Norman Stone: The Atlantic and Its Enemies

The Foreign Secretary, Ernest Bevin, was an old trade unionist, whose ways ran very counter to those of the old imperial Foreign Office, but he inspired much loyalty and admiration. Though born illegitimate, and lacking schooling, he was literate (using phrases such as ‘with alacrity’) because, like so many of his class at the time, he could and would make use of the after-hours workers’ education libraries and self-help mechanisms without embarrassment. He was an astute trade union leader, and that gave him some insight into the ways of Communists, who would exploit an industrial crisis for their own political ends rather than for the workers’ own good. Bevin ran his machine well at the Foreign Office, and he needed to, because his in-tray was a very gloomy one. Was Great Britain bulldog or bullfrog, ran one question.

After 1945 the Western empires fell apart. The Japanese had already broken their prestige, the ‘charisma’ that had kept, say, British India going. There, apart from the army, there had been only 60,000 British in a subcontinent of 400 million, and a unique combination of circumstances kept them in control for an extraordinary length of time. A good part of the story had to do with divisions within India (Churchill said that it was ‘no more a nation than the Equator’), but there was also the army, which worked remarkably well almost to the end, and the British themselves respected the rule of law (with one or two notorious lapses). In 1904 a Viceroy, Lord Curzon, who was not at all a stupid man, remarked that the British should stay in India ‘as if… for ever’. But by the 1930s the formula was coming apart. A nationalist intelligentsia emerged, men such as Nirad Chaudhuri, a Bengali whose English and whose knowledge of literature were better than most Englishmen’s, and whose life story, The Autobiography of an Unknown Indian (1951), is one of the classics of the era. Chaudhuri started off as a nationalist — precisely the sort of Brown Briton who, if Indian independence had developed as, say, Canada’s had done, would have been a paladin of Commonwealth and Empire. Instead, he became rapidly disillusioned when his cause had won. His admiration for England was immense, but men of his stamp sometimes had to put up with absurd humiliations: a Cambridge-educated Burmese rugger player told he could not use the common bath with the British players; a Chinese millionaire in Singapore being invited by the Governor-General to dine at the chief club, and the Governor-General receiving a letter of protest from the committee the following day; George Orwell crossing the road in Rangoon if he heard Scottish voices, so far did they bear overtones of crudity. The heart of Indian nationalism had been in Bengal, itself a special area (and the oldest part of the British raj ). But when the British went down, so, too, did Bengal: a festering mass of hatreds was soon revealed, and they were to wreck Indian independence. Chaudhuri emigrated to an England which he also found culturally impoverished by the loss of Empire.

In the later 1930s it was clear enough that the British would not be staying. The great difficulty was to find a successor element on which to rely, and, here, the war made problems much worse. The Japanese invaded Burma, causing hundreds of thousands of refugees to flee to the already overcrowded north-east. Boats were wrecked, so as to deter further Japanese invasion over the sea. In 1942 the main Indian nationalist movement demanded immediate independence and refused to have any truck even with sympathetic British politicians who asked them to wait until the end of the war. A movement of civil disobedience was put down with some harshness in the same year, and was broken in effect only when a great famine broke out — partly a consequence of the Burmese disaster, partly because of a terrible cyclone that wrecked the rice crop, partly for lack of transport, and partly because the British gave priority to war transports rather than to civilian needs. The (Indian) government of Bengal itself proved none too efficient, and 3 million people starved to death. India had been radicalized, the prestige of the raj broken; in 1946 government buildings were routinely being destroyed, and there were even alarms for the loyalty of the army. In the event, the great tragedy of modern India soon emerged. Getting the Hindu-dominated Congress to agree with the Moslem League proved to be impossible, and a partition was hurriedly agreed. It was, in the words of the very sober Christopher Bayly, ‘a crazy geographer’s nightmare’. Bengal, 25 million Hindus to 35 million Moslems, was almost impossible to partition, and 8 million people moved. However, ‘East Pakistan’ without Calcutta was ‘an economic disaster area’, with the jute production separated from the mills, and it was itself separated from the rest of Pakistan by a thousand miles. The division of the Punjab in spring and summer 1947 turned out to be savage, whole train-loads arriving with corpses that were burned or disembowelled, as the Punjab was mixed, with a large Sikh population that was to be split between India and Pakistan. By the summer of 1947 the British had neither the money nor the will for a fight, and the army did not carry out proper policing; besides, the timetable was absurdly short, and maddened people grabbed what they could when they could. On independence, in mid-August, New Delhi itself was seething, while in Calcutta 7,000 tons of rubbish built up, even at the gates of the stock exchange, the leading financial institution in Asia. It was a dismal end to the British raj and even then showed something of what was soon to happen in England herself. The last Viceroy, Lord Mountbatten, was indeed the gold filling in a rotten mouth — a jibe later on made about the role of the monarchy itself. Not a British life was lost in the departure, but quite soon India and Pakistan were at war over a vast disputed area, Kashmir.

Of all oddities, the British had been at work in 1945 even trying to extend their empire. British troops were present in Vietnam and Indonesia, where they were dragged into support for the existing French and Dutch rulers. In order to do so (and in Burma as well) they were driven to use the hundreds of thousands of Japanese prisoners of war to put down risings by the local nationalists. The French and the Dutch somehow understood even less than did the British that the European position was hopelessly lost: the Foreign Office adviser on Mountbatten’s staff told him that the Dutch were ‘mentally sick’ and ‘not in a fit state to resume control in this vast area’; it was not until 1948 that the Dutch abandoned Indonesia. But the British were also fantasizing, though less bizarrely. In the second half of the 1940s they were trying to create a new form of empire, in this case one based on Malaya. Here, they had a certain amount of justification, in that Malayan rubber earned a surplus of £170m for the sterling area — more than a third of its income (the Gold Coast supplied another quarter). Malaya was put together in a novel way, together with Singapore, but this did not solve the three-cornered problem of Indian, Chinese and Malay cohabitation. A civil war soon developed, with a Communist insurgency that was largely Chinese, and Malaya was not stabilized until 1960. The Americans faced problems of the same sort in the Philippines, to which they gave an independence with certain limits.

The nightmare of nightmares was Palestine. Whatever the British did would be wrong. As with India, it is obvious that a few more years of Empire would have been desirable for an orderly transfer of power to occur. But to whom? Here again, as with other parts of the British Empire, there was much strength in the argument that the Empire kept order, tried to assure legal rights, and sent out honest people. But there was an original sin at the centre of the Palestinian question, and it lay in the context of the Balfour Declaration of 1917, which had offered the Jews a national home in what was then Arab (or Ottoman) territory: the aim being essentially to keep the French away from the Suez Canal. The British then found themselves responsible for keeping order in a small area claimed by both sides, and there was a further problem, in so far as the native Palestinians were themselves very divided. Partition was an obvious solution, and even then the transfer of Palestine to Jordan would have made sense, but there were vast problems as regards Jerusalem. The British muddled, swung to one side and the other with pressures of terrorism, and thus encouraged the terrorists to do their worst. There were some particularly horrible episodes, such as the blowing up, in an operation of sinister brilliance, of the King David Hotel, British headquarters in Jerusalem (March 1946), or the hanging of two sergeants, whose bodies were then booby-trapped, and the British were much criticized for stopping the emigration of Jews from the concentration camps to Palestine. The Americans were loud in their criticism, and in February 1947 the British threw the affair at them and the United Nations. The Mandate was abandoned; an unworkable plan for partition came up; ethnic cleansing occurred, and 700,000 Palestinians fled from their homes. On 14 May 1948 Israel was proclaimed as a state, and a war then followed, until 1949, when an unsatisfactory boundary was set up through an armistice. This period is full of questions: was there ever any possibility that proper partition, or even a single-state solution, might have been established? At any rate, here was another problem, involving Moslems, that the British simply could not manage. They ‘scuttled’, as in India or Greece.