An intriguing feature of Britain’s new Foreign Secretary David Lammy’s early statements during his time in office has been his references to Ernest Bevin, Labour foreign secretary between 1945 and 1951. Speaking at the United Nations Summit of the Future in September, he praised Bevin for his support of the United Nations in its earliest days. ‘Our task is to recapture that founding spirit so that when we reach the UN’s centenary, their legacy endures,’ Lammy declared. Months earlier, in a Foreign Affairs article laying out his idea of ‘Progressive Realism’, Bevin featured a few times, alongside an ambition to have Britain ‘chart a new course’ in the world – one that might be set by renewing partnerships in the ‘Global South’, tackling climate change by collective efforts, and modernising the nation’s approach to development aid. Lammy wrote admiringly of the postwar foreign secretary, noting his rise from orphan to union leader to senior minister in Churchill’s wartime coalition and finally to foreign secretary under the postwar Attlee government. ‘Bevin was committed to realism, a politics based on respect for facts,’ Lammy wrote.

In many ways, these references are promising. Bevin was indeed a transformative figure in British diplomatic history at a time of immense change and uncertainty. He entered the post of foreign secretary in a period that was anything but stable. Though victorious in the Second World War and a central player in the development of a postwar economic and security order, Britain witnessed that system immediately undermined by a dramatic split between the Soviet Union and the Western powers. By 1946 and into 1947, the world was once again between orders – a transitional moment when the ideas and determination of key individuals help set the mould of a new international system. It is here that Bevin’s leadership, particularly on the question of addressing the Soviet challenge to Western Europe was pivotal. He was in many ways a ‘realist’, to use a terrible neologism, but this is not the lesson to draw from this historical moment. Bevin’s approach to statecraft, at least on the issue of European security, was far more complex, even philosophical; and understanding its essence is vital for contemporary British foreign policy.

Just a week before Christmas Eve 1947, the French Foreign Minister Georges Bidault ascended the grand staircase in the British Foreign Office. It was around 10am in the morning and Bidault was there to speak to Bevin before returning to Paris. The foreign ministers had abruptly ended talks with their Soviet and American counterparts the day before. Those conversations had been intended to settle the future administration of postwar Germany, but their failure was setting the stage for future confrontation.

As they sat in the foreign secretary’s office, Bevin and Bidault, along with a handful of their senior aides, shared their frustration at the intransigence of Soviet diplomats. They had reached an impasse in negotiations and, behind their outward anger, both foreign ministers were riven with suspicion and fear. The Soviet Union was determined to exercise their dominance on the continent and the current military balance was well in their favour. Europe was now divided between east and west, from Greece to the Baltic Sea, Bevin told Bidault. He admitted that London and Paris would probably have little influence east of this dividing line, and they should now focus their attention on consolidating influence where they could. ‘Our task was to save Western civilisation,’ Bevin was recorded as telling those gathered in the room, and the only way to do this was to develop some kind of collective grouping to balance Soviet strength.

On the same December day that Bevin met Bidault, he also met the American Secretary of State George Marshall. During their 75-minute conversation that evening, Bevin told him it was time for the British, Americans, and the countries of Western Europe to come into closer partnership – one he insisted should be ‘backed by power, money and resolute action’, which could provide confidence for societies facing the threat of Soviet communism. He described it as ‘spiritual consolidation of Western civilisation’.

Throughout the year, Bevin, along with senior officials in the Foreign Office, had been growing increasingly concerned that Soviet leaders were hoping to prevent a strong Western half of the European continent. ‘We must now reconcile ourselves to forcing a trial of strength in Western Europe’, one official with responsibility for policy towards Moscow wrote. ‘It will be a trial of strength which, for the sake of everything we believe in, we must win.’ Deep down, Bevin’s instinct was the same; but for the sake of future European stability – coupled with his perception that Britain held an inferior position relative to the Soviet Union and the United States – he was intent on working with Russia in order to arrive at a common policy with regard to the future of Germany. Yet, by the middle of December, Bevin’s frustration had boiled over.

His conversations with Bidault and Marshall on 17 December marked a clear departure, one that would set British policy on a new trajectory – one that we are still guided by to this very day. Essential to his vision, and an aspect of his thinking not always adequately appreciated, was what he termed a ‘spiritual union’ of Western societies. Contrary to what some historians have described this term was not empty rhetoric or propaganda, but rather an essential pillar of his wider strategic thought.

In a paper produced for the Cabinet just days into 1948, he stated plainly that the ‘tide’ of Soviet communism had already flooded across Eastern Europe, rendering any kind of open economic or political relations with those societies moot. Titled ‘The First Aim of British Foreign Policy’, Bevin wrote that it was now necessary to bring the countries of Western Europe together in defence of their historical way of life. ‘We must… organise and consolidate the ethical and spiritual forces inherent in this Western civilisation of which we are the chief protagonists.’ He followed this up with a speech in Parliament on 22 January, in which he reiterated the same point:

If we are to have an organism in the West it must be a spiritual union. While, no doubt, there must be treaties or, at least, understandings, the union must primarily be a fusion derived from the basic freedoms and ethical principles for which we all stand. It must be on terms of equality and it must contain all the elements of freedom for which we all stand. That is the goal we are now trying to reach. It cannot be written down in a rigid thesis or in a directive. It is more of a brotherhood and less of a rigid system.

Shortly after Bevin’s speech, a working group on ‘spiritual union’ was established in the Foreign Office. Frank Roberts, a senior official, who in March 1946 produced his own ‘long telegram’ from the British Embassy in Moscow, was designated the chairman. He instructed a group of officials that the foreign secretary was thinking beyond political, economic, and strategic considerations alone. The spiritual aspect would be the cement of the relationship. Individual liberty was a principle that flowed through the world’s great religions, whether Christian, Muslim, or Buddhist; and this is what would offer a common principle against communism, Roberts said.

One of the first decisions the working group made was to reach out to Isaiah Berlin. The distinguished philosopher was then a fellow at New College, Oxford, and was known to the Foreign Office, having served in the Washington Embassy for a period during the war. What was the ‘spiritual cement’ that bound Western countries together, they inquired of Berlin. He began by suggesting that they avoid any mention of Hegel. Not only was Marxism Hegelian in its roots, but so too was liberal imperialism, at least in Berlin’s view. ‘So the less said about that the better’, he advised. Where the core differences between the Soviets and Western Europe lay, he wrote, was in their views of social life. First, civil liberties were indispensable to life in the West. Individuals would prefer to not live at all rather than have their liberties trampled upon, especially in favour of some state-directed aim. These observations, while seemingly trite, were an example of a particular feature in this moment of diplomatic planning. The pressing ideological challenge of communism led officials to return to first-order considerations of national and civilisational experience, which, in turn, delivered core organising principles.

While the contributions of Berlin were just one example of the types of conversations taking place in these weeks (members of the Foreign Office themselves were elaborating on their own ideas as well), the working group on spiritual union turned out to be relatively short-lived. This was not because of inefficiency or a lack of ministerial interest as much as the churn of events. At the end of February the USSR had organised a coup in Prague, a development which led the British Foreign Office to hasten its drive towards a Western European defence system, a prospect that had been discussed within Whitehall since at least 1943.

On 17 March the United Kingdom, France, the Netherlands, Belgium and Luxembourg signed the Brussels Pact, an early seed of the future North Atlantic Treaty. We should think of ourselves as ‘virtually one force’ going forward, Bevin had told Bidault on the train ride to Brussels. Though accounts of this history have painted the process as a logical strategic move in response to a Soviet challenge, a crucial aspect is consistently overlooked: the spiritual dimension – something well beyond political, economic, and strategic considerations – was the driving force across Bevin’s thinking.

Though references to ‘spirit’ crop up in political speeches from time to time, generally speaking it is unfashionable to talk about civilisation and spiritual values in foreign policy and national security today. Many, in a more secular age, see it as arcane or redolent of an outmoded or even imperial mindset; while others, especially those closer to the centres of decision-making in government, wonder how such seemingly vague abstractions can be moulded into practical policy. Talk of a spiritual union is for philosophers at best and mystics at worst – individuals well removed from the hard yards of foreign policy.

Yet we miss the spiritual aspect of foreign policy at our peril. In the era of NATO’s 75th anniversary, there is great anxiety over the fate of institutions that have long served as the foundation of a recognisable international order – one which has embodied a range of norms and principles that have set certain standards of behaviour for governments. One job of the historian is to return to these foundational moments, to understand the myriad forces, whether material or immaterial, that have given life to surviving institutions.

When we return to Bevin and the winter of 1947-48, we see a statesmen driven by deep impulses well beyond normal considerations of military, economic, or political strategy. He was not so much a ‘realist’, as Lammy has written, but more of a visionary who held that political values and moral principles served as a core animating force in a nation’s foreign policy. Power and brute force were indispensable, but so too was a larger notion of national or even civilisational purpose. It is this aspect of Bevin’s thinking – what we might call the spiritual dimension of British foreign policy – that the new Labour foreign secretary would do well to embody.