The Empire Project: The Rise and Fall of the British World-System, 1830–1970 (73 page)

Imperial defence

Before 1930, there had been good grounds for thinking that the British world-system had entered a phase of exceptional freedom from external assault. In no previous period since the 1880s, when the age of ‘world politics’ began, had British interests (or those of the dominions) appeared less exposed to the threat of a great power attack. Of course, it was true that mutual suspicion still governed the conduct of great power relations. There was much British resentment at the gratuitous expansion of the American navy (as it seemed in London) and the symbolic dethronement of the Royal Navy's supremacy that they had been forced to concede. Periodic tensions with France evoked the reminder that, in European terms (and especially in air power), the French would be a formidable enemy. The Italians were an irritant when they jostled and threatened on the frontiers of Egypt, and cast covetous eyes on Ethiopia and Yemen. The subversive activity of the Soviet Union, whose red hand was seen in the growth of working-class militancy in both Europe and Asia, attracted much official attention. Russian agents were credited with anti-British activity in the Middle East (in Iran) as well as in China. The old imperial bogey of the Russian menace to India via the Northwest Frontier took on a new ideological meaning. The growth of Japanese power, bluntly restrained by Anglo-American pressure in 1921–2, required a watchful presence if Britain's large interests in East Asia were not to be squeezed. Indeed, the British suspected that Japan and the Americans were both happy to see British interests bear the brunt of the Chinese nationalist attack on foreign privilege that was growing in virulence after 1925.

Yet this pattern of friction was actually quite reassuring. For what it revealed was that the most dangerous connections in pre-war international diplomacy had fallen apart. Before 1914, the British had seen their main danger in the German domination of Europe. They relied by default on the alliance of Russia and France, and on winning the arms race against German naval expansion. Maintaining the European balance of power had been the main pillar of empire defence. But its far-reaching demands had been increasingly felt in every vicinity where European interests competed, in the Middle East and East Asia especially. Almost no local matter could be settled without reference to its effect on the European balance: and great power relations in Europe, with its high-voltage circuits of rumour and fear, quivered with the shock of remote detonations and consular outbursts on faraway bunds. The ghastly outcome of this ‘old diplomacy’ had revealed the fine thread upon which Britain's security (and imperial defence) had really been hung. But, once European peace had been assured at Locarno by the Franco-German reconciliation, Europe's balance of power was no longer the key to the peace of the world. Soviet Russia was isolated and geostrategically weak. Japan was much stronger in its own sphere in East Asia, but had almost no prospect of finding a friend among the other great powers. The result was a ‘de-linking’ of the regional conflicts so dangerously linked up before 1914 – to Britain's great strategic advantage. With a navy that was more than equal under the Washington terms to those of France and Italy combined, and much stronger than Japan's, the British had little to fear from a Mediterranean dispute, or a Japanese attack on their interests in Asia, and no reason to fear that they might coincide. There was no likely combination of powers to prevent them from holding their own in Europe, the Middle East, the Indian Ocean or East Asia, nor from applying their power in the theatre they wanted and at the time of their choosing. It was not simply that the British were the one global power: no coalition against them had any chance of cohering.

This highly favourable turn owed a great deal to the path of American power. The British approached this leviathan with a volatile mixture of admiration, mistrust and judicious appeasement. Britain is faced, remarked a senior Foreign Office official (with an American wife) in late 1928,

with a phenomenon for which there is no parallel in our modern history – a State twenty-five times as large, five times as wealthy, three times as populous, twice as ambitious, almost invulnerable, and at least our equal in prosperity, vital energy, technical equipment and industrial science. This State has risen to its present stage of development at a time when Great Britain is still staggering from the effects of the superhuman effort made during the War, is loaded with a great burden of debt and is crippled by the evil of unemployment.
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As Craigie's memorandum suggested, the American challenge to Britain's commercial and industrial power was just as potent as that to its maritime primacy. But, if yielding naval supremacy still stuck in the admirals’ craw, and if the American ‘style’ in diplomatic exchange seemed designed to annoy, the transatlantic ‘phenomenon’ had done little real damage to British world interests. Perhaps the reverse. It was American capital (as we saw in the last chapter) that had smoothed the path of European peace, but without exacting the price in diplomatic allegiance another great power might have sought. America's maritime might, scaled against Britain's, was in practice deployed against the power that was thought to threaten them both. From 1922 onwards, the bulk of the United States Navy was placed in the Pacific.
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While ‘War Plan Red’ (for an Anglo-American war) gathered dust, ‘War Plan Orange’ (against Japan) was real. Anglo-American tensions remained. They were fuelled by the old quarrel over ‘belligerent rights’: whether a naval blockade (
the
British weapon in a European war) could be used to prevent the traffic of ‘neutral’ (in practice American) trade; and by American pressure for a further reduction of fleet strengths. In London, governments of both parties accepted the case for a new naval agreement. The London Naval Conference of 1930 preserved the existing distribution of maritime power (including that of Japan), extended the ‘holiday’ in battleship building until 1936, averted the threat of a race to build cruisers, and restored good relations across the Atlantic.
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As it turned out, the conference was the swan song of the short golden age of post-war security. The lowering background to the naval agreement had been the deepening crisis in the world economy. The storm broke in East Asia. The acute dependence of Japan on overseas trade, Japanese fears of exclusion from their markets in China (as Kuomintang rule was extended), and their long-standing suspicion of British and American commercial designs in East Asia, created an aggressive and panicky mood in Japanese politics.
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When the full force of depression was felt in early 1931, and with it the threat of violent social unrest, civilian politicians lost control of the army. China's huge northern province of Manchuria had been a target of Japanese economic penetration since before 1914. The ‘South Manchurian Railway’, its large ‘railway zone’, and the colonial army based on the Kwantung peninsula, were the means through which their regional power was asserted. In September 1931, perhaps to pre-empt future resistance from the migrant Chinese now flooding into Manchuria,
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Japanese officers exploited a trivial fracas to impose the ‘Kwantung’ army's control over the whole of the province, to which their colleagues at home extracted Tokyo's assent. It was a gross contravention of the Washington treaties (the post-war charter of East Asian security), a massive infringement of China's territorial integrity and (not least) an obvious breach of Japan's obligations as a member of the League.

There was thus every reason for a fierce British reaction. The restraint of Japan had been a key part of the post-war peace settlement. It meant a great deal to the Pacific dominions, whose fear of Japan was tightly bound up with their racial exclusiveness as white British societies. Among the Western powers with a stake in China's economy, the British had the most to lose – with much more in investment and trade than the United States. Of the great hub of their interests, the port-city of Shanghai and its British-run enclave the ‘International Settlement’, the Foreign Office had remarked that ‘no Chinese government is as yet fit to control the destinies of a city which…compares with London and New York’. Indeed, ‘whenever real danger threatens the city…British interests…are so great that British troops must be sent to protect the Settlement, just as though it were a British possession’.
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Japan's economic imperialism was unlikely to stay far away in the north: Taiwan, after all, was a Japanese colony, and the Japanese presence was already strong in Shanghai. London, however, was very reluctant to take the lead on Manchuria. ‘Avoid at all costs an open breach with Japan’
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was the watchword of policy. This was partly because a possible armed confrontation was extremely unwelcome at a time of enormous uncertainty in Britain's own politics in 1931–2. But it also reflected two other constraints whose force was compelling. The first was the doubt whether it was in Britain's real interests to oppose Japan on Manchuria. The British had conceded (in 1926) that their extra-territorial privileges in China (symbolised by their treaty-port rights, in Shanghai above all) could not be maintained against the nationalist opposition in China. They had begun their retreat from the beleaguered outposts of the old treaty-port system. But they regarded the Kuomintang nationalism of Chiang Kai-shek as xenophobic and unstable, and dreaded a wholesale assault on British persons and property. ‘A strong China is not a necessity to us; indeed the preservation of Hong Kong, and, as long as possible, of our remaining special rights in China, suffices to suggest the contrary’, was the cold comment in London on an enthusiastic despatch from the Peking legation expressing the opposite view.
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Attacking Japan on China's behalf thus had little appeal. The second factor at work was a well-merited caution. Coercing Japan meant sending a fleet to Northeastern Asia at a time when the nearest fully fledged naval base was no closer than Malta. Few naval strategists would have needed reminding that sending a navy from Europe into the Sea of Japan was an exceptionally hazardous business. For the Russians at Tshushima in May 1905 it had been a catastrophe.
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Even courting a quarrel (by the imposing of sanctions on Japanese trade) might expose British interests to threats and reprisals that would be hard to fend off without a strong naval presence, and unsafe to embark on without large reinforcements to send if need be.

As a result, and with no hope of forging an Anglo-American front, the British response was carefully muted. Japan was condemned by the League, but took little notice. However, the need to strengthen Britain's East Asian presence was taken up by the Admiralty which began its campaign for naval expansion and a fleet large enough to fight
simultaneously
in Europe and the Far East. Hitler's accession to power in January 1933, and his open rejection of disarmament in October that year, hugely strengthened its case. Even those who believed that Japan would only be dangerous if Britain were already embroiled elsewhere, now had to consider the renewed possibility of a conflict with Germany, by far the strongest (if only potentially) of the European powers. It was no longer a matter of an (improbable) war with France or Italy. If Germany resumed its old place as a great military power, the Navy would need to be able to impose a blockade (its weapon of choice) or contain a new German fleet built along pre-1914 lines. The Chiefs of Staff had already denounced (in March 1932) Britain's ‘defenceless’ position in East Asia. In November 1933, in the wake of Hitler's pronouncement, the Cabinet approved the creation of a ‘Defence Requirements Sub-Committee’ to consider what extra spending was needed.
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Its proceedings record the drastic alteration of the geopolitical scene since the halcyon days of 1926–31. But they also reveal the doubts and divisions over how best to respond to the (still dimly glimpsed) new patterns of power.

The argument turned on the relative dangers posed by German and Japanese aggression. In the Admiralty's view, Britain had to be able to deter and defeat an attack by Japan, which meant a strong Eastern fleet to match the Japanese navy. Japan, after all, was now a great island empire that stretched from the Kuriles to Taiwan and since 1918 into the Central and South Pacific; and a mainland power that ruled over Korea and the client state of Manchukuo (as Manchuria was renamed). The disarmament terms of the Washington treaties had barred new fortified bases in East Asian waters – a strategic boon to Japan which had little to fear from Hong Kong or American bases in Guam and the Philippines.
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Even Singapore was poorly defended and lacked proper dry-docking facilities. Yet the Royal Navy had to defend Britain's interests in China (in an era when new markets had exceptional value), its commercial sea-lanes, its Southeast Asian possessions (and those of the Dutch, their strategic dependants), as well as two great provinces of the ‘British world’ in Australia and New Zealand. If it failed to do so, or suffered a setback in trying, the British world-system would suffer a staggering and perhaps irreversible blow. For, in a naval perspective, a defeat of this kind would quickly lead on to the loss of British control in the Indian Ocean, severing Britain's links with its most powerful possession of all, and opening the East and South African coasts to attack from the sea. The whole hinterland of British world power, that had helped Britain sustain the brutal struggle in Europe and the Middle East less than two decades earlier, would have been swept from its grasp. The rest would soon follow. This apocalyptic scenario was reinforced by the view that Japan had become a new ‘Prussian’ state: aggressive, militaristic and set on regional domination
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– a suspicion that was strengthened by its further advance in North China. Japan was a real and immediate danger, so this argument ran: the Germans would follow in several years’ time. But what was urgently necessary was the decision to build up the navy to be able to deal with them both simultaneously.
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