REMARKS BY DR ANTHONY JG INSALL, CONSULTANT AND CO-EDITOR, FCO HISTORICAL BRANCH
Reykjavik, 31 May 2012
I don’t expect that many of you will be veryfamiliar with the DBPO series and the way in which we decide on the content, so I thought it might be helpful to begin by saying a few words about how we set about selecting the documents which we have included in this volume. Since we were evaluating documents spanning eight years, which describe Britain’s relations with five separate countries during a particularly complex and interesting period, there was no lack of material to choose from. Quite the opposite. If you pause for a moment to think about the sorts of issues which were confronting Ernest Bevin and his officials in the Northern Department of the Foreign Office – and I will mention some of them in a moment - you might see what I mean.
The documents which we have selected, nearly 220 in all, provide snapshots describing many of the key aspects of the most significant policy debates throughout this time. In some cases, particularly the question of Atlantic security, we have included a series of documents chosen to describe how the issue developed. That subject is covered quite extensively. Sometimes, usually for bilateral matters, we have selected only one or two documents which we hope will serve to illuminate what might be the most interesting aspect of a difficult, sensitive or knotty problem. We also thought it important to provide some idea of the atmosphere of the time and the circumstances in which these developments were taking place. Hence there is a description by Frank Shepherd, the British Minister in Helsinki from 1944-47, of an elk hunt, when he stood with several Finnish ministers in a freezing forest for the best part of a couple of days, without apparently ever seeing an elk. What we didn’t know when we chose this was that the occasion had a rather deeper political significance, as Kimmo Rentola explains in the article which is included in the SJH special issue. There are a few other documents which provide some similar colour, though not necessarily always with quite the same significant background...
We were able to include a number of documents which had been retained for many years, and not previously released to the archives, usually because they contained references to intelligence matters or because they had been considered to be particularly sensitive. (An example of the latter was a despatch of March 1946 to Bevin from Jerram, the Minister in Stockholm, in which he highlighted the difficulties he would have in carrying out Foreign Office instructions to weaken the position and if possible try to secure the removal of certain high-ranking officers in the Swedish Armed Forces who were considered to be pro-Nazi. The Foreign Office reconsidered and eventually reversed this policy. In the mid-1970s, when this document was initially being considered for release, this was presumably still considered to be too much of a hot potato.) Sometimes we were able to arrange for documents to be released with the redaction, or removal, of just a phrase or a couple of sentences if they referred to intelligence-related matters, if by doing so we did not greatly affect the meaning of the document. With hindsight, we should have highlighted these documents more clearly, as I don’t think that many of those who commented on the volume necessarily appreciated the extent of the new material which we were including. But we have also sometimes benefited when commentators have been able to add further context to some of this material, as Kimmo Rentola has done on several occasions, or where extra detail has been provided in new books, such as Keith Jeffery’s recently publishedhistory of the early years of MI6, the British secret service,in which for example he refers to the activities of a number of British intelligence officers in the Nordic countries, such as Bosley and Magill, who both worked in Finland.
With the benefit of more than sixty years hindsight, we have also included a few documents which throw light on some of the more questionable decisions which were made during this period. An example of this was the conclusion of the Chiefs of Staff in January 1945 that Russian possession of Svalbard would pose little threat either to Norway or to the UK. Olav Riste has quite rightly described this as mind-boggling… You will no doubt be able to find some others.
It is also worth mentioning that I am currently working on a volume (which we plan to publish next year) describing the process of the establishment of NATO, which culminated in the signing of the Atlantic Treaty in Washington in April 1949. Since that book will describe in detail the complex and often difficult negotiations which took place between the United States, Canada and the Brussels Treaty countries(Britain, France, Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg) over the nature of the treaty and the countries which were to be included – or excluded, come to that – it would have been difficult to do justice in such a volume to the important discussions which also took place about the participation of some of the Nordic countries. The documents on that aspect would have been swamped by other material. So we thought that it would make more sense if we were to include Atlantic security in the Nordic volume, as we could give the documents relating to Nordic participation the greater degree of prominence which I think that they rightly deserve. Though we do intend to include in the NATO volume a very small number of the most significant documents which bear on Nordic interests.
Now a few comments to set the volume in its historical context.
In the preface to our volume, we have used a quotation fromthe Scandinavian scholar Geoffrey Gathorne-Hardy, who in 1951 wrote that ‘the importance of the Scandinavian countries in world affairs has lately increased to an extent which is almost startling. In a world divided, as at present, by an “iron curtain” following roughly a line from the Arctic Ocean down the Baltic to the Adriatic, it is obvious that the Scandinavian peninsula no longer occupies a remote grand-stand in which its inhabitants can be passive or neutral spectators of any future conflict, but constitutes more than 1,200 miles of the front line dividing the forces of East and West’.
At the end of the Second World War, the Soviet Union, which in late 1944 had already concluded an armistice with Finland and dominated the country through the its influence on the Allied Control Commission, also occupied a significant part of northern Norway and the Danish island of Bornholm. It was also making unwelcome demands of Norway over Svalbard. But at this stage Britain was not particularly worried about Soviet activities in the Nordic area: its main preoccupations lay elsewhere in Western Europe. The picture began to become clearer in early 1946, as concerns grew about Soviet intentions and it was resolved that their policies should be met by a firm policy of containment. So the documents which we have included in this volume chart the process by which British policy evolved, both initially in response to this as the nature of the perceived threat became clearer, and also later in reaction to Nordic preferences to remain neutral or, in the case of Norway, to try to build bridges between the two opposing power blocs. They go into rather more detail from February 1948 onwards, when shortly after the signature of the Finnish-Soviet Mutual Assistance Treaty, the Norwegians picked up indications that they might be faced with a Soviet demand for a similar pact. This provided the catalyst which led to the beginning of negotiations culminating in the signature of the Atlantic Treaty in April 1949.
But of course there was plenty of substance in Britain’s bilateral relations with all of the Nordic countries throughout almost all of this period. This was partly due to the shared experience of the war, particularly in the case of the exceptionally close relationship between Britain and the Norwegian government in exile. There were of course other factors as well, for example the common economic difficulties and a strong ideological affinity between the British Labour Government of 1945-1951 and its social democratic counterparts in the Nordic countries, exploited most effectively Laurence Collier, Ambassador in Oslo from 1945 to 1950, who sought to use this as a means of improving relations still further, and by Information Research Department (IRD, which I will return to in a moment) who used Labour Party links to facilitate the dissemination of the anti-Communist material which they were preparing from early 1948 onwards. Another interesting example of collaboration, was the formation in 1949 of UNISCAN, an organisation which was set up to promote closer economic co-operation.
Of course, the closeness of relations did not preventproblems. There were difficulties with Sweden over their access to military supplies. Other examples included problems with bases in Iceland, which I expect Valur will be covering shortly in much more detail, the provision of Danish and Norwegian military contingents to participate in the occupation of Germany, and the honouring of contracts to supply coal to Denmark and also Sweden – a subject in which Bevin took a close personal interest. There was also a protracted dispute with Norway over fisheries protection which culminated in a court case at The Hague – and which came to a head in early 1949 just at the time when the final negotiations over the Atlantic Treaty were taking place. We have also used some documents which show the extent to which the Foreign Office accepted that its influence with the Soviet Union over Finland was limited, but sought to find ways of providing support which would not make its precarious position any worse.
Finally, we also thought it worth including a selection of illustrative documents about the work of IRD, a secretive department which was set up in 1948 to counter Soviet propaganda and which was quite active in the Nordic countries. This material describes how some embassies in the Nordic countries planned to use IRDmaterial, and provides examples of ways in which they did so, including the response of IRD to the request for assistance from the Icelandic Foreign Minister, Mr Bjarni Benediktsson, for assistance with material for an election campaign in 1949 where the Communists formed the major opposition party. I am quite familiar with the material in our archives on the work of IRD in the first few years after it was established. It worked in many different ways, but this is the only example which I have found from that period of it reacting – and commendably quickly, at that - to a direct request from a foreign minister, either in the Nordic countries or elsewhere.
We tried to make the volume as comprehensive as we can, given the limitations of its length. So we hope that any omissions which you might notice, won’t affect the key threads which are being described during this period.
Thank you.