The Empire Project: The Rise and Fall of the British World-System, 1830–1970 (47 page)

Instead, it received a violent check. Defeat by Japan in 1905 revealed the latent weakness of the Russian system and the fragile foundations on which Tsardom had erected so imposing a superstructure.
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Economic backwardness was the root of the problem. Low agricultural productivity, a narrow industrial base, a stunted rail network and dependence upon foreign capital were the real index of Russian power and a massive brake on strategic freedom. Economic weakness reinforced (and was aggravated by) demographic inadequacy. Ethnic Russians were too few (forming 45 per cent of the Empire's population) and much too immobile to dominate the minorities that Tsardom had conquered. The frontiers of empire could not be closed: they were too porous to seal off the external connections that made the loyalty of frontier peoples so doubtful in time of crisis. In fact, the Empire remained a multi-ethnic construct to its very core since Tsardom had advanced not by building up a Russian state but by collaboration with non-Russian elites – in the Ukraine, the Baltic, Poland, Finland, Georgia, Armenia and elsewhere. Nor was Russian culture a substitute for political weakness since it lacked the absorptive quality or universal appeal to attract the European and Islamic minorities under Tsardom's sway.
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The result was an imperial power whose size and spasmodic aggression masked weaknesses laid bare in the military catastrophe of 1905, and the near implosion of the whole regime. Thereafter, it was clear that for some time to come a forward movement in North Persia or towards the Straits would require the support of either Germany or Britain. Without one or the other, the outcome would be humiliation – a lesson confirmed in the Bosnian crisis of 1908.
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In official circles, the need for caution was well understood.
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To a realist as brutal as Peter Durnovo, the saviour of Tsardom in 1906, internal cohesion could hardly survive the effects of a European war. The age of expansion was over, he thought. The age of crisis was about to begin.
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Britain's greatest rival, judged by population and output, lay not in the Old World but in the New. Anglo-American antagonism was much older than Anglo-German. Relations had improved in the later nineteenth century. But, in the Caribbean and Central America, there had been persistent friction between the old colonial power and the new commercial prodigy. Canadian mistrust of American expansionism was a further complication. Then, with the Spanish-American War of 1898, the United States became an imperial power. It annexed Hawaii and tightened its grip on the Central Pacific. As ruler of the Philippines, it could claim new influence in maritime China. As master of Cuba, it dominated the Caribbean. But the most significant change, from the British point of view, was the new commitment to naval power in the presidency of Theodore Roosevelt (1901–9). By 1907, he had persuaded the Congress to fund the building of a fleet second only to Britain's. For the embattled Royal Navy, a new sea challenge to its rear joined the new sea challenge to its front.

If Tirpitz had been right, the rise of American sea-power would have sealed Britain's global fate. For Tirpitz believed that common antagonism to British supremacy was the natural policy of all sea states.
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The reality was very different. The British were certainly at pains to conciliate American opinion. Soon after 1900, they had tacitly acknowledged that a war with the United States was militarily unwinnable and politically unthinkable. America's new status in the Caribbean was recognised in the Hay-Pauncefote treaty of 1901 when Britain disclaimed any interest in the Isthmus of Panama. Britain was no enemy of the Monroe Doctrine, declared Arthur Balfour in the House of Commons.
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When the puppet state of Panama was carved out of Colombia with American help in 1903, and a canal zone leased in perpetuity to Washington, the way was open for an American-owned ‘path between the seas’.
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The balance of power had shifted abruptly in the Western Atlantic – or so it seemed.
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Meanwhile, the inexorable rise of the American economy was a source of commercial unease in London. But none of this meant that America now threatened the British world-system.

There were several reasons for this. American opinion was still too ‘continentalist’ in outlook to be converted to the ‘navalist’ views of Roosevelt or his successor Taft. After 1908, their ambitions were reined in by a sceptical Congress.
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Secondly, American sea-power was hobbled by the need to guard two oceans, separated before 1914 by the voyage round Cape Horn. Thirdly, as Roosevelt gradually saw, American interests in China had been exposed by Russian defeat to the pressure of Japan, an ally of Britain since 1902. The Philippines looked less like a salient in Asia than a hostage to naval fortune. Fourthly, the onset of revolution in Mexico in 1910 renewed the old American nightmare: European (or even Japanese) intervention to check the assertion of Washington's influence in its own ‘backyard’.
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The timing here was crucial. For, as completion of the Panama Canal crept nearer, strategic control of the Caribbean and its approaches loomed larger and larger in American concerns.
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As a result, the social and cultural rapprochement between Britain and America, and the racial appeal of ‘Anglo-Saxonism’ on both sides of the Atlantic, had its counterpart in diplomacy. If British leaders repudiated all thought of Anglo-American conflict, it was no more thinkable in Washington. British naval supremacy, remarked Theodore Roosevelt, was ‘the great guaranty for the peace of the world’.
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For Roosevelt, a large and efficient United States Navy would be ‘the junior member of an informal two-power alliance’ tilting the international balance towards Anglo-American interests.
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The cold calculations of naval planners were based on the same assumption. Japan (‘War Plan Orange’) and Germany (‘War Plan Black’) were the likely enemies.
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A German attack was only possible in the ‘highly improbable’ event of British acquiescence. To American opinion, concludes a recent study, the real guarantor of its Atlantic security was British not American sea-power.
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On this calculation, the United States looked less like an imperial rival and more like a forceful, determined ‘super-dominion’.

These checks and balances in the scope of great power ambition help to explain why the theoretical vulnerability of Britain's vast and straggling empire, sprawled across the globe, as one official remarked, like ‘a gouty giant’, was not translated into territorial loss. By the yardstick of relative power, the British system was surprisingly strong. It could not be encircled. Its rivals were at odds. Its lines of communication were secure – unless naval catastrophe occurred in Europe. These were the assets that Edwardian strategy was designed to exploit. But, as the policy-makers came to realise, they could not be turned to account without a more or less drastic revision of the old assumptions of Salisbury's
Realpolitik
.

The South African War had been the forcing-house of change. International isolation and the unrealised threat of a great power combination against them left a lasting impression on British leaders. Post-war tension with Russia and Germany drove home the lesson that their imperial ambitions could not be contained by sea-power alone. In the Foreign Office, a diplomacy of studied caution seemed the only cure for Britain's exposed position. ‘A maritime state’, remarked a leading official, ‘is, in the literal sense of the word, the neighbour of every country accessible by sea.’ To avoid falling foul of a hostile coalition, it must aim to ‘harmonize with the general ideals common to all mankind’, paying careful attention to ‘the primary and vital interests of a majority…of the other nations’.
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Britain could not hope to frustrate the ambitions of all its rivals, was Crowe's implication. A new realism was necessary. This mood was shared even by the most ebullient of Edwardian politicians. ‘We are not a young people with an innocent record and a scanty inheritance’, Winston Churchill told his cabinet colleagues in January 1914. ‘We have engrossed to ourselves an altogether disproportionate share of the wealth and traffic of the world. We have got all we want in territory, and our claim to be left in the unmolested enjoyment of vast and splendid possessions, mainly acquired by violence, largely maintained by force, often seems less reasonable to others than to us.’
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The spirit of Edwardian diplomacy was pragmatic acceptance that Britain now had to compete with ‘world states’ of broadly equal capabilities and appetites. A second insight followed. More than ever before, retreat into blue water isolation was impossible. The gradual integration of world politics since the 1880s was now complete. The fate of distant regions could not be localised: faraway rivalries led back ineluctably to the balance of power in Europe. The future of China, the Arab Middle East, Portuguese Africa or the Belgian Congo would be settled by the European great powers with the United States and Japan as their junior partners. Alarming from one point of view, this vision of a Eurocentric globe offered some consolation. It seemed to rule out the danger that Britain's rivals could make dramatic territorial gains by a military or diplomatic coup. The existing distribution of global influence and the colonial ‘share-out’ it embodied could only be changed by diplomatic agreement. Unless, that is, it was upset by a major breakdown of the European balance and the sudden emergence of a dominant superstate. The logic of this was that the British system could best be protected by the strenuous exercise of Britain's influence in European politics, with the right to be consulted, and the capacity to intervene, if the continental balance were at risk. To many late Victorians, the prospect of alliances and alignments with the continental powers had been unwelcome, even dangerous, and the threat of a European combination against them a real one. To their Edwardian successors, it seemed that the latent conflicts between the European powers now ran so deep that only by incompetence or abdication could Britain be isolated. This was the lesson of the ententes with France and Russia. An active, flexible diplomacy in Europe was thus the best guarantee of imperial safety. The ‘balance of power’ was not just an ideal: to the assumptions on which Edwardian diplomacy was based it had become a necessity.

These elements of Edwardian grand strategy crystallised in 1912 as the naval competition with Germany intensified. London rejected the German demand for its neutrality in a future war as the price of a naval ‘holiday’. The whole point of naval primacy was to ensure Britain's capacity to intervene against disturbance of the continental equilibrium. Indeed, maritime power was her principal claim to great power status. The cost, as we have seen, was an even greater concentration of naval strength in the North Sea to deter aggression by Germany. The consequence was a naval withdrawal from the Mediterranean, the sacrifice, on a superficial view, of imperial to domestic safety. But the senior ministers of the Asquith cabinet vehemently rejected this implication. Churchill (First Lord of the Admiralty), Haldane (Secretary of State for War), Lloyd George (Chancellor of the Exchequer) and Grey (Foreign Secretary) all agreed that Britain's Mediterranean interests would only be in danger if she had first been defeated in the North Sea. Whatever setbacks she might suffer in the region would quickly be reversed once command of the sea had been gained in the decisive northern theatre.
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And, anyway, Churchill insisted, by 1915 the Royal Navy would be strong enough to return in force.
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Meanwhile, overwhelming strength where it mattered most, and the purchase that gave in European diplomacy (above all in securing the friendship of France), were the real foundation of British world power. They were the vital source of leverage against the aggressive designs of rival powers; the best guarantee that, short of an earthquake in world affairs, any redivision of the global spoils could only be slow and partial. And, while British claims to new territory or wider spheres were sure to be contested, there was no reason to think that holding what she had (no mean inheritance) was now beyond her means.

The credibility of these assumptions would soon be tested in the First World War. But, in the meantime, the combination of entente diplomacy and naval concentration had achieved a striking recovery from the isolation and vulnerability that British leaders had feared during and after the South African War. More to the point, it had done so without driving a wedge between the different elements of the imperial system. Of course, the British taxpayer bore the overwhelming brunt of the financial burden. In that sense, a revolt at home was always the greatest threat to imperial cohesion. There were acrimonious struggles in cabinet over the naval estimates in 1908–9 and again in 1914. But, despite the demands of welfare reform and a fierce parliamentary lobby against the surging costs of the naval programme, domestic opinion accepted the dramatic rise in naval spending (from £31 millions a year in 1904 to £51 millions in 1914). It did so in part because the invasion of Britain seemed as great a danger as the loss of empire – exactly the premise on which both foreign and naval policy depended. Indeed, naval and diplomatic doctrine rendered meaningless the distinction between domestic and imperial interests. In the white dominions, this formula was less readily accepted. Dominion public opinion had been roused by the fear that Britain's naval decline would expose the Empire to external attack. If the Empire were broken up, remarked the (New Zealand) Nelson
Evening Mail
, ‘in ten years the Asiatic population of New Zealand would exceed the European’.
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In Canada, however, the dominion's response was caught up in a bitter party quarrel between those who favoured a local ‘tin-pot’ navy and those who preferred a direct contribution to the cost of new dreadnoughts – the policy of the premier Borden after 1911 but blocked by his opponents in the Senate. In the Pacific dominions, where the results of Churchill's concentration policy were felt most acutely amid growing mistrust of Japan, there was marked reluctance to see the battleships built by local money deployed far away in northern Europe. ‘As a Briton’, remarked the New Zealand defence minister, ‘[I] would like to see a consolidated Empire strong enough to stand without the
Entente cordiale.
’
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In practice, Australian and New Zealand leaders had little option but to accept Churchill's insistence that their security lay not in little local flotillas but in the Royal Navy's ability to face down the threat to its maritime primacy. ‘The situation in the Pacific’, he told them in April 1913, ‘will be absolutely regulated by the decisions in the North Sea’.
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After all, whatever its shortcomings, this version of imperial defence was plausible. The alternative, a more far-reaching coordination of military resources, might restrict the autonomy of dominion governments without giving them more influence on British grand strategy. Indeed, the great success of Liberal policy after 1905 had been a credible defence of British world power without recourse to Chamberlainite schemes of imperial unity and tariff reform. More remarkably still, at a time of rising international tension, it avoided the necessity of levying heavier costs on India, so long the milch-cow of imperial defence. A heavier load on the Indian taxpayer would have aggravated the resentments that Morley's reform was meant to soothe. Instead, from 1904 to 1914 (while Britain's defence spending was doubled), the Indian military budget rose barely at all.
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