The Principles of 1888

In the Name of Almighty God Her Majesty the Queen of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, Empress of India; His Majesty the Emperor of Germany, King of Prussia; His Majesty the Emperor of Austria, King of Bohemia, etc., and Apostolic King of Hungary; His Majesty the King of Spain and in the name of the Queen Regent of the Kingdom; the President of the French Republic; His Majesty the King of Italy; His Majesty the King of The Netherlands, Grand Duke of Luxembourg, etc.; His Majesty the Emperor of All the Russias; His Majesty the Emperor of the Ottomans; wishing to establish by a Conventional Act a definite system destined to guarantee at all times, and for all the Powers the free use of the Suez Maritime Canal . . .

The years since 1888 have been hard on the grand titles of those who sponsored the Constantinople treaty for the Suez Canal. But the diplomats of 22 trading nations, gathered last week in London, were still engaged in the same pursuit: preserving a "definite system" of international control over the canal, in the face of Egyptian Dictator Gamal Abdel Nasser's seizure of the Suez for the "grandeur of Egypt."

This reasonable goal was something less than what was sought when the conference was first proposed three weeks ago. Then the angry British and French wanted a fast session to whip off an ultimatum backed by force to smash the pretensions of the Egyptian strongman. But by the time the 200 diplomats and aides gathered around the hollow rectangle in Lancaster House last week, even the British were beginning to say that their utter dependence on the canal for oil imports was not really so utter. They could survive, even if put to great inconvenience. "Many are thinking," said the London Economist, "of the supertankers that will return to Vasco da Gama's way of evading Levantine pressure," i.e., the voyage around Africa. What most delegates now sought was some compromise that would concede Nasser's legal right of nationalization of the Suez Company, provided that he accepted internationalization of control of the canal.

Back to Charles XII. The return to the principles of 1888 was proclaimed in John Foster Dulles' skillful, lawyerlike opening conference speech. "In the Suez Canal the interdependence of nations reaches perhaps its highest point," said Dulles. "The economic life of many nations has been shaped by reliance on the Suez Canal system, which has treaty sanction. To shake and perhaps shatter that system or to seek gains from threatening to do so, is not a triumph, neither does it augment grandeur. The Suez Canal, by reason of its internationalized character, both in law and in fact, is the last place wherein to seek the means of gaining national triumphs." He made passing reference to Nasser's much quoted Philosophy of the Revolution (see box) and its implicit threat of an Arab withholding of oil, "the sinew of material civilization without which machines would cease to function." To guard against such threats, Dulles proposed an international board to run the canal.

A "masterly" presentation, said Britain's Foreign Secretary Selwyn Lloyd. Even Foreign Minister Osten Unden of neutral Sweden spoke up to endorse Dulles' speech, moving one veteran conferencegoer to remark: "Unden is the first Swede to know what side he is on since Charles XII."

Russia's bulky Foreign Minister Dmitry Shepilov made a speech full of the usual Russian irrelevancies, but noteworthy, despite its buttering up of Nasser, in its acknowledgment of the need for "international cooperation." Meeting for the first time, Shepilov and Dulles held several fruitful side sessions. Against the original rigidity of the British and French positions, both Russia and the U.S. stressed flexibility, raising the ironic possibility that these two opponents might bring together those who for years have volunteered to provide a bridge between them.

Telling Nasser. As the side-room politicking began, Nasser's chief political aide, Wing Commander Ali Sabri, flew in from Cairo. He announced that shipowning nations still had rights in Suez -"the same rights as a customer in a shop." Then he went into a long session with India's Krishna Menon, whose eagerness to defend Nasser's anti-Western stand was slightly tempered by awareness that the canal is also his country's road to market. At week's end one Asian delegate asserted that, of the half-dozen Asian representatives he had talked to, all but Menon had expressed "horror" at the idea of Egypt holding supreme control of the waterway.

While back in Indonesia, President Sukarno was crying (in English) "Hands off Egypt!" at a Djakarta mass meeting, one of his delegates was saying privately in London: "We young nations need the tools of industrialization that come to us through the canal -and we cannot afford, as you can, to have them go round the longer and more expensive way. This is what we are telling Nasser." France's Foreign Minister Pineau made the same point to the conference, in a shrewd effort to divert the issue from Nasser's cry of colonialism.

At week's end Britain's Selwyn Lloyd (who had originally called the seizure a greater threat to Britain than Korea or the Berlin blockade) made some incisive contributions to the search for a temperate answer. "Sovereignty," he said, "does not mean the right to do exactly what you please within your own territory. The maxim, 'So use your own that you do not hurt that which belongs to another (Sic utere tuo ut alienum non laedas),' is one which is accepted by every legal system in the world." Furthermore, said Lloyd, "there is no real substance in the idea that a state suffers infringement of its sovereignty by allowing an international authority to perform certain functions in its territory." He cited the examples of the international commissions that already run such international rivers as the Rhine and the Danube.

The whole bent of the conference was now to show Nasser that he could accept an international Suez authority without diminishing his country's sovereignty one iota. The effort was conciliatory, free of threats of what would happen if he refused. John Foster Dulles worked on a scheme for a new Constantinople treaty, so that Egypt need not accept what it had already spurned. So long as he was ready to accept what Germany's Foreign Minister von Brentano called international "institutional safeguards," Nasser had a chance to own his Canal Company (after due compensation), and the world had a chance of guaranteed freedom of navigation.

The opportunity was Nasser's, and the onus of refusal his.

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