by Adam Tooze
There was personal animosity at stake in Clemenceau’s prosecution of figures such as Joseph Caillaux and former Interior Minister Louis Malvy. But above all Clemenceau, modelling himself on his Athenian hero Demosthenes, was driven to demonstrate that France’s will to resist would not be broken, that as a republic it could seize the historic opportunity to stand beside Britain and the United States in a transatlantic, democratic coalition against the Central Powers.8 For the French Republic to waver at such a moment would be a betrayal of its historic mission. Clemenceau’s insistence on ‘war, nothing but war’ was intended to silence not only the pacifists. He was no more patient toward contentious discussions of over-ambitious war aims. Between 1915 and the spring of 1917 the diplomats of Tsarist Russia had repeatedly urged the French to enter with them into agreements for the division not only of the Ottoman Empire, but of Germany as well.9 In 1916, facing the full force of the Verdun assault, the cabinet of Aristide Briand had cheered itself by weighing up a partition of Germany between a French-sponsored Rhineland and a Russian land-grab in the East. But for the collapse of Tsarism in March 1917, this objective might well have become established as official policy. As Clemenceau well understood, in the new age of international politics such ideas would have hung like an albatross around the neck of French diplomacy.
To see what damage such vaulting ambition might have done both to French internal politics and its relations with its allies, one need only turn to Italy. Whereas Clemenceau successfully silenced discussion of the post-war order, Italian politics between 1915 and 1919 was torn apart by a clash between different visions of its place in the future international system.10 Under the terms of its pre-war alliances Italy in 1914 ought to have entered on the side of the Central Powers. Instead, in the London Treaty of 1915 it obtained generous promises of imperial gains from the Entente. By 1917, with both Wilson and the Russian revolutionaries calling for a liberal peace, these were to become notorious. After the disaster at Caporetto they seemed not only ludicrously out of kilter with Italy’s military means, but positively hurtful to the national war effort. In November 1917 Vittorio Orlando, the new liberal Prime Minister, called on Italians to emulate the Roman Republic’s recovery from its shattering defeat at Cannae (216 BC). He formed a broad-based cabinet and despite the anti-war stance of the Italian Socialist Party, refused to carry out a wholesale crackdown. This enabled him to cultivate close relations with the pro-war Socialists, headed by the pro-Wilsonian Filippo Turati. Leonida Bissolati, an agrarian radical, former editor of Avanti and decorated war veteran, was charged with implementing an eye-catching package of welfare benefits. His efforts were flanked by the highly energetic Finance Minister Francesco Nitti, frequently referred to as ‘l’Americano’, who set aside hundreds of millions of lire for the support of ex-servicemen.11 Meanwhile Italy’s savers rallied to the cause, subscribing an unprecedented 6 billion lire to the war loan issued in January 1918. But Italy did not survive by its own means alone. In the desperate weeks in October and November, troops and equipment from France, Britain and the United States had poured into Italy. In thousands of villages and towns Italian-American friendship was celebrated in improvised processions not infrequently featuring the Virgin Mary with the Stars and Stripes in her hand.12 In the Italian Army itself, Wilsonian propagandists collaborated eagerly with the newly created Servizio P, which for the first time attempted to bridge the huge social and cultural gulf between the Italian officer class and the rank and file.
Orlando thus restored a measure of social peace. But the Italian war effort remained under a cloud of political uncertainty due to the manner in which the country had entered the conflict.13 Parliament had not been appraised of the details of the London Treaty, but rumours were enough to suggest that Italy’s political leaders, above all Foreign Minister Sidney Sonnino, had made their country complicit in an odious example of old world imperialism. On 13 February 1918 these fears were fully confirmed when the full text was read out in the Italian Chamber of Deputies. The effect was explosive. There was outrage even on the government benches, as ministers learned for the first time of the discreditable, annexationist demands for which Italy had been fighting. Giovanni Giolitti, the pre-war leader of Italian liberalism, who had opposed the alliance with the Entente in 1915, demanded that the war be brought to an end immediately. But this was not the only option. If only it abandoned its old-fashioned and unrealistic imperialist ambitions, pro-Entente socialists and liberals saw no reason why Italy’s strategic interests could not be made compatible with the new era of self-determination.14 As we have seen, by the spring of 1918 the Entente and the United States were coming around to the view that the Habsburg Empire must be dismantled.15 Just as German progressives had hoped to fashion a liberal hegemony in the East, Italian progressives foresaw a future in which Italy would play the role of promoter and protector of self-determination throughout south-eastern Europe, a vision that harked back to the legendary nineteenth-century Italian patriot and pan-European, Giuseppe Mazzini.
In April 1918, with London’s active encouragement, the pro-war anti-annexationist wing of Italian politics played host in Rome to a Congress of the Oppressed Nationalities from across the Habsburg Empire. Prime Minister Orlando was clearly attracted by this vision, but in his effort to hold together a broad-based coalition he did not dare to drop Sonnino, the father of the London Treaty.16 In the pre-war period Sonnino had been among the most prominent advocates of reform in Italian politics. The furore over the London Treaty drove him into the arms of the right. In a mirror image of the extremist Patriotic Party in Germany, 158 deputies, a third of the chamber, banded together in support of Sonnino in the so-called Fascio for National Defence, determined to prevent any backsliding. For internationally minded progressives, Sonnino’s dogged adherence to the odious London Treaty risked reducing Italy to ‘an anachronism’.17 Sonnino, one pro-Entente socialist fumed, ‘does not see that in this way he discredits his own politics . . . putting Italy in the dock again under the accusation of Machiavellianism’. Sonnino was blind to ‘major world currents, outside of which there are no grand politics’.18
If the contradictions between democracy and empire were becoming a source of political tension by 1917–18, one might have expected Britain to be their most notable victim. And both at home and in the empire, London certainly did face enormous challenges. But in the face of these, it was Britain that drove the Allied war effort into the ghastly fourth year of the war.19 It was Britain that emerged from the conflict with its political system most intact and with the majority of its strategic objectives met. Between 1916 and 1922 Britain was to occupy perhaps the most prominent position of leadership in both world and European affairs in its history. This outcome was due in large part to its favourable initial conditions. Britain was beyond the immediate reach of the Central Powers and had the resources of its empire to fall back on. But this triumph was also a testament to the adaptive capacities of the British political class. Lloyd George, like Clemenceau, was the advocate of a full-throated war effort. The harassment of those suspected of non-conformity or resistance on the home front was relentless. On the Western Front, discipline in the British ranks was notoriously harsh. But this coercion was combined with the hallmarks of Lloyd George’s pre-war political persona. Between 1906 and 1911 in the Liberal government of Prime Minister Asquith, it had been Lloyd George who had carried the radical flag, taking the fight to the House of Lords and breaking their veto over the budget, pushing through redistributive taxation, introducing a social insurance system and guaranteeing the right of trade unions to free collective bargaining.
Before he became the scourge of conservatism at home, Lloyd George had made his name as a radical anti-imperialist. In 1901, in the midst of the Boer War, speaking to a raucous crowd in Birmingham, the heartland of jingoist nationalism, he had demanded that the empire must free itself of ‘racial arrogance’. It must reshape itself as a realm of ‘fearless justice’ held togethe
r by a common commitment to national freedom. ‘We ought,’ Lloyd George insisted, ‘to give freedom everywhere – freedom in Canada, freedom in the antipodes, in Africa, in Ireland, in Wales and in India. We will never govern India as it ought to be governed until we have given it freedom.’20 Despite the repeated cycles of promise and disappointment that littered its history, the seemingly contradictory idea of a ‘liberal empire’ was not empty nor, at the beginning of the twentieth century, was it historically moribund. The fact that Lloyd George could initiate dramatic change, in wartime, at the head of a coalition in which most of the key positions were occupied by Tories, is testament to imperial liberalism’s renewed relevance in an age of dramatic global transition.
II
That there was no time to lose was made horribly evident by the escalation of tension in Ireland.21 When they were swept into office in 1906, the Liberals had been committed to making good on Gladstone’s long-deferred promise of Home Rule – autonomy for Ireland within the United Kingdom. This gained them the support of the parliamentary party of moderate Irish nationalism, who after Asquith’s electoral setbacks in 1910 actually held the balance of power in the House of Commons. Though undeniably a territory of colonial settlement, indeed the origin of British colonialism, Ireland, unlike the rest of the empire, had an integral place in the constitution of the United Kingdom. At Westminster, it was spectacularly over-represented. Of the 670 MPs returned in the last pre-war election, 103 were elected by Irish constituencies, of whom 84 were members of the moderate nationalist Irish Parliamentary Party led by John Redmond.22 But any move to Home Rule would provoke violent resistance from the Protestant community that held a solid majority in Ulster, Ireland’s Northern province, and who were fiercely committed to remaining under the direct rule of London.
By the spring of 1914, the Irish crisis was tearing the British state apart. With the encouragement of the Tory Party and the covert endorsement of the British monarch, the army in Ireland gave notice that regardless of the will of Parliament, they would not impose Home Rule on Ulster. So serious were the rumours of civil war that in July 1914 the British Foreign Office thought it best to warn Berlin that they should not count on Ireland to distract Britain from coming to the aid of France. Despite the open threat of mutiny in August 1914, the Asquith government pushed Home Rule through Parliament, but immediately suspended implementation. The postponement was a sop to the Unionists at the expense of Irish nationalism, but believing that the war was the first test of responsible Home Rule, Redmond threw his party behind the war effort. It was this policy of compromise and delay that opened the door to the radical nationalist minority who had gathered before the war in the Sinn Fein movement. On Monday 24 April 1916, Dublin was laid waste by rifle and artillery fire as extreme Irish nationalists launched a suicidal assault on British power.23 It took a week of bitter fighting to quell the rebellion. London’s embarrassment was compounded by the brutal repression meted out by army commanders on the spot. Though the uprising was crushed, the result, as the insurgents had hoped, was a strategic disaster for British rule. At a stroke they had restored Britain’s fading image as the brutal oppressor and destroyed the credibility of Redmond and the moderates.
If Home Rule was unmanageable, by 1916 London was haunted by the thought that the empire might soon face ‘another Ireland’, in India. As in Ireland, the search for a liberal answer to the question of imperial overlordship in India had been given new energy by the accession of a Liberal government in 1906. In 1909 a system of legislative councils had been introduced to incorporate a larger part of the Indian elite into running the Raj. But by 1916 it was clear that this formula was losing its grip. In May 1916 the Anglo-Irish agitator and disciple of theosophy Annie Besant began to spread her influence from Madras across India, regaling crowds of tens of thousands in Bombay with rousing tales of the Dublin uprising.24 The radical Hindu leader Bal Gangadhar Tilak revived his fundamentalist wing of Indian nationalism and joined in the clamour for Home Rule. At Allahabad in the spring of 1916, leaders of the Hindu-dominated Indian National Congress and the Muslim League issued an unprecedented joint declaration calling for far-reaching constitutional change. This cooperation was consolidated in December at Lucknow when an agreement was reached under which the rights of the Muslim minority would be protected by means of separate electoral colleges.25 These inter-communal agreements were profoundly unsettling to the British. Protecting the 80 million Muslims of the subcontinent was one of the fundamental justifications for British rule. If, unlike in Ireland, the majority and minority could make common cause against London, then the end of the Raj might be approaching far faster than anyone had imagined.
It was against the backdrop of this double crisis in India and Ireland that Lloyd George took office in December 1916 determined to widen the political base of the imperial war effort. The centrepiece of this strategy was the creation of a unified Imperial War Cabinet, in which imperial statesmen such as Jan Smuts of South Africa were given a very prominent role. But Lloyd George also insisted that Satyendra Prassano Sinha, the chair of the 1915 meeting of the Indian National Congress, should attend the Imperial Cabinet as a full member, in his capacity as ‘representative of the Indian people’.26 As Secretary of State for India, the liberal conservative Austen Chamberlain remarked to Viceroy Chelmsford that Sinha was ‘the nearest approximation which India can produce under present circumstances to a prime minister . . . the status of India in the Empire is thus fully recognized and an advance has been made such as Indians indeed hoped for, but scarcely expected, a few months ago’.27 As a further concession, in early March 1917 the government of India announced to general applause that it had secured the right to impose a protective tariff on the import of British manufactures of cotton goods, one of the most eagerly anticipated benefits of self-rule. For British liberals this undermined the entire logic of empire. What purpose was there in clinging to far-flung territories, if they were allowed to retreat into economic self-sufficiency? But Lloyd George was relentless. Parliament must give India what it wanted.28
But economic and political concessions were no longer enough. By the spring of 1917, it had become clear that London would have to do something unprecedented. It would have to define in solemn and public terms the ultimate goal of its rule in India. Austen Chamberlain explained to his cabinet colleagues on 22 May 1917: ‘The constant harping on the theme that we are fighting for liberty and justice and the rights of people to direct their own destinies, the revolution in Russia [the February revolution] and the way in which it has been received in this country and elsewhere, the reception of the Indian delegates here, and the position given to India in the councils of the empire – has strengthened the demand for reform and has created a ferment of ideas . . .’ If Britain failed to come forward with sufficiently bold proposals, it risked throwing the ‘moderate element – such as it is – into the hands of the extremists’.29 Then Britain would be forced to respond with violence. Its moderate collaborators would be discredited and India would fall into the hands of their home-grown version of Sinn Fein.
By the summer of 1917 the first steps in this disastrous delegitimizing cycle were already being acted out by the overstretched governors of Indian provinces, who ruled territories the size of European countries. Unaware of the dramatic concessions being contemplated in London, on 24 May 1917 Governor Pentland of Madras, the home base of Annie Besant’s protest movement, issued an abrupt statement denying any possibility of Home Rule. The result was a storm of protest. From Bengal, Governor Ronaldshay, who faced the most serious threat of terrorist violence, suggested that to quell dissent an extension of wartime security powers might be required, triggering the establishment of a committee of inquiry on repressive powers chaired by Justice Rowlatt. On 16 June Pentland placed Besant under house arrest.30 This played directly into the hands of the radicals. Home Rule agitation spread across the Indian political class. Mohandas Gandhi, recently arrived from South Africa, th
rew himself into the struggle, calling for a petition with a million peasant signatures.31 In an audience with Viceroy Chelmsford, Gandhi warned that Home Rule, which only months earlier had appeared an outlandishly radical demand, was ‘in a fair way towards commanding India’s identity . . .’32
III
With Ireland in open rebellion and the political temperature rising in India, in the spring and summer of 1917 the British government faced a mounting crisis at home as well. The strikes of early May, involving hundreds of thousands of workers in defiance of the official trade union leadership, were unprecedented. The government’s response was to arrest the leading shop stewards under pre-emptive Defence of the Realm powers.33 In January the Independent Labour Party had cheered Wilson’s ‘peace without victory’ speech, and in the summer their conference in Leeds passed resolutions supporting a negotiated peace on the basis of the Petrograd formula, by a majority of two to one. There was no real threat of revolutionary overthrow, however it was clear that it was not just the legitimacy of the empire which needed to be addressed, but that of the Westminster political system as a whole. There had not been an election in Britain since 1910. A poll would be postponed until the end of the war, but before then the parties would have to decide on which electorate their mandate would be based.