The Empire Project: The Rise and Fall of the British World-System, 1830–1970 (95 page)

1949 was a year of political change in both Australia and New Zealand. The new New Zealand prime minister, Sidney Holland, was an ardent imperial patriot. ‘I love the British Empire with all my heart’, had been his response to the great sterling crisis of August 1947.
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The Australian election restored Robert Menzies to power after a gap of eight years. Menzies, like Holland, was a vocal exponent of the British connection and (in his case) of a British Australia. As a wealthy lawyer from Melbourne (Australia's financial capital with close ties to the City), he was deeply attached to the strength and stability of British institutions (‘the quietness, the tolerance, the sense of values, the ordered justice, the security of England’).
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But Menzies was far from being Downing Street's doormat. There was too little awareness of empire in Britain, he thought on a visit in 1948.
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Yet Menzies saw Australia's future as more reliant than ever on its closeness to Britain. The Australian economy would be a ‘food arsenal’ for Europe: its growth was tied up with Britain's recovery and the survival of sterling.
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He was also keenly aware of Australia's deep isolation and clutched at the hope that it could be a member of NATO. He seized the great chance given by London's nuclear ambitions to offer Australia as Britain's partner and test-ground.
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He was not in a hurry to promise Australian troops to the Middle East theatre. But, after the outbreak of war in Korea in June 1950 (which intensified fears of an imminent world war), he reversed Chifley's stance and (some eighteen months later) committed Australia to a Middle East role.
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The timing was not accidental. By that time, the Australia–New Zealand–United States security pact (ANZUS) was settled, the ‘Near North’ was now guarded by American sea-power and the British were committed to the defence of Malaya. With the back door now bolted, Menzies was ready to do his imperial duty.
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Economic and strategic self-interest fused with their sense of a British identity to make the Southern dominions the most reliable partners in the fourth British empire. With the senior dominion (the term itself was slipping out of use), Britain's post-war relations were somewhat more complex. There were plenty of voices still raised to assert that Canada was, in Brooke Claxton's phrase, ‘a British nation in North America’, or to argue, like George Grant, that ‘if we have no link with the British Commonwealth we shall soon cease to be a nation.’
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‘Newfoundland’ (whose adhesion to Canada was then under discussion) ‘is ultra-loyal to the British Crown’, remarked an Ontario newspaper. ‘We can stand some of that too.’
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Canada's Britishness was regarded by most English Canadians as an uncontroversial fact.
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Mackenzie King, then the outgoing prime minister, warned his successor, St Laurent, that the Conservative opposition would exploit ‘British’ sentiment to press for a stronger commitment to imperial defence – a call bound to inflame French Canadian feeling and threaten the cohesion of the Liberal party. ‘You will probably have to fight all Sir Wilfrid's [Laurier's] battles over again.’
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Yet King himself was deeply uneasy about showing too much preference for Canada's ties with America over those with Britain.

The Canadian problem lay in striking the balance. It was perfectly clear, a senior military officer had remarked in August 1945, that Canada was ‘not going to participate in a war…over the frontiers of Iraq or to preserve the Indian Ocean as a British lake’. But, as two great wars had shown, ‘the Canadian people have, on the occasion of a great emergency arising, quickly realised that the security of the United Kingdom is a vital interest’.
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Mackenzie King's instinct (a habitual reflex) was to avoid any forward commitment, but a greater theoretical risk was that Canada's integration into America's continental defence system would constrain its ability to lend Britain its aid. NATO averted this danger. From the Canadian angle, the North Atlantic Treaty signed in April 1949 was the perfect solution: Canada would contribute to North Atlantic defence alongside its two great partners: pragmatism, sentiment and self-interest were reconciled. But, in commercial relations, such compromise was elusive. This was not for want of Canadian efforts. The British market was hugely important to Canada, taking 40 per cent of Canadian exports before the war.
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The sterling they earned helped to offset Canada's large deficit with the United States. During the war, Britain's shortage of dollars had been met by allowing American aid to be spent in Canada. After the war, Canadian eagerness to restore the old pattern had been part of the motive for the large dollar loan they advanced to Britain. But nothing went right. The Canadians had banked on a swift British revival. The convertibility crisis was a shattering blow. As Britain's dollar purchases were cut to the bone, Canada's balance of payments also lurched into crisis. Marshall Aid dollars eased things for a while, and allowed London to pay for Canadian wheat. But the second sterling crisis in 1949 marked a parting of ways. The British tried to persuade the Canadians to accept inconvertible sterling, and to help British exports by restricting their purchase of American goods. To the Canadians it seemed like a transparent manoeuvre, to suck them willy-nilly into the sterling area
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and give a great boost to its dollar reserve. It was also bound to infuriate Washington.
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Ottawa drew back. But its export dilemma was not fully resolved until the Korean war boom widened the American market for Canadian manufactures and foodstuffs. By the early 1950s, 54 per cent of Canadian exports (40 per cent in 1937) were sent there, and 17 per cent to Britain. A mere 9 per cent of Canadian imports (half the pre-war percentage) were now drawn from Britain. Canada's economic and strategic integration into the imperial system of its great southern neighbour looked almost irreversible.

With the fourth dominion, relations had never been easy and seemed likely to worsen. In South African politics, the dominant fact was that Afrikaners formed a majority of the white population who alone (except for a handful of ‘coloured’ or mixed-race voters) had the franchise. The extent of republican or nationalist feeling among the Afrikaner electorate was thus a critical issue and a vociferous minority of Afrikaner politicians had long demanded a republic and secession from the Empire (one was assumed to lead to the other). Yet South Africa had entered the Second World War freely and its soldiers and airmen – including many Afrikaners – fought beside British and other Empire troops. This seemed to suggest that for a significant fraction of Afrikaner opinion the republican path was divisive and dangerous, alienating the ‘English’ minority and isolating South Africa. General Smuts was regarded – in Britain especially – as the indispensable leader. His global prestige, local charisma and political skill (‘Slim Jannie’ was a nickname with somewhat mixed connotations) made him the ideal (Afrikaner) champion of Anglo-Afrikaner amity and South Africa's Commonwealth membership. It was his intervention that had tipped the balance in the vote to enter the war. As the wartime prime minister, he had faced down the furious outcry of the anti-war faction and the paramilitary violence of the Ossewa Brandwag (the name was meant to invoke the Voortrekker tradition), while the Allied victory in Africa had helped his supporters to electoral victory in 1943. After the war, despite the strains of economic transition, and the fiasco of Smuts’ attempt to get United Nations approval to incorporate South West Africa (still a League mandate) into the Union, defeat by the Nationalists seemed highly unlikely so long as Smuts was leader of the United party.
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But, at the general election in 1948, Smuts was defeated – despite winning a majority of the popular vote – and the Nationalists came to power under D. F. Malan.

This was bound to set the alarm bells ringing in London. On any view of Britain's post-war system, South Africa was a large and important component. In the Second World War, as a semi-industrial economy, a supplier of gold, and a great naval and air base in the South Atlantic and Indian Ocean, its cooperation had been vital to the imperial war effort. In a future war against the Soviet Union, it was expected to become perhaps even more valuable. Declaring a republic and leaving the Commonwealth would create a huge crisis in Anglo-South African relations at a critical moment. There was already the danger that a Nationalist government would demand the return of the Simonstown base and renew the old pressure for the ‘High Commission Territories’ (Basutoland, Bechuanaland and Swaziland – today's Lesotho, Botswana and Swaziland) to be incorporated as part of the Union. Nor was it likely that a government so explicitly committed to
baaskap
(white supremacy) and
apartheid
(racial separation) would fit very willingly into a Commonwealth group that had just been enlarged by three Asian dominions. But, as it turned out, Malan was pragmatic and his hand was weak. The capital flight that greeted his victory threatened economic disaster. Malan was forced to place his dollar income in the sterling area pool in return for access to the London capital market – a major concession that Smuts had escaped, with considerable benefit to the white standard of living.
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The referendum on a republic was put off
sine die
. And, since fear of communism was even more of a bogey in the National than in the United party, a retreat into the
laager
away from European complications (that had had great appeal in the inter-war years) now looked less wise.

Malan's dilemma was neatly exposed in the wider debate set off over the Commonwealth's future in 1948–9. It was triggered by the question of India's status. Nehru and the Congress had accepted ‘dominion status’ in 1947 as an expedient to quicken the transfer of power
before
a new Indian constitution was framed. It soon became obvious that the new constitution would take a republican form. Within the Congress there were also those who disliked any formal connection, whether material or symbolic, with the imperial past and who were deeply suspicious that the British intended to drag India back into their imperialist toils. A Congress party resolution in December 1948 proclaimed its commitment to the ‘ending of Imperialism and Colonialism’ and declared that Indian foreign policy should ‘avoid entanglement in military or similar alliances which tend to divide up the world in rival groups’. India's ‘complete independence’ meant that ‘her present association with the United Kingdom and the Commonwealth of Nations will necessarily have to change’.
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The difficulty lay in the strong supposition that allegiance to the Crown was the essential element in Commonwealth membership: a dominion that rejected the king as its head of state automatically left the Commonwealth. In 1948, this had led to the departure of both Burma and Eire (the former Irish Free State). ‘There can be no doubt’, reported a British official committee, ‘that the king has been the symbol and expression of that community of feeling which has been the mainspring of cooperation particularly at times of crisis…Some South African politicians…recommend the severance of allegiance to the Crown on the very ground that some South Africans are influenced…by the emotional pull of the Commonwealth connection and that South Africa's decision to declare war in 1939 would not have been taken but for this sense of “obligation”.’
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The dilemma was whether to loosen the monarchical bond, risk the erosion of the Crown's ‘emotional pull’ and weaken the solidarity of the Commonwealth's ‘central countries’ (defined as Britain, Canada, Australia and New Zealand)
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or to maintain the old ‘rule’ and exclude a republican India.

It was India's geostrategic importance that weighed most with London. If India's request for a new kind of membership was rejected, what would the consequences be? In the climate of 1948–9, it was hard to be insouciant. For all their eagerness to win American backing, Attlee and Bevin saw themselves at that moment as the heroic builders of a grand coalition against the Soviet threat, now being extended – with the advance of Mao's armies in China – into Asia as well. Western European Union and Commonwealth backing were its vital components. Whether India contributed to ‘Commonwealth defence’ or not, ‘her exclusion from the Commonwealth against her own wishes would encourage her to concentrate her attention on the creation of an Asiatic bloc, isolated from and possibly hostile to the Western Powers.’
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If India left, it might be followed by Pakistan and Ceylon (Sri Lanka), and by Britain's other Asian colonies as they became independent. It was ‘a matter of major importance’, the Cabinet were told, ‘that the leading power in South East Asia should remain a member of the Commonwealth’.
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In the Chiefs of Staff’s view, keeping India in offered the best chance for the common defence of South Asia, and for Britain's getting access in wartime to India's manpower and industry. But a formula acceptable to the ‘old dominions’ was not easy to find. New Zealand did not want a ‘flabby Commonwealth with no guiding principle’: it might be better if India stayed out.
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Even at this late stage, Attlee himself tried rather desperately to dissuade Nehru. ‘Does a republic really appeal to the masses in India?…[R]epublicanism is an alien import from Europe’, he urged.
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But, in the end, all the dominion governments accepted that keeping India in was of vital importance, and in this ‘can-do’ atmosphere a compromise formula was hammered out at the Commonwealth prime ministers meeting in April 1949. India accepted the king ‘as the symbol of free association’ of the Commonwealth's independent member nations and ‘as such the Head of the Commonwealth’. The remaining dominions declared their position unchanged. The real surprise of the meeting was what Malan had to say. Malan had been worried by the phrase ‘head of the Commonwealth’, fearing its ‘super-state’ overtones – an old phobia in South Africa and of the Liberals in Canada. But he affirmed South African loyalty to the Commonwealth. ‘South Africa cannot stand isolated, but must have friends and must find them generally among the like-minded nations…but more especially…in the inner circle of the free and independent nations of the Commonwealth.’
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It was a remarkable u-turn, and opinion in South Africa was divided on Malan's real intentions. But Baring (the British representative there) was convinced that Malan actually meant what he said.
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