The Empire Project: The Rise and Fall of the British World-System, 1830–1970 (98 page)

In their approach to the management of British world power and what remained of Britain's world-system, Churchill and his colleagues displayed what might be called a limited pragmatism. The senior ministers – Churchill himself, Anthony Eden (the new Foreign Secretary), Lord Salisbury, Lord Swinton (who became Secretary of State for Commonwealth Relations in 1952), Oliver Lyttelton (Colonial Secretary) – had direct experience of the crushing burden of war on British prestige and resources. They knew at first hand how the astonishing scale of American wealth had tipped the balance of power in Anglo-American relations. Lyttelton had been Minister of Production in the second half of the war; as Minister of Civil Aviation, Swinton had struggled to defend Britain's imperial air routes against American demands for the ‘open skies’. Coming to power amid the third great crisis of the British economy in six years of peace, they had good reason to think that Britain's commitments must be brought more into balance with its available strength. They were also bombarded with their officials’ advice: a litany of warnings about the ever-growing constraints of economic weakness, ‘Asiatic’ nationalism, and the demands of Cold War. Churchill himself played an ambivalent role. His impulsiveness and unpredictability alternately enraged and intimidated his cabinet colleagues and drove Eden, his ‘crown prince’, to ineffectual despair. ‘The fact is’, said Lord Salisbury, ‘the PM is much tougher than Anthony.’
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Churchill's instincts were to conserve British energy (by ending the Cold War) but also maintain British imperial claims by outright force if need be (his view about Egypt). The question of when he would go (or die) hung over his government like a fog. His extraordinary position and the intrigues of the Churchillian ‘court’ made the task of decision in any area that attracted his interest one of exceptional difficulty.

It would be a mistake to suppose that Churchill's ‘die hardism’ frustrated every new policy, and wrong to assume that Churchillian reaction was the primary obstacle to more radical thinking about Britain's place in the world. His colleagues believed that better management was the key to reducing the strain on a hard-pressed economy. They did not draw too dramatic a conclusion from the crisis conditions in which they had come into office. They still thought in terms of a British world-system, necessarily modified in methods and scope, but still recognisably global in reach. Behind this ‘conservative’ outlook lay three connected assumptions. First, in common with most ‘informed’ opinion across the whole Western world, they still drew a distinction between the political capacities of whites and non-whites. The independence of India, Burma and Ceylon (Sri Lanka), the resurgence of China under Kuomintang and then Communist rule, and the popular appeal of Arab nationalist movements wrung a grudging acceptance that ‘Asiatic nationalism’ was a force to be reckoned with. They accepted that confrontation with it was counter-productive and futile. But they were instinctively sceptical about how far such nationalism (or its communist variant) could build a modern nation-state. They thought that the challenge facing Asia's nationalist leaders was how to shrug off obsolete anti-colonial attitudes and acknowledge their dependence upon Western know-how and cash as the means to transform their backward economies. The danger they feared was that by bad luck or bad judgment the West might alienate the new Asian states, delay their transition to ‘moderation’ and ‘realism’, or even drive them like China into the communist bloc. British imperial power, on this view of the world, still had a large role to play in the transformation of Asia – in the Middle East and Southeast Asia especially. In Africa, where nationalism lagged far behind Asia in its mobilising potential, that role seemed likely to loom a lot larger. Here, the nationalist leaders (or so it was hoped) could be kept at a safe distance from the virus of Marxism, and coached in the arts of modern state management before being allowed to drive on their own. In its African version, the empire of influence would last a lot longer and compromise a lot less.

Their second assumption also seemed to be vindicated by the course of events since the end of the war. It was that the world would remain divided between great rival blocs and between international groupings that were actually empires or closely resembled them. Survival outside them would be short-lived and risky. The successor-states of empire in the Middle East and Asia would be targets of subversion, and would be forced to choose between rival great power protectors sooner or later. It was in this context that British leaders found Indian criticism of their colonial policies particularly irritating, although it seemed to be driven in part by New Delhi's special concern for the rights of Indian communities in African and other colonial territories.
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Nehru's public support for the Mau Mau rebellion in Kenya brought a strong private protest. It was only gradually that the defects of this geopolitical outlook began to be seen. In 1955, at the Bandung ‘Asian-African’ conference (to which colonial leaders were invited), Nehru and Sukarno, the Indonesian prime minister, urged ‘non-alignment’ for Afro-Asian states, rejecting association with either the West or the Soviet bloc, and calling for the swift end of colonial rule.
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By the mid-1950s, the United Nations was becoming the forum where post-colonial states could make common cause, and mount a propaganda offensive against the remaining colonial powers. This trend was dramatically strengthened by the Suez crisis in 1956 after which Britain became for many ex-colonial states ‘Public Enemy Number One’.
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Their third assumption was also subject to rapid erosion as the decade proceeded. But, in 1951–2, it was still possible for senior ministers to take satisfaction in the moral reputation of British colonial rule and of British foreign policy generally. This strengthened their resistance to calls for a more rapid contraction of Britain's imperial role and deepened their confidence that ex-colonial states would want a special relationship with their former imperial master. Indeed, Britain's adherence to a broadly liberal ideology, newly infused with post-war social democracy, seemed likely to make it a more ‘attractive’ great power in certain respects than the United States, the seat of red-blooded capitalism and race segregation. British policy-makers liked to contrast their tactful handling of the new Asian states (especially India) with what they saw as Washington's ham-handed treatment of post-colonial sensitivities. Where hubris led, nemesis followed.

There was, even so, a considerable sense of urgency in the crisis conditions of 1951. There was little disagreement in principle that Britain must cut its overseas costs, and find a new equilibrium in those countries and regions where its power and influence had come under challenge. Economic and technological change had transformed the conditions in which British world power had been made. ‘I believe’, the new Colonial Secretary told his Cabinet colleagues on his return from Malaya,

that the ever-improving communications of our century – Singapore will soon be less than twenty-four hours by Comet from London – the rapidity with which news and propaganda can now be spread, and above all the increasing education and literacy of all people make it impossible to hold any other policy than the creation of new Dominions, self-governing but part of the Commonwealth owing allegiance to the Crown…Fifty million islanders shorn of so much of their economic power can no longer by themselves expect to hold dominion over palm and pine on the nineteenth century model of power and paternalism which made us the greatest nation in the world. We may regain our pinnacle of fame and power by the pursuit of this new policy.
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In much the same spirit, he pressed ahead with the rapid development of self-government in the Gold Coast (modern Ghana) under way since 1948, and persuaded the Cabinet in February 1952 that Nkrumah, the ‘leader of government business’ in its legislative assembly, should be allowed the title of ‘prime minister’.
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To his ministerial colleagues, Lyttelton sometimes struck a pose of reluctant consent to the
force majeure
of events. But, in both the Gold Coast and Nigeria, he endorsed expectations of a steady advance to independence. ‘It has been the expressed intention of successive…governments’, he declared in September 1953,

to help the Colonies to attain self-government within the Commonwealth. The timing and method of attaining this objective must vary from one territory to another; but the Gold Coast, with no racial problem, considerable natural wealth and a popular African Government…is offering …enough evidence of ability to manage its own affairs to deprive [us] of any justification for refusing this request.
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What mattered was to devise a political system robust enough to survive the strains of independence and to manoeuvre the local politicians into accepting it. This approach was even more obvious in the case of Nigeria where the 1951 constitution, designed to promote the gradual emergence of a unified state out of the political fragments of the inter-war regime of indirect rule, broke down almost immediately. There was no question of falling back on coercion. Here, too, Lyttelton licensed a major concession. The three regional governments – North, East and West – were to get self-government by 1956, with the implicit suggestion that independence for a federal Nigeria would follow soon after.
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The main concern in British policy was to prevent the Muslim North, where popular nationalism was far less in evidence than it was in the South, from going its own way. As in the Gold Coast (and in Malaya), Lyttelton's aim was the creation of ‘new Dominions’, independent and sovereign, but bound in reality to follow the lead of the ‘Mother-Country’.

Of course, there were plenty of colonies where promoting self-government raised many more difficulties. In East Africa, British policy-makers were attracted to the idea of federating Kenya, Tanganyika (a United Nations trust territory) and Uganda, partly because they thought that a federation would hasten economic development, partly because they hoped it would diffuse settler anxieties in Kenya (where settler opinion was vocal and organised) and Tanganyika. They certainly expected that political progress in East Africa would be much more leisurely than it was in the West African colonies, and the outbreak of Kenya's Mau Mau rebellion in 1952 seemed to confirm this. Yet, even in Kenya, which, said its governor, ‘is and will remain an exceptionally explosive country’,
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Lyttelton supported the move towards greater local self-rule and the sharing of power between settlers and Asians, to be extended in time to Africans as well. It was the only way, the governor argued, to break down the ‘opposition mentality’ from which the whites seemed to suffer and make government work better. In the British Caribbean, London had long favoured federation as the only practicable framework through which a group of small and impoverished territories could achieve greater self-rule and increased prosperity. In the early 1950s, it was anxious to ‘manage’ the constitutional progress of the larger islands like Jamaica, Trinidad and Barbados in ways that would not foreclose the larger objective of a West Indies Federation – a difficult and ultimately futile endeavour. In Malaya, where the worst of the communist insurrection was over by 1953, British policy was similarly dominated by two interlocking objectives. In Malaya itself, they were eager to encourage the formation of multiracial parties and break down the communal antagonism of Malays and Chinese. The promise of staged self-government was the carrot they offered. But they were also determined that Malaya should be part of a larger federal dominion embracing Singapore and the Borneo territories (Sarawak and British North Borneo), as a durable vehicle for British influence and interests in the post-colonial era.
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The larger issue was how that influence could be maintained in ex-colonial territories. Lyttelton had talked of retaining their allegiance to the Crown. The notion that Commonwealth membership would act as the key source of solidarity between Britain and the post-colonial states had already been aired during the Labour government. But, after 1951, it assumed much greater importance as the prospect of self-government in West Africa, the Caribbean and Southeast Asia loomed larger. In the Churchill government there was more than a little unease about the effects of ‘admitting’ new African and Asian members into what was still mainly a white dominions’ club, in which India, Pakistan and Ceylon still formed a minority. Lord Swinton especially worried that the intimacy between Britain and the ‘old dominions’, already under pressure from the new Asian members, would fray to breaking point once the Commonwealth became an association mainly composed of Afro-Asian ex-colonies.
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Yet it was really on the support of the ‘old’ members that Britain would have to rely in the event (still not improbable) of a third world war. One solution proposed was to create two grades of members: in effect an ‘old’ and a ‘new’ Commonwealth. The arguments rattled through Whitehall in 1953 and 1954. The clinching objection was that a two-tier Commonwealth would fail to achieve the primary purpose of the whole Commonwealth system. It would anger and alienate the ex-colonial territories where pro-British feeling was weakest, and where the prestige of ‘full’ Commonwealth membership was the most promising way of maintaining the British connection. To this, Swinton bowed.
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In reality, of course, a pragmatic distinction was made between those Commonwealth countries with whom Britain worked closely in defence and intelligence, and those outside the magic circle of old friends. Meanwhile, the Commonwealth idea became more and more central to British hopes of upholding their status as the third
world
power, comparable to – if certainly weaker than – the two superpowers, but clearly different in stature from any other great power. ‘Were the United Kingdom to stand by herself’, remarked a departmental memorandum in June 1956, ‘her importance would still be great, but immensely less than it is while she remains the centre of the Commonwealth’.
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Britain's ‘authority and influence will continue, in an increasing degree as its rivals grow in strength and power, to derive from its headship of, or association with, the world-wide group of States that compose the Commonwealth’.
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