The Empire Project: The Rise and Fall of the British World-System, 1830–1970 (78 page)

In the ‘Newer World’: the dominions
⁹⁶

The arduous negotiations at Ottawa taught British ministers – if they needed reminding – that dominion politicians had as keen a sense of their own ‘national’ interest as the London government itself. With the formal conferment of the dominions’ full sovereignty under the Statute of Westminster, the vigorous assertion of their economic self-interest, and their increasing alarm that Britain might be drawn into a conflict in Europe in which
they
had no stake, it has sometimes appeared as if this was the time when the dominions acquired a fully fledged sense of their national identity. A new ‘nationalist’ spirit had replaced colonial subservience. They were nation-states in the making, no longer stuck fast in uneasy ‘dominionhood’. It would be hard to deny that the language of ‘nation’ became more widely used among dominion politicians in the inter-war years. But it would be wrong to assume that more than a handful of such ‘nationalists’ envisaged a future outside the British world-system or favoured an open rebellion against it. There were several reasons for this. First, among communities of mainly British origin, affirming a Canadian or Australian identity was not meant to deny their continuing Britishness. They would still be ‘British nations’ as well, numbered among the ‘British peoples’. Secondly, even European immigrants from outside the British Isles displayed a strong attachment to ‘British’ institutions (especially parliamentary government) and the Crown as a source of common allegiance. Thirdly, even where such attachments were weak or contested, as among some French Canadians, Afrikaners and Irish, the right to secede from the Empire and become a republic (to which the Statute of Westminster gave tacit consent) exerted at best an ambiguous appeal. The costs and risks in each case were dauntingly high, and full exit from the Empire was carefully assigned to the indefinite future.

The Pacific dominions

Among the five dominions, there was inevitably wide variation in the extent to which the ‘British connection’ impinged upon their local politics in a period of considerable turmoil. Of the four overseas dominions, Australia and New Zealand were the most homogeneously British. Ethnic resentment against Britain, even in hard times, had little political scope. Both declined to enact the Statute of Westminster in their own legislatures, and showed little interest in the work of its drafting.
⁹⁷
Both were keenly aware of how dependent they were on British sea-power for strategic protection and to safeguard the racial exclusiveness – ‘White Australia’ and ‘White New Zealand’ – that formed the bedrock of their social and cultural identity. In both, the political and business elite (and many farmers as well) acknowledged the umbilical link between their economic prosperity and their close relations with Britain, nowhere more than in Melbourne's Collins Street, Australia's ‘City’. This was not just a matter of markets. In both Pacific dominions, the circulation of credit and cash was tied very closely to the size of the sterling reserves that their banks held in London. The London balances were ‘the real regulative factor and the key to the whole banking system’.
⁹⁸
A shortfall in earnings or the failure to raise a loan in the City threatened the drastic contraction of the local money supply and a savage depression of the kind both had suffered some forty years earlier.

In Australia particularly, the effects of the slump were extremely unsettling. The huge fall in world prices was part of the story. What made things much worse was the scale of the borrowing, public and private, in the boom decade that ended abruptly in October 1929. With public revenues falling, huge railway losses, and the drastic decline in overseas earnings, the risk of default on local and overseas debts loomed large. But the action required to avert this calamity was bound to be painful and to evoke fierce opposition, especially from the supporters of the government in power, the first Labour government since 1916. When the Scullin ministry accepted the advice of the Niemeyer mission (Sir Otto Niemeyer was deputy governor of the Bank of England) that cuts had to be made and wages reduced to balance the federal and state government budgets, the reaction was bitter. The Australian Council of Trade Unions denounced the Loans Councils (which managed public borrowing) for being ‘in the hands of money sharks, loan-mongers and capitalists’.
⁹⁹
As unemployment shot up towards 30 per cent, the Labour party executive called for the nationalisation of banks and insurance companies, and the renegotiation of Australia's war debt to Britain. While Scullin was away at the 1930 Imperial Conference (and promising that Australia would not consider default
¹⁰⁰
), a civil war was being fought within his party and government. In New South Wales, the radical populist Jack Lang won the state election for Labour, and led the demand to ‘nationalise credit’. ‘Enthroned in our society’, he later declared, ‘is a hierarchy of financial anarchists playing with the world of men and women for sheer personal gain’: the villains of the piece were the British banks in Australia and the leaders who had made Australia into a ‘chattel nation’.
¹⁰¹
After twice defaulting on the New South Wales overseas debt, Lang was dismissed by the state's governor in May 1932, by which time Scullin's government had also collapsed. In December 1931, the United Australia party, a composite of the National party and Labour rebels like Joe Lyons, the new party's leader, came into power, promising, in Lyons' words, ‘ruthlessly to eradicate all influences insidiously or openly weakening the ties of Empire’.
¹⁰²

Some historians have been tempted to see in the crisis a conflict between conservative middle-class loyalists, deferential to Britain and earnestly mimicking British upper-class rituals, and Labour's ‘radical nationalists’, bent on resisting Britain's ‘imperial demands’.
¹⁰³
It was certainly true that the professional and business elite (most visible in Melbourne, and closely connected to mining finance) regarded itself as the Australian embodiment of Britain's upper class, and subscribed to its political and educational ideals as well as its leisure habits. The young Robert Menzies (a Melbourne barrister) contrasted the refinement of the British ‘establishment’ with the crudeness and avarice of its American counterpart. ‘They engage in a nauseating mixture of sentiment (“Mother's Day”) and dollar-chasing, not palatable to the English mind’, he wrote after a visit to the United States. ‘They have no consciousness of responsibility for the well-being or security of the world; no sense of Imperial destiny.’
¹⁰⁴
It was equally true that an acrid dislike for the British monied elite was voiced on the left of Australian politics. But it is much too crude to equate this with rejection of Britishness or Australia's British identity. One of the first steps of the Labour government when the depression arrived was to close the door to ‘alien’ (i.e. non-British) migration. In a speech criticising the Ottawa terms, Scullin (whose origins were Catholic and Irish) insisted that the point of imperial preference was the mutual advantage of ‘British nations trading with one another and…keeping the maximum amount of business within the British family of nations’.
¹⁰⁵
His successor as party leader, John Curtin (also Catholic and Irish), who had flirted with repudiating Australia's debts, was no less emphatic. Australians, he claimed, ‘not only desire to be one people but that we shall be kindred from a common stock; that we shall…be a white people predominantly of British origin’.
¹⁰⁶
As leader of the United Australia party, Joe Lyons (Catholic and Irish) played the ‘Empire’ card. His more conservative colleagues, like Menzies’ mentor, J. G. Latham, might have disliked the Statute of Westminster, but they were also determined to extract the most favourable trade terms from Britain and be ready to look to the Japanese market.
¹⁰⁷
Trade with the East was where Australia's economic destiny lay, was Latham's conclusion.
¹⁰⁸
The notorious reluctance of Lyons’ government to question the Royal Navy's ability to defend Australia may have owed most to its fear that this would weaken the Admiralty's case for a strong Eastern fleet and throw an intolerable burden back on Australia itself.

Nor was there much sign that the cultural ferment of the 1930s, that affected Australia like almost everywhere else, had brought a direct confrontation with Australia's peculiar Britishness. Quite the contrary in fact. In 1936, the writer P. K. Stephensen published an influential manifesto,
The Foundations of Culture in Australia
. Stephensen insisted that Australia must have its own national culture that would diverge ‘from the purely local colour of the British Islands to the precise extent that our environment differs from that of Britain’. ‘Is it sedition or blasphemy to the idea of the British Empire to suggest that each Dominion in this loose alliance will tend to become autonomous politically, commercially, and
culturally
?’
¹⁰⁹
But the Australia that Stephensen wanted was a ‘
New Britannia
…cured of some of the vices…of the Old One’, and avoiding ‘Europe's brawls’. ‘This Island, Australia Felix, effectively occupied by the British race, would be easily defensible against all-comers: which Britain to-day is not. This Island is waiting for the British people to
occupy it effectively
…. There is no other part of the British Empire so suited as the permanent domicile of the British Race…
the British people could find no better stronghold and focus than in the Island Continent of Australia
.’
¹¹⁰
The Australian accent was clear. But this was the cultural programme not of national separatism but of Britannic nationalism: the claim to be a distinct British people, equal at least and perhaps even superior to the original stock.

Canada

Scarred by his encounter with its prime minister, R. B. Bennett, at the Ottawa Conference, Neville Chamberlain took a sour view of Canada's part in the Empire. The United States, he said, ‘controls capital and politics in Canada’.
¹¹¹
Only ten years earlier he had been ‘surprised and delighted’ on a visit to Canada ‘to find the most intense British feeling’.
¹¹²
Chamberlain resented what he saw as Bennett's bullying tactics, and not without reason. Even Canadian observers were embarrassed and uneasy. But Chamberlain's diagnosis was crude. Canada was bound to be influenced by its huge southern neighbour, at once the world's largest economy, the largest English-speaking country and Canada's largest market. The ease and convenience of cross-border traffic, the importance of New York in Canadian finance, and the influence of the American media – radio, film and the press – made this all-but-inevitable. But pragmatic acceptance of the American fact was combined with affirmation of Canada's British identity by English Canadians, and (with certain qualifications) by French Canadians as well. At the Conservative convention in 1927, the outgoing leader, Arthur Meighen, defended his argument that a Canadian government should consult Canadian opinion before joining Britain in a war by saying that this would reassure the people that Canada was a ‘real British democracy’ and thus strengthen ‘British institutions and British fidelity’.
¹¹³
A Liberal party pamphlet of 1933 declared that the party ‘stood for British principles of Free Speech and Free Association’.
¹¹⁴
A prairie Liberal like Crerar, who disliked ‘Toronto imperialists’ and the ‘strange shore dwellers’ whose first loyalty was to Britain,
¹¹⁵
could still think of Britain as ‘the Old Country’ and feel an affinity with its Liberal party and opinion.
¹¹⁶
The scale of non-British migration into the west after 1918 sharpened the mood of its bare British majority.
¹¹⁷
The Social Credit party, which ruled Alberta after 1935 (and whose leader, William Aberhart, was an ‘intense Anglophile’), wrapped its electoral platforms in the Union Jack.
¹¹⁸
A well-regulated service, concluded the parliamentary committee on radio broadcasting, would be ‘one of the most efficient mediums for developing a greater National and Empire consciousness’.
¹¹⁹

Canadian nationalism was not an insignificant force, but, as in Australia, it was rarely defined in conflict with Britishness. Its urgency seemed greater after 1930 as the economic depression threatened to fracture the country. ‘Never before had provinces, races, classes and parties been so divided’, complained the Anglophone Montreal lawyer, Brooke Claxton, a former Rhodes Scholar who bought his suits in London.
¹²⁰
What was needed was a strong central government to hold them together. Nationalism reflected the feeling that Canada was still little more than a grouping of regions and provinces.
¹²¹
But its strongest supporters were equally sure that the nation they wanted should be a ‘British nation’. John W. Dafoe was the editor of the
Manitoba Free Press
in Winnipeg, the voice of prairie Liberalism, and the most influential Canadian journalist of his day.
¹²²
Dafoe was an ardent nationalist. But he saw Canada's future as one of the ‘British nations’. ‘I have never believed’, he told one correspondent in 1928, ‘that one of a number of British nations having a common king could remain neutral in a war which threatened the existence of another British nation.’
¹²³
Dafoe fiercely opposed the ‘tory-imperialist’ view that Canada had no choice but to follow Britain blindly into any war that it fought. But nor did he want their foreign policies to diverge. The best solution, he thought, would be ‘agreement by the British nations, that…none of them, not even Great Britain, are 100 per cent international “persons”’.
¹²⁴
They should not make war on their own, nor even make treaties that might involve them in wars without each other's consent.