The Story of Britain: From the Romans to the Present (94 page)

Many of them, like Canada and other Dominions who were representing themselves for the first time instead of being spoken for by British imperial statesmen, came to the peace conference enthusiastically. They were inspired by Woodrow Wilson’s idea of a League of Nations to outlaw war and to protect the rights of small nations. A worldwide reduction of armaments to the lowest point consistent with national safety, which would make the world ‘safe for democracy’ as Wilson put it, offered a chance to escape from the blind destruction of the past. The League, which Wilson spent much time and effort explaining, was to be set up in Geneva, Switzerland and every nation was invited to join and send members to its international assembly.

Wilson’s novel idea, that all the peace treaties should have the League’s charter as an integral and dominating part, was adopted by all the delegates. The charter was a reflection of the peace movements which had grown up during the war, as well as of the Disarmament Conferences before 1914, to find international procedures for arbitration. The powers which signed the Covenant of the League of Nations were mindful of the uncontrollable process of acceleration by which small wars could become big ones. By putting their names to the Covenant they vowed to refer their disagreements to the League for discussion before taking up arms. They also vowed to go to the aid of any fellow member which had been attacked and to act against any member which used force against the League.

It was heady stuff. The world was so exhausted by the war that none of the statesmen in Paris could imagine any country ever wanting to repeat such an experience. The dream of global peace seemed to have achieved reality. The peace conference proposed to resettle Europe along lines of self-determination to prevent the sort of quarrel the Serbs had had with the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The Habsburg Empire was already no more, and the Habsburgs were deposed after the armistice. Their immense territories were broken up into states on ethnic lines. By the Treaty of St Germain, signed with the new Austrian Republic, Austria became a small landlocked country of seven million people forbidden to join up with Germany. Bohemia, Moravia and part of northern Hungary, which were inhabited by western Slavs (the Czechs, Slovaks and Ruthenians), were united to create the Republic of Czechoslovakia. Croatia, Dalmatia, Slovenia and Bosnia-Herzegovina, inhabited by the southern Slavs, were united under Serbia to form the Kingdom of Yugoslavia. Italy, though balked of Dalmatia, obtained Trentino, Trieste, South Tyrol and Istria. Hungary, meanwhile, which lost almost three-quarters of her post-1867 kingdom–Romania acquired the whole of Transylvania–in 1920 reluctantly signed the Treaty of Trianon.

Bulgaria, as an ally of the central powers, by the Treaty of Neuilly had to cede large areas to Greece and the new Yugoslavia. The independence of Finland, and of the Baltic states of Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia was preserved. Russia meanwhile would make no peace treaty. Although initially British and French troops were sent to help the White or conservative forces within Russia against the Bolsheviks, an impasse was reached and they were evacuated.

The treaty agreeing peace with the Ottoman Empire, the Treaty of Sèvres, was not completed until 1920. It destroyed the 300-year-old Ottoman Empire, more or less expelled the Turks from Europe apart from Constantinople, made Armenia and Kurdistan independent, and removed from them Arabia, Palestine, Mesopotamia, Syria, Cyprus and what they owned in north Africa. Greece was to be given much of Asiatic Turkey behind Smyrna.

President Wilson intended that European imperialism should wither away. Former German colonies or Turkish possessions, even if they were taken over by the old imperial powers, were now to be called mandates. By an article of the Covenant of the League, the great powers like France and Britain were commanded to govern the mandates in the interests of their inhabitants until they were ready to be admitted to the League of Nations. Thus a better world was supposed to be remodelled at the peace conference. Unfortunately, although all the peace treaties were predicated on the League of Nations, despite his enthusiasm for the new world order President Wilson had made an elementary mistake. He failed to convince Congress of the importance of the United States guaranteeing the post-war settlement, so despite his own internationalism after the war she returned to her usual isolationism. Congress rejected US participation in the League of Nations, yet the whole new settlement was based on US support for the League. Nor would America guarantee France’s borders against Germany.

As for imperialism withering away, it was really lack of money as far as Britain was concerned–with the post-war slump and debts owed to America of £900 million–that in the end hurried forward the end of empire. Lord Curzon, foreign secretary from October 1919, and much of the India Office might be excited by the mandate system which gave Britain Mesopotania and Palestine to administer as an unofficial way of extending the empire. The importance of the oil-rich Middle East had been recognized before the war and the area offered new markets now that India had her own growing manufacturing industry. With Russia locked in internal revolution, Britain had no rival in the Middle East. But a severe post-war slump prevented Britain from imposing herself on the mandated territories as she would have done in the past. The old empire itself was under attack from nationalists in India. In Ireland a war of independence against the British broke out the year after the war ended. There was a rebellion in Egypt, which had been made a British protectorate at the beginning of the war and wanted immediate independence.

Mesopotamia was in a state of revolt and despite her oilfields most members of the British government had no wish to spend money on subduing her. Though the British retained a great deal of influence, in 1921 they made her into the kingdom of Iraq. Eleven years later in 1932 the mandate ended and Iraq achieved full independence. Faisal, the son of the Hashemite Sharif Hussein, became her king as a reward for his father’s help during the war. This partly offset the obligation on the British to fulfil their wartime promise of creating an independent Arab state in Syria and Palestine, as did carving the independent mandate of Jordan out of their mandate for Palestine. Faisal’s brother, Hussein’s other son Abdullah, became Jordan’s emir. Though a British resident initially controlled both her economic and her financial policy, in 1946 the mandated territory became the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan.

Palestine posed more of a problem because of the 1917 Balfour Declaration, which had been critical in keeping influential Jewish opinion in America onside during the war. This recognized the rights of the Jewish race to establish a national homeland in Palestine, so long as no harm was inflicted on the native Arab inhabitants. At the end of the nineteenth century, the victimization of Jews (especially in eastern Europe) had seen the growth of a powerful Zionist movement, whose objective was to establish a homeland for the Jews in their ancestral home of Palestine. In consequence, between 1882 and 1914 Palestine attracted 60,000 Jewish immigrants, bringing the Jewish population to about 85,000. The question of how many Jewish people could settle in the Jewish homeland without upsetting the lives of the 600,000 Arab Palestinians was to be the subject of much debate within the British government over the next twenty-five years. Sympathy for Jewish settlers who were attacked by Arabs wrestled with official British fears that the poorly educated Palestinians would soon be at a disadvantage in a small country with a land shortage.

The First World War had made the territorial extent of the British Empire greater than ever, but it dramatically loosened its already lax bonds. Before 1914 the imperial government was in the last resort responsible for the foreign policy of the entire empire. But by the end of the war the effect of their vast losses, their separate representation at the peace conference and their membership of the League of Nations set the Dominions on the path to real nationhood. They began to make it clear that in future wars their assistance could not be taken for granted. Separate ambassadorial representation to other countries, a lack of imperial ships to defend the empire east of Suez and a definitive Imperial Conference in 1926 resulted in the 1931 Statute of Westminster. This recognized the changed and wholly independent status of the Dominions, though they remained ‘united by a common allegiance to the Crown and freely associated as members of the British Commonwealth of nations’.

But India was not part of the magic circle of the Dominions. She was very disappointed at not being rewarded as she had hoped after her efforts during the war. One and a half million Indians had fought for the empire, and India had been admitted to the Imperial Conference in 1917. Like the Dominions, India had achieved separate representation in the Assembly of the League of Nations. Many Indians, particularly Mohandas Gandhi, who had studied law in London and was a member of the Inner Temple, had believed in the liberty-loving nature of a Britain ruled by Parliament. They had assumed that India would achieve Dominion status immediately after the war. But it did not happen.

The Indian professional classes felt fobbed off by the 1919 Government of India Act which they were offered instead. It gave India a two-chambered Parliamentary system and allowed Indians to form the majority on the Central Legislative Council, but the diarchal arrangement kept law and order and taxation in the hands of non-Indians. Moreover the legislature could not remove the executive. The notorious Amritsar Massacre in 1919, when General Dyer shot dead 379 unarmed civilians in the Punjab who were protesting against new security laws, crystallized the growing discontent with British rule. People lost faith in the Raj’s promises. For the next seven years, led by Gandhi, India embarked on a new movement for independence with frequent strikes and the boycotting of British goods.

India was inspired by the empire’s other ‘poor relation’, Ireland. In a series of dramatic moves she was casting off British authority. The harsh punishment of those Irishmen involved in the Easter Rising caused Sinn Fein and the revolutionaries to triumph over the moderate Home Rulers in the first election after the war and withdraw from Westminster. Seventy-three of them gathered in the Mansion House in Dublin and announced that they constituted an independent Irish Parliament, which they called the Dáil Éireann, meaning the Parliament of the Irish Republic. A provisional government was elected with De Valera as president. By 1919 there was all-out war between Britain and southern Ireland.

The charismatic Michael Collins, known as the ‘big fella’, minister of finance in the new Dáil, was southern Ireland’s commander. His unorthodox army, the old National Volunteers, who wore trench coats and trilby hats, vanished into the shadows after each guerrilla exploit. His charm and his daring refusal to wear much disguise while bicycling about Dublin gave Collins the status of a folk hero. Even though 8,000 ex-soldiers were drafted in to supplement the Royal Irish Constabulary, the south of Ireland became ungovernable. Because the RIC did not have enough of their usual dark-green uniforms, the new policemen wore khaki, with the black belts and dark-green caps of the RIC. The savagery with which they hunted down the Irish guerrillas got them the caustic nickname of the Black and Tans, after a pack of hounds from County Tipperary. British politicians became sickened by what was going on in Ireland and demanded a political solution.

When Lloyd George was informed by British military chiefs that it would take a military campaign involving 100,000 men to subdue Ireland, he baulked at such an enterprise so soon after the trauma of the Great War. Money was needed to reconstruct Britain, not to fight Ireland. In 1921 the two sides began a series of negotiations. The Anglo-Irish Treaty in December resolved the Ulster Unionist problem by partitioning Ireland, turning southern Ireland into a Dominion called the Irish Free State.

But even this did not bring peace. In 1922 the Irish Civil War broke out between the pro-treaty forces headed by Michael Collins and Arthur Griffith and those like De Valera who believed that Ireland should become a republic inclusive of Ulster. As the death toll in Ireland mounted, assassinations by the newly formed military organization of the anti-treaty nationalists, the Irish Republican Army, or IRA (Collins was one of the victims), were followed by dawn executions of suspects without trial by the Irish Free State government. Eventually the cool, calculating, bespectacled De Valera, who was suspected of ordering Collins’s assassination, called a halt to the anti-treaty IRA’s warfare. The civil war petered out. The struggle should go forward by political means, De Valera said, though at elections he made use of terrorist pressure from the IRA to get out the vote for the rapidly enlarging Fianna Fáil republican party.

If the empire was in tumult in the early 1920s, there was much misery and dislocation in Britain herself, despite the release from war. From 1916 to 1918, when Labour seceded from the national government, Britain had continued to be ruled nominally by the coalition of three parties, though in reality the controlling figure was the amazingly energetic Lloyd George. Parliament should have been dissolved in 1916 but as an election in wartime would have been impossible, acts had been passed from time to time prolonging its life, and thus the life of the coalition. In 1918 Lloyd George and Bonar Law, the leader of the Conservatives, saw no reason not to carry on as before. They agreed that the task of returning Britain to a peacetime existence also deserved government by consensus. In the coupon election of 1918 (so called because Lloyd George and Bonar Law had written a letter or coupon asking the parties not to oppose one another) the coalition–now the 335 coalition Conservatives and 133 coalition Liberals–was successfully returned. The new government lasted until 1922. The electorate had trebled again as a result of the 1918 Electoral Reform Act. If he wanted to be prime minister again, Lloyd George had to fulfil his election promise to make Britain ‘a land fit for heroes to live in’.

With such an enlarged electorate, many of whom were working class, numerous measures for social reform were required. The reforms Lloyd George promised were even more sweeping than those achieved before the war. The state would pay for housing, what were called council houses, to replace the slums that still disfigured towns. By the Unemployment Insurance Act of 1920 all workers were entitled to benefit for fifteen weeks as long as they had paid twelve weeks’ contributions. But soon many of the measures–including a new Education Act in 1918 which was intended to increase teachers’ salaries, provide for the compulsory attendance at school of children up to fourteen and establish continuation schools for boys and girls up to eighteen–proved impossible to implement. They were too great an expense for a country still getting back on her feet. The boom the war caused in munitions and a resurgence of the textile trade after the war were followed by a slump in 1921. There were two million people out of work. Domestic service, which had been an immense source of employment before the war, had almost vanished as few people could afford to employ servants any more. Before 1914 even the most meagre households with pretensions to being middle-class had some kind of help.