of Plenary Session of February 6, 1945,” Hiss Collection, FRUS, 995.

80. Winston Churchill, “Debate on the Address,” November 18, 1942, Hansard Parliamentary Debates, HC Deb, 5th ser., vol. 385 (1942), col. 398.

81. Bohlen Minutes, February 4, 1945, FRUS, 521.

82. Bohlen Minutes, February 4, 1945, FRUS, 590.

83. Charles E. Bohlen, Witness to History, 1929–1969 (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1973), 181.

84. David Dilks, ed., The Diaries of Sir Alexander Cadogan, OM, 1938–1945 (London: Cassell, 1971), 705.

85. Bohlen Minutes, February 6, 1945, Bohlen Collection, FRUS, 663-64.

86. Cadogan Diaries, 705.

87. Scholarship that attributes Churchill’s shift in opinion to other factors include Diane Clemens, Yalta (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970), 220-226. Serhii Plokhy, Yalta: The Price of Peace (New York: Viking, 2010), 187-189, recognized the British general election’s influence during the UN voting scheme debate at the Yalta Conference, but overlooked the importance of the election in haping internal British policy discussions about the UN. Sources that overlook the volte-face entirely include Martin Gilbert, Churchill: A Life; Russell D. Buhite, Decisions at Yalta: An Appraisal of Summit Diplomacy (New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 1992); Diana Preston, Eight Days at Yalta (New York: Grove Atlantic Press, 2019).

88. Martin Dean, Collaboration in the Holocaust: Crimes of the Local Police in Belorussia and Ukraine, 1941-44 (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2000), 1-16.

89. “Minutes of Churchill-Stalin conversation,” November 28, 1943, Records of Anglo-American-Russian Conversations quoted in Harbutt, Yalta 1945, 135.

90. Bohlen Minutes, December 1, 1943, FRUS: Conferences at Cairo and Tehran, 1943, 599.

91. Anthony Eden, “Soviet Policy in Europe,” August 9, 1944, WP (44), 436.

92. Harbutt, Yalta 1945, 194.

93. Winston Churchill to Clark Kerr, March 5, 1944, PREM 3/355/9.

94. Winston S. Churchill, “War and International Situation,” February 22, 1944, Hansard Parliamentary Debates, HC Deb, 5th ser., vol. 397 (1944), col. 698.

95. Harbutt, Yalta 1945, totaled the foreign-policy related agenda items discussed during formal War Cabinet meetings in 1944. Poland topped the list with 40 discussions. A great review of British public and elite reaction to the Nazi-Soviet invasion of Poland includes Keith Sword, “British Reactions to the Soviet Occupation of Eastern Poland in September 1939,” The Slavonic and East European Review 69, no. 1 (January 1991): 81-101.

96. Churchill to Roosevelt, September 4, 1944, Roosevelt Papers, FRUS: The Conference at Quebec, 1944 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1972), 189.

97. Beveridge, “Crimea Conference,” February 27, 1945, Hansard Parliamentary Debates, HC Deb, 5th ser., vol. 408 (1945), col. 1312; Captain Alan Graham, “Crimea Conference,” February 27, 1945, Hansard Parliamentary Debates, HC Deb, 5th ser., vol. 408 (1945), col. 1333.

98. “Future of Poland,” London Times, July 25, 1945, 8.

99. “London Poles Reject Crimea Decision,” Dundee Courier and Advertiser, February 14, 1944, 2.

100. “The Smuts Speech,” Nottingham Evening Post, December 3, 1943, 4; “Britain as Leader of Smaller Western States,” Dundee Courier and Advertiser, December 3, 1943, 3.

101. “Current Events,” Dundee Evening Telegraph and Post, December 3, 1943, 2; “General Smuts on Shaping the New World,” London Times, December 3, 1943, 5.

102. Eden, Reckoning, 516.

103. Harbutt, Yalta, argues that Churchill and the “establishment” in London were of the same mind about the “role for the Great Powers over the importance of the importunate small states of Europe” (194-195). Churchill, however, believed the best way to exercise this role was by negotiating with Stalin.

104. Matthews Minutes, February 6, 1945 in FRUS, 678; Churchill, Triumph and Tragedy, 367.

105. Churchill, Triumph and Tragedy, 368.

106. Bohlen Minutes, February 6, 1945 in FRUS, 668.

107. Bohlen Minutes, February 6, 1945 in FRUS, 668.

108. Matthews Minutes, February 8, 1945 in FRUS, 788.

109. Churchill to Attlee, February 8, 1945, PREM 4/31/1.

110. James Madison, “Helvidius,” Number 4, 14 September 1793, National Archives, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Madison/01-15-02-0070.

111. The Maisky Diaries: Red Ambassador to the Court of St. James, 1932-1943, ed. Gabriel Gorodetsky, trans. Tatiana Sorokina and Oliver Ready (New Haven: Yale University Press), 510.

112. Elizabeth N. Saunders, “War and the Inner Circle: Democratic Elites and the Politics of Using Force,” Security Studies (Sep. 2015): 466-501, explores these three techniques.

113. Moravcsik, “Integrating International and Domestic Theories of International Bargaining” in Double-Edged Diplomacy, 15-18.

114. Daniel L. Byman and Kenneth M. Pollack, “Let Us Now Praise Great Men: Bringing the Statesman Back In,” International Security 25, no. 4 (Spring 2001): 108.

115. In 1947, Senator Arthur Vandenberg supported Truman’s Cold War foreign policy by asserting “[p]olitics stops at the water’s edge.”

116. Realists John Mearsheimer and Hans Morgenthau advanced this idea in The Tragedy of Great Power Politics and Politics Among Nations, respectively. Although both applied the argumentto U.S. foreign policy, it could equally apply to Great Britain.

117. Clemens, Yalta, 266-268; 290.

118. Andrew Roberts, Churchill: Walking with Destiny (New York: Viking Press, 2018), 763; Roy Douglas, Liquidation of Empire: The Decline of the British Empire (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002) notes that Churchill largely fulfilled his pledge and avoided responsibility for the decline of the British Empire. Key decolonization and de-imperialization events occurred when Churchill was not prime minister. These events include Indian independence in 1947, the 1955 Suez Crisis, and Africa’s decolonization and independence efforts in the 1960s.

119. Plokhy, Yalta, 393; Clemens, Yalta, 137-172.

120. For superb scholarship on the international dimension of the Greek Civil War – and the role Churchill and Stalin both played – see John O. Iatrides and Nicholas X. Rizopoulous, “The International Dimension of the Greek Civil War,” World Policy Journal 17, no. 1 (Spring 2000): 87-103. For Churchill’s role, see Thanasis D. Sfikas, “‘The People at the Top Can Do These Things, Which Others Can’t Do:’ Winston Churchill and the Greeks, 1940-45,” Journal of Contemporary History (April 1991): 307-332.

121. David Reynolds, In Command of History (New York: Random House, 2005), 467-468.