THE DILEMMA OF BRITAIN
Although Charles A. Lindbergh and
Amelia Earhart had made the first non-stop solo flights from the USA to Europe
across the North Atlantic as long before as 1927 and 1928 respectively, there
was not – in the 1930s – a regular airmail service between the UK and the USA.
This would seem to matter if you think no satellites or Internet in those days:
cablegrams only. Overseas airmail delivery from and to Britain back then was
under the aegis of Imperial Airways (suitably named) between Britain and India
and points along the way. Swift communications by post between Britain and the
Jewel in the Crown took precedence over those with the United States of
America.
Protocol demanded that when the King
and Queen of England made their historic Royal Visit to North America in 1939,
the Dominion of Canada took precedence over the American Republic. Only after
Ottawa did the Visit turn southwards to New York to meet the Roosevelts and
enjoy a tickertape parade; the American Visit proved a great success
nonetheless.
There was a good reason for all this.
During the Depression and world trade autarky Britain escaped much of the
consequences of these through an all-important Imperial Preference between
Britain and her overseas Dominions and colonies. The British Empire – in a
period dire for free trade – actually came into its own in economic importance
in the last decade or so of its splendour and extent. The Dominions and
colonies featured hugely in the pageant that was the Coronation of George VI in
1937, and not merely for the show. Meanwhile Neville Chamberlain, prime
minister from 1937, personally held the United States in total contempt. Part
of his reason for appeasing Hitler at Munich the following year was that
Chamberlain had little faith in the USA as a potential British ally in any
conflict on the European continent. (In the context of the 1930s this view was
not necessarily misplaced.)
Although in the ensuing World War
hundreds of thousands of colonial troops vastly augmented the manpower
resources of the British army in fighting the enemy (a contribution that went
disgracefully unappreciated in the war’s aftermath), the British Empire was on
the whole a millstone around Britain’s neck in the war with Nazi Germany. While
the Blitz was decimating large parts of London and a host of British cities,
with a Wehrmacht invasion still thought possible, Churchill squandered war
effort on sending the Eighth Army to North Africa to fight Rommel, his object
being to safeguard the Suez Canal in Egypt – the shipping lifeline to India. In
1942 Churchill sent two battleships of the Royal Navy to Singapore while German
U-boats in the Atlantic were sinking vital food and other supplies meant for
the mother country: his object being to prevent the Japanese from conquering
Singapore, then the bastion of Empire in the Far East. The ships were duly sunk
and the Japanese conquered Singapore anyhow, the Empire suffering severe loss
of face before the Asian millions who had been brought up to believe in British
invincibility. British troops sat out the war stationed in India to prevent
both an invasion from without and manifestations of rising popular discontent
within.
From 1940 and after the Fall of France
in the spring of that year, the British and Churchill were becoming strongly
convinced that America must enter the European war. But Empire raised the question with Americans
as to whether they were being asked to save the British Empire as well, an
entity that many Americans detested (including President Roosevelt himself).
The USA went into the war because Japan bombed its Hawaiian territory at Pearl
Harbor in December 1941 while Hitler and Mussolini declared war on the United
States a week later thus leaving Uncle Sam no choice. Had the Axis powers not
been so accommodating to the British in this unwitting way it is one of the
questions of history as to whether the Americans would have joined in the war too
late to save Britain, or indeed would have joined in at all. (In June 1941
Hitler had invaded the Soviet Union thus creating a new Eastern Front that many
Americans, including one US senator named Harry Truman, thought would pretty
well bring down both countries – without US intervention being necessary.)
Imperialism had been one of three
British foreign policy foci over the years and centuries. The other two were:
Europeanism and Atlanticism. Balancing these three in tandem had and has never
been easy for the British to do.
Europeanism goes back to the Middle
Ages when kings of England derived greater wealth from rich and extensive
dynastic holdings in France than from England itself. The Hundred Years’ War
put an end to all that. The Spanish Armada of 1588 may have failed disastrously
but that was mainly down to the weather: the message was not lost on English
rulers and statesmen that a Europe dominated by an overmighty power (Philip II
of Spain in this instance) posed a danger to the British Isles, a threat
repeated with regard to, successively, Louis XIV and Napoleon. English policy
was aimed at as much political fragmentation on the other side of the Channel
as possible. The Congress of Vienna in 1815 was the apogee of foreign policy
Europeanism, after more than a century of British military engagement on the
continent. The perceived threat after this came from the Russian tsar with his
fanatical wish to impose a Russian-style medieval theocracy on everybody. The
Crimean War of the 1850s was a British response to an expansive Russia that
might ultimately threaten India.
From the late 17th century
on, England developed into an overseas colonial power with its own Atlantic
trading system, in competition with France both in the West Indies and in
regard to New France: Quebec plus the vast hinterland of North America beyond
the Appalachians. An early champion of imperialism was William Pitt the Elder
(Lord Chatham) under whom the French were decisively driven from North America.
But trying to recoup the costs of this expensive war by extracting money from
the American colonists proved unpopular, though the subsequent British loss of
its American colonies (though not Canada), while a frightful embarrassment,
proved not to be a calamity. After the hiccup of the War of 1812, the last
Anglo-American military conflict, Britain and America came to enjoy extensive trading
relations, while British capital owned much of what was then a largely
agricultural United States making it something of an economic colony if not a
political one. Yet even though it grew out of this to become the world’s leading
industrial power by the 1890s, the USA financially remained in debt to British
rentiers right up to the outbreak of World War I, the financial consequence of
which was that these positions were reversed. To pay down war debt the UK had
to sell off overseas assets, having to rely on American loans in fighting a war
no one had expected would be so devastating and protracted back in 1914.
(British bankruptcy was even more imminent in the aftermath of the next World
War.)
Henceforth UK-US relations shifted
from being a matter of imperialism to being more objectively Atlanticist, in
what later became known as ‘the special relationship’. This did not exactly flourish
in the interwar period (e.g. failure to combine forces in a stand against Japan
in the Manchuria Crisis of 1931) but came into its own with the Anglo-American
alliance against the Axis in World War II. Even then, however, Churchill was
uneasily aware of what Roosevelt thought of a British India, and was not
reassured by Roosevelt’s increasing closeness to Stalin nor by FDR’s early
overtures to King Ibn Saud of Saudi Arabia, an oil kingdom hitherto deemed to
be under the British aegis.
It took a post-war Labour government
to ease Anglo-American tensions by first granting India independence in 1947
and then (in the person of Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin) inventing NATO.
(Atlanticism.) This provoked bitter controversy within the US Congress since
the United States had never signed a permanent military pact with a foreign
country in its entire history. But President Truman and his Secretary of State
Dean Acheson prevailed and the NATO treaty was duly signed by all concerned in
1949.
Within NATO and with its own
Independent Nuclear Deterrent, Britain reckoned it was still a partner on equal
terms with the United States (a myth subsequently perpetrated and prolonged by
James Bond books and movies). But when it reverted to an imperialist power by
attacking Egypt in 1956 over the latter’s nationalisation of the Suez Canal,
Britain had a rude awakening when President Eisenhower threatened it with
financial sanctions if it did not pull out of Egypt. In one blow this destroyed
any illusions held by Britain of being not only Atlanticist but also
independently Imperialist. You couldn’t be both, in so many words. Even with
James Bond on hand.
With its post-war occupation of a
large part of Germany plus its relative economic superiority over the nations
devastated by World War II giving it a trading advantage, not to speak of its
role in the prosecution of Nazi war criminals at Nuremburg, Britain retained a
foothold in Europeanism.
But things began to change. Germany
(like Japan forbidden from maintaining an extensive-expensive military) came to
outstrip Britain industrially (again) as it joined with France and other
countries to form an economic union that grew in time into today’s EU. The
colonies except for tiny enclaves here and there – and not without much
bloodletting (e.g. Kenya) – became politically independent if (mostly) formal
members of a British Commonwealth of Nations – the ‘British’ has long since
been withdrawn from the name – while the ‘special relationship’ became
something of a figleaf, even a sham, perpetuated in time by Tony Blair’s ‘poodle’
relationship with President George W Bush over the Afghan and Iraqi wars, and
then held up to scarcely-concealed mockery by Donald Trump (at this time of
writing we await with interest his variously postponed official visit to
Britain this coming June, and also probably his speech before the House of
Commons); but in the mockery stakes Barack Obama had got there before him. The
US has tended to treat with the EU (with Britain inside) rather than in terms
of bilateral US-UK relations.
After having shockingly been rebuffed
by President Charles de Gaulle’s veto over Common Market membership back in
1963, British Europeanists won the day when Britons voted for EEC, later EU
membership in the 1970s. Though de Gaulle may have been right: Britain has been
a fractious member over the years. In doing so it failed to take a fuller
advantage of EU membership in forwarding British interests on the continent,
instead harping on the arbitrary and ‘bureaucratic’ nature of a union apparently
ganging up on the British and dominated by Johnny Foreigners. The Tory Party
never quite reconciled itself to losing the other two ‘traditional’ aspects of
British foreign policy in consequence. Indeed the EU was instrumental in the
downfalls of three Conservative prime ministers: Margaret Thatcher, John Major
and David Cameron, and now with a fourth in the offing (and why not a fifth,
after her?)
Brexit has brought much of this even more
into the open. We have a recrudescent Imperialism in a recent Defence Secretary’s
announcement of gunboat diplomacy being deployed in the South China Sea against
China (once we have an aircraft carrier to do it), and trade ministers
spreading the word that Britain can come to triumph alone in world trade
without benefit of ‘Europe’ (fuck Europeanism). This is a warmed-up version of
the ‘splendid isolation’ that Britain maintained in the early 1900s as being
above other nations in needing no alliances or truck with inferior powers. Except
that it no longer presides over a quarter of the globe with a navy to match,
nor does it now hold the world’s reserve currency, as it did at the time.
The Atlanticists might have made a
stronger showing in an anti-EU atmosphere but for the present occupant of the
White House who seems strangely indifferent to any ‘special relationship’ whether
with Britain or anyone else. ‘America First’ on his baseball caps makes this
fairly clear. In any case the prospect of the UK becoming in effect the 51st
state does not hold a lot of appeal.
The British ruling classes are still
educated up to Oxbridge in the default position of Britain being a world power,
which may be why so many politicians, in or out of ministerial office, appear unable
to grapple with the real world.
Probably our most realistic Foreign Secretary was that working-class orphan
Ernest Bevin.
But the big and perhaps insurmountable
problem is a tradition of having had too many foreign options: imperial power,
dominator of European developments, bilateral partnership with the United
States. Goodness! So much an embarrassment of riches that one hardly knew which
one to concentrate upon most without losing the others! And so Britain has finally
failed at pursuing all three (we shall see if this changes in June). Perhaps we
should try to be a bit more Swiss. Switzerland is a well-ordered small country
and not all that bad, really.
Years ago, Dean Acheson said: ‘Britain
has lost an empire and not yet found a role.’ This is probably truer now than
it was when he said it.
But Britain (the first country to
abolish slavery) has as strong a radical tradition as any other tradition. It
is the birthplace of women’s rights (Mary Wollstonecraft 1759-97). The first
mass workers’ movement in the capitalist era was Chartism. It was the home of
Marxism, in the persons of Marx and Engels themselves, not to speak of William
Morris and (the Irish) James Connolly. Over the 19th century it
built up the world’s most powerful trade unions. Together with the USA it was
the home of the suffragette movement. Despite a period after World War II of
Left-wing decline, the Labour Party has re-emerged as the biggest social
democratic party in Europe. Meanwhile 50% of England is owned by 1% of the
population (Guardian 18.4.19). Unemployment is low but productivity is almost
the lowest in the Western world, while many are holding down two jobs while
struggling to survive on food banks and in-work benefits. Our infrastructures, from
Universal Credit to local councils to education to the prison service to the
railways to the big-profits-bigger-leakages of the privatised water companies,
are in a mess. Brexit has placed Britain’s constitution under strain. The
two-party first-past-the-post plus non-elective peers political system has been
seen as hopelessly undemocratic for years but no one in authority appears to
have the will to do anything about it. This is pointing increasingly towards
the one option available of socialism. I say ‘one option’ because no other
prospect of change looks very likely. Or rather, there is another option:
becoming one big island bank or hedge-funder, which will profit financiers but
not please many others. A maritime quasi-Switzerland indeed!
