David Reynolds - Island Stories

Even more important for future geopolitics was the outcome of the American Civil War. At the start, in 1861, Britain declared its neutrality: 80 per cent of Britain’s cotton imports came from the Confederacy, supporting a textile industry that employed 4 million people. And the ethical issues looked confused: the Federal government claimed to be fighting to preserve the Union, not to abolish slavery, and many English liberals saw the Confederate cause as a war for national liberation, like the recent secession of the Italian states from the Habsburg Empire. In October 1862 Gladstone told an audience in Newcastle that the ‘leaders of the South have made an army; they are making, it appears, a navy; and they have made what is more than either, they have made a nation.’ Indeed, he welcomed the potential break-up of the Union because it was ‘in the general interests of Nations that no State should swell to the dimensions of a continent.’[51]

But talk of possible British mediation in the conflict was a passing phase. By April 1865, the North, with its far superior resources, had defeated the ‘Rebellion’ and the United States of America regained its unity ‘from sea to shining sea’. The implications of a country the size of a continent were not lost on Europeans. In 1866 the French economist Michel Chevalier urged Europe to unify in the face of ‘the political colossus that has been created on the other side of the Atlantic’. And in 1882, as the pace and intensity of economic development accelerated throughout America’s vast and now peaceful single market, the German writer Constantin Frantz considered it ‘hardly preventable’ that ‘the New World will outstrip the Old World in the not far distant future’.[52]

What is more, the balance of force across the whole world was shifting against Britain. After the post-1815 lull, imperial rivalries renewed with the scramble for Africa in the 1880s and 1890s and the attempted partition of China at the turn of the century. Britain’s naval supremacy had by then been undermined. In 1883 the Royal Navy boasted 38 battleships; the rest of the world had 40. By 1897 Britain was outnumbered: 62 against 96.[53] By this time the Russian Empire had expanded across Asia to the Pacific, creating friction along the borders of British India. And other non-European powers were emerging. Japan had industrialised and turned its economic strength into military might, defeating China in 1894–5 and Russia in 1904–5.

In the first half of the twentieth century, the British therefore tried to defend a global position that had been consolidated during a rare half-century of European peace and stability after 1815. And they had to do so against rivals which had caught up with Britain, and even surpassed it, in economic and military capability. France remained a competitor in the 1920s and 1930s, and the Japanese threat was acute in 1937–42. But the most momentous and sustained challenge came from the German Reich.

Unified Germany’s first bid for hegemony, in 1914–18, was stopped but at great cost. Britain and the empire lost one million dead, as well as nearly 15 per cent of the country’s total assets. The war also saw a geopolitical shift to the Pacific as both Japan and America – wartime allies of Britain – developed into major naval and economic powers. And although the Habsburg and Ottoman Empires disintegrated under the strain, Russia survived revolution and civil war to re-emerge under Bolshevik leadership. This posed a double danger for Britain, because traditional rivalries with Russia in Asia were now coupled with the ideological challenge of a Soviet state officially dedicated to world revolution.

Round two of the German challenge assumed a more menacing form for Britain because of the collapse of France in June 1940. Throughout the Great War the French, with increasing British support, had sustained a Western Front against Germany. But in four weeks Hitler achieved what the Kaiser’s best generals had failed to do in four years – knocking France out of the war and winning a continental empire. Hitler was now free to turn against the Soviet Union years earlier than expected. Germany’s amazing victories emboldened Italy and Japan to press their own bids for empire in North Africa and East Asia respectively – with British possessions as the main target.

Thanks to its own resources and those of the empire, Britain avoided defeat in 1940. There is no doubt that this was a moment of global significance. Had Britain surrendered, like France, or been knocked out the war, Hitler would have been free to devote all Germany’s manpower and resources on his war against the Soviet Union, while the United States would probably have pulled in its horns and concentrated on defending the Western Hemisphere. Instead, British defiance encouraged Roosevelt to extend material support and then enter the war. Britain became the essential base from which the Western Allies could eventually mount a cross-Channel assault to help liberate Europe.

So Britain’s 1940 really mattered. But whatever Churchill declaimed then about ‘victory at all costs’, overcoming Hitler’s Reich was beyond its own capabilities once there was no French army or Western Front in Europe, and when the Royal Navy faced challenges in the Mediterranean and the Pacific as well as in home waters. Britain therefore had no choice but to rely on new allies to win the victory – above all the USA and the USSR. By May 1945, after five years of total war, Hitler was dead and his Thousand-Year Reich lay in ruins, but he had brought down the old Europe with him. Such was the extent of Germany’s early success in 1940 that the Führer had, in effect, called the superpowers into existence to redress the balance of the Old World. After the D-Day landings in Normandy in June 1944, the United States dominated the campaign in Western Europe, while the Red Army’s long and bloody fightback from Stalingrad to Berlin left it in control of most of Eastern Europe. By the time the Germans surrendered, the armed forces of the USA and USSR each numbered between 11 and 12 million men, more than double the British figure.

Had the world reverted to the pattern of the previous post-war era after 1918, with American and Russian withdrawal from Europe, the power shift would not have been so pronounced. But out of this war there developed a bitter Soviet–American rivalry, which not only divided Germany and Europe into two military blocs but also became truly global and fiercely ideological. Although Britain was still a major power in the immediate post-war period – third in military and industrial terms around 1950, thanks in part to the total defeat of Germany and Japan – it could not match the two superpowers, despite maintaining until 1960 the policy of peacetime conscription. In 1953, Britain’s peak post-war year, its armed forces totalled 900,000 compared with 3.5 million for the USA and 4.75 million in the case of the USSR.[54] Nor, in the age of nuclear weapons and inter-continental missiles, could it hope to keep up in the Cold War arms race with the Big Two. Since the 1960s, Britain’s continued existence as a nuclear power has depended on its ‘special relationship’ with the United States.

This does not mean that Britain is no longer of any military consequence. It remains the only European member of the Western Alliance, apart from France, to maintain a capacity for power-projection outside the NATO area. But its days as a major global presence are over. As with the economic story, others have surpassed its precocious early lead – reducing Britain to the position that one might expect for a state of its size, population and resources. In power, as in wealth, what is historically striking was ‘rise’, not ‘fall’.