The Empire Project: The Rise and Fall of the British World-System, 1830–1970 (62 page)

There was to be one last throw of the political dice. Too much was at stake to abandon all effort at settlement. For London, an unreconciled Ireland would embarrass Britain's relations with the United States (now a ‘co-belligerent’), threaten Irish recruitment and alarm the Unionist majority in Parliament on which the Lloyd George ministry depended. For Redmond and the Irish National party it would ensure the oblivion that Redmond feared. The Irish Convention of 1917–18 was a desperate attempt to find a bargain acceptable to the nationalists, and both the Northern and the Southern Unionists (who had most to lose from partition).
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It failed, but its real failure was to have been irrelevant. It was boycotted by Sinn Fein, and Sinn Fein was already by 1917 the most powerful force in Irish politics. While Redmond pursued a constitutional will-o’-the-wisp, Sinn Fein urged mass support for outright separation. It crushed the Redmondites in the by-elections. In May 1917, it won the open endorsement of the Catholic hierarchy. But the real secret of its remarkable rise was the Irish fear of conscription.

Ireland had been carefully exempted from the Military Service Act of 1916. But its shadow loomed large in Irish society. As the war dragged on, it seemed only a matter of time before conscription crossed the Irish Sea. There were many reasons why Irish attitudes were so different from those in mainland Britain. Even the Redmondites insisted that without Home Rule conscription was illegitimate. Like Afrikaners or French Canadians, the Catholic majority denied an
obligation
to fight for the Empire, even if many were willing to do so. Ireland had the highest rate of emigration in pre-war Europe:
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even without conscription, the haemorrhage of young men (and women) was the cruellest fact in Irish life. In rural Ireland especially, conscription threatened (or was thought to) the survival of small farms dependent on family labour. Scares proliferated about the moral and physical pollution that army service would bring. Conscription would debauch as well as impoverish, a notion not discouraged by the clergy. Politically and culturally, it meant anglicisation, the fraying of local loyalty and Catholic identity.

The fear of conscription was thus the cause that turned the republican separatism of Sinn Fein into a popular movement, and Irish politics into its revolutionary phase. As the Convention floundered towards collapse, the slide towards open revolt gathered speed. For, by April 1918, the threat of conscription had become dangerously real. As the crisis of British manpower grew with the huge new losses on the Western Front, the call-up in Britain was extended to men as old as fifty-one. After a bitter internal row, the Lloyd George government shelved its application to Ireland – for the moment. The effect on Ireland was like a call to arms. The Volunteer brigades recruited and trained more actively than ever.
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For many young men, armed resistance as a Volunteer seemed the only defence against compulsory service in the British army. Raiding and counter-raiding between Volunteers and police intensified. De Valera, now leader of Sinn Fein, drew up a national pledge against conscription that was signed by tens of thousands at the church door on 21 April 1918 and endorsed by a general strike two days later. Amid these signs of violent upheaval (and with deepening gloom on the Western Front), London turned once more to repression. The Sinn Fein leadership (some 150 persons) was gaoled and its meetings proscribed – a step widely seen as the prelude to conscription. But it was now too late to break the grip of the movement and its military wing on the Irish countryside. For the rest of the war, an armed truce prevailed. When peace came, Sinn Fein's electoral triumph (outside Ulster) and the opening shots of its military struggle showed how far and how quickly the war had transformed the old landscape of Anglo-Irish relations.

It was at first sight surprising that the revolt against empire had gone furthest so near the centre of the British system. The paradox is superficial. Though the demands of war had been felt across the whole imperial world, the alienation they caused had been deepest in Ireland. In pre-war Ireland, political expectations had been higher and the edge of violence closer than anywhere else – with the consequences seen in 1916. As in India, the imperial government could not promise enough to save its would-be allies from defeat by ‘extremists’. As in India, its agents enraged their opponents by the threat of coercion. But the real catalyst of Irish nationalism in its republican and separatist mode was fear that the imperial state was about to drive its control deeper than ever before into the localities – through conscription and its enforcement – and thus
reverse
the pre-war trend to devolution. It was in Ireland, then, that the cloven hoof of war imperialism was most clearly visible, and in Ireland that the reaction was most deadly.

War and empire

The effects of the war on the British system were disturbing but also contradictory. Its extraordinary conclusion in Europe – unimaginable in 1914 – had wrecked, for the time being at least, the old balance of power, which had exerted so much influence on the extra-European diplomacy of the European states. Devising a stable successor regime that would restrain the jealousies of the European powers within Europe and beyond was one of the most pressing concerns of the ‘peacemakers’ who gathered in Paris in January 1919. Secondly, the war had set in motion a geopolitical revolution in East Asia. The weakness of a Russia engulfed in civil war (the disintegration of Russian colonial power in Northeast Asia seemed highly likely in 1919), the (relative) strength of Japan, and the rise of xenophobic nationalism in China (that was to burst out in May 1919) threatened a general onslaught against Western interests on this furthest frontier of the British world. Thirdly, the war had destabilised the world economy and checked the globalising trends from which Britain had profited so much before 1914. It loaded Britain with debts both internal and external. At the same time, the sacrifice of men and wealth and the terrible uncertainties that persisted almost until the end of the conflict had strained the old basis of cooperation between Britain and the empire countries, goading into life the secessionist strand of local nationalism in Ireland, India and even South Africa. By way of compensation, the war had crushed for the moment the great power rivalry of Germany and Russia, whose competitive expansion British leaders had feared most before 1914. As a result, the British had been able to occupy much of the Eurasian ‘cockpit’ in the Near and Middle East, the region where geopolitical uncertainty had seemed most dangerous to the imperial system – but at what cost, and for how long?

This was what one of Woodrow Wilson's advisers was to call ‘the new world’.
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How far British leaders could reconstruct their pre-war system, and adapt it to the shape of the new international order, and how far they could carry with them their partners, agents, allies and collaborators in India, the dominions and the ‘outer empire’, will be seen in the chapters that follow.

9 MAKING IMPERIAL PEACE, 1919–1926

In 1918, the British won an astonishing, almost fortuitous, victory, snatching an imperial triumph from what seemed, as late as June, the jaws of continental defeat. Their greatest imperial rivals had been broken, one (Russia) by the other (Germany). In the Armageddon of empires, British credit, domestic unity and imperial cohesion had been tested to the limit, but had survived. Of the three principal victor powers, the United States, France and Britain, the British seemed best placed to turn the making of peace to their advantage. They had made the largest territorial gains, in the Middle East, Africa and the Pacific and had most to bargain with. They had incurred heavy debts to the United States, but London's influence on post-war reconstruction was bound to be large, since it was from London that the European victor states had borrowed most. With their pre-war rivals in disarray, there seemed little danger that British authority would be challenged by colonial politicians – whose leverage had been cut down by peace – or client states, no longer able to play off two sides in the great game of imperial influence. Above all, perhaps, with the gravest threat to the balance of power in Europe extinguished by the defeat of the Central Powers, the British could hope to lower their naval guard (after the strain of the Anglo-German arms race) and ease the pre-war tensions over imperial defence created by their single-minded concentration on the North Sea. European peace would leave them free to remake their partnerships with dominion, Indian and colonial politicians. Devolution – promised to the dominions and India in 1918 – would earn a dividend of loyalty. The British world-system would enter an Antonine Age of peace and prosperity.

But it did not turn out like that. Inevitably, the violent disruption of the pre-war order could not be repaired overnight. Nor was it likely that a new blueprint for world politics would command ready assent among the victorious allies, let alone in the ranks of the defeated or disenfranchised. Everywhere the prospect of a post-war settlement that might last for decades raised the stakes of political and social struggle: between states, peoples, races, religions, clans and classes. Success – whether dominance, freedom or security – was vital before the new moulds hardened, before new rulers could climb into the saddle, before cynicism or despair set in among the rank and file on whose backing leaders at all levels depended. For all these reasons, the formal diplomacy of peacemaking was sure to be staged against the disorderly backdrop of political or armed struggle wherever there was the chance of a
fait accompli
, or the hope of winning the national status that the peacemakers seemed so willing to dispense.

The British system was bound to be especially vulnerable to this post-war turbulence. Sprawled across the globe, it faced nation-making movements at every point: Irish, Greek, Turkish, Arab, Egyptian, Persian, Afghan, Indian, Chinese and West African. Its open societies were easily permeable by new ideologies of class, nation, race or religion. Without a draconian apparatus of control (unimaginable in most places if only for reasons of cost), its colonial and semi-colonial regions could not be closed to external influence or new ideas. Its commercial prosperity depended upon an open trading economy and multilateral flows of goods and money. The prolonged dislocation of this fine-spun web threatened to wreck the mutual self-interest underpinning the politics of empire, and drain the wealth that paid for its costly superstructure. Peacemaking in its broadest sense – settling territorial boundaries and sovereignty, reopening the channels of trade, adjusting the spheres of great power interest – would need to be early and complete. The risk otherwise was that discontent and uncertainty would subvert the collaborative base of British rule and erode the loyalty of its self-governing partners to the idea of a British system. But peacemaking was anything but swift and far from complete. It was an intricate puzzle requiring dozens of pieces to be fitted together. Cooperation in one field required agreement in another and harmony in a third. Territorial settlement, strategic security and economic reconstruction were all entangled in a maddening knot of conflicting interests. Consequently, peacemaking in Europe dragged on until the Dawes Plan (1924) and Locarno (1925) and ignored Russia's place in the post-war order. In the Middle East, a territorial settlement was delayed until the treaty of Lausanne (1923) and final agreement over the northern border of Iraq until 1926. In East Asia, the Washington treaties of 1921–2 checked great power rivalries but not the determination of Chinese nationalists to attack the foreign privileges embodied in treaty-ports and concessions.

As a result, the claims of the dominion governments, as well as Irish, Indian, Egyptian, Arab and (some) African nationalists for wider influence and greater autonomy in the British system were caught up in the larger instabilities of the post-war world. Mistrustful of London's intentions, fearful of new British claims upon them, resentful of the apparent disregard for their ethnic, religious or constitutional aspirations, they had little sympathy for the mood of chronic anxiety that hung over the cabinets of Lloyd George and his prime ministerial successors. Among British ministers and their advisers, the avalanche of international and imperial demands bred a siege mentality that verged at times on paranoia. Die-hards and visionaries pondered loudly whether the end of empire was at hand. But, by the mid-1920s, the worst seemed over. The danger that internal stresses and external pressures would together set off a general crisis of the British system receded. Its strategic security and financial solvency did not break down. The centre held. As nationalism fell back from the high tide of 1919–20, its leaders made their peace – for the moment – with the British world-system.

‘New World’ geopolitics

The first priority of British ministers in London was to secure a peace that would avert a future commitment to European security on the terrible scale of the War. The logic of Britain's global interests, as they well understood, was to protect the imperial centre but not at such cost as to imperil the defence and development of the rest of their world-system. The stringent terms imposed in the treaty of Versailles (28 June 1919) were designed to disarm the terrifying power of German ‘militarism’. Germany's navy was seized (but scuttled by its crews) and its rebuilding forbidden; her colonies were confiscated; and her army capped at 100,000 – one-third the peacetime size of the combined British and Indian armies, one-eighth the size of France's. But the larger problem remained: how to prevent the (eventual) resurgence of German power and enforce (in the meantime) the punitive terms of peace.

For an important group of British opinion, the answer lay in forging an Atlantic partnership with the United States.
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There were many attractions. An Anglo-American alliance would rule the waves and the exchanges. It would be the decisive counter-weight to any power that aspired to dominate the European continent. It appealed to the vague emotion of pan-Anglo-Saxon racial unity to which politicians of all parties were susceptible. It would avert the risk of naval and financial rivalry, whose impact on Britain was bound to be adverse. It was favoured by Canadian leaders, and by Smuts, the heir-apparent in South African politics. It was the best guarantee against the continental entanglements upon which all the dominions looked with anxiety and disfavour as a dangerous distraction from imperial purposes. It would draw Britain away from the ‘old diplomacy’ of secret commitments and (as the war had shown) unlimited liabilities towards open covenants and defined obligations: and thus stabilise her claims on dominion loyalty.
²
Above all, it would make bearable the otherwise open-ended burdens of the League of Nations Covenant as the instrument for post-war collective security.