The Empire Project: The Rise and Fall of the British World-System, 1830–1970 (90 page)

The full extent of their economic fragility was thus partially hidden from British leaders until the very end of the conflict. But they were already aware of the enormous importance of close cooperation with the white dominions if they were to make good their claim to be one of the ‘Big Three’. In the traumatic twelve months after June 1940, before Hitler's onslaught on Russia gave Britain a reluctant, suspicious and (as it seemed for some time) ill-fated ally, dominion support had been important materially and perhaps vital psychologically. The dominions’ contribution to Britain's fighting strength, unlike that of India, cost London nothing. Canadian, South African, Australian and New Zealand troops fought in the Mediterranean and Northern European theatres, as well as closer to home (in the Australian case). Canadian enlistment exceeded the levels of 1914–18.
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Dominion supplies could be purchased on tick. Canada's dollars and its industrial base (much larger than that of the other dominions) were mobilised for the war effort. The Royal Canadian Navy gradually took over the anti-submarine war in the Northwest Atlantic.
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South Africa's value as the great redoubt guarding the only safe route to Egypt and India was greater than ever by 1941–2. The main base from which the British intended to launch their part in the defeat of Japan after 1944 was expected to be in Australia and to use Australian resources.

Perhaps as a consequence, British leaders began to talk enthusiastically about the need for imperial unity and a common foreign policy to which Britain, the dominions and the rest of the Empire, including India, would be tied. They may have been encouraged by the speech made by John Curtin, the Australian Prime Minister in August 1943. Curtin had enraged Churchill by his notorious statement (at the end of December 1941) that Australia ‘looks to America, free of any pangs as to our links or kinship with the United Kingdom’.
¹⁰
Now, like the prodigal son, he had returned to the fold. His Adelaide speech (amplified some three weeks later) roundly declared that ‘some imperial authority had to be evolved’, and called for an ‘Empire Council’ and a permanent secretariat to give it effect.
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His ideas were welcomed in
The Times.
The Empire, it said, could only keep peace in the future as one of the four great powers of the United Nations. But the dominions ‘would fail in these duties if they accepted individual membership of the United Nations as a substitute for the Imperial bond’.
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In July 1943, Sir Edward Grigg, a leading Round Tabler and soon to be Resident Minister in the Middle East, had published a manifesto calling for a ‘Commonwealth, coherent, united and strong’, able to stand beside the United States, Russia and China. Its disintegration, he claimed, ‘would expose many parts of Asia, the Pacific, the Atlantic and Africa to open international rivalry’.
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The book was reissued in December to catch the following wind that now seemed to be blowing. Then, in January 1944, Lord Halifax, the British Ambassador in Washington, and former Foreign Secretary, delivered a widely reported speech in Toronto (where the flame of Empire loyalty usually burned brightest). ‘Not Great Britain only’, he declared, ‘but the British Commonwealth and Empire must be the fourth power in that group on which…the peace of the world will henceforth depend.’
¹⁴
When the dominion prime ministers met in London in May 1944, it was left to Mackenzie King, the Canadian premier, to challenge the formula that the British ministers present proposed to insert in the final communiqué. It would refer, said Eden, to the Empire's foreign
policy
. ‘All agreed’, said Attlee. There would be an ‘Imperial Joint Board for Defence’, said Cranborne, the Secretary of State for the Dominions. But King refused to agree. ‘The more I think of the high pressure methods that have been used the more indignant I feel’, he wrote in his diary that evening.
¹⁵

The reality was that there was little agreement among the dominions or between them and the London government on what Commonwealth unity should actually mean. Curtin had emphasised Australia's British identity. His election campaign in 1943 had wrapped itself in the Union Jack: Australia should be a ‘second Britannia in the Antipodes’.
¹⁶
When he came to London in May 1944, he told his Guildhall audience: ‘Australia is a British people, Australia is a British land.’
¹⁷
But Curtin (and Fraser, the New Zealand Prime Minister, who supported Curtin’s call for an Empire Council) did not intend the subordination of the Pacific dominions to the wishes of London. Far from it. In the long tradition of Australian statecraft, his aim was to commit more imperial resources to the South Pacific and to assert Australia's claim to manage all ‘British’ interests in the region. ‘We are in the south what the motherland is in the north’, he told a Sydney audience in May 1942.
¹⁸
His ‘Empire Council’ was meant to rotate between the dominion capitals and London because the Empire could not be run by a government sitting in Britain. In case there should be any doubt in the matter, the Australia–New Zealand Agreement in January 1944 had bluntly insisted that any settlement in their region would require the active assent of Canberra and Wellington – an assertion that was even more badly received in Roosevelt's Washington than in Churchill's London. Curtin and Fraser's ‘imperial regionalism’ was implicitly shared by Smuts in South Africa. The northward extension of South African influence and the gradual inclusion of Central and East Africa in the South African sphere were long-cherished ambitions. They duly emerged in Smuts’ ‘explosive’ speech in November 1943. The British system needed ‘tightening up’ but also decentralising if it were to match the ‘Colossi’. That meant consolidating the colonial territories into larger units and tying them more closely to the neighbouring dominion – a delicate euphemism.
¹⁹
Smuts may also have hoped that this sub-imperial vision would strengthen his United party's appeal against its National party opponents. The ‘old narrow little-Afrikanerdom had been defeated for good’, he told Leo Amery in October 1943.
²⁰
But Smuts (with an Afrikaner majority on the electoral roll) knew better than to call for new imperial machinery. The government-inspired
Cape Times
had rubbished Curtin's ideas.
²¹
Talk of imperial unity, Smuts confided to King, was just ‘damn nonsense’;
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it ‘was a thing of the past’.
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And, for Smuts perhaps, as for Curtin and Fraser, the prospect of Britain's huge wartime commitments in the Mediterranean and Europe continuing on into the peace made it all the more urgent to wrest the direction of British power in their regions into dominion hands.

All this made less sense in the senior dominion. Mackenzie King was keenly aware of the strength of pan-British patriotism in Canada. One of his closest allies, the Montrealer Brooke Claxton, echoed Curtin's ‘Britannic’ sentiments in a speech made at much the same time. ‘Canada’, he said, ‘is a British Nation in North America’.
²⁴
King himself was irritated by the ‘isolationist and autonomist position in intra-Imperial relations’ adopted by his own officials in the External Affairs department. ‘Of all countries’, he noted, ‘we are really the most vulnerable because of our extensive territory, resources and the like.’ Canada ‘will greatly need strength alike of British Commonwealth as a whole and of US in protecting her position’ (he was thinking of the threat that the Soviet Union would pose).
²⁵
But, since the conscription election in 1918, King had been obsessed by the danger of an irreconcilable rift between Quebec and ‘English Canada’ that would tear his party, as well as the country, in half. English Canada's loyalty to Britain, and to Canada's identity as a ‘British nation’, were facts of political life. They had forced King into the 1942 referendum that authorised the government to apply conscription ‘if necessary’. Quebec's low rate of enlistment was observed with resentment. ‘Quebec is hated in the rest of Canada’, noted ‘Chubby’ Power, one of King's ministers, an English-speaking, Catholic Quebecker and a much decorated veteran of the First World War.
²⁶
Power opposed conscription, arguing that it would turn Quebec into ‘Ireland all over again’,
²⁷
but several of King's cabinet colleagues were determined to enforce conscription for overseas service once the losses from ‘Overlord’ began to be felt. To King these cross-pressures made it all the more critical that Ottawa should be visibly free from any last vestige of imperial control, most of all when it came to external commitments. At the prime ministers’ meeting in May 1944, he threw his weight against any change in the way that dominion governments were consulted. When the premiers discussed the proposed ‘World Organisation’, King insisted that Canada would want its own representation ‘as one of the medium powers’, a position soon followed by Curtin, Fraser and Smuts.
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For all four dominions, a separate voice at the United Nations offered better protection of their ‘national’ interest than collective membership of a Commonwealth bloc in which London would enjoy an inevitable lead.

The main imperial legacy of the second half of the War was the scale of the British commitment in the Mediterranean and Middle East. This was an echo (with certain key differences) of the ‘Eastern’ war in 1914–18. Then, as later, the British responded to a double imperative. They had to guard the road to India through Iraq and Iran, and defend Egypt, the ‘Clapham Junction’ (as the cliché had it) of their imperial communications and the northern gateway to the Indian Ocean. But the Middle East was also a huge bastion that was meant to make up for Britain's weakness in Europe. In 1918, it had been the grim prospect of outright defeat on the continent that drove the British forward in Palestine and Iraq and towards the Caucasus. The fall of France in June 1940 and the German advance into Russia the following year recreated the nightmare of 1918. For the British once again, the Middle East was the theatre where their fate would be settled. If they were to lose the Middle East war, their world-system would be cut in half, and Britain's dependence on American aid would become absolute. But, if they could hold on and secure their position, the Middle East was a springboard from which they might hope to reassert their position as a
Mediterranean
power and as a great power in Europe. The equation was not new. Britain's claim to be a great power in Europe had rested in part on her Mediterranean presence since the seventeenth century.

Of course, the pattern of conflict after June 1940 had followed a different trajectory. In 1914–18, the British had fought the Ottoman Empire at Gallipoli, in Palestine and in modern Iraq. After June 1940, they fought the Italians and Germans in a war that was as much Mediterranean as Middle Eastern and became steadily more so with the invasion of Italy and the British intervention in Greece. The invasion of Normandy in June 1944 reduced the strategic importance of the Mediterranean theatre and also signalled the moment when the United States army became the indisputably dominant force in the Anglo-American alliance. The final struggle for Europe would be fought for the most part between German, Russian and American armies: two-thirds of the eighty-five divisions assembled for Eisenhower's advance into Germany in the spring of 1945 were American. In the Mediterranean, however, the British remained the senior partner, and a British general was the Supreme Commander. In the Italian campaign, there were as many British and Commonwealth troops as American.
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‘Italy is a country which we can get at and in which we rather than Russia should naturally expect to exert predominant influence’, remarked a senior British official.
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The British were eager to ‘reconstruct’ Italy as a parliamentary state that would look towards Britain. They were just as determined that the liberation of Greece would produce a regime that was friendly to Britain, if not dependent upon her. Intervention in Greece, Eden told his War Cabinet colleagues in August 1944, was indispensable to Britain's strategy in the Balkans and the Eastern Mediterranean.
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Churchill's notorious ‘percentages’ deal with Stalin in Moscow in October 1944 (Greece was to be ‘90 per cent’ British) was designed to exclude Soviet influence from the Mediterranean. Whatever was to happen elsewhere in Europe, Churchill and Eden were determined to use Britain's large share in the Mediterranean victory to contain Soviet expansion and reinforce Britain's claims as one of the ‘trinity’ – what Smuts had seen as the post-war executive of the United Nations.

It was this grand ambition that made the Middle East so important. Historians have often been scornful of the British failure to rethink their Middle East interests at the end of the war. In fact, the course of the war had reinforced their belief in the region's exceptional value. Egypt was the base from which the British had fought their Mediterranean campaign. It was from Cairo, after all, that their war and diplomacy in the Eastern Mediterranean had been organised and directed. At the British Embassy there, in the elegant house of the British Resident Minister in the Garden City nearby, and at the Mena Palace Hotel beneath the Great Pyramid, diplomats, soldiers and politicians in transit had pondered British policy for the entire vast region from Greece to Iran. The Arab Middle East as a whole, but especially Egypt, had become a supply zone, partly filling the role that India had played in the First World War. By 1945, the British owed Egypt some £400 million for goods and services rendered.
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With its barracks and bases, repair shops and storage, Egypt was the arsenal of British military power as well as the way-station through which it was shuttled en route to the East or back ‘home’ to Europe. The practical closure of the Mediterranean to shipping for much of the war had diminished the value of the Suez Canal, but its importance in peacetime was expected to rise sharply. Finally, the strategic importance of the Middle East region had been emphasised still further by technological change. Without the Abadan oil refinery at the head of the Gulf, the British war effort across a huge swathe of Eurasia would have ground to a halt: fear of its loss was so great that a separate command had been created to guard it. Middle East oil had supplied nearly one-quarter of Western Europe's needs in 1938, a figure expected to rise sharply at the end of the war.
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No one could doubt the enormous advantage conferred by control of it. The same could be said of Egypt's importance as a hub of air transport. The gruelling air journeys undertaken in wartime by British civilians and soldiers to Moscow, Yalta, Teheran or New Delhi, or to confer with the men on the spot, invariably took them through Cairo. The need for air bases to link the scattered components of the British world-system, and for an overland ‘trunk route’ between Europe and India, had long been recognised. The colossal expansion of air power and air travel during the Second World War (and the general assumption that a new air age was dawning) only hammered it home.