The Empire Project: The Rise and Fall of the British World-System, 1830–1970 (70 page)

Had politics in South Africa been solely a matter of the antagonism between the white communities, they would at least have been simple. The republican option repelled the English but also many Afrikaners who feared the turbulence it threatened. So long as that was true, the British connection was safe. But, after 1918, Afrikaner opinion became more susceptible to the appeal of nationalism not less, as the irritations of wartime were replaced by new sources of grievance. The main reason lay in the rising fear of the educated class – clerics (
predikants
), teachers, (a handful of) academics, lawyers and journalists – that the deepening poverty among rural whites (almost all Afrikaners) would destroy the cohesion of the Afrikaner people. By 1921, the numbers of ‘poor whites’ (the term was coined in 1906 for those neither skilled nor semi-skilled) was estimated at over 150,000 – perhaps one-fifth of the Afrikaner community.
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Over much of South Africa, the land was too poor or too dry to support much more than subsistence farming, and after 1920 the problem was made worse by the huge fall in agricultural prices from the artificial heights of the First World War.
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To the Afrikaner elite, three outcomes of almost equal horror seemed all too likely. The poor whites might be seduced by the appeal of socialism or communism and exchange their ethnic loyalty for one based on class. If they drifted to the towns, they might be absorbed by the English culture that was dominant there. Or they might lapse into ‘barbarism’ by adopting the living standards of the blacks and intermarrying with them. It was this double crisis – the threatened loss of both Afrikaner and white identity in so large a fraction of the Afrikaner people – that gave Afrikaner nationalism its urgency and sharpened the edge of its racial message: explicitly against imperialism and its
Doppelganger
capitalism; implicitly against the silent threat of the black majority.

Social rather than ethnic antagonism was also a problem for those English politicians who counted on Britannic solidarity to keep Afrikaner republicanism at bay and force Afrikaner ‘moderates’ to accept the permanence of the British connection. Class conflict between English (often British immigrant) mineworkers and the mining interest whose influence was strong in the Unionist party had been a feature of pre-war politics and had led to the rise of the Labour party on the Rand. After 1918, these intra-English class tensions erupted spectacularly. Post-war depression was the immediate cause. South African gold producers were trapped between the fixed price of gold and the rising costs of drilling ever deeper into the gold-bearing reef beneath Johannesburg. They longed to cut their costs by substituting cheap black labour for the costlier white men they were forced to employ by the strength of (white) organised labour on the Rand. The surge in prices during wartime (when gold's price was still fixed) made matters worse, and when the temporary relief that came with the fall in the post-war value of the pound against gold was reversed by early 1922, and depression led to declining production, the crisis could not be postponed. When the mineowners suspended the old ratio of white to black workers, a strike broke out. In early March 1922, it became a general strike on the Rand, and then an armed insurrection as some of the strikers declared a socialist republic. Smuts’ reaction was uncompromising. Troops were sent in, and in several days of fighting over 200 people were killed. The strike was crushed. The number of white miners was cut by over 3,000 and real wages fell. The gold industry returned to profit.
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But Smuts’ identification with the mining interest was to cost him dear. Three revolutions in a few short years, sighed one English politician, was ‘too much for any country’.
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Smuts was committed wholeheartedly to empire membership. He had commanded the imperial force in the East African campaign. He had represented South Africa at the Imperial Conferences of 1917 and 1918. By the last year of the war, he had become one of the most powerful figures in Lloyd George's government. He played a leading part in the planning for a league of nations and in the diplomacy of peacemaking at Paris in 1919. In a secret mission in 1921, he had pressed on the leaders of Sinn Fein the argument for accepting dominion status and not holding out for secession and an Irish republic.
¹¹⁴
Yet Smuts had also been one of the loudest voices demanding British recognition of the dominions’ equality: in constitutional status and external policy. And, like other dominion leaders, he thought that Britain's involvement in post-war Europe would weaken her claims on dominion support. It was vital, he urged, that Britain renounce secret diplomacy for open covenants. Then the dominions would know what commitments they faced.
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Smuts knew very well that, whatever the guise, South African involvement with Britain's global interests was deeply unpopular with many Afrikaners. The ‘bulk’ of the Dutch people, he told a friend in Britain, were republicans.
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But he was convinced that a united British Empire within the League of Nations was the key to world order in an age of great uncertainty; and that survival as a ‘white man's country’ (itself far from certain in the 1920s) made empire membership essential for South Africa. In a conscious echo of Rhodes’ programme, Smuts looked forward to a chain of white states stretching north to Kenya – ‘A great white Africa along the eastern backbone, with railway and road communications connecting north and south’ – under South African influence and sooner or later as part of the South African Union. Here was the promise of South Africa's greatness, and her commercial prosperity (as the sub-metropole of this settler Africa) and the best guarantee against a colonial policy that favoured Indian traders or native (i.e. African) chiefs.
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But this long game of South Africa's future made it all the more vital to have influence in London, to be a partner in African empire, and to keep the loyalty of the South African English and the British settlers to the north of the Limpopo.

In 1921, Smuts had turned the tables on his nationalist opponents. Post-war prosperity and the reaction of English voters against republicanism gave him and his ex-Unionist allies a clear election victory over both Hertzog and the Labour party. The electorate had given a ‘decisive answer’ on the question of secession, said Smuts.
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After that, almost everything went wrong. Depression, the bloodshed on the Rand and the continuing fear of a crisis in Europe damaged Smuts’ reputation. In 1923, to Smuts’ great chagrin, the white settlers in Southern Rhodesia (where rule by the British South Africa Company was about to end) voted for a separate future as a self-governing colony rather than join the South African Union. In the general election of June 1924, although its popular vote held up well, the South Africa party lost badly to the National and Labour parties united in a pact.
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Smuts was hated by Afrikaners and many British, Fitzpatrick told Lord Milner.
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‘Intense unreasoning racialism (i.e. towards the English) and class hatred and communism’, was how he explained the defeat to Amery.
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But the 1924 election was not the prelude to South African secession.

Hertzog and his able lieutenant, Daniel François Malan (a
predikant
turned newspaper editor), had been the champions of republicanism. But, with the defeat of 1921 and the social crisis within the Afrikaner community, their priorities shifted. To tackle the problem of ‘poor whites’, if need be by a ‘colour bar’ in employment, to safeguard the cultural unity of the Afrikaner people and to promote Afrikaans as a national language (the 1910 constitution provided for English and Dutch) laid a premium on power not principled opposition. Hertzog knew that without Labour party support he had little hope of defeating Smuts, and that many of Labour's English voters would desert it if it allied with him on a republican ticket. Instead, he was able to trade on the widespread fear of white unemployment and the ‘ignorant panic’
¹²²
over black competition. His greatest fear was that Smuts would beat him by an appeal to the Britannic sentiments of the English minority. ‘Smuts het net een kans’, he told Malan in November 1923, ‘en dit is nogmaals ’n khaki electie’ – Smuts had one last chance, a khaki election.
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What Hertzog wanted, when once in power, was the same formal status for which Smuts had pressed: constitutional equality within the Empire, as the substance (or so he claimed) if not the form of republican independence. By an ironic twist, the need to safeguard a white South Africa – the same ultimate goal as Smuts – had led him to accept, for the time being at least, the same constraints and the same solution.

The dominions and Ireland

Hertzog's opportunity came with the Imperial Conference in 1926. At the previous post-war conferences in 1921 and 1923, the dominion premiers showed no appetite for the constitutional debate envisaged in 1918. Hertzog gave warning of his intention, and the British government planned its tactics carefully. A. J. (now Lord) Balfour, who chaired the committee of British and dominion ministers set up at the conference to report on ‘inter-imperial relations’, had already signalled his willingness to concede the principle of equal status to the white dominions.
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When Hertzog presented his draft, in which the dominions were described as ‘independent states’,
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it was not the principle to which the British ministers objected but the wording. They were ready to concede the dominions’ right to exercise external as much as internal autonomy – the right to conduct their own foreign policy – but resisted ‘independence’ as implying the lapse of their Empire membership. (Mackenzie King also opposed ‘independence’ as an American usage that would be badly received in English Canada.) After a blizzard of drafts, Balfour produced a formula of almost theological intricacy in which the central concession of the dominions’ equal constitutional status (and their implicit right of secession) was carefully balanced against their free and willing recognition of empire membership. In a sunburst of good will it was accepted by all.

The effect of this pronouncement was twofold. It gave a meaning to dominionhood that was flexible enough to embrace all the dominions’ varied relationships with Britain. The risk of a division between the dominions themselves was averted. Secondly (and consequentially), it reinvented the bilateral connection between Britain and the different dominions as an intimate form of international association whose terms of membership (‘free association’) were very attractive to small states in an age of collective insecurity. ‘The British Empire’, said Balfour's version, ‘depends essentially…on positive ideals. Free institutions are its lifeblood. Free cooperation is its instrument. Peace, security, and progress are among its ideals.’ This appealed to a wide segment of opinion in all the dominions for whom the dangers of isolation and diplomatic ‘weightlessness’ were as important as Britannic loyalty, if not more so. Balfour's formula acknowledged that the real ties that would hold the dominions to Britain were the informal ties of sentiment or self-interest. Its acceptance by the least Britannic of the dominions, South Africa and the Irish Free State, showed that for one reason or the other exit from the British world-system had as yet little appeal.

Balfour's motive is clear enough. He wanted to discredit the ‘small but obstinate minority who…persistently advocate the break-up of the Empire’.
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Free association would pull the rug out from beneath the secessionists. Austen Chamberlain, the Foreign Secretary, may have hoped that he would gain his reward in the dominions’ diplomatic sympathy: indeed, in the defence discussions that followed, all except the Irish Free State said that they would come to Britain's aid if ever necessary.
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Balfour, Chamberlain and Lord Birkenhead (the Secretary of State for India) bundled Amery, the Dominions Secretary, along with them. He was a political lightweight. But the three senior ministers may have had another reason for wanting an amicable settlement. All three, especially Birkenhead and Chamberlain, had been deeply involved in the Anglo-Irish treaty of December 1921. They had the strongest motive for avoiding confrontation with the Irish Free State government and rousing ‘die-hardism’ from its slumbers on the Tory backbenches. Nor could they be sure that too little flexibility at the conference might not damage the pro-Treaty government in Dublin and pave a path to power for its republican and secessionist enemies.

Indeed, of all the dominions, the Irish Free State was the one that British ministers watched most nervously.
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Its assimilation to the dominion ‘model’ was more a hope than an expectation. Its ‘Britannic garrison’ after partition was far smaller than South Africa's. For all the practical limits to linguistic independence, its cultural revolt against Englishness was more vehement than anything seen in the other dominions. Alone of the dominions, it had won self-government in a violent insurrection against British rule. Alone among the dominions, its right to self-rule was limited by treaty. In the war of independence (1919–21), Sinn Fein declared an Irish Republic, and its candidates who were successful in the United Kingdom general election of December 1918 (but refused to take their seats at Westminster) met as a separate Irish parliament, the Dail Eireann. After eighteen months of guerrilla warfare, terrorism and reprisal had produced a stalemate truce in July 1921, and a treaty settlement was hammered out in London between the Lloyd George government and a Sinn Fein delegation. It gave the twenty-six counties of southern Ireland ‘Canadian’ status as a self-governing dominion, but rejected the demand for an Irish republic outside the Empire and insisted on an oath of allegiance to the King by those taking office or sitting in the Dail. The possibility of a united Ireland – if Northern Ireland agreed – or of repartition on terms more generous to the South was held open. By a narrow majority, the Dail upheld the treaty proposals. But the Sinn Fein government split. De Valera, president of the 1919 republic, denounced the oath of allegiance (though he was willing to recognise the King as the head of the Empire). Much of the Irish Republican Army in the south and west rebelled against a civilian regime whose treaty-based constitution was at odds with the claim that the citizen in arms was the true embodiment of the Irish nation – and which threatened to end the free rein that the ‘flying columns’ enjoyed.
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It took a bloody civil war, with a death-toll heavier than in the Anglo-Irish struggle, to impose the authority of the ‘treatyites’ and the Free State government.