The Empire Project: The Rise and Fall of the British World-System, 1830–1970 (59 page)

The passing of conscription was the highwater mark of Britannic nationalism in Canada. It marked the readiness of English Canadians to identify their contribution to the imperial war effort as the acid test of nationhood at whatever cost in racial friction. For the result was to divide Canadian politics along racial lines. ‘The government have won’, said Laurier, ‘but the peace of the country is certainly in danger.’
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Quebec no longer held the balance of political power, one of Borden's supporters told him, but the result might be to make ‘an irreconcilable Ireland in this country’.
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It would take a generation to repair ‘what the fanatics have destroyed in a few months’, groaned Skelton.
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Once the war was over, however, the momentum behind Borden's grand alliance was quickly lost. Economic difficulties and sectional differences between the prairies and the East fractured the wartime unity of Britannic sentiment. The coalition fell apart and, by 1921, the Liberals, under Mackenzie King, had returned to power. And, in the meantime, Borden's pre-war dream of a seat at the table when foreign policy was made for the Empire had dissolved in the cold clear air of the aftermath.

In Australia, recent British immigration was also a factor in the readiness with which public opinion responded to the outbreak of a faraway war. The flow of British migrants had picked up strongly in the last years before 1914, though not on the same scale as in Canada.
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To a much greater extent than in Canada, the British-born minority were prominent in political life: both wartime premiers had been born in Britain.
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But the eagerness with which Australians greeted the call of imperial duty was not just a result of nostalgia. Long before the war, anxiety about the ‘Yellow Peril’ of Asian migration and the rising power of Japan had made defence an important issue in Australian politics and bred two different but complementary reactions. The sense of remoteness from Britain placed a premium on self-help. The defence Act of 1903 authorised conscription for home defence, and from 1911 military training was compulsory for young men. Australian governments pressed hard for control over their own ‘fleet unit’ contribution to the Royal Navy. But they were just as anxious for a louder voice in British policy since the imperial umbrella rather than local defence was the real guarantee of White Australia's survival in an empty continent. That may have been why a secret promise was made in 1911 to send an expeditionary force to Britain's aid in time of war, and why the Australian government was determined that any troops it sent should fight together and not be split up amongst British units.
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Their influence in London, so the Australian leaders believed, depended not just on what they contributed to empire defence, but also on what they were seen to contribute.

Official enthusiasm helped to ensure the rapid formation of an all-volunteer Australian Imperial Force (AIF), and the enlistment of over 50,000 men by the end of 1914. At the local level, recruiting was promoted through the existing system for military training, and by the ‘patriotic leagues’ who arranged the enlistment meetings where men ‘joined up’ in an emotional atmosphere of patriotic sacrifice. As in Canada, Protestant clergymen were vociferous recruiters. ‘We are British first and Australians second’, said the Anglican minister in one country district in Victoria.
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A sense of adventure and fear of unemployment at the beginning of the war (when trade was disrupted) were reinforced by a happy naivety about life at the front. Nevertheless, once Australian troops were committed at Gallipoli, and the scale of the war became gradually clearer, the federal government hastened to boost the volunteer impulse. ‘Eligible’ men from eighteen to forty-five had to fill in a card to say whether they were willing to enlist, and, if not, why. Recruitment was reorganised to give a larger role to ‘recruiting sergeants’ and intensify the moral pressure to volunteer.
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It was not enough. Once much of the AIF had been transferred to the Western Front after the evacuation of Gallipoli, and its losses began to mount (six times as many Australians were eventually killed there as at Gallipoli), the struggle to refill its ranks began to haunt the Australian ministers. If the AIF was not just to waste away, and with it Australia's reputation and influence in London, something had to be done. That something was compulsion.

The most ardent champion of this view was William Morris Hughes, who had become premier in 1915. Hughes exemplified the ‘White Australia’ outlook of the Labour party, and its Asian paranoia. He had been a strong supporter of military service before the war. He mistrusted British ministers, but had no doubt that the fate of the four million Australians turned on their claim to British support as partners in the imperial enterprise. He spent much of 1916 in London partly to negotiate terms for the Australian wool-clip, partly to publicise Australia's contribution to the war. On his return, he threw himself into a furious campaign for conscription, since compulsory service in Australia applied only to home defence. To dramatise his appeal and maximise cross-party support, Hughes chose to test opinion through a referendum, not a general election. The wide public support for recruitment (even among those who opposed conscription) suggested that he would win an overwhelming victory. But, at the referendum of 28 October 1916, he lost by over 90,000 votes.
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When he tried again in December 1917, in what seemed even more desperate circumstances, the margin was even bigger.
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Conscription proved bitterly divisive in wartime Australia, and the divisions long outlasted the war. In country districts especially, they separated friends and even families. Opponents of conscription bore the taint of disloyalty. In the eyes of Protestant and middle-class opinion, the ‘shirkers’ who resisted compulsion were identified with the Catholic and Irish communities and with organised labour. The ruling Labour party split over the issue. Hughes led his followers into a new coalition and formed the Nationalist party in 1917. The rest of the Labour party drifted gradually to the left. By the middle of 1918, the New South Wales party had declared in favour of an immediate peace. At the party's federal conference, the resolutions of the Imperial War Conference were rejected in favour of full Australian self-government, an end to all legal appeals to London, and the abolition of the honours system. Labour leaders also gradually withdrew from the recruiting effort which relied heavily on the publicity of speeches and meetings.

What lay behind the double failure of conscription? How far did it reflect opposition to the ‘misuse’ of Australian manpower in a ‘British’ war? How far did it spring from mistrust of British strategy and alarm at British methods? How far did it signal the growth of a new Australian identity that was determined not to be taken for granted by an overweening mother-country? The answer must be: not very much. It was true, for example, that some of the fiercest opponents of conscription were both Irish and Catholic. Amongst the large Irish Catholic community in Australia, there was wide support for Irish Home Rule and (after Easter 1916) furious anger at London's brutal treatment of the leaders of the Dublin rising. Hughes himself had warned that Home Rule was an imperial, not just a British, question. It was natural that many Irish Australians should resist the Britannic rhetoric with which Australia's contribution to the war was justified. But the wider argument against conscription had little to do with the repudiation of Britishness or empire. In a voluntaristic society, it was an attack on individual rights. Some opponents complained that conscription would mean the permanent weakening of trade unionism, as the champion of working-class interests in the wage arbitration system. It would be the prelude to the industrial conscription of labour. Others insisted that Australia was doing as much as it could. In rural districts, and among farmers, conscription was feared as a remorseless drain on agricultural labour and the family farm. But the most widely vented, and probably most influential, arguments were those that portrayed conscription not as an attack on Australia's autonomy, but as a deadly threat to its white, Britannic identity.

The logic was not hard to follow. It appealed to the old, half-submerged tradition of isolationism in Australia: resentment at the costly involvement in European wars at the expense of more immediate concerns. Germany posed no danger, claimed the rising young Labour politician, John Curtin: Japan was the real menace.
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And, while sending off Australia's manpower to Europe would make no difference against Germany, it would make all the difference in resisting Japan. This argument was especially powerful in Queensland, the ‘invasion colony’ most exposed (it was believed) to attack from the north.
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But defence was not the only issue. The more insidious danger was the infiltration of non-white labour: the old bogey of the Labour party and the trade unions. ‘Vote against conscription and Colonial Coloured labour’ urged anti-conscriptionists in Victoria. ‘The Coloured Ocean…will swamp us if we do not stop the forcible deportation of our men, who are the white walls of Australia’, howled a Queensland pamphlet. ‘Vote no and keep Australia for future Australians – pure, free, unfettered and peopled with our own race and blood’, roared another.
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Hughes was guilty of treason against White Australia, said Curtin.
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The pro-conscription rhetoric of defence and democracy was neutralised by the claim that draining off white manpower would open the door not just to non-white labour but the erosion of hard-won political rights. One anti-conscription cartoon portrayed a dark-skinned, turbanned figure bringing down an axe labelled ‘yes’ on the neck of ‘democracy's’ crouching (white) form. ‘Goodbye democracy’ was its byline.

The vote against conscription was thus not a repudiation of empire, let alone of Britishness. It was a vote against an open-ended commitment to the war on the Western Front. It expressed a fear that the deeper purpose of empire – conceived as the expansion of ‘White Australia’ in its South Pacific homeland – would be jeopardised by the reckless expenditure of its most precious resource: white men. But it was far from reflecting any wider disenchantment with the war. Hughes’ defeat in the first referendum was followed by the crushing victory of his Nationalist government in the general election of May 1917. The Labour government in Queensland, the only state ministry to oppose conscription (the Labour governments in South Australia and New South Wales had supported it), was at pains to reassure British opinion that its commitment to victory was unimpaired.
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Other Labour leaders, perhaps fearful of the ‘lose-the-war’ label that Hughes tried to hang round their neck, insisted on their support for the war and enlistment. Nor was the ‘digger’ myth that emerged in the second half of the war to celebrate ANZAC heroism at Gallipoli at odds with the ‘Britannic’ tradition of White Australia as the British vanguard in the Southern Seas. The tough, independent-minded digger colonising the ‘bush’ fitted perfectly with a ‘conservative imperial nationalism’ in which Australia played the part of the ‘imperial farm’.
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In the other Pacific dominion, contributing to the war aroused much less controversy. In New Zealand, there was the same eagerness as in Australia to be seen at Britain's side. During the war, over 40 per cent of eligible males enlisted for service, the vast majority of them volunteers. Press, public and government united behind the vision of empire unity. ‘A great step forward is being made in the work of Imperial unification’, declared
The Dominion
newspaper in September 1914.
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In the race to send an imperial contingent, boasted Sir James Allen, the defence minister, in April 1915, ‘we are a long way ahead of any one of the Dominions’.
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The
quid pro quo
was a voice in foreign policy;
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the
sine qua non
, a voice in London. The joint leaders of the government coalition, Massey and Sir Joseph Cook, spent much of the war in London, the real centre (as James Belich observes) of the New Zealand war effort.
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In May–June 1916, conscription for overseas service was enacted by an overwhelming parliamentary majority.
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There was no great feeling against it, Allen reported to Massey in London.
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Of course, this remarkable commitment to a far-off conflict was not unqualified. By the end of 1916, there was growing nervousness about the commercial predominance of the United States and Japan in the Pacific, and industrial unrest welled up in the last year of the war. But the fierce divisions of Australian politics were largely avoided. War prosperity allowed the government to conciliate the most powerful trade unions. New Zealand's longer history of social intervention by central government may have made conscription more palatable. And the isolationist tradition was weaker: a reflection partly of demographic and strategic realities, and partly perhaps of the differences in ethnic composition (New Zealand's Irish Catholic community was smaller, less radical and less influential than Australia's) and immigrant tradition on the different shores of the Tasman Sea.

The spectre of revolt: South Africa, India, Ireland

South Africa