Liberal Imperialism Past and Present

The repercussions for today’s Middle -East

By Brendan Clifford

Robert Cooper, who is said to have shaped the direction of Blair’s militarism, was interviewed on Newsnight about his book The Breaking Of Nations. Judging by what he said in that interview, his view of the world is that there are now no imperialist states. The states that used to be imperialist have given up imperialism and that is the cause of the great problem of the “post-modern” era. Imperialism left behind it an array of states which are incapable of functioning as states. They lack strong central institutions capable of giving structural coherence to the country as a whole, and the chaos that develops in them constitutes a danger to the former imperialist states – the West. The states of the West have an obligation of self-defence to overcome the disorder of these disorderly states and preserve liberal civilisation.

It was put to him that this position might be described as Liberal Imperialism. He dismissed that suggestion as an absurdity on the grounds that Liberalism and Imperialism are mutually exclusive terms. The interviewer (Jeremy Paxman) did not put it to him that the British Government which in 1914 threw the world into the flux in which it has remained ever since was a Liberal Imperialist Government. Presumably he did not know.

Liberal Imperialism was not a term of abuse applied to the Liberal Government of 1905-1915 by Liberal opponents of imperialism. It was the position frankly adopted by the leading stratum of the Liberal Party.

The war of conquest waged on the Boer Republics (1899/1902) by Lord Salisbury’s Unionist Government (i. e. a Government formed by the merger of the Tory Party with Joseph Chamberlain’s social reform Liberals) 4 Labour and Trade Union Review was opposed by the Liberal Party under Campbell-Bannerman’ s leadership. Campbell-Bannerman was a sentimental Gladstonian anti-imperialist. But the Gladstonian position (or rhetoric) was no longer popular. What was popular was the war. It was the first British war in which substantial elements of the middle class took an active part as Volunteers. The second layer of leadership of the Liberal Party entered into the spirit of the times, with an eye to the future. They rejected Campbell- Bannerman’s position, declared themselves Liberal-Imperialists, and dared the leader to do anything about it. He didn’t. He was thereafter a fig-leaf on a Liberal-Imperialist party, and when he became Prime Minister in 1905 he was obliged to give the major departments of state to the leading Liberal-Imperialists — H.H. Asquith, R.B. Haldane, and Lord Grey. And to Winston Churchill, who came over from the Tories to the Liberals on Imperialist grounds.

Joseph Chamberlain, the Unionist Colonial Secretary, having defeated the Boers in an unexpectedly difficult war, proposed in effect to call a halt to the expansion of the Empire, accepting that the British Empire would be one amongst half a dozen major states in the world. The imperialist impulse, which is so deeply rooted in British society, then passed over to the Liberals for its further development. Asquith became Prime Minister in 1908. The Liberal backbenches remained predominantly Gladstonian in sentiment, but were hustled into supporting the Great War when Asquith launched it in 1914.

The Liberal-Imperialist War led to the very great expansion of the Empire, but also to a collapse of the Party that launched it. The Liberal Party split in 1916, and effective party politics did not resume in Britain until 1945.

November 11th, 1918 marks the high point in British militaristic imperialism. The subversion of the greatest Empire the world even seen began in the General Election a month later.

This was the first Election in which a majority of the adult population had the vote — all men and a substantial proportion of women. The democratisation was a direct consequence of the war, and particularly of the conscription introduced in 1916. Introduction of the Continental method of military recruitment required an extension of the franchise on Continental lines. And the virtual civil war on the issue of women’s suffrage during the years before Britain’s decision to make war on Germany was rendered obsolete by the activity of the Suffragettes in white feathering reluctant men into the trenches to be cannonfodder. Fear that women stood for fundamentally different political principles to men, and would subvert the imperial state, were dispelled by feminist conduct in the war.

(Imperialism always functioned by harnessing the avant-garde forces of progress in Britain. The war to destroy the Afghan State might be described as Polly Toynbee’s war. A centrepiece of the propaganda of the war to destroy the Iraqi State was a picture of a woman artillery officer suggestively stroking the big gun of an artillery piece. These are the fruits of the full incorporation of the feminist movement into the life of the militaristic state. All of this was implicit in the white feathering of 1914).

The franchise was substantially democratised by the 1918 Reform Act, and the first democratic election, in December 1918, produced a landslide majority for Lloyd George’s Imperialistic, militaristic and Jingoistic Coalition. Four crucial decisions were taken by this post-war Government, and the democratic Jingoism of the time ensured that they were all bad decisions. They were about the Middle East, about the Austrian Empire, about Germany and about Ireland.

The British war propaganda of 1914 was largely a propaganda of nationalism. The tactic of fostering nationalist resentments in the camp of enemy went back to the Napoleonic wars when Britain encouraged terrorist activity against the French in Spain. But the deployment of nationalist propaganda in 1914 was on an unprecedented scale. Nationalism was proclaimed as one of the great principles for which the war was being fought. This was for the purpose of recruiting a quarter of a million Irish initially, and was later for the purpose of generating nationalistic discontent amongst the peoples of the Austrian and Ottoman States.

The implication of the war propaganda was that Britain had been born again, and that it now stood for a world order in which all peoples would be guaranteed the right to independent nation- states. So committed was Britain, in its public stance, to the principle of nationality that it planted the seeds of nationalism where none had previously existed. It constituted nationalism into the only reputable form of political existence.

And it was all a confidence trick.

Nationalist Ireland rallied to the Union Jack in 1914/15. Its representatives were not demanding independence. The British State had made it painfully clear to them over many generations that they could not get independence by voting for it. They could get it only by defeating Britain in war. And since they had no army, and no possibility of forming an army under close British policing, they made do with Home Rule. Home Rule — the kind of thing that now exists in Scotland — was available only on the conditions of accepting British sovereignty.

An Irish Home Rule Bill was brought in by the Liberals in 1912 and was enacted in the summer of 1914 but its operation was suspended for the duration of the war. Home Rule Ireland declared its loyalty to the Crown and its willingness to play an active part in the affairs of the Empire. And it rallied to the Union Jack, inspired by the slogan of universal nationalism, which asserted as a fundamental principle of world order the very thing which Britain had denied in Ireland. The Liberal Party was equal in Parliamentary strength with the Unionist Party and held office with the support of the 80 Irish Home Rule MPs. The Unionist Party had declared he Irish Home Rule Bill unconstitutional on the ground that it was carried with the support of the Irish Party whose real object was to break the British Constitution by seceding from the UK.

The Unionists demanded that the Liberals should put Irish Home Rule to the UK voters in a General Election. It was not an unreasonable demand. When the Government refused it, the Opposition launched a powerful extra-Parliamentary campaign against the Bill, which even went to the length of raising an illegal Unionist Army amongst the Ulster Protestants. And the Unionists declared that when they returned to office they would repeal the Home Rule Act.

They expected to return to office at the end of 1915 when the next General Election was due. In the event they returned in March 1915 as part of a Coalition with the Liberals.

The Unionists demonstrated during the Home Rule conflict of 1912-14 that they were the stronger party in the country. They became active warmongers when the Liberals declared war on Germany, and they flourished in wartime conditions while the Liberals wilted. They formed a coalition with Asquith in 1915 and they ousted Asquith, split the Liberal Party, and took power with Lloyd George as their Liberal fig-leaf in 1916. (The 1915 Election was not held, and Parliament continued without an electoral mandate until December 1918.)

The Irish Home Rulers, having joined the war effort under the delusion that it was being fought to establish a general right to national independence, suddenly found themselves being governed by a Party which had raised an illegal army to prevent the implementation of a mild measure of devolved government.

The duplicity of it all led in the first instance to the Rebellion of 1916 in Dublin, and then to the Irish vote for independence in December 1918, five weeks after Britain’s victory in its war to establish democracy and the rights of small nations throughout the world. The intimidated Irish electorate had never previously returned a single independence candidate to Parliament, and now all of a sudden three-quarters of the Irish seats were held by representatives who had campaigned on an Independence programme.

The Jingoistic British democracy took no heed of the Irish result. British government continued on the basis of force. It was expected that when the Irish electorate understood that the war propaganda had not changed the long-established rules governing British/Irish relations they would fall back into their old subservience. But they didn’t. In the 1920 local government elections they confirmed the 1918 result, and they did so again in an Irish election held in 1921. And, having voted for independence, they resorted to force to prevent Britain from governing by force.

Thus the British Empire reached its greatest extent on November 11th 1918, and began to disintegrate on December 14th It existed in prime condition for five weeks.

And I would judge that British conduct in Ireland in 1918-22 should be listed amongst the causes of European fascism of the inter-War period. Britain was the most powerful state in the world. It was the exemplar of liberalism. Democracy and the rights of nations were its slogans of the Great War it had just won. And the example it gave the waiting world of what should be done next and how it should be done set the pattern for the next twenty years.

And Sinn Fein gave the other half of the imperialist world an example of how to respond to British confidence trickery. The war slogan about nationality, repudiated within the territory governed by Britain, was put into effect recklessly in the territories of two states destroyed by Britain: the Austrian and Ottoman Empires.

The Austrian Empire was incomparably more democratic that the British Empire, both as to the extent of the electoral franchise and the representation of the various peoples. All the peoples of the Empire had access to the electoral franchise on an equal basis, and they also had representation as nationalities. None of the peoples of the British Empire, except the Irish, had access to the electoral franchise on the basis of which the Empire was governed, and the Irish had no representation as a national body. The British Parliament toyed with Irish Home Rule for thirty years. The British parties came to the brink of civil war over it in 1914 – and were relieved to find an escape route in a collaboration to make war on Germany. Irish Home Rule had still not been established in December 1918. But Czech Home Rule was established by the Hapsburg monarchy without any fuss or bother before 1914.

Britain did not decide to destroy the Austrian Empire until the last year of the war. It allowed various Slav nationalist extremists to maintain a propaganda presence in Britain from the start of the war, but kept them on a leash until 1918. When the expected easy victory over Germany did not materialise it tried to make a separate peace with Austria, which would have preserved the Empire. When Austria resisted the final British overture in the winter of 1917/ 18, Britain gave the green light to all the extreme nationalist tendencies, even though it knew very well that the Austrian Empire would not dismantle into a series of homogeneous nation states.

The Czech nationalist extremist, Masaryk, declared the independence of a Czechoslovak nation. Britain recognised this Czechoslovak nation, and brought it into a kind of existence, by recognising and forming a Czechoslovak state. But the Czechoslovak nation-state consisted of half a dozen nationalities which had never acted together politically against Austria. Even among the Czech nationalists there were doubts about the advisability of separating from Austria. One of the founders of Czech nationalism had said at the time of the 1848 revolutions that if the Hapsburg state did not exist it would be necessary to invent it. Multi-national Austria was seen as a necessary protection against the developing German nation-state. 6 Labour and Trade Union Review

Austrian arrangements provided a sufficiency of national existence for most Czechs. The Slovaks, seen as a backward peasant nationality, had not acted politically with the Czechs. The Germans of the Sudetenland, split off from Austria, began to feel the pull of German nationalism. The Hungarians, cut off from Hungary as a punishment, were unlikely to become Czechoslovak patriots. And for the Jews the Hapsburg Empire was the absolute condition of a socially useful existence. But all of these peoples, who had no internal cohesion amongst themselves, were thrown together in the name of nationality (with the addition of some Poles, and Ukrainians – under the alias of Ruthenes – for good measure), just because Britain decided to destroy the Austrian Empire in punishment for not deserting Germany in the war — a war which had begun by Germany supporting an Austrian stand against Greater Serb terrorism in Bosnia.

And that is how it was all the way from the Baltic to the Balkans. Unheard of nationalities like the Czechoslovaks and Yugoslavs were conjured into being by Britain as a matter of short-term expediency. And meanwhile the Irish vote for independence was over-ruled by force.

The anti-Semitism which was a major factor in European life from 1918 onwards did not have its source in Fascism or in Germany; but in the destruction of the Hapsburg Empire. The Jews were the middle-class of the Empire: the only Empire-wide people. The new “nation- states” conjured up by Britain required the development of nationalistic middle-classes out of what were basically peasant communities. In some of these new states the Jews constituted 80% of the commercial, professional and artisan classes, while being only a few per cent of the population. This was not a sustainable condition. The Jews were systematically squeezed out in all these new states to make way for a national middle class — even in Czechoslovakia, despite Masaryk’s earlier activities on behalf of the Jews.

At the behest of the Allies a new German state was formed in November 1918 by simple-minded democrats, and in June 1919 the new democratic Government was compelled at the point of a gun to confess to “war-guilt” on behalf of the German people. German war guilt was written into the Treaty of Versailles and all states joining the League of Nations had to subscribe to it. Consistently with this view that the German state was a uniquely evil force in the world, the French wanted it dismantled. It might easily have been dismantled into three states: Bavaria, the Rhineland and Brandenburg/Prussia. Such an arrangement would have been entirely consistent with the British war propaganda. But it would have restored France to the position of the dominant power in Europe. Balance-of-power strategy had led Britain to make war of Germany in alliance with France (and Russia), and now led it to insist on the German state being maintained (with some losses at the edges) as a counterweight to France. It plundered and humiliated Germany (with reparations, war guilt and loss of territory), thus stimulating national resentment, and at the same time kept the German state in being, enabling humiliation to lead to revenge.

Those three decisions, on Ireland, Austria and Germany, launched Europe into its Fascist phase. (Italian Fascism had its source in British encouragement of Italian irredentism in 1915, and in its welshing in 1919 on the deal about the share-out of the Hapsburg Empire which had brought Italy into the war).

The fourth decision is still awaiting its consequences.

Britain embarked in 1914 on a straightforward conquest of the Ottoman Empire in the Middle East. There was then very little in the way of Arab nationalism — a handful of intellectuals in Damascus and a chieftain in Basra. The chieftain in Basra, Said Talib, offered Britain an alliance against the Turks. The offer was rebuffed and Said Talib was taken out of the way. Britain did not want its conquest compromised by deals with natives. But the Turks proved as difficult to break as the Germans, and a year later Britain began to foster Arab nationalism. It made a deal with a Muslim religious leader in Mecca under which he broke his allegiance to the Sultan and launched a Jihad against the Turks. The deal was that there should be an Arab State in the Middle Fast when the Ottoman Empire was overthrown. Then Britain made a secret treaty with France in breach of this deal. And in 1917 it offered a large stretch of the Middle East to the Zionist Organisation.

The conquest of Mesopotamia was launched from India. Through a deal with Russia, southern Persia has become part of the British Empire in effect. A secret deal had been made with a local chieftain across the Gulf in Kuwait. The conquest of Mesopotamia came as the next logical measure of Imperial expansion. The conquered areas were run by competent administrators of the Indian Empire. But at the end of the war the construction of an Imperial administration was aborted, the undertaking to recognise an Arab state was broken, a series of “nations” which had infinitely less national coherence than Czechoslovakia were conjured into being for the purpose of Balkanisation. And the Zionist project was unleashed

And all of this was done in the name of democracy.

It would be useful to take a closer look at it at a time when the “global democratic revolution” has been announced as an ideological fog to obscure Ameranglian difficulties in Iraq.

This article appeared in the November 2003 edition of this magazine, then called Labour and Trade Union Review.  The whole magazine is available at https://labouraffairsmagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/ltur-134-november-2003.pdf