The Empire Project: The Rise and Fall of the British World-System, 1830–1970 (105 page)

Thirdly, Suez exposed the divisions that would make themselves felt if London resorted to unilateral action internationally – the alliance with France cut little ice with the critics of Suez. It might have been true that Eden's opponents at home were more vocal than numerous, and that he enjoyed the support of a silent majority. The protracted delay before he took action may have amplified doubts and multiplied doubters. But the torrent of criticism showed that ‘liberal internationalism’ – faith in collective action and the ‘rule of law’ – enjoyed wide public support, not least among the elite. Ignoring its precepts risked the corrosion of a government's moral authority, and made it more vulnerable to external pressures. Division at home was mirrored in the Commonwealth. Among the Commonwealth countries, only Australia and New Zealand gave Eden full backing. The Liberal government in Canada, mindful of Washington's views, and traditionally mistrustful of Britain's Middle Eastern adventures, expressed deep reservations. Nehru's opposition was vehement.
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It could hardly be doubted that, if they wanted the Commonwealth to reflect British influence, British leaders would have to take care not to upset its new member states, henceforth mainly Asian and African. Old-fashioned imperialism (of the Suez variety) would be self-defeating at best.

Fourthly, Suez suggested the limits of British military power. In 1882, they had landed from the Canal, scattering the Egyptians at Tel el-Kebir before entering Cairo to install a puppet regime. In 1956, they occupied (most of) the Canal Zone alongside the French. But there would be no knock-out blow and no Egyptian collapse.
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The British faced a tougher regime, an urban environment and a hostile population. Nor could they count on their regional allies where the popular mood was one of Arab nationalist outrage: their bases in Libya (perfect for use against Egypt) could not be used.
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Their military action was then brusquely called off on Washington's orders. Suez seemed to show that the age of colonial ‘expeditions’ had passed. It was one thing to engage in counter-insurgency (as in Malaya, Kenya or Cyprus) or to defend a frontier against foreign incursions (as the British were to do in Kuwait, Borneo and Oman). But invading a recalcitrant state to defend British interests was now beyond British strength. Of course, this was a symptom not just of military weakness but of geopolitical change. 1956 marked a shift in superpower competition. The dual crisis set off by the Soviet invasion of Hungary and the Anglo-French intervention in Egypt signalled a new phase of Cold War. It confirmed the effective partition of Europe between two grand ‘protectors’. But it was also the moment at which Soviet–American rivalry began to extend much more widely in the ex- (or nearly ex-) colonial world. The British had their part in this new global struggle, but they had to observe the new rules of the game. It was more important than ever to show that the West was the nationalists’ friend. Independent Afro-Asia must not turn to the East. Colonialism's aim should be to wind itself up, as a finishing school for Afro-Asia's new nation-states. The other ground-rule was just as important. Deploying British troops against mass political movements had always been risky, and was rarely favoured in London. By the late 1950s, to be trapped in a struggle against any popular movement with no end in sight and no local allies seemed the worst possible option. We will see in the next chapter how London reacted to the threat of this happening.

It might be deduced from these objective conditions that a British world-system could survive in some form, at least for a while. But it could have no real independence while the Cold War persisted (as Churchill had seen) and could face no serious opposition. Its internal solidarity (as a grouping of Commonwealth countries) was bound to be fragile. The burden on Britain, economic and military, was bound to be large. Yet British leaders, however shrewd and pragmatic, saw little choice but to press on. Why they did so, and what happened, is the theme of what follows.

14 RELUCTANT RETREAT, 1959–1968

The most curious aspect of the British reaction to Suez, once the immediate drama had passed, was the mood of public indifference. There was no grand debate about Britain's place in the world, no official inquiry into what had gone wrong. Neither main party showed any desire to rake over the details, perhaps because even those most against Eden's policy realised how deeply the crisis had divided British public opinion. Instead, all sides seemed anxious to treat it as an unfortunate accident, or as Eden's personal tragedy, as if the whole episode could be laid at his door. A desire to avoid any further embarrassment, or perhaps some awareness of what an inquiry might reveal, may explain this response. But what seems even more curious is that, after such a defeat, British leaders still showed an extraordinary faith that, with its sails duly trimmed, Britain must remain a world power. For, despite the conventional view that they hastened to scuttle their remaining commitments and fall back upon Europe, the reverse was the case. The dream of a British world-system, updated and modernised, haunted Harold Macmillan, prime minister 1957–63. A less robust version, more anaemic and ethereal, bewitched Harold Wilson, who led the Labour government of 1964–70. The rapidity with which what remained of the Empire was wound up politically, far from being planned, was a painful surprise. Official opinion had intended a ‘managed’ withdrawal, with a ‘transfer of power’ to carefully chosen ‘moderates’. Constitutional change would proceed on a schedule, and local politicians would have to ‘earn’ each incremental advance by displaying their fitness to govern. Respect for the institutions with which a benevolent Britain had endowed them, and a desire to maintain some form of ‘British connection’, would be the test of this. But, when these plans began to unravel, British policy fell into confusion. Behind the facade of memoranda and minutes, official anxiety sometimes bordered on panic. By the time that a general withdrawal from Britain's eastern commitments was eventually ordered in January 1968 (to take effect three years later), the familiar conception of a British world policy, inherited from the late Victorians, had almost completely dissolved. Amid a blizzard of vacuous reports into what Britain's interests now were, a future in Europe (as yet undefined) seemed the only fixed point on which (almost) all could agree.

Why was it possible to go on believing in a British world-system (however constrained) in the later 1950s? In fact, as is often the case, the logic of their situation appeared quite different to contemporaries who had no means of predicting the scale and speed of geopolitical change. Far from enforcing a drastic rethink, that logic encouraged their hopes of renewal and prolonged a Churchillian view of Britain's ‘manifest destiny’ for nearly a decade. The main source of hope was the rapid resumption of friendly relations across the Atlantic. Washington's fury at Suez was quickly assuaged. The growth of superpower competition and Khrushchev's global ambitions made the British too useful an ally to fall out with for long. Their curious attachment to an ‘independent’ nuclear deterrent could be safely indulged: indeed, it quickly led London to scrap its own missile programme for an American substitute. From the British viewpoint, this was a huge reassurance that, if they avoided the sort of catastrophic misjudgment of which Eden was guilty, they would enjoy the support – diplomatic and material – which they now knew was essential. It reinforced their belief that what remained of their empire, if properly managed, was an invaluable asset as the Cold War expanded. The process of transition from an empire of rule to an empire of influence was as yet incomplete. In plenty of places, a decade might be needed before a suitable class of political leaders could be trained up for the work of representative government. Nor was it obvious that colonial authority was bound to break down in the foreseeable future. Where it was still a ‘going concern’, it was hard to imagine its sudden displacement or who might push it aside. Constitutional change was essential. But it was easy to think that London held the initiative and could settle the timing.

In holding these views, British leaders were in tune with the main stream of public opinion. Another Suez adventure would have led to an outcry. But belief that Britain held a special place in the world was still deeply embedded in popular attitudes. This was only partly a residue of the imperial past. It also sprang from the feeling that Britain's parliamentary, industrial and cultural achievements embodied a wealth of experience and conferred a moral authority that no other country could match. No one could doubt (this was the premise) that British institutions were best, and that British motives for fostering them were altruistic and disinterested. A hasty withdrawal – as had happened in Palestine – might be forced by necessity. But it should not be a ‘policy’ or a deliberate plan. And, in the late 1950s, one other force was at work. Britain was still in the grip of its ‘post-war’ mood and mentality. A heroic conception of the British war against Hitler pervaded both popular culture and middle-class attitudes. It was purveyed by film, a huge war literature and an array of children's comics, then at the height of their influence before the full advent of television.
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Settling instead for a secondary role in the world was not easy to square with the service and sacrifice of Dunkirk, the Battle of Britain, the Blitz, Alamein or the D-Day invasion. It was an historical irony that patriotic support for some version of empire had been nourished by the war that had destroyed its foundations.

White hopes in Black Africa

One of the main justifications for retaining Britain's presence in the Middle East after 1945 had been that it would help to protect Sub-Saharan Africa from Soviet intrusion and subversion. Even Attlee, who had opposed staying on there in 1946–7, had imagined a neutralised Middle East as a ‘glacis of desert and Arabs’, barring the way to the valuable – and defensible – British sphere in Africa. Far beyond Attlee, and far beyond Whitehall, Africa's importance was now on the rise. With the loss of India, and all that it had meant for British power and prestige, Africa became the main theatre for constructive imperial energy.

Three kinds of assumptions helped to entrench what appears in retrospect a romantic delusion, cherished as much on the Left as on the Right in British politics. The first was that Sub-Saharan Africa was still a safe geopolitical niche, sheltered from the storms of the post-war world. Without a bridgehead in the Middle East, the Soviet Union lacked the will or the means to exert any influence in the African colonies, British, French, Portuguese or Belgian. Geographical access from the Soviet bloc was very restricted. Colonial Africa lay well behind the front-line in the emerging Cold War. There was little need for the British to take much account of external pressures on a continent still largely frozen in diplomatic time. Secondly, Africa's politics remained on the face of it extraordinarily placid. The political legacy of the inter-war years in the British dependencies had been ‘indirect rule’. The effect was to localise political life and marginalise those who wanted states and nations on the Western model. Colonial Africa thus lagged far behind Asia. There was nothing to compare with the vast popular movements that had revolutionised politics in India, China, Indonesia and Vietnam before and during the Second World War. Hence it was widely assumed that Africans were still in their political innocence. Their ideas and habits could be formed and moulded by the adept use of tutelage. Unlike Asians (‘Asiatics’ remained common usage in the 1950s), with their tenacious traditions, complex religiosity and hyper-sensitive cultures (to which the intensity of ‘Asiatic nationalism’ was usually attributed), Africans seemed likely to embrace Western modernity with much less ambivalence. So the colonial mission would be much easier, as well as more satisfying, than it had been in Asia.

Thirdly, there was Africa's place in the world economy. In the depressed 1930s, African resources had attracted little interest (with the exception of gold). But the Second World War and its turbulent aftermath transformed the prospects of its export commodities. In the era of shortage and Britain's ‘dollar famine’, they assumed a vast new importance. Colonial producers, after all, could be paid in inconvertible ‘soft’ sterling and at prices prescribed by official ‘marketing boards’. Strategic minerals like uranium, copper and tin; foodstuffs like cocoa and vegetable oils; and tobacco (the one indispensable luxury in the age of austerity): all were urgently needed to speed Britain's recovery, ease the pangs of denial, earn dollars or save them. Modernising the colonial economies became an official priority. Partitioned in haste, ruled on a shoestring, colonial Africa had come into its own. And with the richest parts – if not the largest share – of Sub-Saharan Africa, the British could expect to profit the most from this reversal of fortune.

The easy assumption that political change would proceed at worst on a leisurely timetable, allowing plenty of time for a controlled experiment in social and economic reform, did not last long. Within fifteen years of the end of the war, British power in Africa was in a state of collapse. Between 1960 and 1965, it vanished altogether. But, although the symptoms of weakness can be detected much earlier, it was surprisingly late before the loss of British authority had become a political fact and not a fear, a hope or a rumour. It is sometimes supposed that the British withdrawal was a serial affair: marked by the orderly transfer of power to successor regimes by due constitutional process. And so it was on the surface, with one crucial exception. The reality was that British plans for transition were swept away by the crises that afflicted much of the continent from early 1959 onwards, so that in the event the British departure was at best hasty and improvised where it did not break down altogether (as over Southern Rhodesia). Yet, until the crises set in, it had seemed quite realistic to treat colonial Africa as a cluster of regions, with different demands, different solutions and different political clocks. Hence the British applied different rules and imposed different timetables in the three main divisions of their African empire: in ‘British West Africa’, where there were no white settlers or major strategic interests; in the East African territories, where the settler interest was vocal (in Kenya), absent (in Uganda) or muted (in Tanganyika, a United Nations trust territory); and in South Central Africa, where a self-governing settler colony (Southern Rhodesia) was yoked in 1953 to the two ‘Northern’ protectorates, in one of which (Northern Rhodesia) the settler population was rapidly growing with the boom on the Copperbelt. Looming over British interests (and also their thinking) was the fourth great component of Britain's African
imperium
. The Union of South Africa was a fully self-governing dominion, and a sovereign state (unlike Southern Rhodesia). After 1948, it had an Afrikaner nationalist government. But, in the long view from London, it was a quarrelsome, irritating, but exceptionally valuable partner in the defence of what remained of British world power. The hope that its British connections (including the 40 per cent of whites who were ‘English’, i.e. English-speaking) would help liberalise its politics was not given up until after 1960.