Introduction
This paper provides some historical background on the history of Wilton Park in the year of its eightieth anniversary. Why does this matter? Wilton Park is the Foreign Commonwealth and Development Office’s executive agency. It now occupies Wiston House and its estate in the South Downs, close to the village of Steyning. The secluded location with poor mobile phone reception is intentional: participants are supposed to concentrate on discussions with their fellow participants rather than browse social media.
While linked to FCDO, the organisation is independent in terms of its programming. Over the course of the year, it convenes meetings and workshops that involve a wide range of people involved in making foreign policy from the UK and countries around the globe: It brands itself as the UK’s ‘foremost multilateral facilitator’ and ‘expert in convening international policy dialogue’.
Topics range from discussions about nuclear proliferation over conversations about current conflicts, to counter terrorism, over AI and other technological challenges to foundational topics that consider the role of religion in conflicts and in conflict resolution; the role of women in peace making; or, most recently, the question of the role of regions in national foreign policy making.
Wilton Park is rarely in the news, but this is on purpose: it seeks to provide some deep analysis and forge networks. Its power lies in the ability to convene different people with different interests and positions and to foster open debate between and among them. Helmut Schmidt, then West German minister of defence and later West German chancellor, quipped on the occasion of Wilton Park’s twenty-fifth anniversary, that it was at least as useful as the military and came at less an “annual cost to the taxpayer than one single modern tank”.
It is difficult to find comparable institutions in the UK and around the world. Why was Wilton Park founded, and how did it develop into the organisation it has today? Answering these questions has implications for Wilton Park’s role and the structure and contents of British foreign policy in the twenty-first century.
Origins
Wilton Park was founded in January 1946 as a training and education facility for German POWs near Beaconsfield in Buckinghamshire. Around 4500 Germans attended the courses in what was then often referred to as a ‘nissen-hut university’ in the early period between 1946 and 1948. Among the first participants was, for example, the German journalist and publisher Joachim Fest, author of a famous biography of Adolf Hitler which formed the basis for a 1977 film. Almost immediately after its foundation, Wilton Park broadened its focus to include a growing number of civilian participants. They were proposed by the British occupation authorities because they were deemed to be key multipliers for democratic ideas and practices. Participants included Ralf Dahrendorf, the liberal politician and later director of the London School of Economics and life peer; Hildegard Hamm-Brücher, the grand dame of German liberalism; the social theorist Wolfgang Abendroth, and a number of German mayors and senior civil servants.
Wilton Park’s key characteristic, which has set it apart from other similar bodies in the UK and elsewhere, is that it has operated at arm’s length from the government in what its first warden (then the name for the CEO), Heinz Koeppler called its ‘self-denying ordinance’. The idea behind Wilton Park was essentially liberal: to enable the free, informed and rational discussion of views on the basis of education, with the aim of resolving problems. Such ideas were common among liberal internationalists at the time when Wilton Park was founded, but Wilton Park as an organisation was an attempt to put these ideas into practice. Koeppler, in particular, also sought to set up Wilton Park as a copy of interwar Oxford, where lectures and tutorials as well as general sociability would provide a holistic educational experience. Koeppler had missed the liberty of such discussions in the debates about appeasement and international order in 1930s Oxford, and he sought to address this at Wilton Park.
Wilton Park initially shared and then took over the site of the intelligence unit MI9 before taking over from it. As the site was needed for military purposes, Wilton Park moved to its current location at Wiston House in 1951. Wiston House, too, had played a role in the Second World War: it was the home of the Highland Light Infantry as it prepared for the Normandy invasion.
Wilton Park’s organisational origins lie at the crossroads of intelligence, propaganda, the question of what to do about prisoners of war, the planning for the post-war period from 1942/3 onwards, and the politics and policies of the occupation of Germany. The official take, developed by Richard Mayne in his 2003 history, attributes the specific origins to Winston Churchill and its first Warden, Heinz Koeppler. My own research has shown that this interpretation somewhat misconstrues the context of Wilton Park’s foundation and thereby risks downplaying its importance and significance.
Post-war planning became relevant within the British government not only in the context of the changing fortunes of war from 1942/3 onwards. It also mattered as these changing fortunes together with the uncertain duration of the war emphasised the need for more targeted analysis and action on propaganda and public morale, both in the UK and in the friendly and enemy nations. As Lee Richards has pointed out, citing the memorandum by Duff Cooper and Hugh Dalton on Propaganda Policy from November 1940, the British government realised the need for this early on: ‘Although essentially we are fighting for our very existence, this factor alone is not fully adequate to the psychological needs of our own people and means nothing to our enemies. A more positive conception is required. From the point of view of our propaganda, there is a real need for a formulation of post-war aims in broad terms which will sustain the spiritual motive force of our own people, appeal to our supporters abroad (especially America) and counter the German conception of a new order.’
The first important element of the historical context was the British propaganda and intelligence operation in the Second World War, especially in the context of the Political Intelligence Department in the Foreign Office, the Political Warfare Executive (PWE) and the BBC. Wilton Park’s founder Heinz Koeppler was linked to all of these through his role in the wartime BBC. Koeppler, born in 1912 to a wealthy East Prussian family and naturalised as a British citizen in 1937, had come to the UK in 1933 to study history at Magdalen College Oxford, later completing a DPhil in medieval history becoming a tutor there before volunteering to join the war effort. The idea for the kind of POW camp that would educate inmates for democracy had originally come from Waldemar von Knoeringen, however. A Bavarian baron involved in the far left resistance against Hitler, exiled to the UK and later important social democratic politician, Knoeringen worked for the PWE and the BBC propaganda section in northern Africa, a position that he had obtained via his friend Richard Crossman, the head of PWE’s German Section. The blueprint for Wilton Park is likely to have come from Knoeringen rather than from Koeppler. But Knoeringen left Wilton Park in Easter 1946 as he wanted to help with German reconstruction, so that his early role was soon forgotten.
Knoeringen’s involvement points towards another important context for Wilton Park’s foundation: discussions about adult education and its role for German reconstruction. Here, the London-based group German Educational Reconstruction (GER), a group of mostly German and British academics that was founded in 1943, was especially important. There are direct links to Wilton Park from that group, not only through the ideas of a liberal education through open debate, but also through some of the academics who worked for it as well as for Wilton Park. The most prominent person here might be Fritz Borinski, who later played a significant role for the expansion of German adult education (the Volkshochschulen) or the educational reformer Minna Specht.
Groups like GER as well as Koeppler had direct connections to liberal internationalism. There are two aspects to this context. First, as Helen McCarthy has shown, the significant role liberal internationalism played in debates about ‘education for world citizenship’ and ‘education for democracy’ in the 1930s in the context of debates about the League of Nations. Second, as such ideas seemed to have become obsolescent with the outbreak of war and liberal internationalism had fractured as a result, the question became one of what to do about Germany after the war. There were two main positions – although these should be seen as ideal types rather than as pragmatic positions: One group, symbolically headed by Robert Vansittart, argued that the only response was the complete destruction of Germany and ‘re-education’ of Germans – the German character, it argued, was ultimately totalitarian and German history since at least the nineteenth century had been characterised by a ‘special path’ towards National Socialism. Only an imposed root-and-branch reform could work. The other group sought to maintain some of the optimism of liberal internationalist thinking: not re-education, but educational reconstruction was still the answer; most Germans were ‘good Germans’ who could be educated for democracy; the rule of law and rationality could ultimately prevail. In 1940, in response to the German invasion of France and the British withdrawal from the continent, Heinz Koeppler (who was friends at Oxford with prominent internationalists like Gilbert Murray) co-authored the book A Lasting Peace with the physicist and League of Nations campaigner Maxwell Garnett. In the book, they argued for the importance of education on both sides to create a lasting peace and warned about the dangers of the continuation of hatred of war into peace time. While this intervention was at best naïve, given the circumstances at the time, such ideas gained more plausibility towards the end of the war.
Such ideas about reconstruction and the role of education later chimed with the ideas and practices of the British occupation authorities in Germany. In the context of Wilton Park, ‘Red’ Robert Birley was especially important here. Birley, a former headmaster of Charterhouse and future headmaster of Eton, became the educational adviser to the Control Commission in the British occupation zone and later played a significant role in Wilton Park’s advisory board. Birley was instrumental in providing support for other Anglo-German initiatives as well, such as Lilo Milchsack’s plans for was to become the Königswinter Conferences.
Wilton Park’s foundation and its early history demonstrate that British policy in Germany was much more strategic and much more successful than many historians – especially early historians – of British occupation policies have given it credit for. While historical research has stressed the importance of the United States’ role in democratising Germany, the history of Wilton Park shows that the UK developed an approach that was at least as important.
The Anglo-German networks that not only supported the organisation but were already present at the creation highlight the importance of transnational networks to support more formal organisations.
Subsequent developments
With the move to Wiston House in 1951 came a different focus – while the shift from the War Office to the Foreign Office had happened before, the move to the new location was a symbolic marker for the civilian focus. For Wilton Park as an organisation, that also meant an increased pressure to think about its role in post-war British foreign policy vis-à-vis Germany. Gradually from at least 1947 onwards and, in the context of the Korean War more pronouncedly from the early 1950s onwards, Cold War fears about communism superseded concerns about denazification. Given the increasing integration of West Germany into the Western alliance and the existence of other informal bodies for Anglo-German reconciliation, the enthusiasm for Wilton Park declined. It took a motion by the Foreign Secretary Selwyn Lloyd in the Cabinet in 1955 to get the Treasury to provide the necessary funds for Wilton Park – the German government and even the Social Democratic Party in opposition were reluctant to come out in support of maintaining Wilton Park.
Financial pressures continued, although the Swiss government began to provide significant support from the early 1950s in the context of its work for socio-economic reconstruction in Germany as part of the broader context of the European Recovery Program (Marshall Plan) and the OEEC. The remit of Wilton Park became more European as a result, and its focus moved away from adult education in the narrow sense and in the Anglo-German context to discussions for politicians, civil servants, business leaders, trade union representatives and other representatives of civil society in a European context. The 1970s saw an attempt by Edward Heath’s government, following discussions with the French president Georges Pompidou, to position Wilton Park as a training and discussion centre for questions around European integration.
With the UK’s accession to the EEC, the European Discussion Centre had soon outlived its usefulness as civil servants found discussions and analysis in the context of the EEC more relevant and important. In October 1981, a civil servant observed that it was ‘difficult to argue that the avoidance of [the German partners’] sadness was worth a quarter of a million pounds per annum.’
We know little about the ways in which Wilton Park discussed questions of decolonisation, and about how and why Wilton Park’s remit was broadened beyond Europe from the 1960s. There are virtually no sources on Wilton Park available in the National Archives at Kew, and other evidence is also sparse. We know that the Ford Foundation provided significant financial support in the form of a number of grants in the region of several hundred thousand dollars each. But we do not know what impact this had on Wilton Park’s programmes. We also know that Wilton Park included questions of colonialism and decolonisation in its very early discussions with prisoners of war and German civilians, for example by inviting Margery Perham (appointed the first female fellow of Nuffield College, Oxford in 1939 and director, from 1945-1948, of the Oxford Institute pf Colonial Studies) as one of the speakers. But we do not know whether this attention continued into the 1960s. There is some evidence that Robert Birley, then still involved in Wilton Park’s board, played an unofficial role in UK-South African relations, though it is not clear whether and how this filtered into Wilton Park’s programme.
In the 1980s, it was decided that the length of seminars was shortened, and the scope of topics under discussion broadened further, and intentionally so. There was now an especial interest in the question of global trade as well as a growing concern with economic development and under-development, in particular in Commonwealth countries. Nicholas Barrington, head of FCO’s Guidance and Information Policy Department, had already argued in his paper ‘A new Look for Wilton Park’ in the 1970s that the institution’s ‘generalist approach’ was too ‘superficial’ and that a more ‘specialized approach’ was required. And Wilton Park itself pointed out in 1977 that the current focus on OECD had become too narrow and advocated a broader engagement with ‘developing and underdeveloped countries.’
In the early 1990s, the Foreign and Commonwealth Office again used Wilton Park as way to deflect attention from the instruction of broader organisational reform by the Treasury and 10 Downing Street. When it was asked to name a part of the organisation for a trial for the ‘Next Steps’ initiative on remodelling the civil service by creating executive agencies alongside government departments, the Foreign Office nominated Wilton Park. The institution has remained in that status ever since, as an arms’-length body, albeit still linked to its host department. A review of Wilton Park’s work in that role came to a relatively positive conclusion. The review, conducted by Dr C P Burdess of the FCO, concluded that Wilton Park was seen as ‘useful though not absolutely essential to core FCO activities.’ But it discarded all alternative options, such as privatisation, merger with other organisations such as the Ditchley Foundation and incorporation into the FCO as not viable options. It did so not because these options were fundamentally not open to policymakers, but because these options were not able to replicate, at a comparable cost and with comparable efficiency. It pointed out, though, that occasions when protagonists with ‘different viewpoints’ could meet and ‘advance mutual understanding on contentious issues’ had been rather marginal. The main use of Wilton Park was as an opportunity to ‘cross check their ideas with academics and other experts’. The main proposal was to make Wilton Park sustainable by asking it to run more conferences external parties.
Some diplomats in the Foreign Office sometimes saw Wilton Park also as complicating British diplomacy, rather than enhancing it. During a discussion about whether the Secretary of State should speak at the event on the occasion of the forty-fifth anniversary of Wilton Park (conference no. 286), Alyson Bailes pointed out that the time required to draft a speech on ‘sensitive “German” issues’ (specifically the question of reunification) for the conference was not worth it – and that the projected audience of around 50 people made it too large for an ‘informal’ setting, so that there was a significant risk of misperception and diplomatic complications as a result of an involvement.
What was Wilton Park?
Given Wilton Park’s transformation from a POW camp to an executive agency of the Foreign Commonwealth and Development Office, the question arises of how we describe Wilton Park’s role and significance. Was Wilton Park an instrument of projecting British ideas about democracy, an institution of projecting British power, an instrument of British propaganda and information policy, a way of spreading ‘the gospel of freedom and democracy among intelligent and well-placed Germans’, a clearing house for knowledge and the exchange of ideas, or even, as Dexter Keezer has called it in his history of Wilton Park, ‘a unique contribution to international relations’? Wilton Park’s history can be told as the story of how these different elements of its roles shifted over time – and while the flexibility of its mission probably accounts for its survival, it makes judging its impact and role for British foreign policy quite difficult.
The idea and practice of Wilton Park at any given time mattered just as much and perhaps more than its setting. The unofficial dialogue that Wilton Park provided a corrective of group think that is common in all bureaucracies – and that also made it an especially valuable resource of information for smaller countries that did not have extensive research departments. As an analyst observed at a conference on Wilton Park’s role in British foreign policy, the idea and practice of Wilton Park could ‘spin webs and networks of relationships that are sufficiently healthy and robust to evolve and grow organically’. Taken together – the sharing of ideas and information and the creation of networks – also served a means of risk reduction, namely to provide information on aspects of a problem that might not have been considered otherwise.
Implications
Wilton Park was founded at a very specific time in the history of British foreign policy after the Second World War: when the belief of British power was still present, but when its structural foundations – its economic might, its imperial reach, and its military prowess – were beginning to break away. If Wilton Park did not exist, it would be unlikely to be founded today – the belief in Britain’s convening power backed up by hard power is no longer there. Nonetheless, Wilton Park might have become more rather than less important for British foreign policy: because it has the track record of Britain’s convening power, it is taken seriously as a multilateral facilitator at a time when such facilitation matters more than ever. Because of the flexibility, Wilton Park is also able to adapt to changing policy challenges, such as supporting the Burnham’s government’s emphasis on regional development as the foundation for economic growth by bringing together international, national and subnational expertise.
By 1947, the UK faced a dire economic and financial situation. This has led to rather negative assessments of British foreign policy, in particular when compared with that of the United States. The history of Wilton Park suggests a much more positive assessment. Its model of educational reconstruction was a key and still underrated foundation stone of Anglo-German reconciliation. The investment in ‘soft power’ mattered for the United Kingdom’s hard power by endowing key sections of German political and cultural elites with a deep understanding of Britain’s history.
The involvement of Germans in exile as well as experts – academics and civil servants – with area expertise so shortly after the Second World War was especially remarkable. It is difficult to see that such similar expertise exists in the UK today with regard to areas of war and conflict. In particular, the ability of speaking and interacting in languages other than English has been in decline for some time – and thereby also the ability to understand how other countries and cultures work. Translation software, artificial intelligence or short language courses cannot compensate for this decline of deep knowledge. The early history of Wilton Park suggests the investment in the teaching of foreign languages in schools and universities should be a key strategic priority. British foreign policy makers after 1945 understood this because many of them had made experiences abroad, either as civilians or as soldiers.
It is difficult to measure the success of institutions like Wilton Park merely with quantitative key performance indicators. It is unlikely that Wilton Park’s founders would have been able to predict that so many of its first participants would end up being part of the formative generation of politicians and public intellectuals of the new Federal Republic. Wilton Park’s success was cumulative rather than immediate, and it worked through what the sociologist Mark Granovetter has called the ‘strength of weak ties’.
The Cold War that developed between the United States and its allies and the Soviet Union and its sphere of influence from around 1947 onwards initially provided mainly background noise to Wilton Park’s operation – the key purpose was German reconstruction in the context of Britain’s continental commitment. And yet, as Germany’s position in European international relations became part of the confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union, Wilton Park became part of the transatlantic and trans-European networks that underpinned what came to be called ‘the West’.
Wilton Park was also a product of what the historian Anne Deighton has called the ‘self-regarding ambivalence’ of British foreign policy in the early post-war years. It provided a foundation for its sustained commitment to the European continent and to German reconstruction in particular: as one of the occupation powers in Germany, as a founding member of the Brussels Pact, the Western European Union of NATO, while not intending to endanger its relationship with its other key partners, the United States and the Empire/ Commonwealth. From hindsight, this ambivalence appears a strategic failure in so far as it ruled Britain out from the process of European integration, providing France with a leadership role. However, as one of the products of that failure, Wilton Park could become an even more important strategic asset of British foreign policy, now that the exit of the UK from the European Union has upended a key plank of the European international order that rested simultaneously on both a commitment to NATO and to European integration. Wilton Park can provide a place of rational discussion and calm reflection on the foundations of policy making, where such attributes are rare; and it can strengthen multilateralism at a time when it is under threat.
