The Empire Project: The Rise and Fall of the British World-System, 1830–1970 (69 page)

There were nationalists in Canada after 1918, but King showed no sympathy for them, and they all but despaired of him. In Quebec,
nationaliste
feeling was moving gradually away from the outlook once championed by Henri Bourassa, towards a more hostile view of ‘British connection’ and (under the influence of the Abbé Groulx) towards the dream of peaceful separation from the rest of Canada.
⁹¹
In English Canada, post-war nationalism formed a polar opposite. It was built on the pre-war claim to full equality with Britain in the management of the Empire and on an angry repudiation of the ‘isolationist’ and ‘abjectly colonial’ mentality attributed to the French Canadians.
⁹²
Its most articulate proponents after 1918 were Sifton and Dafoe, proprietor and editor of the Winnipeg-based
Manitoba Free Press
. Both had been ardent conscriptionists in 1917. But, by the early 1920s, both were convinced that the Britannic patriotism to which they were loyal was being abused by the reckless expansionism of the Lloyd George government, especially in the Middle East, and by its assumption of European liabilities that had little to do with the common concerns of the white dominions. They backed King's efforts to disentangle Canada from these ‘false’ imperial burdens, but they wanted to go further and gain formal recognition of Canadian sovereignty. They were in no doubt that Canada was and should be a ‘British nation’, and wanted the (white) Empire to become a ‘league of British states’, free and equal but bound together by racial sympathy and mutual interest. This sectional view of Canadian identity was anathema in Quebec (as Bourassa pointed out to Dafoe),
⁹³
and, as Dafoe himself acknowledged, this ‘national’ idea had yet to supplant the imperial sentiment of which King was so nervous. Indeed, for all its ambivalence, King's careful formula proved surprisingly durable. His Conservative opponent, Arthur Meighen, had already asserted Canada's particular interests and her special ties with the United States in the argument over renewing the Anglo-Japanese alliance in 1921. Borden's closest adviser, the diplomat-lawyer Loring Christie, abandoned in the early 1920s the old Borden policy of a common foreign policy. Like Dafoe and Sifton, he was alarmed by the signs that Britain had turned away from her imperial destiny to plunge into the quagmire of European diplomacy.
⁹⁴
To be true to the Empire was not to follow the same route. Meighen himself, in despair at reviving his electoral fortunes without support in Quebec, had conceded by 1925 that no Canadian government should follow Britain into war without holding and winning a general election. An uneasy consensus had been reached.

Australia

In Australia and New Zealand, by contrast, there was little enthusiasm for greater detachment in imperial relations: quite the reverse. Radical opinion in the Pacific dominions disliked the expansion of ‘tropical empire’ over non-white peoples and distrusted the motives that lay behind it – for similar reasons to radicals in Britain. It resented the influence of the City of London and its power to frustrate the political aims of Labour in the state governments. But, despite widespread industrial unrest at the end of the war, radicalism and the Labour party made little headway in the post-war decade.
⁹⁵
The commemoration of the war was conservative and imperial-minded: Gallipoli as Britain's blunder and Australia's sacrifice was a much later mythology.
⁹⁶
Australian leaders were more sympathetic than Canadian leaders to Britain's Middle Eastern travails: Australia's interest in the Suez Canal was second to none. Where differences arose between Australia and Britain, it was over Australia's claim to the German ex-colonies in the South Pacific and the thorny issue of the Anglo-Japanese alliance. Here there was a passionate Australian (and New Zealand) belief that renewing the alliance was the vital means of restraining Japan from imperial aggression. But, against Canadian opposition, and (more cogently) the urgency of reaching an Anglo-American accord, the Pacific dominions protested in vain.

Australian and New Zealand dissatisfaction arose not from a fear of imperial commitments but from what they saw as London's indifference to imperial interests. King saw a plot to make Canada party to a common imperial policy. Hughes and Massey (more realistically) resented their exclusion from the imperial decisions that mattered. At the peace conference in Paris, Hughes fought a stubborn battle to annex Germany's conquered colonies in the South Pacific not hold them as mandates under the League of Nations – a struggle that brought him into conflict with both the British government and President Wilson.
⁹⁷
The ‘class C’ mandate (envisaging permanent trusteeship) was the compromise outcome. In the furious arguments over the Japanese alliance and at the Washington Conference in 1921–2, the Australian government saw further proof that its vital interests received little attention in British diplomacy. For Hughes, the last straw was the crisis at Chanak in September 1922 and the conference that followed at Lausanne. Unlike Canada and South Africa, he reminded London, Australia and New Zealand had answered Churchill's call for help and promised troops if they were needed to defend the Dardanelles against the resurgent Turks. But neither dominion was represented at the conference. Hughes’ rage knew no bounds. ‘The habit of asking Australia to agree to things when they are done and cannot be undone’, he told the Bonar Law cabinet,

is one which will wreck the Empire if persisted in. You have already seen Canada and South Africa standing aloof on the plea that they had not been consulted. I have pointed out…many times that what is wanted, and what we are entitled to, is a real share in moulding foreign and Imperial policy. In foreign affairs the Empire must speak with one voice.
⁹⁸

Hughes’ frustration was the greater because, as he readily admitted, ‘there is only one course open to us in practice and that is to follow Britain’.
⁹⁹
Unless Australia spoke as part of the Empire, he told the Australian parliament in September 1921, its voice ‘would be lost across the waste of waters’. ‘But when Australia speaks as part of the British Empire

[w]ith its 500,000,000 of people, its mighty navy, its flag on every sea, its strongholds on every continent, its power and glory shining and splendid, then she speaks in…tones that are heard and heeded…With our hands on the lever of Empire, we move the world, but casting this aside we are shorn of our strength and count for little or nothing.
¹⁰⁰

The uncompromising intensity of Hughes’ Britannic nationalism was a measure of this brutal realism about Australia's prospects in isolated independence.

Hughes’ language was characteristically blunt. But his suave successor as prime minister, Stanley Bruce, was just as unequivocal. ‘It is useless for anyone to maintain that if we were an independent nation, with no connection with the British Empire, we should be in a position to protect ourselves’, was his message in 1924.
¹⁰¹
The reason was simple. ‘We have the most wonderful unprotected white man's country in the world’: defending it relied on British help. The fierce rhetoric of Hughes and Bruce, and the similar attitude in New Zealand, showed that the war had quite different effects in the South Pacific from those it had set off in Canada and (as we shall see) in South Africa. In Australia, the issue of conscription had been deeply divisive. But neither there nor in New Zealand did it result in an ethnic fissure. Instead, it strongly reinforced the pre-war sense of racial and strategic vulnerability. The signs of China's resurgence in the ‘May the Fourth’ movement, and the visible evidence of Japanese sea-power and imperial ambition, were easily converted into the racial nightmare of ‘teeming millions’ of Asian immigrants that an Australia without British support might be forced to admit. It was this anxiety, and the fear that the post-war recession might drive Australia back to the dark days of the 1890s, that led post-war governments to call for even closer economic ties with Britain. What Australia needed, said Bruce, was ‘men, money and markets’: Britain must supply them. The limitless possibilities of Australian development became an article of faith. When the geographer Griffith Taylor sought to puncture inflated claims by pointing out that Australia could support at best 20 million people at an American standard, he found it wiser to pursue his career in another dominion.
¹⁰²
The population (a mere six million in 1925) must be boosted; the interior colonised. The same impulse was felt among writers and artists.
¹⁰³
Coming to terms with Australia's landscape, love and fear of the Australian ‘bush’, and adaptation to the Australian environment became the hallmarks of ‘Australianness’: a creole identity not in conflict with ‘Britishness’ but a supercharged, perhaps superior, version of the north European original.

Indeed, Hughes and Bruce reasserted the British character of the Australian Commonwealth in terms inconceivable to a Canadian premier – at least one who wanted some votes in Quebec. ‘We are all of the same race and speak the same tongue in the same way’, said Hughes, ‘we are more British than the people of Great Britain…[O]ur great destiny is to hold this continent in trust for those of our race who come after.’
¹⁰⁴
‘It is…essential to remember’, insisted Bruce, ‘that the British Empire is one great nation…the British people represent one nation and not many nations as some have endeavoured to suggest.’
¹⁰⁵
Of course, not all Australian opinion was convinced by this heavy stress on imperial ties. Too much deference to Britain ran athwart the claim that Australian society was stronger, fairer, more democratic and more manly than the parent stock. Self-reliance and the cultivation of ‘Australian sentiment’ was how Labour preferred to lay the emphasis. It wanted to cut away some of the outward signs of subordinate status: the judicial appeal to London and the appointment of state governors by the Crown. But these were superficial. The defence of ‘White Australia’ remained the foremost plank on the party platform. Labour was as committed as Bruce's government to the urgent need for economic development, and accepted that large-scale immigration was the necessary price.
¹⁰⁶
But, when immigrants flocked in from Southern Europe, it was quick to denounce them for taking jobs ‘from British workmen’
¹⁰⁷
and forced a government ban on employing ‘foreigners’. For Hughes and Bruce, then, there was little to fear at home from a close association with imperial policy, as long as it reflected their views and protected their interests. Their real concern was not that the London government would impose its wishes, but that those wishes were becoming too selfishly narrow. Like Christie, and other old followers of Borden, they were alarmed by the European turn in British policy. The air defence of Britain (against a putative threat from France) might consume the resources needed for a stronger presence in the Pacific and at Singapore, Bruce warned in 1924. If post-war Britain with its straitened finances chose to protect the Home Islands at the expense of ‘outlying parts’, Australia would be in peril.
¹⁰⁸
It was not declarations of dominion freedom that were needed (or so he might have said), but a clear reminder to opinion in Britain of the global scope of imperial interests.

South Africa

South Africa was not a ‘British nation’. Nor was there a common feeling of South Africanness, even among its white minority. Of the four main overseas dominions, it had been the last to receive the full measure of self-government. Among the whites (a more fluid category than it became under
apartheid
after 1948) there was an Afrikaner majority but more than half a million ‘English’ – English speakers mostly of British origin. Afrikaans (a patois of Dutch) was still only a language in the making, and well-educated Afrikaners were as likely to use English as Dutch in business or professional life.
¹⁰⁹
Indeed, there were many Afrikaners in the propertied and professional classes for whom the parliamentary government introduced to the Cape in the 1870s was the optimal combination of order and liberty. There a property-based franchise and the wide degree of local autonomy made symbolic allegiance to the British monarch at worst unobjectionable, at best a buttress of social stability and the racial order. When ‘responsible government’ was extended to the rest of the country after the South African War of 1899–1902 (but with manhood suffrage for whites and no votes for blacks), this pragmatic loyalty was adopted by many Afrikaners in the old republics. It was futile to break up the Union of 1910 to revive the pre-war states. To drag the whole country into secession from the Empire as the ‘South African Republic’ would mean imperial intervention and a third Boer War. Worse still, it would set off a civil war among the whites. In a sub-continent, where blacks outnumbered whites by nearly four to one, and where memories of war's catastrophic impact were all too recent, this was a desperate option.

Nevertheless, the First World War had placed a major strain on the pragmatic compromise that Botha embodied. Although the 1914–15 rebellion had collapsed, Afrikaner support for the National party established by General Barry Hertzog in 1913 was markedly stronger by the end of the war. Much Afrikaner opinion was bitterly resentful of South Africa's involvement in an ‘English’ war and regarded a British imperial triumph with foreboding. The rise of republicanism – which stood for an Afrikaner state outside the Empire – alarmed the English politicians in South Africa. When Smuts returned from Europe on Botha's death to take up the premiership, he found it hard to bend the older man's bow. He lacked Botha's canny sense of Afrikaner feeling or the charm (some alleged more material inducements) through which he kept his followers loyal. In the first post-war election in 1920, Smuts’ South Africa Party emerged neck and neck with the Nationalists, driving him towards fusion with the Unionists (the old party of Rhodes, and led by his political and financial legatees) to keep his hold on power.