The Rise and Fall of the British Empire (56 page)

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One of the new battlecruisers ordered in 1909, HMS
New Zealand,
was paid for by the New Zealand government, and Australia footed the bill for another, HMS
Australia,
which became the flagship of its new navy. These gestures represented a triumph for those British statesmen and diplomats who had for some years been attempting to persuade the dominion governments that it was in their interests to participate actively in the implementation of the new imperial grand strategy. It was assumed, at least by the British government, that measures undertaken to secure the defence of the homeland against the German navy were in the interests of all the dominions. Dominion politicians were not altogether convinced; Sir William Laurier, who was Prime Minister of Canada until 1911, believed that his country would remain inviolate from outside attack because of the Royal Navy and the Monroe Doctrine, by which the United States pledged itself to oppose any foreign intervention in any part of the Americas. It was therefore pointless for Canadians to reach into their pockets to subsidise defences they did not need.

Australia and New Zealand objected on other grounds. ‘Germany is not a danger,’ claimed Andrew Fisher, Australia’s Prime Minister, on the eve of the 1909 imperial conference on defence, ‘We have to look to the Pacific for a menace if there is any.’
14
For some time, Australians and New Zealanders had been nervously glancing northwards towards Japan. What they, and Canadians looking westwards, saw was ‘a thousand million Asiatics … looking southward with hungry eyes’.
15
This frightening image of the restless masses of the Far East fanning out across the Pacific and eventually taking over the empty spaces of Australasia had become fixed in the consciousness of Australians and New Zealanders. It had impelled them to erect barriers against Indian, Chinese and Japanese immigration and made them deeply mistrustful of Britain’s ally, Japan. It was defence of the ‘White Australia’ policy as much as defence of the empire as a whole which lay behind the 1903 and 1904 Defence Acts, which made all Australian males between eighteen and sixty liable for military service, and their successors of 1911 and 1912, which compelled all eighteen-to twenty-five-year-olds to undertake eight days of training every year. Likewise, Australia’s decision to create its own navy in 1909 (which had an annual budget of over £2 million) was taken in the light of the imagined Japanese threat. New Zealand’s introduction of compulsory military training in 1909 was similarly motivated.

Neither Australia nor New Zealand placed much trust in Britain’s alliance with Japan, which to all intents and purposes placed the protection of British Pacific interests in the hands of the Imperial Japanese Navy. It was argued that in the event of Britain becoming embroiled in a war against Germany, Japan would snatch the opportunity to advance on Australasia and possibly British Columbia, which already had a Japanese immigrant community. It was, therefore, necessary for the British government to reassure Australia and New Zealand that by committing themselves to a grand strategy based upon the defence of Britain from the German navy, they were not leaving themselves vulnerable to Japan. At the same time, Britain could not abandon its alliance with Japan without seriously weakening its fleet in home waters.

Close and willing dominion cooperation was absolutely vital for Britain’s grand strategy. If Britain found itself fighting an extended land war, it would have to rely heavily on dominion manpower since, by 1914, 20 million of the empire’s 65-million-strong white population lived in Canada, South Africa, Australia, and New Zealand. For this reason alone Asquith’s government had to calm whatever doubts the dominions entertained about their own safety and persuade them to integrate their armed forces with those of Britain. Technical, training and staff cooperation was supervised by the Imperial General Staff, set up in 1907, and in 1909 arrangements were made with the Admiralty to provide for the naval defence of the dominions. Here, Britain had to take account of Australia’s and New Zealand’s ‘yellow peril’ fantasies and provide units for a combined Pacific fleet. This was not enough, and so Sir Joseph Ward, the New Zealand Prime Minister, asked for and got private assurances of more substantial assistance ‘in days to come (which I believe will come) when the Eastern races are a trouble to Australia and my own country, and when a great Power in the East, now happily attached to England … may be detached from it.’
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The chance of such an emergency occurring was removed in 1911 when Britain renewed its alliance with Japan for a further ten years.

The 1911 conference on imperial defence witnessed the greatest breakthrough in the procuring of closer dominion participation in Britain’s grand strategy. Sir Edward Grey held centre stage. In a compelling, eloquent speech, he broke with precedent and outlined Britain’s present foreign policy and offered prognoses for the future. Britain would only involve itself in a European war if one of the powers adopted what he called a ‘Napoleonic policy’, that is establishing dominance over the entire continent by force or intimidation. In such an event, British seapower would be in jeopardy since the paramount state could confront Britain with the fleets of as many as five other countries. He concluded:

So long as the maintenance of Sea Power and the maintenance and control of the sea communications is the underlying motive of our policy in Europe, it is obvious how that is a common interest between us at home and all the Dominions.
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Grey’s audience agreed; without British seapower, the dominions would be unable to survive in their present state. It was for this reason imperative that they made common cause with Britain if the circumstances described by Grey came about.

Grey assured his listeners that Britain had no hidden understandings with any other power and the dominion representatives heard nothing whatsoever about the past five years of planning for the despatch of an expeditionary force to France. Nor would they hear anything in the future, for the dominion members on the Committee of Imperial Defence were specifically excluded from discussions of military and naval matters which did not concern the dominions.
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Even if they were in the dark about Britain’s tentative commitment to fight the Germans in northeastern France, the dominion leaders were now convinced that they would have to support Britain if and when she believed her seapower was threatened. As Grey had made clear, not to do so would imperil each dominion.

By making seapower the issue which would decide whether or not Britain entered a European conflict, Asquith’s government had brought the dominions into line. Britain could, therefore, expect to be able to tap dominion sources of manpower which would be vital if the war was prolonged. Few present at the conference could have doubted that Germany would be the power whose ‘Napoleonic’ pretensions would precipitate a war. Taking breakfast with David Lloyd George the morning after Grey’s address, Louis Botha, the Prime Minister of South Africa, announced that immediately the conflict began he would invade German South West Africa with 40,000 men.
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Australia and New Zealand had already been urged to take swift action against German colonies in the Pacific once war started, although they probably needed little encouragement.

The 1911 Imperial Conference had been called against a background of deepening Anglo-German antipathy. The German navy remained the chief source of contention, but there were wider reasons for hostility. These concerned the question of what Germany would do next and were summed up in an article which appeared in the right-wing, imperialist journal
The Nineteenth Century and After
in 1912:

Will a nation such as Germany, with the motive power supplied by a high birth-rate within it, and with every instinct of patriotism alive in its heart, forgo willingly the prospect of national aggrandisement and the hope of territorial gain?
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The enlargement of the German empire and the extension of German political influence had lain at the centre of the policy of
Weltpolitik,
but, the Kaiser and his ministers claimed, this would not involve any infraction of Britain’s official and unofficial empires. Rather, Germany demanded what it considered to be an equitable distribution of the spoils from those empires that seemed to be on the verge of dissolution: the Chinese, Turkish and Portuguese.

Britain was prepared to lend a cautiously sympathetic ear to German requests for alterations to the international
status quo,
although ministers and diplomats who were over-accommodating towards Germany ran the risk of public opprobrium. Nevertheless, a secret accord had been reached on the Portuguese colonies by 1913 and, after much wrangling, an agreement was made over the Berlin-Constantinople-Baghdad railway in 1914. Britain had originally been a partner in this enterprise, which was principally designed to open up the resources of the Tigris and Euphrates valleys, but withdrew in 1903 on the grounds that its share of the investment was too small. The line, later described by Curzon as a ‘dagger thrust towards India’, scared the government in Delhi. Its nerves were not soothed by an odd, off-the-cuff remark of the Kaiser’s, made in 1907, that ‘we should most assuredly want our armed men on a certain frontier not a very long way from India’.
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Such outbursts, a peculiar mixture of threat, braggadocio and silliness, came frequently from Wilhelm II’s lips and did much to increase international tension during this time.

Precautionary measures were quickly taken. In 1906 the Committee for Imperial Defence had plans prepared for the occupation of Basra, which included a proposal to populate southern Mesopotamia (Iraq) with Indian immigrants.
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A year later, the client sheik of Kuwait agreed to lease his foreshore to Britain, which ruled out its use as the Persian Gulf terminus of the Baghdad railway. The India and Foreign Offices also covertly cultivated the goodwill of Abd al Aziz Ibn Saud, the ruler of Najd, who, in the process of extending his patrimony, occupied the coast between Kuwait and Qatar in 1907. Conscious of the need to maintain the Persian Gulf as a British lake, and also aware of the impropriety of openly backing a rebel against the Turkish sultan, the Foreign Office simultaneously refused to recognise Ibn Saud’s independence and warned Turkey not to undertake operations against him.
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Empire-building Arabian sheiks were the least of the Turkish government’s worries. The ‘Young Turk’ revolution of 1908 had begun a period of acute turmoil throughout the Ottoman dominions. Intensely nationalist, the Young Turks supported a far-reaching programme of modernisation throughout the Ottoman empire, which, when completed, would make Turkey the Japan of the Near East. The European powers wanted it to be the China, and interpreted the change of government as marking the opening phase of Turkey’s disintegration. Outlying Turkish provinces in south-eastern Europe were successively snatched by Austria-Hungary and the petty Balkan kingdoms. Italy, the Johnny-come-lately of imperial powers, invaded Libya in 1911.

These assaults on Turkish integrity, together with the quickening tempo of European, particularly French and German, commercial penetration of the Ottoman empire (the German ambassador in Constantinople had talked ominously of Turkey as ‘Germany’s Canada’) encouraged local nationalism. Soon after the 1908 revolution, a Turkish newspaper had likened the great powers to ‘scorpions, snakes and hyaenas preying upon the land, so lost to all decency that they had been prepared in their lust to export even the droppings of dogs’. The release of some, but not all of the old régime’s restraints on freedom of discussion stimulated political activity. Turks, Arabs and Kurds began to discover a sense of national identity.

Britain was not directly affected by these developments. The centre of British influence in the Middle East had shifted from Constantinople to Cairo. The security of British interests now depended on the Mediterranean fleet, the garrison in Egypt and the goodwill of France and Russia, rather than the friendship of the Sultan. British policy towards Turkey was constrained by the need to consider the special interests of her new partners. France was seeking a sphere of influence, possibly more in Syria, and Russia desperately needed a permanent guarantee of free passage through the Straits for the ships which carried her growing export trade, particularly in grain. There were also the peculiar requirements of the Indian government, which, in the event of a Turkish collapse, would want to safeguard its trade in the Persian Gulf and Mesopotamia, which was already being considered as a possible Indian colony.

Surrounded by rapacious powers and suffering an erosion of its territory, Turkey was anxious to obtain an arrangement which would protect it from further encroachments. When the reforming Committee of Union and Progress came to power in 1913, it approached Britain and then Russia and France for an alliance. Neither power would oblige; Britain could not compromise its relations with France and Russia, and the latter two had their sights set on more substantial gains at Turkey’s expense. The crisis in July 1914 and the possibility that France, Russia and Great Britain would fight Germany drove a far from willing Turkish government into German arms. Only a German victory could save Turkey from partition by the
entente
powers. Ottoman enmity was reinforced by the peremptory seizure in August 1914 of two Turkish battleships then under construction in British yards, one having been funded by a public subscription.

There had been no ‘scramble’ for Turkey before 1914. Britain and Germany had been able to reach an accommodation over financial and political spheres of influence, although at that time there was no way of knowing whether the Germans would seek new arrangements once the Berlin-Constantinople-Baghdad railway had been completed. Germany was not yet satiated, nor had
Weltpolitik
run its course, as the German ambassador in London told Colonel John Seely, the Under-Secretary of State for War. ‘Our people do not like your
status quo,’
argued the ambassador. ‘It means that for all time you will have command of the whole of the sea and all the best places in the land. Our people cannot accept your
status quo.
’ Nor could the British accept what was implicit in this statement and the more flamboyant outbursts periodically made by the Kaiser to the effect that at some time in the future Germany would demand radical changes in the world order. It was believed by a wide range of ministers (including Grey), diplomats, senior civil servants and commanders and journalists that these alterations would lead to a dilution of Britain’s power.