The Economist: Viva, Zapatero!

SELDOM can a European prime minister have had a less auspicious start. It was only days after al-Qaeda's Madrid train bombings on March 11th 2004 that the Socialists unexpectedly won an election in Spain, propelling their leader, Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero, into the top job. Mr Zapatero was inexperienced, ill-prepared and unprepossessing; he was nicknamed "Bambi", as he often looked like a startled fawn caught in the headlights. His very first action was to pull Spanish troops out of Iraq, infuriating the Americans and provoking charges of appeasing terrorism.

How different it all looks today. No other European leader is as popular or as entrenched at home as Mr Zapatero. It is true that, under his predecessors, the European Union has for many years seen post-Franco Spain, like Ireland, as one of its great success stories: modern, democratic and increasingly prosperous. The Spaniards are masters at extracting money from Brussels. And they have carefully and gradually freed up an economy that was (and to an extent still is) unduly mired in red tape.

Mr Zapatero has added three achievements to this list. The first, and perhaps most important, was not to muck it all up. His experienced finance minister, Pedro Solbes, has kept the public accounts in order. The government has not succumbed to leftists' usual fondness for too much new regulation or interference in the labour market--indeed, unemployment, albeit still over 8%, is at its lowest for 25 years. Within the EU, Spain under Mr Zapatero has usually, if not always, been on the side of the liberalisers and in favour of the Lisbon Agenda to promote competitiveness--more so than the three other big euro members, France, Germany and Italy.

The prime minister's second achievement has been to tackle Spain's restive regions. His People's Party predecessor, Jose Maria Aznar, was positively Castilian in his determination to maintain Madrid's grip and refuse to negotiate. Yet Mr Zapatero quickly began to discuss a new deal with Catalonia. He also reached out to the Basques, even offering to talk to ETA if the terrorist group declared a permanent ceasefire. The People's Party pilloried him for giving in to the gun and, more generally, risking the break-up of Spain. Yet Mr Zapatero has now delivered a new statute for Catalonia that uses the word "nation" but stops short of self-determination, let alone independence. After securing his permanent ceasefire, he is also going to talk to ETA. The prospect of a settlement in the Basque country looks the best in a generation.

In all this, Mr Zapatero has faced relentless opposition from the People's Party, as he has in his third area of achievement: the modernisation of Spanish society. Before he arrived, the Catholic Church still held great sway in such matters as attitudes to sex or religious instruction in schools; and open debate about the Spanish civil war remained taboo. Mr Zapatero's government has passed some of the most liberal laws in Europe, including legalising gay marriage. He has also opened up debate about the civil war, in which his own grandfather was shot dead by nationalists. If it can come to terms with its past, Spain will surely be better able to face its future.

The economy, stupid

There are some causes for concern. As British experience in Northern Ireland suggests, talks with ETA may be long, painful and perhaps unsuccessful. Other regions may now insist on more autonomy. The church's hostility could damage the Socialists. Most worrying of all, Spain's prosperity is precarious: the current-account deficit is gaping, the economy is far too dependent on a boom in property and construction, inflation is rising and, locked inside the euro, Spanish industry is fast losing its competitiveness (see page 33).

The economy clearly needs more deregulation, not the fostering of national champions that Mr Zapatero has espoused. Yet overall he has proved a better prime minister than critics expected. The opposition People's Party is in disarray, so his party is well placed to win re-election in 2008. Other leaders, not least George Bush, with whom Mr Zapatero's relations remain frosty, should take note: this prime minister, presiding over the world's ninth-biggest economy, will be around for a while. He should be treated with due seriousness--despite that "appeasement" over Iraq.

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The Economist: Zappy happy on the beach

SUMMER is not what it was in Madrid. Only a few years ago the Spanish capital ground to a halt every August, as offices, shops and bars closed for the entire month. This year, most of the city is planning to remain open. It is yet another sign that one of Europe's best-performing economies, with a decade of continuous growth under its belt, has ditched its old "siesta-and-fiesta" reputation.

One man who will be leaving Madrid is Spain's Socialist prime minister, Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero. The political year is over and, as he hits the beaches in the Canary island of Lanzarote, he may reflect on several triumphs. The economy is powering on--GDP is expected to grow by almost 3.5% this year. The ticklish Catalan question appears to have been answered, with a bit of fudging, through a new autonomy statute. The Basque terrorist group, ETA, is sticking to its permanent ceasefire declared in the spring. A slew of socially liberal legislation, from gay marriage to fast-track divorce, has gone through parliament. To crown it all, Mr Zapatero's Socialist Party (PSOE) has a comfortable, if not huge, lead in the opinion polls.

In short, halfway through his first term in office, Mr Zapatero looks to be a man in control--and one who is increasingly likely to be re-elected in 2008. The leader once jokingly known as "Bambi" may thus be around for a long time to come. Yet he cannot afford to rest on his laurels. His political future may seem promising, but Spain's long-running economic boom is not quite so healthy.

Inflation is close to 4%, almost 1.5 points above the average for the euro area. Spain boasts one of the world's biggest current-account deficits, heading for over 9% of GDP. Cheap credit, a construction boom and domestic consumption, not investment, have been the main motors of growth. House prices, says a recent Goldman Sachs report, may be overvalued by as much as 25-35%. With euro interest rates rising, the housing bubble could well burst, pulling the rug out from under a construction sector that accounts for 16% of GDP and 12% of employment.

"If we weren't in the euro zone, our inflation and external deficit would already have produced recession and devaluation," says Miguel Arias Canete, economics spokesman for the opposition People's Party (PP). Economists are divided. Several are just as gloomy as Mr Arias Canete. "We are not on a good path," says Rafael Pampillon, of Madrid's Instituto de Empresa business school. "It has to come to an end, because we cannot keep building homes at this rate." When the building stops, he says, the cycle by which construction fuels consumption, and vice versa, could be inverted: "the virtuous cycle becomes a vicious one."

The trouble with warnings about an overheated Spanish economy is that they are starting to sound stale. Predictions of collapse in the housing market are at least three years old. Some economists now think that prices will simply flatten out, as they have elsewhere. "A soft landing similar to that experienced in the United Kingdom and in the United States seems the most probable scenario," argues Jose Carlos Diez, chief economist at Intermoney, a stockbroker. Mortgage-holders have plenty of wiggle-room, he says, to extend payment periods. Spain's banks are robust enough to handle a rise in defaulters. Inflation may eat away at competitiveness, but immigrants have kept wages down, boosted social-security receipts and provided new, eager consumers. Another 650,000 immigrants arrived last year.

All the same, Mr Zapatero has little room for manoeuvre. He cannot devalue a currency, the euro, that is shared with 11 other countries. He cannot look to a sharp rise in interest rates to curb inflation, because rates are set by the European Central Bank, which must take into account the larger, more sluggish, economies of Germany and France. A tighter rein on public spending is another possible response, but the budget is already in surplus. "We are very aware of the importance of budget policy," says David Vegara Figueras, deputy finance minister. "It is important that we do not throw on more gasoline."

Does Spain have much time? Mr Pampillon predicts that the housing bubble, if it bursts, will do so in 2008. "We expect the slowdown to be quite mild," says Javier Perez de Azpillaga, at Goldman Sachs, who says that GDP growth will remain over 2.5% in 2007. "That is not a disaster. In fact it is very good compared with the rest of euroland." Spaniards may be fretting about high house prices but, apart from that, they show little concern about their consumption- and credit-driven economy.

In politics, meanwhile, the PP has made little effort to return to the centre ground from where it was able to govern Spain for eight years until 2004. Vitriolic opposition to such relatively popular moves as gay marriage or peace talks with ETA plays well to a hard-core conservative audience, but not to the centre. Mr Zapatero has been quick to spot the gap. Indeed, his latest move is a bold attempt to dress the PSOE in the clothes of liberalism.

"In its social and political side, the values of liberalism are better represented by the PSOE than the PP," Mr Zapatero's chief economic adviser, Miguel Sebastian, declared in a recent speech. "In the economy the PSOE also better represents the principles of stimulating the private sector, less intervention and a reasonable-sized public sector."

This is clever, if not entirely convincing. The PSOE can certainly claim to be social liberals. They have also tended to be more liberal economically than, say, their French counterparts. The government even has plans, not yet set in concrete, to cut corporate tax by five points, to 30%, over the next few years. The finance minister, Pedro Solbes, has a well-earned reputation for balancing his budget.

But the PSOE is no free-market party. The government's attempts to obstruct a takeover by Germany's E.ON of a Spanish electricity giant, Endesa, regardless of EU rules, are proof of that. A mild reform of employment law this year made firing workers cheaper, but it still costs a lot more than in other countries.

Yet Mr Sebastian's analysis is intriguing. Spain introduced the word "liberal" to world politics early in the 19th century. But it has no liberal party of its own. Some polls suggest that 18% of Spaniards would define themselves as liberals, rather than conservatives, socialists or any of Spain's other political brands. Whichever of the two big parties can win this floating vote in the centre tends to win an election.

Mr Sebastian is one of Mr Zapatero's closest advisers. Perhaps, as he rests this August, Mr Zapatero might conclude that further liberalisation could kill two birds with one stone--not only warding off an economic slowdown, but also ensuring that he gets a second term.

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The Economist: We'll jolly well say what we want to

Against expectations, China's media are taking free speech seriously

YOU might think that China's media have been having a hard time in recent months: editors sacked, reporters jailed, new curbs announced on what they can report, new clampdowns on the internet. But is it as bad as it sounds? Even as the authorities attempt to tighten controls, the media keep fighting back.

The picture is much more varied than that suggested by Reporters Without Borders, a Paris-based pressure group, in a report this year. It said a government faced with growing social unrest had imposed a news blackout. “The press has been forced into self-censorship, the internet purged and foreign media kept at a distance.”

In the last month, however, several media organisations, including some affiliated with the government, have been unusually outspoken in their criticisms of government censorship. Far from subdued, some newspapers and their websites have been airing a lively debate about how far these controls should go.

The loudest protests were heard after it was revealed in late June that a proposed law on public emergencies contained a clause banning the media from issuing any news about such events without government permission. Violators, it said, would be fined. The outcry was remarkable given that the draft law merely states what had been widely understood to be the rule since the Communist Party came to power in 1949. Indeed, the fine of between 50,000 yuan ($6,250) and 100,000 yuan could be considerably offset by the extra revenue earned by an exclusive report on a big story.

Caijing, a fortnightly magazine, quoted one academic on its website as saying that freedom of the press was an offshoot of the constitution's (little observed) guarantee of freedom of speech. Restrictions should therefore be introduced with caution. Another academic reportedly said that giving local governments the power to interpret the rules could turn China into a “police society”. Southern Metropolis News, a widely read daily, said in an online commentary that delays in releasing news would only encourage rumours. It called for “healthy competition” between the media and the government over information on emergencies.

On July 21st, just such competition forced the authorities in the southern province of Hunan to revise the death toll reported from a storm from 92 to 346. A journalist from the central television network found that officials in the worst affected area had been under-reporting the numbers. Also in the last few days, newspapers in the neighbouring province of Guangdong have been attacking an internal directive, leaked to the press, that requires journalists in the capital, Guangzhou, to apply two days in advance to interview hospital staff about public-health emergencies. On July 12th, a newspaper in the city also published an astonishing article comparing China's political reforms unfavourably with Vietnam's.

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The Economist: Mind those proportions

“YES, Israel has a right to exist and defend itself, but bombing houses, roads and utilities and killing hundreds of civilians is surely far out of proportion to the offence it suffered.” “But doesn't it make a difference that our enemy in Lebanon, with its arsenal of rockets standing at 12,000, wants to destroy our state? Consider all that, and surely our response (which falls well short of our potential and tries to minimise civilian deaths) is restrained: proportionate, in fact, to the threat we face.”

An argument on just those lines is going on between Israel and its detractors in the world. Both sides in the argument presume that proportionality in war has some broadly accepted meaning which rational people can discuss, refine and apply to real situations. Are they right?

If it is a question about the state of philosophical debate on the morals of war, the answer is yes. Most Western thinking about military ethics has its roots in Augustine, the sainted Christian writer from North Africa whose elaborate theory of “just warfare” has provided a framework for debate over the 16 centuries since his death. And for philosophers in the Augustinian tradition, proportionality is one of the things you should consider when contemplating war. Others are the probability of success and whether warfare is a last resort: have all the other options been tried? In this context, the proportionality question is judged by the destruction which the war will cause, weighed against the good it may do.

Put like that, proportionality is a concept that most Israelis can live with. They would argue that the good which might be achieved by smashing Hizbullah (and the threat it poses not only to Israel but also to Lebanon and other states) does outweigh the travails of Lebanon's civilians.

But proportionality in that Augustinian sense covers only half of the modern debate about military force. What today's Augustinians are talking about is jus ad bellum, in other words whether it is right to be fighting at all. Since 1945, there has been a new emphasis in diplomacy and jurisprudence, and in the language of human-rights lobbies, on the other big dilemma in military ethics: jus in bello—literally, law in war. The question here is this: once the bullets are flying and you are a belligerent, by what methods and weaponry is it legitimate to wage your war? How careful must you be to spare civilians and non-combatants, such as prisoners and wounded?

That is what the four Geneva Conventions (extensively revised in 1949, though born of a process that began 80 years earlier) and their three “additional protocols” are all about. The Hague war-crimes tribunal, which was set up to punish the enormities of the Balkan wars, has a similar emphasis; it has little remit to consider the cause in which atrocious acts were committed. And Human Rights Watch (HRW), a New York-based group that monitors wars and other abuses all over the world, is even blunter about its area of concern: it consciously blocks out questions about jus ad bellum and concentrates its efforts entirely on jus in bello.

Using these narrow criteria, HRW did an extensive audit of the American-led campaigns against Serbia in 1999 and against Iraq in 2003—and found that both times the attacking coalition infringed humanitarian law by failing to take enough care to distinguish between military and civilian targets. These rebukes stopped short of denouncing the campaigns in general; from HRW's point of view, that was for others to decide.

But in the case of Iraq, in particular, certain specific misdeeds were identified: using cluster munitions in populated areas, and attacking electric-power facilities in the city of Nasiriya, which, though of some military use, were also vital to civilian welfare. In other respects, HRW found, the coalition tried quite hard to spare civilians.

One of the tests that human-rights analysts use to make these judgments is that of proportionality, albeit in a slightly different sense from the one Augustinians use. For those who monitor human rights, a key piece of language is Article 51 of the first additional protocol to the Geneva Conventions. This outlaws attacks that “may be expected to cause incidental loss of civilian life” which would be “excessive in relation to the concrete and direct military advantage”. Even in situations such as Lebanon today, where most of the 1949 Conventions are technically inapplicable because Hizbullah is not a state, the Geneva language is seen as a guide to the spirit of customary humanitarian law.

The trouble is that measuring civilian woes against military gain is a tall order, especially in a densely populated place like Lebanon. For one thing, they are hard to separate: almost any piece of “infrastructure”—a road, a power plant, a reservoir—can serve some military purpose but also helps keep civilians alive.

Critics of Israel's campaign in Lebanon (and Gaza) have been framing their attack in the language of jus in bello. Indeed, HRW has already deplored Israel's use of anti-personnel cluster bombs—as well as Hizbullah's firing into Israeli towns of Katyusha rockets, “dirty” weapons that are too crude to discriminate between soldiers and civilians. The lobby group says other aspects of the campaign need more time to assess. Others are saying that there is no military advantage that could outweigh the harm caused to Lebanese innocents who have been killed or forced to flee their homes in terrifying conditions and seen their livelihoods destroyed.

Indeed, it is not clear, judging by the latest reports, that the Israeli army is achieving its declared aim of removing Hizbullah's military threat to Israel's security. So the killing of some 400 civilians and the displacement of perhaps 800,000 of them cannot even be weighed in the moral balance. By this criterion, Israel's actions will surely be adjudged disproportionate in effect, if not by intention.

But the calculus of military advantage versus human cost, suggested in the Geneva formula, could still be used to justify some of Israel's recent tactics. For example, using large bombs to assassinate terrorist leaders, in the knowledge that civilian bystanders will also be killed. When the military gain is so big, Israeli hawks argue, some “breaking of eggs” may be inevitable. That, of course, is no comfort to the families thus bereaved.

In the end, some philosophers think, debate about the ethics of war will have to reintegrate two ancient questions—about the right to go to war, and the methods that may be used—which have become artificially separated in modern times. To put it more simply, nobody will be impressed with a line that goes: “We didn't start this war, so our cause is just—but now that it's begun, we'll fight as dirty as we like.” Augustine saw the questions of jus ad bellum and jus in bello as intertwined—and so, probably, should modern man.

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The Economist: An affair to remember

ON JULY 26th 1956 Gamal Abdul Nasser, president of Egypt, addressed a huge crowd in the city of Alexandria. Broad-shouldered, handsome and passionate, Nasser stunned even this gathering of enthusiastic supporters with the vehemence of his diatribe against British imperialism. Britain had ruled Egypt, one way or another, from 1882 to 1922, when the protectorate gained nominal independence, and continued to influence Egyptian affairs thereafter, maintaining troops there and propping up the decadent monarchy overthrown by Nasser in 1952.

In that speech in Alexandria, though, Nasser chose to delve back even further into history, in a long digression on the building of the Suez canal a century earlier. That gave him the chance to mention the name of the Frenchman who had built the canal, Ferdinand de Lesseps. This he did at least 13 times. “De Lesseps”, it turned out, was the codeword for the Egyptian army to start the seizure, and nationalisation, of the canal. It also launched the start of a new era in the politics of Europe, the Middle East and America.

The Suez crisis, as the events of the following months came to be called, marked the humiliating end of imperial influence for two European countries, Britain and France. It cost the British prime minister, Anthony Eden, his job and, by showing up the shortcomings of the Fourth Republic in France, hastened the arrival of the Fifth Republic under Charles de Gaulle. It made unambiguous, even to the most nostalgic blimps, America's supremacy over its Western allies. It thereby strengthened the resolve of many Europeans to create what is now the European Union. It promoted pan-Arab nationalism and completed the transformation of the Israeli-Palestinian dispute into an Israeli-Arab one. And it provided a distraction that encouraged the Soviet Union to put down an uprising in Hungary in the same year.

It also divided families and friends, at least in Britain and France, with a degree of bitterness that would not be seen in a foreign-policy dispute until the invasion of Iraq in 2003. If that is difficult to understand, remember that the world was a different place then. Many European politicians still believed their countries had a right to run the affairs of others. Many were also scarred by memories of appeasement in the 1930s. Faced with a provocation, even an entirely legal one involving the nationalisation of a foreign-owned asset like the Suez canal, the instinct of such Europeans was to go to war. They and their Israeli partners-in-invasion were restrained, eventually, by the United States, led by a Republican president and war hero, Dwight Eisenhower. The venture involved intrigue, lies, nemesis—and no end of a lesson. How did it come about?

The road to collusion

In Egypt, the British had become so resented for their racist, arrogant ways that by the early 1950s even Winston Churchill, the grand old imperialist who had returned as prime minister in 1951, felt he could resist the tide of nationalism no more. After 1951 the British were confined to the Suez canal zone, harassed by Egyptian irregulars who wanted them out altogether. By June 1956 the last British soldiers had left even the canal zone.

Yet Anglo-Egyptian relations did not improve. Nasser was enraged by America's withdrawal of its offer of loans to help pay for the building of a dam on the Nile at Aswan. This project was central to his ambitions to modernise Egypt. But John Foster Dulles, the American secretary of state, thought the dam would place too much strain on the resources of newly independent Egypt.

For their part, the British, mistrustful of Nasser and feeling the pinch, were also ready to withdraw their loan offer. So, thought Dulles, best to let the Russians take on the dam, as he knew they would if the West backed out. He did not, however, bargain for Nasser's immediate response—the nationalisation of the Suez canal, whose revenues, Nasser argued, Egypt now needed to replace the loans promised by Britain and America for the dam.

The reaction in Britain was unanimous in condemning “Grabber Nasser”, as the Daily Mirror put it. Comparisons were immediately made to Hitler and Mussolini in the 1930s: if he got away with this, where would he—and other emboldened post-colonial leaders—stop? Eden, who had succeeded Churchill as prime minister the year before, argued that the canal was Britain's “great imperial lifeline”, especially for oil. Nasser could not be allowed to have his hand “on our windpipe”.

The French reacted just as strongly, but for different reasons. First, they had a stake in the Paris-based company that ran the canal. Second, they were fighting an increasingly nasty little colonial war in Algeria. The new government of Guy Mollet was resolved to put down an Arab uprising there with all the force that the Fourth Republic could muster. By the summer of 1956 France had about 400,000 soldiers in Algiers. Nasser backed the Arab insurgents, so the French were as eager as the British to see the back of him. Accordingly, Britain and France started to co-ordinate plans for a military invasion of Egypt and a reoccupation of the canal zone.

But their bellicosity was matched by the scepticism of the Americans, and of Eisenhower in particular, who from the beginning was against the use of force by his two main allies. One concern for him was the presidential election due that November, which he intended to win as the incumbent “peace” president. He knew that the voters would not thank him for taking them into a foreign imbroglio in which America had no direct interest.

Eisenhower was also motivated by an anti-imperialism rooted in the attitudes that had made Americans break free from the British empire. Intensifying his scepticism was a fear that, in the new cold war, any British and French bullying of Egypt would alienate Arabs, Asians and Africans and drive them towards the communist camp. To head off Anglo-French military action, Eisenhower and his secretary of state ensnared the Europeans in a fruitless round of talks and conferences.

Aware that they were on shaky legal ground for an invasion, the British and French reluctantly played along. But they were losing the momentum for military action, which was the American intention. The increasingly histrionic Eden, in particular, wanted not only the reversal of the canal's nationalisation but also regime change: he wanted Nasser “destroyed”.

The Israelis provided a way out. On September 30th a delegation secretly presented the French with a fabricated casus belli: Israel would invade Egypt and race to the canal. The French and British could then invade, posing as peacekeepers to separate the two sides, and occupy the canal, ostensibly to guarantee the free passage of shipping. When this plan was presented to Eden, he jumped at it. Thus was collusion born. The details were agreed on at a secret meeting in Sèvres, outside Paris. Not for nothing is the Suez crisis known in Egypt as the “tripartite aggression”.

The British and French forces now had a pretext to invade. For the Israelis, it would punish Egypt for its escalating incursions into Israel from Gaza. It would also hitch the major European powers to the cause of Israel: up to that point, the French had tried to be even-handed between Israel and its neighbours; the British had leaned towards the Arab states.

A complete mess and botch

Only a handful of people were let in on the collusion. Most of them thought it was mad from the start, arguing, quite correctly, that the cover for the invasion was so flimsy it would soon be blown. To disguise what was going on, the British, in particular, were drawn ever deeper into a bog of lies and deception, particularly with the Americans. Parliament was also deceived. Both Eden and Selwyn Lloyd, his foreign secretary, told the House of Commons that, as Lloyd put it, “there was no prior agreement” with Israel.

On October 29th, Israeli paratroopers, led by a zealous officer called Ariel Sharon, were dropped into Sinai to fulfil their side of the bargain. Feigning surprise, the British and French issued an ultimatum to both sides to cease fire. When the Egyptians rejected this, British planes started bombing the Egyptian air force on the ground and on November 5th Anglo-French troops went ashore to begin the invasion of the canal zone and, it was hoped, topple Nasser.

Eisenhower, kept completely in the dark, felt utterly betrayed by his erstwhile allies. “I've just never seen great powers make such a complete mess and botch of things,” he told his aides. He determined to put a stop to the whole enterprise.

America struck at Britain's fragile economy. It refused to allow the IMF to give emergency loans to Britain unless it called off the invasion. Faced by imminent financial collapse, as the British Treasury saw it, on November 7th Eden surrendered to American demands and stopped the operation, with his troops stranded half way down the canal. The French were furious, but obliged to agree; their troops were under British command.

America also proved adept at working through the UN. On November 2nd an American resolution demanding a ceasefire was passed by a majority of 64 to five, the Russians voting with the United States. And to sidestep Anglo-French vetoes at the Security Council, for the first time the General Assembly met in emergency session (where no country held a veto) and took up a Canadian suggestion to assemble an international emergency force to go to the canal and monitor the ceasefire. These were to be the first “blue hat” UN peacekeepers. The organisation was one of the clear winners of the crisis, gaining an enhanced role in the world. For the other participants in the drama, the consequences were more mixed.

The French drew the clearest lessons. Suez showed that they could never rely on perfide Albion. Britain, then Europe's strongest power, would, it seemed, always put its “special” relationship with America above its European interests. And the Americans, to the French, were both unreliable and annoyingly superior.

So the French would have to look elsewhere for more durable allies—a search that was, by one account, short. The story goes that on the evening of November 6th, when Mollet got the call from Eden that he was aborting the invasion, he happened to be with the German chancellor, Konrad Adenauer. The French foreign minister, Christian Pineau, records Adenauer as saying that “France and England will never be powers comparable to the United States...Not Germany either. There remains to them only one way of playing a decisive role in the world: that is to unite Europe...We have no time to waste; Europe will be your revenge.”

Thus was born the six-country European common market, which has now become the 25-country European Union. The founding Treaty of Rome was signed the very next year, in 1957. And the French, particularly Charles de Gaulle in the 1960s, kept the British, America's Trojan horse, out of it for as long as they could, until 1973. France had by then made itself truly independent of American military power (unlike the British) by building its own nuclear deterrent from scratch and, in 1966, leaving NATO's integrated command structure.

It should have been no surprise, then, that in the months before the invasion of Iraq in 2003, it was the French who played the American role of 1956, though Jacques Chirac could hardly deliver the coup de grâce, as Eisenhower had done in 1956. In reaction to Suez, France had constructed a new identity as the ostensible leader of Europe, upholding a set of universal values in competition with the Americans.

The British were hurt most by Suez. Eden resigned soon afterwards, his health wrecked, his reputation in tatters, his lies and evasions damaging the country's always tendentious reputation for fair play. The crisis exploded Britain's lingering imperial pretensions, and hastened the independence of its colonies.

Some talked of a “Suez syndrome”, where, in Margaret Thatcher's words, Britain's rulers “went from believing that Britain could do anything to an almost neurotic belief that Britain could do nothing”. Certainly, much of Mrs Thatcher's prime ministership, particularly the retaking of the Falklands in 1982, was an essay in exorcising the demons of Suez. Tony Blair has not been afraid to take advantage of her success, by deploying British power in Sierra Leone, the Balkans and Iraq.

But never without the Americans' support. The major lesson of Suez for the British was that the country would never be able to act independently of America again. Unlike the French, who have sought to lead Europe, most British politicians have been content to play second fiddle to America.

Eden recuperated from the crisis in Ian Fleming's house, Goldeneye, in Jamaica. It was an appropriate choice, as it was Fleming who was to mythologise the new relationship in his James Bond novels. The first, “Casino Royale”, was published to little attention in 1953, but the series took off in the years after the Suez crisis, offering some sort of literary consolation to a country coming to terms with its new, humbler status. The partnership between Bond and Felix Leiter, a CIA agent, reflected the way the British now liked to see things, the one suave, smart and endlessly resourceful, the other with a lot of money and a slightly plodding manner.

Eisenhower won his election in America. The crisis affirmed the country's new status as the global superpower, challenged only by the Soviet Union. Suez was also to be the last incident in which America was to take strong action against Israel. As Eisenhower had feared, the Russians moved into the Middle East to fill the gap left by the disorderly retreat of the British, so the Americans felt compelled to get in as well. Thus the cold war spread to north Africa and Egypt (the Russians duly stepped in to finance the Aswan dam, and much else), and Israel became ever more closely tied to the United States.

Before 1956, Israel had been militarily vulnerable, but, beyond the Arab world, morally and politically unassailable. The Israeli occupation of Sinai (and Gaza) in 1956 began the gradual inversion of this state of affairs, as it marked the first expansion of Israel beyond its original borders, with all the subsequent criticisms of its occupation of Arab or Palestinian land. In 1956 the Israelis were quickly forced to withdraw from Sinai by American (and Russian) pressure. Never again, however, would an American president face down Israel as Eisenhower had done at Suez.

The rise of Nasserism

The chief victor of Suez, in the short term, was Nasser. Before the crisis he had faced lingering opposition in Egypt, not only from the former ruling class but also from communists and the radical Islamists of the Muslim Brotherhood. “Pulling the Lion's tail”, and getting away with it, proved wildly popular. As dissidents fled, fell silent or filled its jails, Nasser's Egypt projected itself as the vanguard of Arab nationalism and a beacon to liberation movements across the third world.

Puffed up by his own success, Nasser launched misguided adventures such as a short-lived political union with Syria and disastrous nationalisations of Egyptian industry. And the Nasserist dream inspired a wave of pan-Arab nationalism that helped install lookalike leaderships, with similar flags, propaganda and secret police, across much of the Arab world. Saddam Hussein was one who drew inspiration. Nasser himself was largely discredited by Israel's crushing victory in the 1967 war, but the institutions of Nasserism still lived on, in Egypt and elsewhere, as effective systems of political control.

Nasser's 1956 triumph endured in Arab memory as a moment of cathartic liberation. It inspired, to some extent, Saddam's dramatic moves, such as invading Iran and later Kuwait. A famous Egyptian film, “Nasser 56”, lingers nostalgically over the Egyptian leader. Amid rousing music, he is portrayed in black and white, shrouded in pensive solitude by a swirl of cigarette smoke, reaching his momentous decision to nationalise the canal. But the film jumps to the happy outcome, ignoring the fact that Nasser's victory was not won by this new Arab superman, but delivered by superpower intervention.

A wider lesson lies in the interpretation of history. Eden, who had honourably resigned as foreign secretary in 1938 in disapproval of the appeasement of Hitler and, especially, Mussolini, was nonetheless haunted by Neville Chamberlain's readiness to yield to tyrants. His impulses at Suez were surely complex. Eden was far from anti-American or indifferent to American concerns. He had resigned in 1938 partly because he thought his prime minister, Chamberlain, had treated Roosevelt shabbily. Yet he saw Nasser as a “Mussolini” and was plainly determined to avoid any charge of appeasement, even though the essential features of Munich and Suez were wholly different. Instead of saying that those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it, George Santayana might have better said that those who misinterpret the past are condemned to bungle the present.

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