The Empire Project: The Rise and Fall of the British World-System, 1830–1970 (63 page)

But in Europe such an Anglo-American partnership proved impossible. On the British side, even those keenest on Atlantic amity would not give up the claim to naval superiority and its vital instrument, the right of blockade.
³
The ‘freedom of the seas’ – on which Woodrow Wilson insisted – remained a bone of contention. For Wilson, naval parity with Britain was the only basis on which the United States could enter the new world order envisaged in the League of Nations Covenant.
⁴
But, before the naval issue could be resolved, as it was in part at the Washington conference in 1921–2, American membership of the League of Nations was bluntly rejected by the United States Senate. This reaction against further involvement in the rancorous quarrels of the Old World had a second vital consequence. It aborted the three-way security pact through which Britain and the United States were together to guarantee France against unprovoked attack by Germany. When ratification failed in Washington, the Anglo-French pact lapsed as well.
⁵

From July 1919, therefore, the British were thrown back on less attractive solutions to the most pressing of their strategic concerns. They could not wash their hands of Europe for fear that the dangers that had forced their intervention in 1914 would quickly recur, and because a European settlement was economically vital. They might have been tempted to hark back to ‘Edwardian’ solutions: to rebuild a European ‘balance of power’ so that no state could dominate the continent against them. But the balance of power was now discredited by its failure in 1914, and by public suspicion of the ‘old diplomacy’ of alliance treaties and secret clauses. Instead, London was pledged to collective security and the League of Nations. In principle, this shared the burden of keeping the peace and enforcing the treaty system of post-war Europe among the great continental states. In practice, the Bolshevik revolution in Russia and the fragmentation of Eastern Europe threw the task of containing Germany and policing the treaties back upon Britain and France. Worse still, the communist ‘contagion’ from Russia threatened to spread through a Europe that was economically devastated and socially disoriented. What was needed was a Concert of Liberal Europe, to preside over the new era of national self-determination, to promote material recovery and to repel the Bolshevik menace. That meant the reconciliation and cooperation of Britain, France and Germany.

This was the object, often muddled and obscure, of Lloyd George's coalition government and those of his successors after his fall in October 1922. What made it Herculean, or worse, were the interlocking differences blocking a European settlement along the lines laid down in the peace treaties of 1919. Thus the peace treaties looked forward to the creation of new nation states in Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary and the ‘South Slav state’ (later Yugoslavia), and the ethnic ‘rectification’ of other pre-war boundaries. Such an ambitious programme depended heavily upon the cooperation of Germany. At the same time, the treaties prescribed reparations payments through which Germany would compensate France and Belgium (mainly) for the damage of the war. But, neither reparations on the scale demanded, nor the peaceful reconstruction of Central and Eastern Europe, were possible without a wider programme of economic recovery, and the provision of new capital to help rebuild Europe's war-shattered finances. Here was a further maddening complication. New capital meant American money. Fresh American loans were unlikely without agreement on repaying the wartime advances made mainly to Britain. The British were unwilling to promise payment unless the huge loans they had made to their European allies were part of the financial settlement. (Indeed, loud voices in Britain, including Keynes and a former Chancellor of the Exchequer, urged mutual cancellation of all war debts.) But, of their wartime allies, one (Russia) was a bankrupt outlaw; and the other (France) insisted upon large German reparations as the condition of any reckoning. And so the problem came full circle.

By the end of 1922, after three years of tortured diplomacy, periodic confrontation and a full-scale war between Poland and Russia, Europe's post-war instability approached a crisis. Anglo-French relations were embittered by growing differences over their approach to Germany (whose economic recovery was more urgent in British eyes than the enforcement of reparations) and by rivalry in the Near East. German resistance to French demands and resentment against the territorial losses imposed by the treaties were fanned by internal discontent and economic hardship. In January 1923, the Conservative government led by Bonar Law, who had emerged from retirement to break up the Lloyd George coalition, watched impotently as France occupied the Ruhr to extract German reparations. It faced the demand from the United States for repayment of its war loans on terms that Bonar Law rejected as intolerable. It fretted about the military consequences as the Foreign Secretary, Lord Curzon, struggled (at the Lausanne conference) to defend the draconian terms imposed on Turkey in the treaty of Sèvres (1920) against an insurgent regime led by Kemal Ataturk, the treachery (as Curzon saw it) of the French and the hostility of the Russians, posing now as Turkey's friend against the British ogre. ‘I have realised from the first’, Bonar Law had told Curzon in December 1922, ‘the utmost importance of trying to get the Lausanne business settled before we came to grips with Poincaré over reparations.’
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But, as the Turkish conference turned sour, and the German crisis deepened, he began to press the case for withdrawal from Britain's mandate in Iraq for whose northern third (the old
vilayet
of Mosul) the Turks were expected to wage an armed struggle.
⁷
The travails of the imperial centre were leaving their mark on imperial defence. The need for drastic economies at home (partly to meet the American bill), and the receding prospect of European peace and reconstruction seemed to be turning Britain's main strategic prize in the Middle East into an untenable liability.

1923 was a crisis year. But matters gradually improved. The nightmare of a Turkish, French and Russian combination against Britain in the Near and Middle East soon passed. In the treaty that was signed in July 1923, the Turks accepted the loss of their Arab provinces, and the demilitarisation of the Straits but regained full sovereignty in Anatolia and part of Thrace. Mosul was deferred for arbitration. Bonar Law's Cabinet colleagues insisted upon accepting the American terms over his bitter opposition and even his threat to resign (Bonar Law went so far as to write to
The Times
under the soubriquet of ‘Colonial’ to denounce his colleagues’ views).
⁸
In doing so, they paved the way for American credits to flow to Europe as the severity of the crisis, highlighted by the Ruhr occupation, sounded the alarm across the Atlantic. With the Dawes Plan (1924), it at last seemed possible to cut the Gordian knot of debts and reparations, and begin to normalise the economic relations of the European states. In a more hopeful atmosphere, the idea of a Liberal Concert revived.

For the British, the question was how large a continental commitment they would have to make to ward off the danger of a new European conflagration. Relations with France would not improve, argued Austen Chamberlain (Foreign Secretary 1924–9), unless Britain guaranteed her safety against Germany. Nor would the Germans ‘settle down’ so long as they hoped to divide the wartime allies. Sooner or later, a ‘new catastrophe’ would occur, into which Britain would be dragged. ‘We cannot afford to see France crushed, to have Germany, or an eventual Russo-German combination, supreme on the continent, or to allow any great military power to dominate the Low Countries.’
⁹
There were imperial arguments as well. If Britain was at loggerheads with France, said Maurice Hankey, who, as secretary to both the Cabinet and its Committee of Imperial Defence, exerted a powerful influence on ministerial thinking, ‘our imperial communications [through the Channel and the Mediterranean] would be jeopardised’ and London in ‘extreme danger’ from France's powerful fleet of bombers. It was an ‘almost essential Imperial interest’ to be on good terms with France – which meant a pact or guarantee.
¹⁰
Imperial defence, noted a Foreign Office memorandum, was ‘closely related to a policy of European security’. The government should say publicly that the defence of the Empire entailed a guarantee of France and Belgium.
¹¹
But the arguments against were formidable. Opinion at home was dead against a French pact. It would be denounced by both Liberals and Labour. It would shackle Britain to the Franco-Polish alliance and to the murky state-system of Eastern Europe. It would be anathema to the dominions and disliked in India. It would mean an intolerable strain on a post-war army barely sufficient for its imperial role.
¹²
In the event, Chamberlain achieved a triumph of limited liability. In the Locarno Pacts of October 1925, he avoided an outright guarantee of French security. Instead, France and Germany exchanged pledges to uphold their post-war borders, with Britain and Italy as joint guarantors of their mutual promises. The significance of this implausible formula was largely symbolic. It marked Germany's acceptance of the new European order (in the West), signalled by her joining the League of Nations, not a new continental commitment for Britain. By the same token, it revealed how dependent Britain's
imperial
position had become upon a Liberal Concert in Europe – as a substitute for military power or a continental balance. The fragility of that concert was soon to be seen.

European security was a precondition of imperial safety; but it was not the only one. In his Locarno conversations, Chamberlain bluntly told the French and German leaders that, whatever happened, Britain could never be a party to economic sanctions that brought her into conflict with the United States. ‘It is a fundamental condition of British policy’, he insisted, ‘I might almost say a condition of the continued existence of the British Empire, that we should not be involved in a quarrel with the United States.’
¹³
It was true, of course, that America had drawn back from the role that Woodrow Wilson had imagined for her in the post-war world, a role that promised friction with Britain as well as partnership. To Isaiah Bowman, one of Wilson's closest advisers in Paris, the failure came to seem inevitable. America's multi-ethnic politics, democratic government and commercial self-sufficiency made a definite foreign policy impossible. ‘Whatever degree of participation we may finally come to have in world affairs’, he wrote, ‘it will be conditional in many respects and limited in all.’
¹⁴
But this did not make the US a negligible factor, least of all for the British. They treated American oil companies and their Middle East claims with wary respect. They needed the cooperation of American bankers for the financial reconstruction of Europe. They were conscious that Wilsonian ideals held a powerful attraction for British opinion in the centre and on the left: a fact of some weight in the fluid politics of the 1920s. Above all, they were anxious not to goad American leaders into an arms race at sea.

Britain had ended the war with a colossal navy: 70 battleships and battle-cruisers, 120 cruisers, 463 destroyers and 147 submarines. Once the German fleet was confiscated or scuttled, the American navy, with some 40 battleships, 35 cruisers and 131 destroyers, was the second most powerful. But these flattering figures were not the whole story. The British fleet was far too large to be maintained in peacetime: the naval budget crashed from £334 million in 1918–19 to £54 million in 1923–4. Secondly, many of its most powerful units would soon need replacing by more modern versions. Thirdly, it faced a post-war strategic revolution as far-reaching as that of 1912. For now, its main rivals were the American and Japanese navies: two potential enemies at opposite ends of the globe. The strategy of concentration used to bottle up Germany was obsolete. Worse still, American hostility to a continental blockade – Britain's key weapon in another war – meant that British sea-power in the Atlantic could not be weakened to reinforce the East except in a great emergency. At the very least, the Royal Navy needed parity with the Americans, whose Pacific commitments would then serve to balance its own obligations in the eastern seas.

In the aftermath of the war, this looked improbable. The Wilsonians were committed to a big navy. Their programme for 1918 had added 20 ‘super-dreadnoughts’, 12 large battle-cruisers and 300 other ships.
¹⁵
The naval budget rocketed upwards from $37 million in 1914 to $433 million in 1921. As these new battleships came into service, even a numerically smaller American navy would outgun its Atlantic rival. At the end of 1920, British ministers anxiously debated how to contain the American challenge. Lloyd George argued for the pre-war view that America should be discounted as a possible enemy. But other ministers insisted that naval supremacy could not be surrendered.
¹⁶
It was agreed to seek negotiations, but from the Washington embassy came warnings of growing antagonism to Britain even amongst the incoming Republicans, exacerbated by friction over war debts and the war in Ireland.
¹⁷
This analysis proved excessively bleak. In fact, much American opinion regarded enmity towards Britain as unthinkable: talk of British aggression, said the
New York Times
was ‘grotesque’.
¹⁸
The reaction against Wilsonian involvement in international politics had its counterpart in the revolt against ‘navalism’. A big navy would drag America into overseas conflicts as surely as the League. Naval limitation attracted growing support. This new mood gave the British some much-needed leverage. They could hope to bargain their limited programme of March 1921 for American concessions. More to the point, by giving up their twenty-year-old alliance with Japan, whose renewal was disliked by both the Foreign Office and the Admiralty, they could neutralise the strongest card of the ‘big navy’ school in Washington: the fear that Britain would abet Japanese expansion in the Western Pacific. After a fierce debate, into which both Canada and Australia were drawn (on different sides), and amid much unease about the fate of British interests in China, the alliance was abandoned.