The Empire Project: The Rise and Fall of the British World-System, 1830–1970 (79 page)

Canadian nationalism of the Dafoe variety was highly articulate but had a limited following. It attracted suspicion. Dafoe himself acknowledged that ‘the Canadian people do not want now any definite break in what we call the “British connection”’.
¹²⁵
There was still a very powerful minority, ‘holding the money, employing labour, owning the newspapers and controlling the parties’, who ‘are very British in sentiment’ and who would answer ‘Ready, aye ready’ to an appeal from Britain, whatever the cause and however divided the rest of Canadian opinion.
¹²⁶
It denounced the idea that Canada had interests that were different from Britain's. The headquarters of this feeling were found in Toronto, the ‘Belfast of Canada’, and the ‘most assertively British of Canadian cities’.
¹²⁷
But just as disheartening in the nationalist view was the indifference of the ‘isolationists’ to events elsewhere in the world as if Canadians could ‘contract out of the universe’.
¹²⁸
Isolationism seemed to be growing in strength after 1931 along with the fear of involvement in Europe's intractable conflicts. Its domestic parallel was endemic provincialism, and the rooted mistrust of the federal government. It was this that had led to the clause in the Statute of Westminster by which power to amend the Canadian constitution was carefully reserved to the Imperial Parliament (and denied to Canada's), at the explicit request of Canadian leaders. ‘Provincial rights’ remained a potent political cry, in Quebec above all, where Canadian ‘nationalism’ was readily seen as a ‘British’ conspiracy. Maintaining the ‘British connection’ in its unreformed shape, ill-defined, emotive and open (as some thought) to British abuse, was thus the great bulwark to unwanted constitutional change.

The boldest challenge to this political impasse came paradoxically from the Conservative government of R. B. Bennett between 1930 and 1935. Bennett had denounced the Liberals for failing to deal with the depression effectively. Bennett's own cry was ‘Canada First’, a sharp rise in tariffs to defend Canadian industry. This cut little ice on the prairies which had to pay more for home-made manufactures while grain prices fell steeply. Bennett had gone to the Imperial Conference in London to demand an imperial (and thus Canadian) preference in the British market for food. Labour rebuffed this attack on free trade. But the 1931 crisis in Britain, the new National Government and its swift turn to protection gave Bennett his chance. By inviting the British and other Empire governments to an economic conference at Ottawa, he aimed to reverse that defeat. The British would be forced to concede the ultimate prize, a protected home market for Empire food exports in return for a modest revision in Canadian tariffs. Bennett's plans were concerted (by his own tacit admission) with the Australian chief delegate, Stanley Bruce, the former prime minister, and now the
eminence grise
of Australia's economic diplomacy. He had the British ‘completely encircled’.
¹²⁹
Bennett may well have believed that the British delegation would not dare to resist. As a close friend of Lord Beaverbrook, he may have been swayed by his and Leo Amery's hopes of promoting a real protectionist government in Britain, much more fully committed to ‘Empire Free Trade’. A hard line in Ottawa (where Amery was active) would help this to happen.
¹³⁰
It may have been an inkling of this that enraged Baldwin and Chamberlain with Bennett's conference tactics. Certainly Bennett was playing for high stakes. He regarded himself as the saviour of Empire, who would drag the British kicking and screaming towards his own version of it. To have upheld ‘Canada First’, saved the prairie's grain market, and imposed a form of ‘Empire Free Trade’ on the recalcitrant British would have been a remarkable triumph for his vision of Empire. But Baldwin and Chamberlain were not so easily broken.

As a shrewd businessman, Bennett hedged his imperial bets. Access to American markets (closed up by Washington's emergency tariff) remained a vital concern. When President Roosevelt embraced freer trade, Bennett eagerly sought a commercial agreement to match that with Britain. But his domestic experiment in a strong central government and the Bennett ‘New Deal’ fell apart in the face of provincial resistance, internal party division and Bennett's ill-health. The 1935 election was a Conservative bloodbath. Although both parties agreed in opposing Canadian involvement in Britain's confrontation with Italy, the new Liberal government soon faced the old question: what would Canada do if Britain was drawn into a conflict in Europe. Mackenzie King may have thought privately that Canada neither could nor should stand apart.
¹³¹
But his public position was to say as little as possible and fall back on the formula ‘parliament will decide’. The prime reason for this, as for many years past, was fear that Quebec would revolt against any prior commitment to Britain and bring down the Liberals, both party and government. ‘British imperialism’, said Henri Bourassa, still the great tribune of Quebec's
survivance
, ‘must not be allowed to drag Canada into any more wars.’
¹³²
Ernest Lapointe, the Quebec Liberal leader, said much the same thing. Both were fiercely opposed to the separatist nationalism of the ‘Action française’ and its clerical leader, the Abbé Lionel Groulx. Neither was anxious to give him a cause. Indeed, while this sleeping dog lay,
Canadien
separatism remained carefully vague about when and how a separate Quebec state might come into being. Its leaders denied any wish to break Canada up: ‘Nous ne voulons rien détruire’, said the Abbé Groulx piously.
¹³³
Nor could they count on any support from the voters. The real political voice of French Canada's nationalism was the ‘Union nationale’ of Maurice Duplessis. Duplessis' government was a thorn in Ottawa's side. Its programme was not separation but the unremitting defence of provincial autonomy.
¹³⁴
Canada's ‘British connection’ – by default or by choice – remained the pole of its politics.

South Africa

In the cruel trajectory of South African history, the inter-war years have often been seen as the prelude to the triumph of Afrikaner nationalism and its programme of
apartheid.
It was certainly true that an amalgam of paternalism, segregationist attitudes and overt racial discrimination (especially in the treatment of labour) prefigured much of the substance of post-war
apartheid
although without the ideological ‘rigour’, systematic enforcement (by classification and removal) and violent repression of the 1950s and after.
¹³⁵
Africans (some 10,000 of whom had qualified for the vote under the property-based franchise that prevailed in the Cape) were removed from the voters’ roll in 1936, but ‘coloureds’ (the South African term for those of mixed race) were not.
Zwaartgevaar
(‘black peril’) was invoked continually by white politicians in search of cheap votes. But the inter-war state lacked the means to impose real control over many black communities in town and country alike. In a similar way, the irresistible rise of Afrikaner nationalism to political dominance was much less apparent to contemporary eyes than hindsight suggests.

There were several reasons for this. The dominant personality in South African politics was General J. B. M. Hertzog, prime minister from 1924 until 1939. To his political critics, Hertzog's shortcomings were plain. He was the ‘apostle of the short view’ and shared ‘that latent sense of racial grievance’ that inspired many of his followers, wrote Patrick Duncan, Smuts’ right-hand man in the South African party.
¹³⁶
Hertzog was often accused of cloudy and imprecise language (as were Botha and Smuts), the means of survival in South African politics as almost everywhere else. But he was ready to claim that the Imperial Conferences of 1926 and 1930 had lifted the burden of British hegemony, and removed any doubt about South African sovereignty. With the hypothetical right of secession assured, pragmatic acceptance of the
Britse konneksie
had become politically possible. Hertzog lent his authority to
The King's Republics
, published by H. J. Schlosberg, a South African lawyer,
¹³⁷
which claimed that, though the dominions now had the right to neutrality, it was inconceivable that they would exercise it if Britain were in danger.
¹³⁸
Hertzog himself now veered towards the position that no issue of substance divided Afrikaners and ‘English’ (the local term for those of British descent). The task of the National party, he told its 1930 congress, was to build a ‘
gekonsolideerde Suid-Afrikaanse volk
’. The two streams of English and Afrikaans culture must eventually merge (‘
saamvloei
’).
¹³⁹
Here, perhaps, was a tacit admission that the struggle to define an Afrikaner identity by the systematic denial of ‘English’ influences and attitudes was futile and unwinnable, and could only prolong the sometimes bitter antipathy of the previous decade.

Hertzog may have also been hoping to undermine Smuts, his main political rival. Smuts’ South African party enjoyed the support of many better-off Afrikaners who disliked the (white) populist style of the Nationalists, their pact with the Labour party and the secessionist republicanism favoured by a vociferous wing.
¹⁴⁰
It also attracted most of the English vote, since Smuts’ attachment to the
Britse konneksie
could hardly be doubted. ‘Are we going to desert General Smuts, a Dutchman who is sacrificing health and leisure for the British cause?’, asked the young Harry Lawrence in a speech at Kalk Bay near Cape Town in 1927.
¹⁴¹
Smuts seems to have regarded himself more and more as the bearer of Rhodes’ old vision of a grander South Africa: fully self-governing, Anglo-Afrikaner in culture, but part of the Empire. He was keener than ever upon South Africa's northward expansion by a ‘fair linking up with the two Rhodesias’, as well as ‘friendship and collaboration with the rest of British Africa’ as ‘junior members of the family’.
¹⁴²
A federation of states from the Cape to the Equator
¹⁴³
would form a great African dominion to rival Australia or Canada – a prospect his opponents denounced as a ‘kaffir state’ nightmare. Yet, for all Smuts’ prestige, his party's survival could not be taken for granted. He had no obvious successor (Smuts was sixty in 1930) with the connections and skill to keep the party's Afrikaner support. His English lieutenants feared that the siren call of
hereniging
(reunion) would lure their Afrikaner allies away. And the party's cohesion was constantly strained by its English ‘extremists’ who opposed what they saw as the steady erosion of the link with the Empire. ‘Politically they are like children’, said Duncan contemptuously of a breakaway faction in Natal. ‘I do not think the fits of imperial hysteria are good for us or the British connection.’
¹⁴⁴
The suggestion by one of his English frontbenchers that the party should abandon the dual language provisions of the South Africa Act was dangerous enough to draw a savage rebuke from Smuts himself.
¹⁴⁵

Perhaps surprisingly, the politics of Depression allowed both Hertzog and Smuts to escape their extremists and construct a ‘moderate’ centre enjoying broad Afrikaner and English support. Hertzog had hoped to ride out the storm without leaving the gold standard, as the British had done. But signs of white unrest on the Rand
¹⁴⁶
and the bruising effect on agricultural exporters brought a revolt in his party and pushed him towards a coalition with Smuts in February 1933. Both came under pressure from their Afrikaner supporters to press on towards ‘fusion’, a union of parties. The critical issue became South Africa's ‘status’ – the real extent of the freedom conferred by the Statute of Westminster. Within Hertzog's party a sizeable faction led by D. F. Malan was hostile to fusion, because it meant accepting dominionhood as a permanent condition and losing the hope of a republican future outside the Empire. For some of Smuts’ English supporters, there was the opposite fear that their voice would be drowned by the Afrikaner majority, and that Malanite republicanism would enjoy too much influence. But, when the ‘status’ bill was debated (the bill enacted the terms of the Statute of Westminster in South African law), Smuts won over his doubters while those who favoured a future republic also drew back.
¹⁴⁷
Only seven MPs opposed the bill. The way was now open to form the ‘United’ party: the status Act was its charter. However, much to Duncan's relief, Malan and his followers chose in the end to stay out. ‘It will consolidate our [new] party against a republic’, was Duncan's conclusion, while ‘a small ultra-British group mainly in Durban and East London’ formed on the opposite wing.
¹⁴⁸
The so-called ‘Dominion’ party won a sensational by-election in 1935 (‘Are you a bulldog or a handsupper?’ was its cry),
¹⁴⁹
but most English voters elsewhere heeded the warning that ‘the English-speaking must have the support of the moderate Afrikaans-speaking. They alone cannot prevent the country from seceding from the British Empire.’
¹⁵⁰

But what had fusion achieved? To its supporters it marked the end of ‘race’ conflict between Briton and Boer and the creation of a new ‘South Africanism’. To ensure its success, they were willing, like Duncan, to remove the African franchise – on the grounds that it might cause a dispute among whites. But fusion did not stop the movement to build a distinct Afrikaner identity, which gathered speed in the 1930s, with the promotion of the Afrikaans language (a patois which replaced Dutch as the country's official second language in 1924), the rapid growth in the number of Afrikaans-only schools (by 1936, 55 per cent of white children were receiving instruction only in Afrikaans
¹⁵¹
), and the systematic propagation of an ‘Afrikaner’ account of South African history in which the Afrikaners were cast as the innocent victims of black barbarity and British imperialism.
¹⁵²
The approaching centenary in 1938 of the Great Trek was perfectly timed to advance the agreeable myth that the Afrikaners were a chosen, martyred but ultimately victorious people and the republic their symbol of national ‘liberation’. Against the power of this racial and cultural appeal (which hindsight confirms), the United party's ‘South Africanism’ now looks rather wan. But it would be wrong to assume that success was assured to separatist nationalism before the Second World War. For many Afrikaners, it was the weakness and poverty of their language and culture that really stood out. The higher civil service was still overwhelmingly English, and few senior officials could or would speak Afrikaans. English opinion was voiced by English-owned newspapers in all the main cities. Almost the entire business world was English and a large proportion of its most influential members were also British by birth. The same was true of the main professions – medicine, law, education, journalism, engineering and architecture.
¹⁵³
Their ties with Britain – family, business or professional – remained strong. The towns into which many Afrikaners were moving were mainly English in culture. It was hardly conceivable that a political movement that proposed to root out the
Britse konneksie
could escape the furious opposition of this English middle class to an Afrikaner republic outside the Empire. Few well-informed Afrikaners believed that it could be imposed on a hostile minority. Indeed, even republicans were forced to concede that it lay far in the future, while half of those teaching at Stellenbosch University, the seed-plot and seminary of Afrikaner nationalism, backed Hertzog and Smuts, not Malan's ‘Purified Nationalists’. A true (
ware
) Afrikaner society might be the white hope of ages to come: in the world of practical politics, South Africa would remain a dominion.