The Empire Project: The Rise and Fall of the British World-System, 1830–1970 (99 page)

It could be objected, of course, that this was so much pie in the sky if Britain itself were to be drastically weakened by economic exhaustion or geopolitical crisis, or if the pace of change in the colonial world got out of control. Churchill's obsession with promoting a summit conference with Stalin and (after his death in 1953) his successors worried his colleagues, unnerved the Foreign Office and annoyed the Americans.
¹⁶
It was rooted in Churchill's belief that his personal influence could achieve the breakthrough to a real European peace and end the Cold War. But it also reflected his deep sense of foreboding at the effects on Britain and British world power of a prolonged ‘armed peace’. As much as, if not more than, his Cabinet colleagues, Churchill was conscious of the limits of Britain's material strength and the vital importance of economic recovery, on which the huge burden of defence spending (around 8 per cent of GDP in 1952) hung like an albatross. Continued Cold War would drive Britain deeper into dependence on America. Even more worrying was the risk that the American will to confront communist power would set off a crisis that could not be stopped. There could be no illusion that either British world power, or even Britain itself, could survive a third world war in the twentieth century.

In fact, the failure of summitry did not prevent an easing of the tensions that had made Attlee's rearmament programme seem so urgent in 1951. Meanwhile, British leaders drew comfort from the powerful advantages that Britain's geopolitical position still seemed to confer. Despite a niggling sense of American rivalry, they enjoyed Washington's general backing for their Middle East policies, and their effort to keep Britain's regional primacy there. American antipathy to European colonialism had already been modified by the fear that the over-hasty demolition of European rule would open the door not to West-leaning nationalism but an East-leaning Marxism. The growing intensity of Cold War competition by 1950 and ever heavier emphasis on the supply of strategic materials strengthened the case for keeping key colonial producers under politically reliable management. The Belgian Congo supplied more than 50 per cent of the ‘free world's’ uranium (all of it destined for the United States) and 75 per cent of its cobalt. Even
Fortune
magazine, mouthpiece of American big business, choked back its dislike of the Belgian cartels that controlled the Congo's economy in light of these facts.
¹⁷
Even the French, on whose colonial methods Franklin D. Roosevelt had once lavished his vitriol, enjoyed the support and extensive largesse of the American government in their Vietnamese war. There was good reason to think that Britain's contribution to global ‘containment’ would earn Washington's goodwill for as long as the Soviet threat lasted.

Thus London could hope for far greater leverage in Washington than any other Western country. It could also exploit its special position in Europe. This was not just a matter of being (for the moment) economically stronger than other European countries. It derived in great part from the deep rift of mistrust between France and West Germany, and French opposition to the rearming of Germany or the German admission to NATO. So long as this rift lasted, France was bound to look to Britain as its most reliable ally: after all, the Germans might be bribed into pro-Soviet neutrality; and American willingness to pay the full price of keeping France free could never be more than a matter of faith. But British self-interest bound them to France against both the Soviet threat and the danger of German aggrandisement. It was the British undertaking (in the Paris agreement of 1954) to keep 50,000 men in West Germany (the ‘British Army of the Rhine’) that cleared the logjam and won French agreement to recruiting a West German army, the vital reinforcement of NATO that Washington wanted. The British were the key (or so it appeared) to the internal solidarity of the West European members of NATO. Their blessing was needed (or so it appeared) for any West European project. Their cooperation was vital if the United States was to manage its cumbrous European commitments alongside its burdens in Northeast and Southeast Asia and in Latin America.

Finally, the British could take some satisfaction, in the early 1950s at least, from the fact that their colonial empire was still little exposed to direct assault from outside. Hong Kong was perhaps the greatest exception. Elsewhere, for the most part, it was the risk of internal subversion that threatened colonial authority and the efforts to orchestrate colonial politics. Nor had their colonial power yet become the embarrassing archaism that it later appeared. The British could point to the French, the Portuguese and the Belgians as practitioners of colonialisms far less liberal than their own, and far less likely to lead to the self-governing nation-states, the ideal form of polity enshrined in the Charter of the United Nations. Much effort was expended in the reinvention of empire as the preparatory school for colonial adulthood, finally recognised with the key to the door – sovereign membership of the (British) Commonwealth.

These aims and plans belonged to the world of ‘high’ policy-making: they drew on the products of a
Realpolitik
calculus. But how far were they ‘viable’ in terms of public opinion? In Britain itself, the rough rule of thumb for working politicians remained much as it had been for decades. British opinion was largely indifferent to the detail of what happened in ‘remote corners’ of the Empire. But it could be quickly aroused by reports of the murder or mistreatment of other (white) Britons, and expected the smack of firm government to be felt by the miscreants. On the other hand, intervention that went wrong or produced heavy casualties for little return, would damage a government's prestige, perhaps very badly. It might be better in those cases to stage a rapid retreat from an untenable salient (like Palestine or Abadan) and hope that this would be seen as cool-headed restraint. As an index of attitudes the British newspaper market offered a very approximate guide. Of the daily papers, those leaning to the Right (
Daily Express
,
Daily Mail
,
Daily Sketch
and
Daily Telegraph
) had a circulation (in 1956) of approximately 8.2 million; those to the Left (
Daily Mirror
,
Daily Herald
and
News Chronicle
) approximately 7.2 million.
¹⁸
Although it could not be assumed that this reflected the relative strength of opinion for or against the defence of empire, these figures gave some indication of the fine line to be trodden if it was to enjoy general backing at home. The more serious danger was that public opinion in general would become disillusioned by the cost (in lives and money) of fighting colonial insurrections; that the burden of world power on the domestic standard of living would grow unacceptably heavy; or that some shocking abuse of colonial rule would give the critics of empire (usually a vociferous but minority group
¹⁹
) a chance to derail official policy and encourage its local opponents – those politicians who were labelled ‘extremists’ by the colonial authorities. In general, however, a revolt by public opinion seemed unlikely, and the counter-insurgencies in Malaya, Kenya and (after 1954) Cyprus were successfully portrayed as a fight against communism, terrorism and barbarism.

British opinion was important, but so was opinion elsewhere in what was still meant to be Britain's sphere of influence. In Australia, the sense of being a ‘British’ country was still very strong. Intense rivalry in cricket, periodic bursts of resentment over trading arrangements, irritation at London's indifference to Australia's regional defence and the knowledge that Australia now depended more upon American power for its national security had not erased the close identification with Britain's fate and fortunes.
²⁰
Britain's survival as a major world power and the centre of a global trading system still seemed emphatically in Australia's interests. To most Australians, the stability of their own society and its cultural cohesion still seemed to derive mainly from its British origins and continuing ‘British’ character. As a small community of European stock on the maritime margins of Asia, the cultural lifeline to Britain had always been important. The independence of India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Burma and Indonesia, and the political change impending elsewhere in Southeast Asia may have deepened the feeling of antipodean isolation, and increased the urgency of keeping the British connection. One measure of this continuing bond was the pattern of migration. Increasing Australia's
British-born
population was government policy, and (white) British immigrants (a large proportion of them ‘assisted immigrants’) made up half the intake of newcomers until the 1960s.
²¹
There was also a migration in the other direction as Australians came to Britain in substantial numbers to pursue education and seek career opportunities. The public stance of the Menzies government (Menzies was prime minister from 1949 to 1966) of loyalty to Britain and devotion to the Crown (the Queen's visit to Australia in 1954 – the year after her coronation – was received with great popular enthusiasm) thus largely reflected Australian feeling – and the expectation that the British should continue to behave like an imperial people.

Not surprisingly, perhaps, these attitudes were echoed with still greater vehemence across the Tasman Sea in New Zealand. There, the cool calculation of an expert committee at the end of the war that immigration from Britain was unnecessary
²²
was overturned by ‘the clamour of public opinion’.
²³
The sense of dependence on the British market for New Zealand's foodstuffs and wool was almost overwhelming. Under the National party government of Sidney Holland, New Zealand's place in a Britain-centred world was announced unequivocally. ‘Where Britain goes, we go’, declared Holland's press statement after the Commonwealth Finance Ministers Conference in early 1952. ‘If Britain sinks, we are sunk…but neither of us will sink’, he added – perhaps a little hastily.
²⁴
Like the Australians, New Zealanders expected the British to behave imperially, especially when it came to safeguarding the Suez route to the South Pacific. On the future of the Suez Canal, the New Zealand press was even more unbending than the Conservative diehards in Britain.
²⁵
At the height of the Suez crisis in November 1956, Holland asked himself: ‘Do we want to be in a position where Britain will say, or even think, we sought their help and it was not forthcoming…?’.
²⁶
His answer was no. Of course, there was scope for friction and disagreement, not least over the role of British-owned shipping companies in New Zealand's trade.
²⁷
But, in the Cold War climate, there were few parts of the ‘British world’ where London could hope for a more sympathetic hearing than in 1950s New Zealand.

In the other ‘old dominions’, public attitudes were less crystalline. Canada ‘is no longer a British dominion trying to act like a nation’, said
Fortune
magazine approvingly in August 1952.
²⁸
Its population had risen by 20 per cent since 1940, its national product by 90 per cent while its foreign trade had tripled. The presumption remained deeply rooted that what made Canada Canada was its British inheritance, in institutions particularly. Canada also continued to be a major destination for migrants from Britain. But, in communications, business and cultural life, the dominant influences now came up from the south. After the Second World War, Canada was integrated much more fully into a ‘continental’ economy. A huge tide of investment poured in from the United States to develop Canada's natural resources: a huge stream of raw or semi-processed materials, especially minerals and wood-pulp, poured back in return. Canada's ‘“triangular trade” seems nearly done for’, crowed
Fortune
: now Canada had to pay for its American imports by exporting not to Europe (as before the war) but to the United States. Defending Canada against the effects of American mass culture came to seem urgent enough to prompt a ‘Royal Commission on Arts, Letters and Sciences in Canada’ – a revealing designation. Perhaps the need to define a distinctively Canadian culture signalled the increasingly rapid decline of older British connections in the media, publishing and higher education. Canadian troops formed part of the ‘Commonwealth’ division that fought in Korea and Canadian ministers took a prominent part in Commonwealth meetings. But Canadian opinion had far less reason than Australian or New Zealand to interest itself in Britain's imperial problems in the Middle East or elsewhere, and was far less likely (as events were to prove) to give public support where that risked disagreement with the United States.
²⁹

South Africa was a paradox. After 1948, Afrikaner nationalism had strengthened its grip on the country. While the shift to republican status that had been a public goal of the National party for thirty years was quietly deferred, the right of ‘coloureds’ (i.e. persons of mixed race) to vote – a right confined to Cape Province and a relic of its ‘colonial’ parliamentary system – was swept away amidst a fierce constitutional crisis. As the elements of what became the
apartheid
policy (residential segregation, urban removals, formalised racial status, stricter labour controls, and prohibitions on political and social mixing) were gradually enforced, the volume of public disapproval from interested parties in Britain became far louder than before 1939. In their relations with London, however, the governments of Malan and Strijdom showed caution and pragmatism. The long-standing demand for the transfer of the ‘High Commission Territories’, Basutoland (now Lesotho), Bechuanaland (Botswana) and Swaziland, to South African control was kept in low key. In 1955, the Simonstown agreement ended British control over the naval base near Cape Town, but placed the South African navy under the overall command of the Royal Navy in wartime.
³⁰
Meanwhile, British investment in South African mining and industrial companies continued to grow rapidly. Among the South African ‘English’, still around 40 per cent of whites, attachment to Britain remained strong, reinforced by disdain for Afrikaans (a ‘kitchen’ language) and for most Afrikaners, stereotyped as the dim ‘Van der Merwe’ (a common Afrikaner surname) from the
platteland
or backblocks. By the mid-1950s, however, ‘English’ feeling was being cooled by resentment at the chorus of criticism from Britain aimed at
apartheid
and by the growing suspicion that British colonial policy elsewhere in Africa posed a threat to white supremacy.