After Tamerlane (65 page)

The partition of Europe did not come immediately. The original expectation of Stalin, Roosevelt and Churchill seems to have been a rough division of interests that recognized Soviet predominance in Poland, Romania and Bulgaria but left a wide ‘middle sphere' – including Austria, Hungary and Czechoslovakia – whose future would be settled by the European peace. But a real European peace could be made only if a solution was found to the problem of Germany. Fear of German recovery, a newGerman imperium or a second Nazi empire built on the wreckage of Eastern and Central Europe ruled Allied diplomacy. For obvious reasons, it was the dominant element in Soviet thinking. Hence the reconstruction of Europe was meant to proceed in a continent made safe from German aggression. A four-power commission (France would join the ‘Big Three') was to dismantle permanently the apparatus and sources of German imperialism. Disarmed, denazified and deindustrialized, Germany could empire-build no more. But it was over this programme that the Allies fell out. To the Western powers economic recovery was paramount. They feared that its delay would spark mass unrest across Western Europe, and refused to postpone economic normalization in their part of Germany. When Stalin objected, they went ahead anyway. After the Berlin blockade in 1948 (Stalin's riposte), joint supervision of Germany was abandoned in favour of a de facto partition. Across Eastern and Central Europe, Soviet power helped install Communist-led governments subservient to Moscow (Yugoslavia was the exception). In the west, American financial aid (through the Marshall Plan) and the promise of protection against Soviet pressure shored up a mixed economy and democratic politics.

The division of Europe was a critical fact of the post-war world. It
marked the final breakdown of the Allies' wartime unity. It affirmed Stalin's conviction that he faced an American onslaught
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– since capitalism could not tolerate the Soviet experiment. When Soviet control over Poland, Romania and Bulgaria was followed by efforts to assert Soviet influence in Iran, Turkey and Greece, opinion in Washington began to shift rapidly. For this seemed to confirm the view, already propounded by the leading American expert on Soviet policy George Kennan, in his famous ‘long telegram' from Moscowin 1946, that the Soviet Union was bent on expansion. Kennan seems to have argued both that Soviet expansion was ideology-driven and that it was the continuation of tsarist expansion under newmanagement.
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In American politics, the case for containing the Soviet threat and accepting a huge newcommitment to defend Western Europe was fused with the paranoid fear of a Communist plot against American freedom – the nightmare vision that became McCarthyism. It entrenched an ideological vision of international rivalry, and laid down the theoretical grounds for American intervention anywhere in the world. When North Korea (the state formed out of the Soviet sphere in the Korean peninsula after Japan's eviction in 1945) attacked South Korea in June 1950, the conviction that America was engaged in a global cold war against Soviet expansion became the cardinal rule of American policy. Meanwhile, the division of Europe drove its western half into much deeper dependence on American power than anyone had envisaged at the end of the war – a pattern that was replicated in the Soviet-controlled east. For the world beyond Europe, the results of Europe's partition were even more surprising.

We have already seen that American leaders had a strong dislike for the colonial empires that were ruled from Europe. To their way of thinking, these empires were feudal survivals: bastions of privilege; negations of democracy; inefficient, unprogressive and clumsy. Worse still, they acted as zones of economic exclusion, barring the gate to American trade, hampering the growth of American exports. The fall of empires in French Indochina, the Dutch East Indies and British-ruled Malaya and Burma, and the impending withdrawal of the British from India, seemed positive results of the Pacific war. After a brief reoccupation to remove the Japanese armies, there was every reason for America to insist on the swift dissolution of colonial rule. Colonial
states could then be reborn as ex-colonial nations, who would look for help and advice to the world's greatest ex-colony. In their weakened state, and with more urgent concerns much closer to home, the European colonial powers could be expected to take a similar view. Empire was a luxury they could ill afford – or so it might have been thought.

In one crucial case this is exactly what happened. The British had fought the war to save themselves from Hitler. Yet, at Churchill's insistence, the British war effort was also designed to preserve their imperial power. ‘I have not become the King's First Minister', Churchill declared in a famous phrase, ‘to preside over the liquidation of the British Empire.' But in the desperate crisis of 1942 even Churchill had been forced to agree that India's independence should follow soon after the war. For eighteen months after Japan's surrender, the Labour government in London struggled to find a political formula to give India freedom but keep it united. They resisted Muslim demands for an Indian partition, partly because the majority Congress Party refused to agree, and partly because they hoped that a united India would be Britain's willing partner in post-war Asia. But in early 1947, as their economic crisis grewdeeper, and in fear of being trapped in an Indian civil war, they threwin the towel. A newviceroy was sent to wind up the Raj in just over a year. Lord Mountbatten exceeded his brief. After persuading the Congress that partition was the price of swift independence, and that to resist it further risked a descent into chaos, he staged a lightning retreat after six months of office in August 1947. Within less than a year, Ceylon (Sri Lanka) and Burma had gained independence as well.

The surprising thing was that this retreat from empire did not become general. It was true that the British also abandoned their mandate in Palestine. But that was mainly because they thought that further involvement in the Arab–Jewish conflict would wreck the Middle East primacy they were so keen to maintain. Far from drawing the lesson that their economic weakness and strategic exposure had made their overseas empires an unprofitable burden, Britain, France, the Netherlands and Belgium reached the opposite conclusion. To rebuild their war-shattered economies, they needed cheap raw materials and tropical commodities that they could resell for dollars
–the dollars to help pay for their essential imports from the United States. Their colonies nowseemed the perfect source: they could be forced to accept payment at belowthe world price, and in Europe's soft currencies not hard American dollars. Cocoa from West Africa, copper from the Congo, tin and rubber from Malaya, sugar, coffee and oil from the Dutch East Indies would keep the wolf from the door until the metropolitan economies got back into balance. ‘Indië verloren, ramspoed geboren' (‘If the Indies are lost, ruin will follow') ran the saying in Holland. ‘We are on the edge of the abyss,' said the Netherlands finance minister in April 1947, shortly before the Dutch ‘police action' to regain control of key economic assets in Java.
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It went without saying that Britain's concession for oil in south-western Iran was even more valuable.

The argument for empire was not solely economic. A crucial part of the British case for staying put in the Middle East was geostrategic. Soviet aggression in Central Europe, the strategists argued, could best be deterred by the use of air power – the huge bomber force the British had deployed against Nazi Germany. Russia's industrial cities were beyond the range of Britain's own airfields, but from its Middle East bases they could be bombed at will. The British imperium in the Middle East would make up for British weakness close to home in Europe. France's post-war leaders were also convinced that they needed their empire – as much if not more so. After France's defeat in June 1940, it had been the African colonies that had rallied to ‘Free France'. Any hope of recovering France's pre-war status as one of the world's great powers seemed to depend on keeping the empire intact, not least as a source of military manpower.

But staying on was not an easy option. It was bound to cost money and divert precious resources from reconstruction at home. In South East Asia it meant rebuilding colonial power in the face of resistance movements that had originally sprung up against Japan's occupation. Leaning as they did on America's financial help, the unrepentant imperialists would scarcely have dared defy a veto from Washington. They had no need to fear. As Truman and his advisers grasped what they sawas the Soviet challenge, their viewof Europe's colonialism turned almost full circle. It no longer seemed wise to force their European friends to abandon their assets. When the British sought
help with the burden of military aid to Turkey and Greece, Washington responded with the Truman Doctrine, to share the burden of containment in the Mediterranean and Middle East. The American chiefs of staff urged ‘all feasible political, economic and if necessary military support… to the United Kingdom and the communications of the British Commonwealth'.
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At a billion dollars a year, the United States underwrote the costs of defending Britain's overseas empire, quietly approving Britain's imperial presence in the Middle East. By the late 1940s, large tranches of aid were propping up France's struggle to keep Indochina French. The astonishing outcome of the war in Europe had turned the United States into the patron and protector of the European empires – although a patron which expected that, sooner or later, their imperial economies would be opened up to its own.

Of course, it was not just the chain of events in Europe that produced this result. The collapse of Nazi imperialism on the European continent had its counterpart in East Asia. But, just as in Europe, the way the Asian war ended took an unpredictable turn and had unexpected results. In the fight with Japan, the Soviet Union was a neutral. Much of the Japanese army (more than a million soldiers) was stationed in China, to guard Japan's puppet regimes and grind down the resistance of the Kuomintang army. The American assault on Japan required a slowbloody progress from island to island, leading eventually (this was the plan) to a D-Day type landing on the main Japanese land mass. The part that China would play in the defeat of Japan and in the newpeacetime order envisaged in Washington shifted dramatically in the last year of the war. By late 1944 the disastrous performance of Chiang Kai-shek's army in the ‘Ichigo' campaign had convinced Roosevelt and Churchill that the Kuomintang would count for little in the assault on Japan. They turned their attention to persuading Stalin to attack Japan as soon as war ended in Europe. At the Yalta Conference in February 1945, they agreed in return that Russia should take back the territory lost in 1905 (the Kurile Islands and northern Sakhalin), its old railway rights in Manchuria, and (most astonishing of all) its old naval base at Port Arthur (nowcalled Lü shun) guarding the maritime entry into northern China. In this unceremonious way, the previous assumption that, in the
post-war world, Kuomintang China would be one of the ‘Four Policemen' (alongside the United States, the Soviet Union and the British Empire/Commonwealth), and America's great partner in the Asian Pacific, was quietly downgraded. The urgency of forcing Japan to surrender, the terrible toll in American lives that a seaborne invasion was expected to take, and the vital necessity of Soviet help imposed a newset of priorities.

As it turned out, the defeat of Japan was achieved not with Soviet aid but by use of the A-bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. But the collapse of the Japanese Empire and of its far-reaching claims over ‘Greater East Asia' brought no advantage to the Kuomintang state. In the 1930s Chiang Kai-shek might have hoped that, if Japan were crushed, the new nationalist China would win a dominant place in the East Asian order. A renascent China would play off the powers and reclaim the vast sphere where Ch'ing influence had ruled: Sinkiang, Tibet, Mongolia, Manchuria, Korea, Vietnam and perhaps even Burma.
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For a fewmonths after the end of the war, the KMT government still seemed an irresistible force: even Stalin discounted the chances of Mao's Communist followers.
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In fact the eight-yearlong war of resistance (1937–45) had sapped much of the Kuomintang's strength. With only a dribble of aid from abroad (only 3 per cent of America's Lend Lease programme was directed to China), it had been a hopeless task to create a war economy in the parts of China outside the occupied zone. There was no income from exports. The domestic commercial economy, based on the exchange of agricultural produce between China's different regions, was wrecked by the war and the fragmentation it brought. As China sank into a subsistence economy, there was nothing to back the Kuomintang currency, which became virtually worthless. The extraction of taxes from rural producers became more and more brutal and more and more difficult.
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So, when the Kuomintang government tried at the end of the war to destroy the parallel Communist state under Mao Tse-tung, it faced an uphill struggle. Mao's version of Communism appealed to peasant hostility against landlords and towns – the administrative base of the tax-gathering government. It promised rural self-help and the redistribution of land as an immediate cure for the desperate poverty of peasant communities.
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Mao's Communist armies received
crucial assistance from the prompt Soviet entry into Manchuria, and had access to the stockpile of Japanese arms. When Chiang Kai-shek rushed north to seize control of Manchuria's industrial assets – southern Manchuria was China's richest and most industrialized region
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– he overstrained the resources of his weakened regime. In 1949 Kuomintang resistance was broken. In October that year the People's Republic of China was proclaimed in Beijing (Peking).

The implications were seismic. At each end of Eurasia the war had created a divided subcontinent. Just as there was no agreed post-war order to settle the future in Europe, so there would be no general peace settlement to end the war in East Asia. As Washington took stock of the Kuomintang's failure, a surge of Communist influence in the war-shattered societies from Korea to Java (and not excluding Japan) seemed increasingly likely. Yet any newcommitment on the mainland of Asia, to add to the burden of defending Europe, seemed out of the question. It was this dilemma that pushed American policy in its newdirection. It strengthened the argument for backing British and French colonialism against Communist-led movements in Vietnam and Malaya. It weakened the case for supporting the Dutch against Indonesian nationalists who, to Washington's delight, crushed a Communist uprising in 1948. It reversed the plan to neuter Japan's industrial muscle (Japan would become the ‘Switzerland of Asia' had been General Macarthur's prediction) in the interests of China. Instead, Japan would become America's Asian ally, offering unlimited use of its national territory in return for American protection. This remarkable bargain seemed to some observers to be in the grand tradition of Asia's unequal treaties.