by Adam Tooze
Something had to be done. But what? If the British Liberals had seen a way to deliver Home Rule without unleashing a civil war in Ireland, they would have seized on it long since. Speaking in the House of Commons in March 1917, Lloyd George reiterated that as far as London was concerned the question had already been decided by Parliament in August 1914. It was now up to the Irish themselves to agree on how to implement Home Rule. In the spring of 1917 one option considered in London was to bring Australian and Canadian pressure to bear as advertisements for the benefits of autonomous self-government within the empire. But the Ulster Protestant influence was too strong in Canada and the Irish Catholic element too powerful in Australia. The Irish question was internal not just to British politics but to the politics of the entire empire.60 Was the United States the decisive external force with which one might break the deadlock? In light of America’s importance to the imperial war effort, the leaders of the Conservative Party had been forced already in 1916 to accept that there could be no more talk of a Protestant mutiny in Ulster. It was left to die-hard Unionists like Lord Selborne to rail against the ‘idea that we are to change our constitution because of the force of American public opinion’.61
To work out an all-Irish compromise, Lloyd George convened a Constitutional Convention meeting in Dublin. But this was no longer enough to satisfy the more radical wing of Irish nationalism. Sinn Fein and its allies boycotted the Convention, demanding that the Irish question be put to the post-war peace conference, ‘an unpacked jury of the nations of the world’ that ‘England could not coerce or cajole’.62 Even the moderate Nationalists, who did agree to attend the Convention, were now making demands that amounted to the kind of Dominion status enjoyed by Canada or Australia. Meanwhile the Unionists agreed to concede Home Rule to the South but only in exchange for a permanent exemption for Ulster. This would satisfy the Protestant majority but would trap hundreds of thousands of Catholics as a disadvantaged and resentful minority in Northern Ireland. If London were to impose a compromise solution, if necessary with force, how would Washington react? If Washington demanded Home Rule, perhaps Lloyd George might enlist Wilson in sharing responsibility for the disagreeable choices that lay ahead. Throughout the bitterly contested deliberations of the Constitutional Convention, the British supplied the White House with the same confidential reports that were received by George V in Buckingham Palace.63 The message was clear. The hopes of American intervention were fuelling intransigence on the Nationalist side. Unless the full force of both London and Washington was put behind a compromise, Ireland faced permanent partition between a ‘majority and a minority each relying upon the doctrine of self-determination . . .’64
It was the war that forced the issue. As Germany’s spring offensive crashed into the Allied lines in March 1918, manpower was the imperative of the moment. Sinn Fein refused any war service on behalf of the British state. But the British Labour movement made clear that it would not accept a last levy of men from London and Manchester, if Dublin and Cork remained exempt. The only way to give even a shred of legitimacy to conscription in Ireland was to move immediately to Home Rule. This, however, would require the South to accept the exemption of Ulster and Ulster to accept that this exemption could only be temporary. Fearing the worst, prior to the final decision, Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour took the remarkable step of first contacting the White House to elicit the President’s opinion. Aware that this constituted an unprecedented opening of the internal affairs of the United Kingdom to the views of the American government, Balfour thought it necessary to explain that Irish conscription was only ‘apparently’ a ‘purely domestic’ matter. If a decision on this question were to upset the balance of opinion in the US, it might have important ramifications for the Alliance.65 In the event, the White House resisted the British invitation to share responsibility for an Irish settlement. Colonel House merely made a perfunctory reply reiterating the need for Home Rule. But hardliners in Whitehall viewed these proceedings with less equanimity. One noted imperialist fumed that Balfour’s enquiry was ‘a document’ the likes of which he ‘never thought to see an English statesman put his name to’. By washing their dirty linen in front of the Americans, the British cabinet had stooped to asking Wilson and House ‘to make up their minds for them’. But injurious though it may have been to national pride, neutralizing the possibility of a disavowal from the White House was essential. When Lloyd George announced Irish conscription to the House of Commons on 16 April 1918, he was able to present it not only as the quid pro quo for Home Rule. He was also able to reassure Parliament that this resolution was fully consistent with ‘that principle of self-determination for which we are ostentatiously fighting’, and that London could expect a ‘full measure of American assistance’.66
When Curzon had addressed the House of Lords in May 1917, he had held out the prospect that the harmonious resolution of the Irish question would ‘pave the way for that world cooperation of the three greatest liberty-loving nations on earth – namely, France, the United States of America, and ourselves . . .’. ‘The settlement of the Irish question’ would thus emerge ‘as a great world factor of capital importance . . .’.67 Washington’s grudging response to the Home Rule compromise of April 1918 fell far short of that grandiose vision, and with good reason. Ireland’s political future was in no way resolved. Sinn Fein was preparing to resist conscription with force. The path to partition and a bloody civil war was clearly marked. But London’s painstaking elaboration of the Home Rule formula had done enough to prevent any serious breach with Washington. Wilson denied Sinn Fein its demand that Ireland should be debated at the Versailles peace conference. It remained a matter internal to the British Empire.68 At least in this minimal sense America was cooperative. How far America would underwrite Britain’s wider effort to reconstruct its empire remained a question still to be resolved.
VI
The most consequential effort to explore how far America might go was made in the Middle East, the main zone of imperial expansion during the war.69 From the mid-nineteenth century British policy in the region had been torn between the desire to protect the Suez canal, by shielding the ailing Ottoman Empire against Tsarist expansion, and liberal indignation over ‘Turkish atrocities’ in the Balkans. Turkey’s decision to join the Central Powers in October 1914 turned London’s policy in a decidedly turkophobic direction. In December, London declared a protectorate over Egypt, triggering the Russians into expansive claims on Ottoman territory, which Britain and France sought to contain in the spring of 1916 with the so-called Sykes-Picot agreement.70 This allocated a slice of northern Mesopotamia, Syria and Lebanon to France. Palestine proper was to be internationalized as a buffer zone. Britain would secure the extended eastern flank of Egypt with naval bases in Gaza and Haifa. In 1917 Russia’s collapse, France’s enfeeblement and the recovery of Britain’s military position in Mesopotamia came together with the new imperial focus of Lloyd George’s cabinet, to produce a far more aggressive strategy. In the eyes of Curzon and Viscount Alfred Milner the outcome of the war should be the total suppression of imperialist competition by the assertion of British control over the eastern Mediterranean and East Africa, establishing a British Monroe Doctrine in the Indian Ocean and its approaches. It was to be an all-empire project. The Indian Army played a decisive role in all the campaigns against the Turks.71 In 1917 London weighed up the possibility of giving Germany’s East African colonies to India as its own mandate.72 The Admiralty was abuzz with schemes to base squadrons of an imperial navy in the Indian Ocean and the Pacific.
Conceived at first at a moment of triumph, at the height of the crisis that followed the Brest-Litovsk Treaty and Ludendorff’s Western offensive in the spring of 1918, this encompassing vision of empire became instead the vision of a defensive redoubt to which Britain would retreat if France collapsed and control of the continent fell to a rampant Germany.73 This made it all the more pressing to decide how such expansionism might be square
d with the dominant power of the future, the United States. As Milner put it, ‘the remaining free peoples of the world, America, this country and the Dominions’ must be ‘knit together in the closest conceivable alliance’.74 How could this ambition conform with Wilson’s opposition to any imperial expansion in the Middle East? Washington had refused even to declare war on Turkey.
Meanwhile the overthrow of the Tsar had transformed Russia’s politics. In May 1917 the distinguished patriotic liberal, Pavel Miliukov, was forced by the Petrograd Soviet to resign as Foreign Minister, for upholding the Russian demands on the Ottoman Empire. If a democratic Russia was now calling only for international supervision of the Black Sea Straits, how could Britain justify its claims? If, as one Middle East hand put it in the summer of 1918, ‘open annexation is no longer practical and out of kilter with declaration of allies’, Britain must make itself into the vanguard of self-determination.75 In 1915 London had officially espoused the cause of the Armenian minority. In the summer of 1916 Britain sponsored a rebellion in Arabia. In 1917 it was to address the specific challenges posed by the Russian revolution and the rise of American power that British imperial strategists took up the cause of Zionism.76
Since 1914 a handful of Zionist activists in Britain and America had been urging London to assume the mantle of their protector. This was flattering to men such as Balfour and Lloyd George, steeped as they were in Old Testament religion. But it was a far from obvious association. Britain’s own Jewish population was small and highly assimilated. In 1914 the central office of the international Zionist organization was headquartered in Germany and had declared itself ostentatiously neutral. In 1915 Zionists both in Europe and America had been unable to hide their enthusiasm when the Kaiser’s armies drove the Tsar’s army out of western Poland. Though it is hard to credit in retrospect, the promise of a new regime of toleration in the East was one of the aspirations associated by German-speaking Jews with the Brest-Litovsk moment. When Lloyd George took office in December 1916 it was precisely to redress this imbalance, to win ‘world Jewry’ back for the cause of the Entente, that British Zionists began pursuing a new alliance with the British Empire. By the spring of 1917 influential voices in London were calling for the Zionist cause to be added to the Armenians and Arabs as British clients. Finally, in August, as General Allenby’s troops readied themselves for a drive to Jerusalem, the small coterie of Zionists in Britain led by Chaim Weizmann were asked by the Foreign Office to draft a declaration in favour of a Jewish home in Palestine.
The proposal was vigorously debated in cabinet, with heated opposition coming from Curzon, who regarded Russia, not the Turks, as the main threat, and from Edwin Montagu, Secretary of State for India. Preoccupied as he was with his momentous declaration on Indian policy, Montagu could not but regard with horror the casual manner in which Britain, the ruler in India of the largest Muslim population on earth, was proposing to affront the Ottoman Empire. This was bound to consolidate the ominous alliance between the Muslim League and the Hindu Home Rulers. But Montagu spoke not only in his capacity as Secretary of State. He was also a prominent member of assimilated Anglo-Jewry. As such, Montagu deeply resented the Zionist claim to represent the entire ‘Jewish people’ and he was acutely sensitive to the anti-Semitic reflexes amongst his Gentile colleagues that Weizmann was turning so eagerly to his advantage.77
First and foremost, the British cabinet was considering patronage of the Zionist cause because they credited ‘world Jewry’ with power to influence affairs both in the United States and in revolutionary Russia. In 1917 the openly anti-Semitic Petrograd correspondent of The Times stoked widespread speculation about the role of the Jews in the overthrow of the Tsar. The assumed influence of the New York Jewish lobby, echoing similar anxieties about the power of the Irish-American machine, reflected a by no means flattering conception of the working of American democracy. The Zionist activists themselves did nothing to discourage these crude ideas. Spokesmen for ‘world Jewry’ was precisely what they aspired to be. Opponents of Zionism within the American Jewish community found themselves portrayed as a reactionary moneyed elite fighting the democratic aspirations of the ‘Jewish masses’. The news that the huge Zionist organizations in revolutionary Russia had, in fact, voted overwhelmingly to disown any aggressive demands on the Ottoman Empire was suppressed.
Once again, the United States was the crucial factor. Would Wilson take up the role assigned to him? When in August 1917 the President proved unenthusiastic about a Palestine declaration, the British cabinet pulled back. It was not until October that Wilson’s equivocation was overcome by persistent lobbying from within his inner circle.78 In light of these overriding ‘political considerations’ Curzon withdrew his objections. Montagu was outvoted and the cabinet approved Balfour’s short declaration announcing Britain’s sponsorship of Jewish aspirations to a National Home in Palestine. It was despatched to Lord Rothschild as the presumptive leader of Anglo-Jewry, on 2 November 1917.
VII
On 20 November 1917, with the French and Italian governments reeling and his own leadership in question, Lloyd George personally welcomed the first American government delegation to visit wartime Britain at a joint conference with the British War Cabinet. The meeting was staged not in the usual Cabinet Room in Number 10 Downing Street, but in the Treasury Board Room next door, from where, Lloyd George informed his guests, Lord North had in the 1770s ‘decided and directed’ the ill-fated policy that drove the American colonists to rebellion. That had been, Lloyd George admitted, ‘a cardinal error’.79 Britain had learned its lesson. Whilst the war in Europe might be in disarray, Britain was rebuilding its empire in the image of a liberal future. The programme of change in India and the new policy in the Middle East were tokens of Lloyd George’s determination to remake the empire as a ‘great commonwealth of nations’. Nine days later the British and American parties joined sixteen other delegations at the Inter-Allied Conference in Paris. Despite the challenge laid down by the Bolsheviks and Germans at Brest-Litovsk, the French and Italians in their weakened state refused to allow any discussion of broader war aims. Lloyd George’s response to this impasse was telling.
His first reaction was to despatch the charismatic South African General Jan Smuts to Switzerland for secret discussions with the Austrians, who were clearly desperate and might perhaps be lured out of their dependence on Germany. The message that Smuts conveyed to the Austrians was indicative of the British self-conception at the time. If Austria would abandon Germany, Smuts assured the Austrian envoy, London would ‘assist Austria’ in giving ‘the greatest freedom and autonomy to her subject nationalities . . .’. ‘If Austria could become a really liberal empire . . . she would become for central Europe very much what the British Empire had become for the rest of the world . . .’, a benevolent liberal guardian.80 It was a fantasy no doubt, but one that had taken on real force.
But in response to the publicity fanfare from Brest-Litovsk, secret diplomacy was not enough. On 5 January 1918, Lloyd George used the occasion of a national meeting of Labour organizers at Methodist Central Hall in London, the same venue that would host the first meeting of the UN General Assembly in 1946, to make a major statement on the war aims of the British Empire. The speech was drafted in close consultation with the pro-war wing of the Labour Party and representatives of the empire. The Entente, Lloyd George proclaimed, was an alliance of democracies fighting for a democratic peace. ‘The days of the Treaty of Vienna,’ the Prime Minister announced, are ‘long past’.81 It would be a peace, he openly declared, of self-determination, ensuring that governments ruled by the consent of the governed. It would restore the sanctity of treaties and would be underwritten by an international organization to see to it that peace was preserved and the burden of armaments was lifted. Whilst Wilson was still labouring over his 14 Points address, it seemed that Lloyd George had beaten him to it. Would it be Lloyd George, the champion of ‘British democracy’, who claimed for hims
elf the ideological leadership of the war against Germany? The question was not fanciful. As Colonel House later admitted, ‘when the Lloyd George speech came out . . .’, the mood in the White House was ‘depressed’.
Wilson was scheduled to address Congress a few days later, but following Lloyd George, what did he have to add? House was undaunted: ‘I insisted that the situation had been changed for the better rather than for the worse.’ Lloyd George had merely cleared the air of any potential quarrel between the US and London. It was all the more ‘necessary for the President to act . . . after the President had made his address, it would so smother the Lloyd George speech that it would be forgotten and that he, the President, would once more become the spokesman for the Entente, and indeed . . . for the liberals of the world’.82 House was proved right. And the willingness of world opinion not only to give far greater attention to Wilson’s 14 Points, but to read into his text phrases that Lloyd George rather than Wilson had actually uttered, was a harbinger of things to come. But it should not be allowed to obscure the point that if the leaders of the British Empire emerged in a confident mood in November 1918, it was because they felt they had secured the foundations of the empire as a key pillar of the emerging, liberal world order.
10
The Arsenals of Democracy
France, Britain and Italy contained the crisis of political legitimacy that felled Russia and would soon tear the Central Powers apart. But what kept the populations of the Entente off the streets and drove their armies across the line was a remarkable economic effort. Even the richest combatants in World War I were not affluent by modern standards. Pre-war France and Germany had per capita incomes roughly comparable to those of Egypt or Algeria today, but had access to far less sophisticated technologies of transport, communications and public health. And yet despite such limitations, the major combatants were by 1918 committing 40 per cent or more of total output to the destructive purposes of the war. It was a defining moment in reshaping the modern understanding of economic potential. Back in 1914 conventional liberal wisdom had insisted that the globalization of the world economy would make prolonged war impossible. The collapse of trade and finance would bring the fighting to a halt within months. That crisis had indeed arrived in the autumn of 1914, when financial markets seized up and the stocks of ammunition ran low. Both were overcome through decisive state intervention. Central banks took charge in the money markets of New York, London, Paris and Berlin.1 Imports and exports were tightly regulated. Scarce raw materials and food were rationed. Far from limiting the combat, industrial mobilization and technological innovation acted as a flywheel on the war.2 This enormous effort spawned three new visions of modern economic power, two of which have remained as part of the commonplace iconography of the war; the third, significantly, was largely erased from memory.