British Prime Ministers and Democracy by Quinault Roland;

Author:Quinault, Roland;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
Published: 2019-11-27T00:00:00+00:00

In a broadcast to the United States, after the Munich agreement, Churchill claimed that the ideological antagonism between Nazidom and democracy strengthened the free world.77 In April 1939 he again endorsed Roosevelt’s defence of democracy.78

Churchill opposed Chamberlain’s policy of appeasing Hitler partly because he feared that it would undermine democracy in Britain. He predicted that ‘the policy of submission’ would lead to restrictions on criticisms of the Nazi dictatorship in Parliament and in the press.79 That fear had some foundation for Churchill’s condemnation of the Munich agreement led to calls for him to be disowned by his constituency association. He retorted that parliamentary democracy would not survive if the constituencies returned subservient MPs and tried to stamp out independent judgement.80

When Churchill entered the Cabinet at the outbreak of war in 1939, he called for tough measures to convince the world that the democracies were more than a match for the dictatorships.81 Throughout the war he was convinced that democracy was on trial as much as dictatorship. In 1942 he told Roosevelt that democracy had to prove that it could provide ‘a granite foundation’ for war against tyranny.82 Yet Churchill’s famous speeches, in the summer of 1940, employed the old language of freedom, rather than the newer language of democracy. His use of specifically democratic rhetoric was soon constrained, moreover, by contradictory pressures from Britain’s two major wartime allies. In 1941 Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union provided Britain with a much-needed ally but one that undermined the democratic credentials of the anti-Nazi front. Soon afterwards, Churchill and Roosevelt signed the Atlantic Charter, which asserted the right of people to choose their own form of government but made no reference to democracy. That omission avoided embarrassment not only for the Soviet Union but also for imperial Britain. When the United States entered the war, Roosevelt privately asked Churchill to give independence to India, but he refused to consider the matter until after the war was over.83 Indeed in 1944, Churchill told Roosevelt that British imperialism ‘has spread and is spreading democracy more widely than any other system of government since the beginning of time’.84 Presumably, he had in mind the white dominions – even though they largely denied the vote to their aboriginal inhabitants. In India, at that time, there was no democratically elected central government.

Churchill’s most important wartime statement on democracy was made in opposition not to the Nazis but to the Communists. In December 1944 he defended British intervention in Greece as an action designed to ensure the rule of democracy, which he defined as free and secret voting for the candidate of one’s choice. He claimed that throughout his life he had ‘broadly’ stood ‘upon the foundation of free elections based on universal suffrage’ and he accused the Communists of creating ‘a swindle democracy’:

Democracy … is not based on violence or terrorism, but on reason, on fair play, on freedom, on respecting the rights of other people. Democracy is no harlot to be picked up in the street by a man with a tommy gun.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.