Empires of the Mind

by Robert Gildea

  Empire by Force of Arms

  One of the ironies of French history in 1944 and 1945 is that the rhetoric of liberation applied to the metropolis did not transfer to the Empire. This is because liberation was a means to re-establish French greatness, not an end in itself. On 25 May 1945 Gaston Monnerville, a black lawyer and deputy from French Guyana, who was perfectly assimilated into the French system, told the French Provisional Consultative Assembly, which had transferred to Paris, ‘Without the Empire, France would not be a liberated country’; ‘Thanks to her Empire, France is a victorious country.’88 This tension had led to disastrous results in Algeria less than three weeks before, on 8 May 1945. As French crowds in the metropolis and Algeria celebrated the victory of democracy against Nazism, Algerian nationalists protested against the imprisonment of Messali Hadj, leader of the clandestine Algerian Popular Party (PPA), and demanded an end to colonialism. At Sétif the Algerian flag was flown. Clashes with police became riots and then an insurrection during which 103 Europeans were killed. In turn French repression killed between 6,000 and 8,000 Algerians, although the PPA claimed 30–45,000 martyrs.89 Far from seeing this as a legitimate demand for Algerian liberation, the French authorities treated it as dangerous disorder, while the Communist Party, seeking to preserve the discourse of Resistance on the French side, denounced a fascist plot and blamed ‘troublesome elements of Hitlerian inspiration’.90 Messali Hadj wrote to the American president to say that ‘the fundamental evil from which the Algerian people suffer is colonialism’ and the massacre at Sétif became a founding moment for Algerian nationalism.91

  This desperate attempt to recover or reassert empire was repeated in other regions. In the same month of May 1945 Senegalese troops were landed in Syria from the cruiser Richelieu and when the Syrians refused to concede French paramountcy the French shelled Damascus between 29 and 31 May 1945, killing 800 Syrians. Hypocritically, the British denounced this ‘reign of terror’ and intervened, driving the French back to barracks. In the Provisional Consultative Assembly Foreign Minister Georges Bidault declared that ‘justice is the only issue, honour is at stake and the patrie is our passion’. Opposing him was Pierre Cot, a charismatic leader on the French Left. He argued that:

  To refuse to deal with the Syrian, Lebanese or Arab peoples as equals, to hold on to old privileges and old ways at any price, is the politics of the past. The politics of the future, on the other hand, is that which champions the independence of peoples still subjected to colonial or semi-colonial regimes and acts as a fraternal guide on their path to liberty.92

  On this occasion, Cot’s argument carried the day, and no credits were forthcoming to keep France in Syria. The ‘politics of the past’, however, were far from over. De Gaulle, who had served in Syria–Lebanon in 1929–31, regretted that the opposition ‘did not say a word about the work of civilisation undertaken by France in Syria and Lebanon, the efforts of our soldiers who helped to free them from the yoke of the Ottoman Empire in the First World War and helped to protect them from Hitler’s domination in the second’.93 The French had far from given up on Syria.

  While scolding the French, the British took the opportunity to strengthen their position in the Middle East. ‘The Middle East is a region of vital consequence for Britain and the British Empire’ concluded the British Cabinet’s Palestine Committee, chaired by Herbert Morrison, on 8 September 1945. ‘It forms the point in the system of communication by land, sea and air which links Britain with India, Australia and the Far East; it is also the Empire’s main reservoir of oil. The attitude of the Arab states to any decision is a matter of first importance. Unfortunately the future of Palestine bulks large in all Arab eyes.’94 In their Palestine mandate the British tried to limit the influx of Jewish refugees in order to minimise provoking Palestinian Arabs. This uneasy balance was upset by the Holocaust. In 1945 David Ben Gurion toured former concentration camps and told survivors in a Bavarian hospital, ‘a vibrant Jewish Palestine exists and that even if its gates are locked the Yishuv [settlement] will break them open with its strong hands’.95 The British remained obstinate, and two Zionist resistance organisations, the Haganah and Irgun, launched attacks on British railways, oil refineries and other installations in Palestine on 31 October 1945 in a bid to force them to rethink the virtues of a Jewish Palestine.96

  In the Far East the position of France was at a nadir. The Japanese, feeling less secure after the fall of Vichy in France, with the American recapture of the Philippines in December 1943 and facing US bombing raids as far as Saigon, decided to round up the French authorities and remaining military in Vietnam on 6 March 1945, taking direct control. French Vietnam with its 20,000 settlers was not only discredited but destroyed. In a somewhat fanciful way, de Gaulle’s government issued a declaration on 25 March 1945, announcing that when France did returned to Indo-China the five countries of Tonkin, Annam, Cochin-China, Laos and Cambodia would be joined in an Indochinese federation within the French Empire under a French governor-general. On 15 June 1945 de Gaulle persuaded General Leclerc to lead an expeditionary force to recover Indo-China, but this took months to arrive.

  The balance of forces was completely transformed by the atomic bomb attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the capitulation of Japan on 15 August 1945. The communist-led League for the Independence of Vietnam or Vietminh under Ho Chi Minh emerged from the shadows to seize Hanoi on 22 August and Saigon on 25 August. He invited Emperor Bao Dai to abdicate, and on 2 September 1945 proclaimed a democratic Vietnamese republic and its independence. The American Declaration of Independence of 1776 and the French Declaration of the Rights of Man of 1789 were quoted in an attempt to win the Americans over to Vietnamese claims to self-government and to expose the contradiction between French revolutionary principles and colonial practices. ‘They have built more prisons than schools’, Ho taunted. ‘They have mercilessly slain our patriots; they have drowned our uprisings in rivers of blood.’97

  As the Vietnamese began to attack French settlers, the French themselves were dependent on the British Army to hold the fort until the arrival of Leclerc. General Douglas Gracey of the Indian Army and a veteran of the Burma campaign arrived on 13 September 1945 with troops from India, Burma and Malaya, which had just been recaptured, to take the Japanese surrender. The tricolour was raised in Saigon and French settlers went on the rampage against the Vietnamese, while French and British soldiers looked on.98 General Leclerc finally arrived on 5 October 1945 and began to organise French forces for a push into North Vietnam, and also into Cambodia and Laos.

  In 1940–2 the European colonial empires were all but defeated. The humiliation of white supremacy and the rhetoric of resistance and liberation from Nazi power encouraged colonial peoples to seek their own liberation. They were supported in this by the United States proclaiming the ‘end of empire’ and the United Nations defending the equal right of all countries to self-government. The beleaguered empires, however, were reluctant to abandon the territories that were the foundation of great power status, and which had contributed to their victory over the Axis. In 1945 they were therefore blind and deaf to claims to independence of subject peoples they had once governed and were prepared to use massive force to impose their will. These violent attempts to recover empire by colonial powers, as if nothing had happened, only set up problems for the future.

  3

  The Imperialism of Decolonisation

  After 1945 Britain and France faced a dilemma. Exhausted after six years of war, deeply in debt to the United States and other countries, confronted by rising demands for self-government and independence in their empires, and shaken by the United Nations’ declarations on the equality of all nations, they might have been forgiven for recognising that the age of imperialism was indeed over and jettisoning their colonies. The difficult challenge of decolonisation would be embarked upon. Europe, emerging from the same six years of war, tyranny and devastation, could now be seen as the arena in which former allies and former enemies coul
d build peace and prosperity.

  Many other factors, however, mitigated against such choices. The loss of some colonies did not necessarily serve as a model for losing others. On the contrary, the pain of losing some colonies intensified the desire to hold fast to what remained. Britain’s loss of India, the jewel in the crown, in 1947, increased the need to develop its influence in the Middle East and eastern and southern Africa. France’s loss of Indo-China in 1954 made it imperative to preserve Algeria, even at the cost of another six-year war. Threats of Arab nationalism to their strategic positions in the Middle East and North Africa and the spectre of the Munich agreement prompted France and Britain, together with the new colonial state of Israel, to intervene militarily in Suez in 1956. Other factors too favoured imperialism rather than decolonisation. The colonies were a source of foodstuffs and raw materials that could sustain the mother countries and help build their postwar economies. European settler communities, especially in Algeria and eastern and southern Africa, put intense pressure on the metropolis to defend their vested interests vis-à-vis the indigenous Algerian or African population. Lastly, in a new Cold War order dominated by the United States and the Soviet Union, empires underpinned the great power status of Britain and France and kept them as serious players on the world stage. All this had a serious impact on the European project but here France and Britain behaved very differently. While France put itself at the heart of the new Europe, Britain feared loosening its ties with the Commonwealth and remained outside the negotiations that founded the new Europe.

  Returning by sea from America on 21 September 1945, John Maynard Keynes concluded that ‘we cannot police half the world at our own expense when we have already gone into pawn for the other half’.1 Britain not only owed $153 billion to the United States but $3 billion to India and Egypt for the cost of defending them. Six months later, in March 1946, Indian Congress leader Jawaharlal Nehru published an article in the New York Times Magazine announcing that ‘the whole system known as colonialism must go’. There was, he said, ‘a passion and hunger for freedom, equality and better living conditions which consume millions of people in Asia and Africa’.2 West Indian journalist George Padmore and Gold Coast activist Kwame Nkrumah organised the 5th Pan-African conference in Manchester in October 1945 which defined a Gandhian strategy of non-violent socialist revolution in Africa.3 In Tangiers, on 10 April 1947, Sultan Mohammed V of Morocco, who had hosted a meeting of Churchill, Roosevelt and French leaders de Gaulle and Giraud in Casablanca in 1943, gave a speech in which he stated, ‘Morocco took an active part in the last war through its sons and all the means at its disposal, until the final victory.’ As a result, he asserted, ‘Morocco ardently desires to recover its full rights […] the Arab peoples form a single nation; whether they are in Tangier or Damascus they are one.’4

  Britain and France were obliged to rethink their relationship with their empires. Abandoning them wholesale at this stage, however, was not an option. Rationalisation was attempted: some regions were slated for progress towards independence, while others were to be held on to at all costs. Greater autonomy was conferred in a new architecture of governance, but the metropolis and settler populations retained the upper hand. Economic development was undertaken, but the aim was always to supply the metropolis with what it needed, not to provide competition. The result in the immediate postwar years was less decolonisation than what has been called a ‘second colonial occupation’, ‘the imperialism of decolonisation’ or, in the case of Britain, ‘the fourth British empire’.5

  The British Empire: Letting Go and Clinging On

  The so-called white settler Dominions were still at the heart of the British Empire/Commonwealth, although the dynamics between them were changing. Canada, which had been known as the ‘arsenal of empire’ during the Second World War, was expressing a degree of ‘Dominion nationalism’ and moving close to the United States in economic and defence terms. It passed its own citizenship act in 1946, to which the British were forced to respond with a British Nationality Act in 1948, to ensure that British citizens in Canada would remain British subjects in the United Kingdom and elsewhere in the Commonwealth.6 In South Africa, Smuts’ South Africa Party was swept aside in May 1948 by the Purified Nationalist Party, who saw it as their God-given mission to take power for the Afrikaners. Relations with Britain became cooler, and one response to this was to combine Southern and Northern Rhodesia and Nyasaland in a Central African Federation in 1953 as a ‘Central African Australia’, dynamic, stable and ‘100% British’.7

  In Australia and New Zealand, by contrast, ties with the United Kingdom strengthened after the war. In order to power their economic growth they continued to prefer ‘British stock’ in preference to migrants from southern or eastern Europe or the Third World. Australian Immigration Minister Harold Holt planned to bring in 100,000 migrants a year from 1950 under an Assisted Passage Scheme, of whom half would be British. By 1961 the journey had been made by over 360,000 British migrants, known as ‘Ten Pound Poms’.8 Trade with the Dominions was also privileged: in 1950 Britain still supplied 50 per cent of Australia’s imports and 60 per cent of New Zealand’s, while these countries with South Africa and Canada provided 20 per cent of Britain’s imports and the London capital market was still central to their economies.9 The Dominions were still very much part of Britain’s defence system. South Africa provided the naval port of Simonstown, Australian and New Zealand forces were used to defend Malaya and Suez, and Australia became a testing ground for the United Kingdom’s infant nuclear deterrent. Britannic nationalism and the idea of Greater Britain was still a force. Robert Menzies, known as ‘the last of the Queen’s men’, who returned to power in Australia in 1949 said that ‘the boundaries of Great Britain are not on the Kentish Coast but at Cape York [Queensland] and Invercargill [New Zealand]’.10

  While the white Dominions were held on to, India, the jewel in the crown, was relinquished with regret – and much bloodshed. The Cabinet mission under Sir Stafford Cripps – sent to India by Churchill in 1942 but unable to find a solution – was sent back by the newly elected Attlee government and arrived in New Delhi on 24 March 1946. Its ambition was to found a United States of India with foreign policy and defence through the Indian Army still in the hands of the British, while Hindu and Muslim states would enjoy states’ rights.11 This was not possible. The Congress Party insisted on full independence and had demonstrated its legitimacy in provincial elections held in 1945 and 1946. The British policy of divide and rule that had encouraged Muslim politics since the 1930s had another effect. Congress did poorly in Muslim-majority provinces such as Bengal, where Jinnah’s Muslim League was returned to power. The Muslim League boycotted elections to the Constituent Assembly and agitated for the establishment of a separate Pakistan. The Hindu minority of Bengal feared subordination to the Muslim majority and also pressed for partition, so that they could remain part of a Hindu-majority India.12

  Attlee decided to cut the Gordian knot. Earl Mountbatten, who had been Supreme Allied Commander in South-East Asia, was sent out as the last viceroy in March 1947 with full powers to negotiate a British withdrawal. This should not, in the words of historian John Darwin, appear to be a ‘scuttle’, an ‘inglorious retreat’ or a ‘first step in the dissolution of empire’ but as ‘a voluntary transfer of power to a democratic government’.13 Brigadier Enoch Powell, who served in India during the war, feared ‘an outbreak of violence in India such as will dwarf 1857’. He is said to have burst into Churchill’s office in 1946 and offered to reconquer the Raj if he were given ten divisions.14 On the question of violence Powell was not far from the mark. Government was suddenly devolved to India and Pakistan and the Punjab and Bengal were partitioned. About a million people died as a result of communal violence and ethnic cleansing. Over a million Muslims fled from East to West Punjab and another million non-Muslims fled from West to East Punjab.15 Similarly, over a million Hindus fled from East Bengal and 1.5 million Muslims fled from West Bengal. Mu
slims accounted for a third of the population of Calcutta in 1941 but only 14 per cent in 1951.16 In spite of this catastrophe the British worked hard to develop the myth of the peaceful transfer of power. Mountbatten later argued that the transfer took place between men of the same background. Of Nehru he said that ‘having been educated at Harrow and Trinity, and having lived so many of his formative years in England, I found communication with him particularly easy and pleasant’.17 Moreover India, despite becoming a republic, was persuaded to remain part of the Commonwealth of Nations

  The loss of India increased the need for Britain to hold on to other possessions, for both strategic and economic reasons. ‘Quitting India’, said historian Jack Gallagher, ‘has to seen in the light of the simultaneous decision to push British penetration deeper into tropical Africa and the Middle East […] Africa would be a surrogate for India, more docile, more malleable, more pious.’18 The threat of the atheist Soviet Union which was pushing into the Middle East as the Cold War intensified, made it all the more important to hold on to empire as an arc that stretched from South Africa round the Indian Ocean to Australia, and the key route via Suez.

  ‘In war, Egypt would be our key position in the Middle East’, the chiefs of staff told the Cabinet in January 1947, and it was ‘necessary that we should hold Palestine as a screen for the defence of Egypt’.19 Holding on to the Palestine mandate, and preserving the ideal of a bi-national state, however, did not go according to plan. Jewish paramilitary groups waged a relentless campaign against the British presence, attacking its administrative headquarters in the King David Hotel in Jerusalem on 22 July 1946. Zionist Dr Nahum Goldmann flew to Washington in August 1946 to persuade President Truman of the justice of their cause. Not least to garner the Jewish vote at home, Truman declared his support for partition and a Jewish state on Yom Kippur, 4 October 1946.20 Attlee was furious but the British were losing the propaganda war. Scandal was caused by the flogging of a Zionist terrorist too young to hang on 27 December 1946 and by the British refusal to allow The Exodus, carrying Jewish refugees from France, to disembark in Haifa in July 1947, sending them back to displaced persons camps in Germany.21 The United Nations passed a resolution on partition on 29 November 1947. This spelled the end of Palestinians’ hopes for an Arab state and attacks were launched on Jewish businesses and settlements. The Jewish military replied by destroying 286 Arab villages by August 1948 and creating 750,000 Palestinian refugees. The State of Israel was proclaimed on 14 May 1948 and was recognised three days later by the United States, but the Arab League states of Egypt, Transjordan and Syria declared war on Israel. This enabled Israelis to further occupy Arab lands, massacring 250 in the Arab towns of Lydda and Ramleh on 12 July 1948. Some 750,000 Palestinians became refugees in Lebanon, Transjordan and Egypt while the Israelis increased their grasp from 56 per cent to 78 per cent of the territory of the former mandate.22 Arguably Israel became the most recent settler colony, turning the remaining Palestinians into colonial subjects.23