In 2021, the government’s Integrated Review – published with the title ‘Global Britain in a Competitive Age’ – described the UK as a ‘soft power superpower’. The review justified this assessment by singling out the UK’s strengths in the arts and sciences, as well as the BBC, the number of foreign students studying at UK universities and the nation’s sporting achievements.

That the UK should be a soft power ‘superpower’ is no accident: the British state was one of several which sought to expand their influence and bolster their economies in the interwar period through cultural diplomacy. One of the UK’s key institutions then (as now) was the British Council, which today organises English language teaching, cultural exchanges and study abroad programmes. Its creation in 1934 as the British Committee for Relations with Other Countries responded to the challenges facing interwar Britain: supporting its interests against those of competing states, countering the rise of fascism and shoring up the British Empire.

A kinder face

This last point was particularly important. In his report on the 21st anniversary of the Council, the politician Harold Nicolson noted the ‘complacency’ that afflicted the Empire into the 20th century as a result of its dominance in the 19th:

‘We had ceased to be the most invulnerable of the Great Powers and had become one of the most vulnerable.’

While countries such as France, Germany and the US had been operating cultural diplomacy through schools and educational institutions for decades, Britain had depended on military and economic might. ‘Gone were the days when we could alter the whole course of the Eastern Question by sending two frigates to Besika Bay’, Nicolson observed. The British Council was envisioned by one of its early chairmen, George Lloyd, as projecting a kinder face of British power. Its initial focus was on young people in the smaller European countries and those bordering the Mediterranean. Expansion into the Commonwealth and beyond would follow in time. Lloyd’s view was that Britain had exercised its wealth and dominance without seeking to understand local cultures. While the former meant Britain was respected for that power, it also meant that it was held in suspicion. Showing the world a different side to Britain – and providing opportunities for young people – would forge sympathy and solidarity.

By the 1930s the British government was also deeply concerned about the threat of fascism. Portugal, one of the UK’s oldest allies, had fallen under the rule of the dictator António de Oliveira Salazar in 1932, turning away from the UK and establishing links with other fascist states. The British response, five years after the fascist seizure of power, was to establish a ‘British Institute’ in Lisbon to provide English language education. Similar outposts in Warsaw, Cairo and Bucharest were also opened in 1938.

In the years before the outbreak of the Second World War, Lloyd returned from visits to the Near and Middle East convinced that the propaganda of the Axis powers was a serious and immediate danger. This included the number of Italian schools and affordable postgraduate study programmes in Italy for young Arabs. In a report from 1935, the High Commissioner to Egypt noted that British cultural power was under threat from France and Italy. It took four years, but the budget for the British Council was increased with the aim of expanding the number of school places available to Egyptians in British schools teaching British ideas.

The Council’s antifascist outlook could play out differently on the ground, however. The director of the British Institute of Florence, Harold Elsdale Goad, was a fascist sympathiser (who wrote a pamphlet on the subject). Goad was only removed in 1939 after 17 years at the helm.

War council

The Balkan and Levant trilogies by the novelist Olivia Manning provide an insight, albeit with artistic licence, into the inner workings of ‘the organisation’, as her characters refer to the British Council. Manning based the six novels on her experiences in Romania, Greece and Egypt, where her husband, Reginald Smith, was stationed as an employee of the Council. Guy Pritchard, the character based on Smith, is depicted as a somewhat aloof fellow-traveller who makes friends easily but is often consumed by flights of fancy. At the end of the Balkan Trilogy, Pritchard has spent weeks organising a performance of Troilus and Cressida which opens on the same night that France surrenders to the Axis powers. Yet despite the apparent frivolous nature of his work, one of his Romanian students goes on to become an operative for the Special Operations Executive.

During the war the Council closed its offices in occupied countries, but expanded its presence to include neutral states such as Turkey, Spain, Sweden, Iceland and countries across South America. Within Britain, the Council served as the official organisation responsible for the ‘education and cultural welfare’ of civilians and merchant seamen from allied countries, as well as helping the eight governments in exile in Britain to establish cultural centres. The Council also produced over 100 films documenting British life throughout the 1940s. Designed to counter Nazi propaganda, the films ranged from depicting the modernisation of the army (Britain Shoulders Arms, 1940) to life in Newlyn Bay, a Cornish fishing village (A Coastal Village, 1943), to the importance of Lloyds of London’s shipping insurance (A.1. at Lloyd’s, 1942).

Behind the wall

Towards the end of the war, the Council’s future became uncertain, but the Foreign Office soon identified it as a way of informally influencing Eastern Europe following the Soviet occupation. Poland had had a Council presence before the war, and a representative was dispatched in 1945 with a view to making it permanent. The Council was evicted from its Warsaw offices in January 1947, but it moved to new premises and maintained a presence in Poland throughout the Cold War, despite the defection of its representative, George Chandos Bidwell, in 1949. Bidwell’s defection came as a shock to friends and colleagues, who – along with MI5 – attributed it to a complicated personal situation (he had divorced his British wife and married a Polish woman only for her to be refused British citizenship). However, Bidwell gave a public statement in which he said: ‘The British Council cannot escape confusion with the British Government [and therefore] my work here is no longer possible.’ His resignation letter also came with a claim for payment of 90 days’ untaken annual leave. Defections of Council representatives in Hungary, Bulgaria and Czechoslovakia followed. In the latter, Arna Rides, a medical doctor, declared that: ‘The British Government maintains activities directed against the USSR and against other peace-loving countries. The British Council is the instrument of such a policy.’ However, the Council’s Moscow office, opened in 1959, remained open until 2018.

Another element of the Council’s postwar role was maintaining relations with the Commonwealth as the British Empire was succeeded by newly independent states and its military power waned. During the war, the Council opened offices in Ghana and Nigeria; after the war outposts across Africa, Asia and the Middle East followed. In Kuwait, the opening of the British Council in the 1950s was seen as crucial to countering Arab nationalism. C.J. Pelly, a British political agent in Kuwait, wrote in a letter of 1952:

I must say that the sight in the cool of the evening of many of the young men of [Kuwait] causes me concern. They bicycle to the coolest place they can find, often on the sea-shore, and read Arabic newspapers and magazines ... at the very best antipathetic in tone to the west.

The solution? ‘A British Council institute should tend to make them sympathetic with the British point of view and to counter the influences which now make them hostile to it.’

New rivals

In the last two decades, the role of the British Council has again come under scrutiny. Russia formally banned the Council in 2018 in retaliation for Britain’s decision to expel Russian diplomats following the attempted murder of Sergei Skripal in Salisbury. Offices in Iran were closed in 2009 and any work with the organisation banned in 2019 following the arrest, and conviction for spying, of an Iranian citizen, Aras Amiri, who worked for the Council in the UK.

In 2012 the Syrian office was closed with the outbreak of civil war; the office in Afghanistan shut in 2021 following the takeover by the Taliban. Many Afghan staff working for the Council were effectively abandoned. In January 2023, the Guardian reported that a group of 47 British Council contractors had ‘been forced to live in hiding since the Taliban’s takeover’, enduring 18 months of moving between safe houses while being ‘hunted’.

Britain also has to contend with new soft power rivals. In 2022, during his campaign to become leader of the Conservative Party, Rishi Sunak pledged to ban Chinese Confucius Institutes, which provide Mandarin classes and cultural events and which, he said, were part of a strategy to ‘infiltrate’ British universities. Sunak has since decided to hold off on a ban, partly because of the risk of retaliation against the British Council in China.

As Britain finds its way in the world post-Brexit, some commentators have talked up the idea of ‘Empire 2.0’. But the reality – as the authors of the Integrated Review suggest – is that soft power will continue to be Britain’s best route to exerting global influence. Sometimes, what is soft is strong.

Samir Jeraj is an author and journalist based in London.