The Anglo-Saxon Social Model

[Rattigan]

So this update might be a little ASB for many people, given how far ahead of OTL it is technologically. However, I hope that I've set out previous changes in TTL's engineering teaching and R&D that make it, broadly, plausible.

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Black Gold: The Royal Geological Survey and the Saving of the British Economy

The Montrose Oil Drill - the first offshore rig to successfully draw oil out of sight of land


Since the beginning of its mission in 1926, the British Geological Survey’s search for oil fields in British territorial waters had pottered along with greater or lesser intensity but with nothing to show for it in terms of practical results. Those funny little men with their floating drills and fragile structures in the middle of the sea: to those who remembered their existence they were little more than a quaint monument to English eccentricity. However, that concealed a serious dedication to their task which put their research and engineering several decades ahead of their competitors, a dedication that would pay off dramatically in October 1946, with the discovery of the Montrose Oil Field about 135 miles east of Aberdeen, followed by the vast Forties and Brent Oil Fields in November and December. Using state of the art oil rigs and extraction technologies, the British government became, at a stroke, one of the most oil-rich entities in the world.

A connected, but not necessarily linked, event was the fate of Anglo-Arabian Petroleum, a company founded to prospect for oil in the Arabian Peninsula in 1933. Originally a private company with a mix of British and Arabian shareholders, the company’s shares were progressively taken over by the British and Arabian governments during the course of the World War such that, by 1945, it was effectively a joint-owned venture with the Arabian government.

These two phenomena transformed not only the UK’s energy picture, which until then had been reliant on increasingly inefficient domestic coal production and foreign oil imports, but also its trade balance, as oil revenues (even if they wouldn’t be fully realised until the 1950s) allowed industries to be repurposed from war and exports and towards domestic consumption. However, the promise of a rush of this ‘black gold’ immediately raised questions about what to do with it. The most obvious answer was to plunge this money into the social security programmes the government was trying to undertake, which was the argument made by many prominent people such as Ernest Bevin and Health Secretary Nye Bevan (not people who, otherwise, agreed on much). On the other hand, figures such as Herbert Morrison proposed creating a single nationalised oil and energy company which could be used as a job creator. Finally, Cripps and Keynes suggested the creation of an investment fund for the future.

Attlee, ever the conciliator in these things, contrived to produce a compromise which was amenable to all sides. An investment fund was set up with proceeds to be divided up three ways: the vast majority of profits would be paid directly back to the fund for reinvestment; profits above a certain level would be paid into a nationalised company with certain R&D directives; profits above that would be paid directly into the exchequer. The investment aims of what was named ‘The Sovereign Wealth Fund of the United Kingdom’ (or, more simply, the ‘SWF’) were kept deliberately vague, with the only limit being that whatever investments that were made be made ‘in the UK national interest.’ In practice, the founding charter of the SWF stipulated that the government would have input into what counted as the national interest, even though the SWF had considerable latitude in its investment decisions.

Keynes, who, despite a health scare in 1946 that some conspiracists claimed was a heart attack, remained vigorous, was tapped up to head the SWF. He agreed immediately and would chair the organisation from its formation on 1 January 1948. Under Keynes’ tenure, the value of the SWF grew every year at an astonishing rate, outperforming an average UK and Commonwealth equity index by an average of 12% a year, building up its equity and asset reserves substantially, all the while providing the extra funding for Labour’s ambitious domestic and foreign agenda. By the time of Keynes’ death (at his desk, fittingly enough) on 21 April 1956, the SWF was the largest and most influential investment fund in the world.

 

[Rattigan]

Before continuing with the narrative, I should say that this update was strongly inspired by @NixonTheUsedCarSalesman 's defunct 'East of Suez' TL, particularly the role of Slim and the different partition borders. I reached out to him/her some time ago to ask whether they minded me borrowing these ideas and didn't receive a reply. Nevertheless, I think the background for India in TTL is sufficiently different for me to use that kernel of an idea as the basis for this update.

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Freedom at Midday: The Final Struggle for Indian Independence

Viscount Slim in his uniform as Viceroy


Contrary to popular belief in the years since and (to a certain extent) at the time, Attlee’s government was not anti-imperialist, seeing itself as continuing the liberal (and Liberal) tradition of reforming and improving the Empire rather than abolishing it. Harold Nicolson continued in his wartime role as Foreign Secretary and Attlee’s old ally Douglas Jay was installed as Colonial Secretary, with Attlee taking a close personal interest. Nicolson would be guided by the dual impulses of cementing good relations with both the United States and the Soviet Union while also preserving a special sphere of influence for the UK wherein she could act independently. The contradictions and tensions inherent in these aims would echo down Attlee’s ministry and beyond.

Nicolson looked for ways to bring western Europe together in a military alliance, signing the Dunkirk Treaty with France in 1947 and the Brussels Pact with Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg a year later. That same year, he openly threatened the US Secretary of State Charles E. Bohlen with British withdrawal from Germany unless the US retained and deepened its military and financial commitment to European defence. Such a threat was absurd on its face (the UK had no strategic interest in leaving Germany, given that they were supervising the ongoing partition of the country and implementation of the Roosevelt Plan) but it was enough to scare Bohlen (especially given that the Olson Administration was facing a tricky re-election fight at home) into acceding to most of his demands. An American commitment to Europe was an essential plank of the creation of NATO in spring 1949, which Nicolson saw as the crowning achievement of Attlee’s first term: an effective acknowledgement by the Americans that western Europe would be an Anglo-American sphere of interest. The balance of the ‘Anglo’ and the ‘American’ in that formulation would echo down the years in surprising ways.

On colonial affairs, while the government was by no means anti-imperialist, they were unsentimental about the Empire and unwilling to spend blood and treasure defending it. They also believed that they had to keep the promises made by previous governments. To this end, when Cripps was recalled to London to become Chancellor, Frederick Pethick-Lawrence was sent out to India to take his place as Chairman and organise the universal suffrage elections that Cripps had promised in March 1941. Perhaps the imperial authorities should have been tipped off about the potential problems when, in the uncontested by-election to give Pethick-Lawrence his seat in the Indian assembly, there were twice as many spoiled ballots as votes for the actual candidate. When the elections were held in April 1946, the Liberal Unionists were reduced to a rump of 9 seats, while the INC won 90 seats and the League won 48.

Over the course of 1946, civil and military disobedience increased across the Raj and the Viceroy Lord Auchinleck asked for seven extra divisions to keep order. Aware of what such an occupation would look like in practice, Attlee sacked Auchinleck in November 1946 and replaced him with General (now Lord) Slim.

Slim was in many respects the ideal choice, being a graduate of the Indian Staff College in Quetta and a well-respected war hero across the world for his service in Singapore and Malaya, as well as a man of Labour leanings. With Nehru now Chairman of the Assembly and openly calling for independence, Attlee came to accept the inevitable too and ordered Slim to draw up plans for an independent India covering the entire subcontinent. Slim began drawing up plans for a single Dominion of India with a singly military and currency but Hindu-majority and Muslim-majority subdivisions. This raised the obvious question of the fate of Bengal and Punjab, two provinces with only small Muslim majorities and vast Hindu (and, in the case of Punjab, Sikh too) minorities.

The Liberal Unionists, despite their electoral destruction in 1946, remained strong amongst the landowning and ruling classes of the Punjab and were able to band together to defeat a League motion to partition the province. Instead, it was agreed that the entire province would join a single entity named Pakistan (a rather imaginative combination of the five north-eastern regions of the Raj: Punjab, Afghania, Kashmir, Sindh and Balochistan with the extra ‘i’ added to aid pronunciation). A similar process occurred in Bengal, although here it was the League who were unwilling to be separated from the majority Hindu western regions. Slim combined the Hindu-majorities east of Bengal into the expanded province, creating a single sub-entity with a (roughly) balanced Hindu-Muslim population.

The only outstanding questions were the status of Burma, Ceylon and the princely states. When it became clear that the British government would not be supporting their independence anymore, the vast majority of the princes agreed to accede to the independent Dominion, provided that certain guarantees were given to them with respect to the rulers’ incomes. The only ones which remained outstanding by January 1948 were those of Kashmir and Hyderabad - the two largest states which each maintained their own currencies, postal services and universities - and Sikkim, a small country north of Bengal which fancied ts future as an independent state alongside Bhutan and Nepal. Ceylon and Burma, it was agreed, would go their own way, the former as an independent member of the Commonwealth and the latter as a crown colony for the near-term future.

Fears about a refugee crisis were allayed by the prompt and clear publication of what border decisions had been made, giving people enough time to move if they wished. As it turned out, few were willing to move once the minority rights protections had become known and there were comparatively few internal migrants. Independence finally arrived at midday on 26 April 1948, with Slim travelling to the capitals of the overarching Dominion of India (New Delhi), India Proper (Bombay), Pakstan (Karachi) and Bengal (Calcutta) in an exhausting 24-hour long ceremony. Although there was much fanfare at the time, the problems of the Dominion (namely too much power reserved to the subdivisions, continued simmering interreligious strife and communist subversion) would remain on the horizon. Nevertheless, in Westminster at least, politicians could breathe a sigh of relief that things hadn’t been as bad as they could have done.

 

[Rattigan]

Just a short update about the 1949 general election. For the rest of this week, I'll be doing one update a day which will cover postwar reconstruction in Europe and the Middle East before returning to the UK and three updates a week after that.

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The Liberal Crusade: The General Election of 1949

Labour campaigned on a ‘steady as she goes’ message, stressing the need for more time to bed in their reforms. Nevertheless, everyone in the party knew that their success of 1945 probably represented a high water mark of their support and braced themselves for losses. A reduction in seat numbers from 740 to 725 seats was also, it was felt, something which could disadvantage the party.

The Liberals, lead once again by Churchill, ran an insurgent and well-funded campaign. The collapse of the Conservatives in 1945 left, it was thought, a gap in the market for the Liberals to sweep up voters concerned about Labour’s perceived radicalism and inexperience. To that end, Churchill campaigned on a platform of patriotism and anti-socialism, all the while stating that they would keep the NHS and the majority of Labour’s welfare reforms (which they also claimed for themselves, at least in part). The Conservatives, now lead by Anthony Eden, attempted to mount a comeback in their traditional heartlands of wealthy suburbs, adopting a strongly right wing manifesto that rejected much of the post-Edwardian social reforms and arguing for a reduction in regulations on land-use and finance. The title of their manifesto, ‘Britannia Unchained’, summed up this feeling.

In the end, the night was tough but by no means disastrous for Labour. They lost 77 seats, all to the Liberals, but retained a workable majority of 23. The Liberals had plenty to be pleased about, having saved themselves from what, in the heady atmosphere of 1945, had seemed like the first steps down a path to inevitable extinction. The same could not be said about the Conservatives and the Liberal Nationals, both of whom were seen to have been treading water. For the Conservatives, their hard right manifesto had failed to strike a chord and a return to national government looked as far away as it had ever been. The only real positive was the performance of Eden, who managed to carve out a prominent public profile even as his party had dwindled to just over three-dozen seats.

The King, satisfied that his government was in good hands, would happily depart for his Australasian tour two months after the election.

 

[Rattigan]

So this is the first of the four-part miniseries which covers postwar territorial changes in Europe and the Middle East. This part focuses on Germany but touches on the rest of western Europe too but if you have questions which you feel aren't covered then feel free to let me know.

I've not been able to prepare any maps so I've put asterisks to what territories correspond to which OTL territories (and have made them all correspond to OTL territories for the sake of ease). If/when I manage to do the maps I'll post them straight away. [EDIT] I've now got a map of Europe which I've put with the update for western Europe.

A further update on the fate of China and East Asia will come next week. I've separated it out because it plays into Commonwealth domestic politics more directly.

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Dismembering the Reich: The Death of the German Empire and the Birth of the United Nations

Images of Prussian citizens emigrating following Soviet partition


Of all of the Axis powers - Germany, China, Spain, Bulgaria, Italy, Hungary and Slovakia - Germany presented the biggest challenge to the Allies. Although Germany and China together bore responsibility as the main aggressors of the War, Germany was the only one who had ‘started’ two wars in the past three decades and so bore a unique level of responsibility as far as the Allies were concerned. The Soviet Union had lost over 20,000,000 men fighting the War and the United States had only entered after the murder, as they saw it, of their citizens by German submarines. Germany also had the distinction, unlike China, of facing the very real possibility of territorial occupation and dismemberment (something that the Big Three contemplated as regards China but which never got beyond the planning stage). The UK had been the prime force holding back the Entente from taking such actions against Germany in 1918-19 but now, in 1945-49, not only did the UK consent to the plans of her Allies but fully joined in.

At the time of the Hamburg Surrender, Soviet troops had occupied eastern Germany, Poland and the Czech lands of Austria while the Western Allies occupied the rest (with the rough division being the Americans in Austria and the south, Britain in the north and France in the Rhineland). Reflecting its unique position amongst the Axis powers, when Germany signed the instrument of surrender it was not - as Spain, Bulgaria, Italy, Hungary and Slovakia were - simply occupied and an interim government of Allied appointees put in place. Rather, Germany was declared to simply no longer exist as a state. So it was not a question of putting a new government in place in an existing country, instead the United Nations now regarded the territory of former Germany (defined by its borders after the surrender of Poland) as simply an expanse of land that the Security Council (or, more explicitly, the five permanent members: France, Japan, the US, the UK and the USSR) could dispose of as it decided.

Over the course of the war, Tukhachevsky and his senior military advisors had come to the conclusion that Germany had to be permanently broken up and put down if Soviet security was to be maintained. At the Potsdam Conference, the Soviets found the British and the Americans in full agreement. President Roosevelt and his Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau Jr. had developed a general plan which met with the approval of the Soviets and, in a less qualified way, from the British (who were growing concerned about the Soviet imposition of puppet regimes in Poland and East Prussia but nonetheless saw the wisdom of cracking down on Germany). When Roosevelt quit the presidency to become the first Secretary General of the UN in February 1946, Morgenthau remained an influential voice on German policy (not coincidentally, Morgenthau had served during the Great War, winning the Purple Heart at the Battle of Ghent) and, in April 1946, what came to be called the Roosevelt Plan was adopted with respect to Germany.

In general terms, the Roosevelt Plan split Germany up into seven territories: east Germany, Czechia, Austria, southern Germany, northern German and western Germany. Although it was not spelled out in UN Resolution 2 (to give the Roosevelt Plan its official title), it was commonly understood that the Soviets would dominate the first two countries, the Americans the third and fourth, the British the fifth and the French the final one. (Secret negotiations had taken place between Roosevelt, Churchill and Tukhachevsky to that effect at Potsdam.) The Roosevelt Plan was designed to eliminate former Germany’s ability to wage war by eliminating its arms industry and other key industries, but left a great deal of leeway for the military governors in the different regions.

In the Soviet zone of interest, they took a broad view of their mandate under the Roosevelt Plan, destroying mines and physically removing all of the heavy industrial equipment as they could take. In addition, they were required to deal with the question of Poland. During the war, the Soviet Polish government had been put under severe strain not only by the refugees from the parts of Poland conquered by Germany but by a separatist movement within the Polish SSR which had actively fought with the Germans and undermined the Soviet war effort. At Potsdam the Allies had agreed to adopt the Oder-Neisse line as the basis of Poland’s western border and, in 1946, the Soviets agreed to give up the territory of the Polish SSR to combine with Poland-Slovakia create the Polish-Slovakian Federated People’s Republic[1]. In June 1946, the Soviets arranged for a referendum to be held to confirm the new borders, along with new elections to the Senate. In blatantly falsified results, the referendum passed with 70% in favour and the Polish Workers’ Union, lead by the Soviet client Wladyslaw Gomulka, won 90% of the seats.

At the same time, the Soviets were partitioning the remaining bits of German territory they controlled. They were concerned that the countries they created be both too weak to challenge Soviet hegemony but, at the same time, not too small so as to be threatened by absorbtion by the western German states. Therefore, in November 1947 the region of Saxony, because of its distinct cultural and political history, was hived off as the Democratic People’s Republic of Saxony[2]. At the same time, the rest of Soviet Germany was organised into two Prussias: the Democratic Republic of Brandenburg in the west[3]; and the People’s Republic of Prussia in the east[4].

In the American-controlled region, the original plan had been to install a republican constitution in Bavaria but this foundered on the personal popularity of King Rupprecht. Rupprecht had broken with the military government in Berlin over the decision to order unrestricted submarine warfare and had spent the period 1941-5 in a prison camp, thus avoiding blame for the subsequent disasters. Personally impressed by him, Eisenhower (the military governor of America’s zone) agreed to allow him to retain his throne on the condition that an American-drafted parliamentary constitution be approved. At the so-called Anif Declaration of November 1946, Rupprecht swore an oath of loyalty to the new constitution which rendered his position entirely symbolic and the Kingdom of Bavaria[5] became independent under continued American occupation. The House of Hesse had similarly broken with the Berlin government before 1945 and so was also allowed to retain its throne with a reduced constitutional role. The Grand Duchy of Hesse[6] returned to existence in October 1947, with a territory that slightly expanded on what it had under the old German Empire. The remaining bit of the American occupation zone would be organised into the Republic of Wurttemberg until it unified with the French-controlled Republic of Baden to form the Republic of Baden-Wurttemberg[7] following a referendum in May 1949.

In the French region, the industrial region of the Saar was annexed as a Department of France in December 1947 to better preserve its industrial base. The British zone was reorganised in August 1946 into the State of Hanover[8], the State of Schleswig[9] and the State of the Rhine, while the islands of Heligoland were re-occupied by the British as a Crown Dependency. In one of the more quixotic moments in recent European history, in November 1946 the British government fished the head of the House of Hanover, Ernst August, out of retirement in his estates and installed him as the constitutional head of the Kingdom of Hanover. In May 1949, Schleswig and Hanover would be amalgamated into the United Kingdom of Hanover. At the same time, the State of the Rhine would be amalgamated with the remainder of the French occupation zone to create the Republic of the Rhineland[10].

The final issue was what to do with Austria. The Americans controlled the south and eastern part of the country and the Soviets the north-western and Czech parts. Otto Habsburg remained a popular figure in most of the country, something helped by his outspoken opposition towards the German invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941 (like Rupprechy, he had spent most of 1943-45 under house arrest). However, this cut no ice with the Soviet authorities, who had no interest in propping up monarchies (and, indeed, were in the process of deposing those in Bulgaria and Romania). Otto pressed the Western Allies to support his idea of a ‘Danubian Federation’ along the lines originally proposed by his great uncle Franz Ferdinand before the Great War but this cut no ice with the Soviets either (never mind the Serbs or the Italians).

This ambivalent relationship would continue until 1955, when terms were finally reached for the division of the country. Following population transfers, the old territories of Bohemia and Moravia became independent as the Czech Socialist Republic (or ‘Czechia’)[11] while the remainder of the Austrian territories became independent as the Kingdom of Austria[12] with further territorial concessions agreed in April 1957 so that Serbia held most of the Istrian Peninsula.

[1] OTL Slovakia and Poland minus Warmian-Masurian Voivodeship.
[2] OTL Saxony
[3] OTL Mecklenburg-Vorpommen, Berlin, Brandenburg, Saxony-Anhalt and Thuringia
[4] OTL Kaliningrad Oblast and Warmian-Masurian Voivodeship
[5] OTL Bavaria
[6] OTL Hesse
[7] OTL Baden-Wurttemberg
[8] OTL Lower Saxony, Bremen and Hamburg
[9] OTL Schleswig-Holstein
[10] OTL Rhineland-Palatinate and North Rhine-Westphalia
[11] OTL Czech Republic.
[12] OTL Austria, Slovenia, Friuli–Venezia Giulia and South Tyrol

 

[Rattigan]

A shorter update on Eastern Europe. Not much is different from OTL (hence why I want to run these all out this week to stop spending too much time on it) but there are a couple of under-the-surface changes which I (at least) think are significant and a few relevant impacts on the Commonwealth intellectual and leftist classes that I thought worth mentioning. As with yesterday, profuse apologies for the lack of maps: I'm currently snowed under with marking/grading/graduation but will hopefully have more time to learn a new skill over the summer (some people learn a new language, I do this...). As some of you might have noticed, I've changed the names of East Prussia and West Prussia mentioned yesterday to 'Prussia' and 'Brandenburg,' respectively.

As ever, all feedback/praise/abuse welcome and I'll try and answer as best I can.

[EDIT] I've now got a map of Europe which I've put with the update for western Europe.

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The Red Man's Burden: Communism and Empire in Eastern Europe

The Red King: King Mihai I of Romania in 1947


During the course of the World War, the Soviet Union had conclusively attained the level of a global superpower: the Red Army was the largest the world had ever known (and arguably the mightiest), its heavy industry was vast and its resources near-unparallelled. But, at the same time, the Soviet government was nothing if not paranoid and the lasting legacy of the failed Soviet-German Pact of 1939-41 was to reinforce the belief that the capitalist world would stop at nothing to overthrow them.

Fighting the German invasion had inflicted profound political changes on the Soviet system. The capture of Petrograd in September and the flight of the Soviet bureaucracy to Moscow had finally caused the one thing that had concerned those at the top of the Soviet government since Lenin suffered the first of his strokes in 1922: namely, the fall of civilian government and the emergence of a Bonaparte. This time, the man the took the reigns was Mikhail Tukhachevsky, a career soldier who, despite his family’s aristocratic origins, had joined the Bolsheviks in 1917 and worked his way up the ranks over the course of the 1920s before being put in command of the military reforms of the 1930s. Managing to avoid blame for the poor state of Soviet border defences in 1941, in October 1941 Tukhachevsky had organised enough political allies to install himself as the Soviet Premier. However, with Nikolay Krestinsky remaining as General Secretary and Bukharin in the Finance Ministry, there was sufficient continuity in domestic affairs to keep the rest of the Soviet political class more or less on-side with this semi-coup.

In the postwar years, Tukhachevsky set out with the explicit aim of building up a network of client states who would serve as a buffer zone in Europe. As we have already seen, the early parts of that were accomplished over the course of 1944-49 with Anglo-American connivance, resulting in the creation of communist dictatorships in Poland, Saxony, West Prussia, East Prussia and (later) Czechia. But Soviet ambitions, as it had done so for their Tsarist predecessors, also focused on the Balkans and Central Asia. In secret negotiations at the Potsdam Conference, Churchill and Roosevelt privately agreed that the Soviets should be allowed a free hand in the region.

Bulgaria fell swiftly, with the royal family having been expelled in a communist-backed coup in 1944 and a republican constitution being rubber stamped by a referendum in February 1946, at the same time as the Bulgarian Communist Party won 75% of the seats in a rigged election to the new constituent assembly. Over the course of the rest of the 1940s, the BCP would coerce smaller parties into joining them and intimidate those who refused, until elections in 1950 gave the BCP-dominated Fatherland Front 100% of the seats. Hungary suffered the same fate: conquered by the Red Army in February 1945, a communist regime was installed under Matyas Rakosi in November 1945 with little pretence of democratic accountability.

Romania was slightly different, something conditioned by its unusual history during the interwar and war years. Over the course of the 1920s, Romania and the Soviet Union had grown closer to each other, with both countries recognising that their energy resources made cooperation useful. The first attempt to weaponise that cooperation, the February 1941 oil embargo on Germany, however, ended disastrously for both countries, with Romania occupied and the Soviet Union ravaged by Operation Typhoon. Nevertheless, friendly relations did give the Romanian government and royal family a place to flee to and from which they could organise resistance movements and, finally, a return to power on the backs of a Soviet invasion and a popular uprising in August 1944.

In the immediate postwar years, Romania was granted a lot more political freedom than Bulgaria, Poland or the dismembered Germany. Partly this was because of the historic good relations between the two countries but it was also because both King Michael and his prime minister Constantin Stanescu were reliably loyal to Petrograd, despite their aristocratic and small-’c’ conservative lineages. Their governing programme included land reform and the Romanian Communist Party was already strong, especially compared to the situation in Bulgaria or the German countries in 1945. The Communist Party won more seats than any other in the free elections of May 1946, becoming the largest party in a coalition made up of six parties and headed by Stanescu.

However, the Soviets thereafter grew frustrated with the Communists’ failure of make a significant gains in the elections of February 1948. Thereafter, Soviet and Romanian Communist Parties began to formulate plans for a coup. In July 1948, pro-Communist military units and protestors surrounded the Royal Palace and demanded that Michael dismiss his government and replace it with one entirely made up of Communist ministers. Fearful of civil war and a Soviet invasion if he did not comply, Michael capitulated to their demands and an entirely Communist government under Petru Groza was appointed. In elections held in November 1948, a single list of candidates from the National Front (as the expanded Communist Party was renamed) was elected to the Parliament in rigged elections. Michael himself staggered on until a secret agreement in April 1949 allowed him to flee with his family in a Royal Naval ship and a republican constitution was instituted in his absence.

Leon Trotsky (who, since being forced out of the Foreign Ministry once more in 1926, had been sidelined in a variety of undistinguished academic and bureaucratic offices) wrote an article in ‘Pravda’ in August 1950 arguing that this was the culmination of his revolutionary vision in 1919. But few, at least not in the Tauride Palace, were fooled: this was imperialism, red in tooth and claw. While most bureaucrats probably did believe that these countries would be better served as Soviet satellites than they would if left free to toss and turn on the waves of the free market (where they would probably become satellites of the British or the Americans anyway), there was little pretence that they had joined a willing association with the USSR or that they retained popular legitimacy. Over the course of the 1950s, elections were cancelled and legislative assemblies abolished in favour of appointed 'revolutionary councils' of one flavour or another. These councils often included Soviet bureaucrats and military officers as ‘advisers,’ an idea borrowed from the British method of governing the Indian Princely States.

The final countries in eastern Europe were Serbia and Greece, both of whom had been fighting guerilla wars against Italo-Bulgarian occupation during the World War. Unlike the other countries in the region, the Ally with the biggest presence in these countries by the end of 1945 was Britain. At their meeting in Potsdam, Tukhachevsky had acknowledged British interests in the region and therefore did not give support to the Communist insurgents in the country. Although Britain desired the reinstallation of the Serbian and Greek monarchs as a bulwark against them being drawn into the Soviet camp, they had no interest in attempting to impose a repressive, conservative regime on either of those countries (partly for moral reasons, partly for financial ones).

To that end, the British made a requirement of their support for the monarchies that both would bring democratic socialists into government. Of the two monarchies, the Serbian one was slightly more positive about this requirement, Peter II being ambivalent about politics in general and preferring the idea of constitutional monarchy to save himself from the boring duties of governing. To this end, Serbia[1] was reconstituted in 1946 as a constitutional monarchy called the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, with prominent former communist partisans Milan Dilas, Aleksandar Rankovic, Boris Kidric and Svetozar Vukmanovic in the cabinet as part of a coalition. Greece took a bit longer but a constitutional Kingdom of Greece[2] eventually emerged in October 1948 with a coalition government lead by the social democrat Georgios Papandreou and the moderate communist Markos Vafiadis.

The takeover of eastern Europe proved to be a watershed moment in the history of global communism, with notable effects in the Commonwealth. Communism, it turned out, was no bulwark against oppression and imperialism. For example, in Australia it is credited with the collapse of communist influence within the trades union movement, which some have argued preserved the unity of the Australian Labour Party. In the UK, too, these events set off dramatic changes in the intellectual class. Christopher Hill and E.P. Thompson were amongst the figures who left the party in the late 1940s and would go on to have careers as public intellectuals. Their journal ‘Past & Present,’ founded in 1952, would take a left wing but avowedly non-communist position, further pushing the British left in that general direction.

[1] OTL Serbia, Kosovo, Albania, Bosnia-Herzegovina and Croatia
[2] OTL Greece, FYR Macedonia and Istanbul, West Marmara, Aegean and East Marmara regions

 

[Rattigan]

A Continent Safe for Capitalism: NATO, the World Bank and the Anglo-American Empire in Europe, 1945-54

The King of the Benelux: General Bernard Freyburg greets dignitaries are part of his role commanding the Commonwealth occupation of the Low Countries


While the Soviet domination of eastern Europe was very traditional in what its projection of hegemonic power looked like, the same could not be said for the supposed ‘Anglo-American sphere’ in western and southern Europe. Rather than seeking a traditional military domination, the Commonwealth and the Americans sought to build stable market democracies in those countries, who would then be reliable trading allies for the UK and the USA. In the words of the historian Adam Tooze, the plan was to “make the continent safe for capitalism and democracy.” The fact that this happened in such a relatively smooth manner often makes one forget that it was in fact a notable achievement, capitalism and mass democracy having previously not been regarded as natural bedfellows.

Saying that the Anglo-American alliance dominated southern and western Europe obscures that they were in fact dealing with at least four fundamentally different types of polities. In the first place, were the utterly defeated enemy combatants (Spain and the western German territories), who could be disposed of pretty much as the victors wished. Secondly, there was Italy who, although an unconditionally surrendered opponent, had only been occupied (outside of Sicily and its overseas colonies) after its surrender and whose material and economic infrastructure remained largely intact. Thirdly, there were the Benelux countries: technically victors (some with continuing imperial pretensions) but economically and materially seemingly as ruined as much as Germany. Finally, there was the special case of France: a country which seemed in a similar position to the Benelux but who in practice had valid great power pretensions and a vibrant and independent-minded political culture of its own.

As we have already seen, to deal with Germany the Allies simply abolished her as a nation and partitioned her up as best fitted their needs. Although they did not partition her nor abolish her legal personality, something very similar did happen to Spain. Following the defeat of the Falangist government in March 1943, a provisional government had been formed under the nominal leadership of General Francisco Franco, but in truth all power was held by the Commonwealth military authorities. In February 1946, Franco was unceremoniously defenestrated when it became clear that he would resist any attempts to install a democracy. Instead, a constitution was imposed with a parliamentary system based on the Westminster system and a ceremonial head of state elected by the legislative assembly. Miguel Maura’s Liberal Republican Party won the first elections in May 1947, defeating the Republican Left Party of Diego Martinez Barrio.

The territorial changes to Italy, too, were moderate, with her colonies being confiscated (Libya to become an independent kingdom, Albania to Yugoslavia and Somaliland and Eritrea absorbed into Ethiopia) and Istria being divided between Austria and Yugoslavia.[1] Perhaps surprisingly, the occupying American forces alighted on the exiled former monarchy as a way of securing a reasonably consensual head of state. Victor Emmanuel himself was judged to be too controversial, given his role in the collapse of the first Kingdom in the 1930s. But his son could be prevailed upon to accept a constitutional system and rule as Umberto II. A new constitution was drafted which required political parties to adhere to the democratic basis of the state (under penalty of being abolished by the constitutional court), an implicit threat to the Communist Party. Furthermore, although the legislative chamber retained a level of proportional representation, parties were required to achieve a minimum percentage of the popular vote (set at 5%) before they could send delegates. The new constitution and the return of the monarchy were put to a referendum in June 1946, followed by the first elections to the assembly three months later. The newly-constituted Christian Democrat Party, a coalition of various centrist and centre-right movements, won the majority and formed a government under Alcide De Gasperi. The Communist Party came in second, its commitment to the democratic process proved, something which was cemented by the party’s formal break from the Soviet Union (over its anti-democratic conquest of eastern Europe) in 1949. This comparative stability, combined with the country itself being relatively untouched by the War, laid the grounds for the Italian economic miracle of the 1950s and ‘60s.

France was a unique case, with Charles De Gaulle anxious that she should retain her independence outside of the Anglo-American orbit. He thus insisted that France have her own area of occupation in Germany, a permanent seat on the security council and undertook several measures to re-secure her colonial empire after 1945. Although French politics was thrown into chaos by the assassination of De Gaulle in 1946, of which more will be spoken of later, France remained very jealous of her independence from the British and the Americans, something which was key to President Bonnet’s decision to veto the French joining of NATO in 1949 (although she would join in 1952 under President Leclerc). When the French Union was formally constituted in 1958, it was regarded as a big failure of Anglo-American diplomacy in Westminster and Washington foreign policy circles.

In the Low Countries, any pretensions local elites had of a return to the status quo 1939 was swiftly disabused when the Belgian King, Leopold III, was told in no uncertain terms by the head of the Commonwealth occupation forces, General Bernard Freyberg, that, in view of his collaboration with occupying German forces in 1940-45, it would no longer be appropriate for him to carry on his royal duties. 15-year-old Crown Prince Baudouin was installed in his place and Leopold spent the rest of his life in a luxurious form of house arrest in the Chateau des Amerois (his guards were always Commonwealth soldiers) until his death in 1983. Queen Wilhelmina of the Netherlands and Grand Duchess Charlotte of Luxembourg, both of whom were judged by the British to have had a ‘good war,’ were allowed to keep their thrones. But beyond that there was little need to make radical changes to their political structures, those three countries having had relatively stable democracies in the first place. They did, however, desperately need money to re-start their economies and all three became the first recipients of WBG grants in August 1948.

Commonwealth soldiers would remain in those three countries for many years, with Freyburg gaining the nickname ‘the King of the Benelux.’ He used his influence to encourage closer cooperation between the three nations, as well as to urge the Netherlands to stay in the fight when a communist rebellion broke out in the Dutch East Indies in 1949. The creation of the Benelux Union in 1954, a political and economic confederation of the three nations, was regarded as one of his major successes.

As mentioned already, the overarching framework of the Anglo-American relationship took the form of the NATO military alliance. This served Commonwealth purposes well by tying the Americans, now militarily as well as economically, to the fate of Europe. The equal involvement of the three superpowers would, it was hoped in Westminster, preserve the European balance of power. At its inception its members were:

1. Baden-Wurttemberg
2. Bavaria
3. Belgium
4. the Commonwealth
5. Greece
6. Hanover
7. Hesse
8. Italy
9. Luxembourg
10. Netherlands
11. Rhineland
12. Spain
13. the United States
14. Yugoslavia

[1] TTL Italy shares OTL borders minus South Tyrol and Friuli Venezia Giulia

Europe in c.1955

 

[Rattigan]

This is the final update in our miniseries about reconstruction, this time focusing on the Middle East. This is another update where lots of you will (rightly) complain about the lack of maps, for which I can only apologise and promise that it will be fixed one day...

[EDIT] A map is now attached.

From next week we'll be returning to the usual format of three updates a week. Next time will focus on Attlee's second term domestically, what happened to China and Indian developments.

* * *
​

Twilight of the Ottomans: The Partition of the Middle East, 1945-49

The new face of Turkey: Nuri Demirag (seated, second from right) and other members of the Turkish delegation before the signing of the Ankara Accords in 1949


Turkey had entered the war as a rebuke to the Entente of the Great War, in particular the British. By joining the Axis, they hoped to reabsorb the lost territories of Armenia and Smyrna (the status of Constantinople in any putative Axis victory remains unclear: Italy promised it to Bulgaria but Germany implied that it would be returned to Turkey) and gain a share of the conquered territories in the Caucuses. They also believed that large portions of Mesopotamia, Syria and Palestine would be returned to them from a defeated Britain, somewhat underestimating the de facto independence of Arabia by that point. While their armies had performed creditably in the Caucuses (in pure tactical terms), rumours of massacres of ethnic Armenian and Georgian civilians by occupying forces severely damaged Turkey’s reputation in 1945. When the Anglo-Arabian armies occupied Ankara and extracted an unconditional surrender from the government, the decision was taken to finally dismember the country.

The first such dismemberment was the handing over of the entire former international zone of Marmara to Greece, along with an enlarged Aegean region. It was an unwieldy conglomeration that left the new Greece with a substantial Muslim minority but it was nonetheless one that Tukhachevsky had agreed to in 1945 on the condition that the Red Fleet be granted free access to the straits of Constantinople (a grant made by the Commonwealth, of course: the Greeks didn’t have a say in this). One of the British aims through the foundation of NATO was - along with, in the language of the time, keeping ‘the Germans down, the Russians out and the Americans in’ - was to safeguard her own continuing control of the trade routes through the Mediterranean and, when the organisation was founded in 1949, Greece furthered that aim by being a member and a reliable Commonwealth ally.

With the Western Allies having already gobbled up one successor state, the Soviets wasted no time in securing another one for themselves. The new and expanded Republic of Armenia[1] was declared in the area occupied by the Soviet army over the summer of 1945. In Armenia, the occupying Soviets did not bother with the democratic niceties they had occasionally attempted in eastern Europe. Instead, a communist government was installed and a dictatorship established under Anastas Mikoyan without the prelude of ‘democratic’ elections.

The final country looking for a client/buffer state was Arabia who, although still de jure a British client, was de facto independent and sought to crush her former Turkish overlords once and for all. Indeed, with Arabia having suffered 298,000 casualties (89,000 in the Great War and 209,000 in the World War) fighting the Turks, the Big Five didn’t really think they could deny them that. To that end, the Republic of Kurdistan[2] was declared in February 1946.

This left the remainder of rump Turkey[3], effectively reduced to a square of central Anatolia. In 1949, the new Turkish President Nuri Demirag signed the Ankara Accords with representatives from Greece, Georgia, Kurdistan, Araba, NATO and the USSR. The Ankara Accords provided for the Turkish military to adopt a permanent declaration of neutrality, insert a number of pacifist amendments into their constitution and agree to never join a military alliance such as NATO or the Bucharest Pact.

[1] OTL Armenia and the Northeast Anatolia, Central East Anatolia and East Black Sea Regions
[2] OTL Southeast Anatolia Region
[3] OTL Mediterranean, Central Anatolia, West Black Sea and West Anatolia Regions

The Middle East following the signing of the Ankara Accords in 1949

 

[Rattigan]

Tales of a New Jerusalem: Britain Enters the Atomic Age

Visions of a new age: Capenhurst Nuclear Power Station in mid-1954


Following the widespread reforms of his first ministry, Attlee’s second ministry would be rather quiet on the domestic front as domestic reforms were given time to bed in and much of the government’s time was taken up firefighting various foreign policy crises in Asia.

The biggest early event of note was a cabinet reshuffle in May 1950, following poor local election results for Labour. Most of the senior members of the Attlee cabinet were occupied by men born the late nineteenth century, who saw their mission as being the culmination of the social reforms begun by Chamberlain, Dilke and Lloyd George in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Many were now running out of ideas and were, in any event, in failing health. To this end, Attlee decided to use this opportunity to freshen up his top table.

Cripps left the Exchequer, Chuter Ede the Board of Trade, Nicolson the Foreign Office and Dalton the Office of Privy Seal, being replaced by Hugh Gaitskell, Evan Durbin, Patrick Gordon-Walker and Richard Crossman, respectively. Further significant changes followed in April 1951, when Ernest Bevin died and his position at the head of the Labour and Supply Ministry was taken by Douglas Jay, whose position at the Colonial Office was filled by John Strachey. At the time of the second reshuffle, it was rumoured that Attlee himself considered retirement too but decided against it owing to concerns that his favoured successor, Gaitskell, did not yet have the internal backing to see off the challenge of Attlee’s great personal enemy Herbert Morrison (who remained as Lord President).

In December 1950, the government opened the world’s first civilian nuclear energy plant, HER-1, in Capenhurst in Cheshire. Funded heavily by research money from the SWF, the plant was a mixed civilian and military installation, producing both electricity for future civilian consumption as well as progressing towards a nuclear bomb. It had been ordered in October 1947 pursuant to an agreement between Attlee, Bevin and Nicolson that had circumvented cabinet discussion. Its entire existence was secret until its civilian opening in December 1950 but the military part remained secret until the detonation of the Commonwealth’s first nuclear weapon in October 1951. HER-1 would first begin to produce commercial electricity in December 1953.

Somewhat accidentally, the opening of HER-1 also became an important stepping stone towards further Commonwealth unity. The military part of its work was, naturally, under the general overview of the ICS. When the ‘Hurricane’ nuclear bomb was detonated in October 1951, it made the Commonwealth the world’s third nuclear power and strengthened its hand at the superpower table. When HER-1 also began producing commercial electricity (it was powering the entirety of the County of Cheshire by the middle of 1955), this naturally stimulated interest amongst the rest of the Commonwealth about sharing the technology. Although run by private companies, the commercial nuclear industry operated using proprietary technology leased from the SWF and under the utmost secrecy, with the regulators mistrusting not only the Soviets but also the Americans. However, in December 1953 Attlee delivered his famous ‘Atoms for Peace’ speech at the Commonwealth Prime Ministers’ Conference, which allowed for the exporting of nuclear expertise and technology to other Commonwealth countries (under certain guidelines).

 

[Rattigan]

Restless Empire: The Birth of the Fourth Chinese Republic

The Red Emperor - Wang Ming in 1948


Following the surrender of China in September 1945, coastal ports had been occupied by the Commonwealth, Americans and the Dutch, while the Japanese and the Soviets occupied Manchuria and Korea. However, other than these aforementioned operations and a joint five-powers occupation (the Dutch no-doubt enjoying their brief return to Great Power status in this context) of Beijing, a widespread occupation of the vast Chinese interior was not attempted. Since Chiang’s declaration of the Third Chinese Republic in 1927, Chinese communists had generally gone into exile in Xinjiang and Soviet central asia, where, although welcomed in their way, they found little active support as the Soviets regarded it as more politic to not upset the Kuomintang in the pre-war years. However, following Soviet entry into the war in 1941, support was given to Communist insurgents as a way of destabilising the Kuomintang war effort. A strong Communist paramilitary and political organisation, headed by Wang Ming, arrived in Beijing on 1 January 1946.

The immediate postwar period, however, was largely free of violent conflicts (apart from small skirmishes between communist and nationalist paramilitaries), as the Allies commenced a thorough reorganisation and disarming of the Chinese military, under the five-party overview of Louis Mountbatten, Chester Nimitz, Georgy Zhukov, Sokichi Takagi and Karel Doorman. Negotiations between the two sides, lead by Wang and Sun Li-jen, produced a new constitution in April 1947, which would establish a federal semi-presidential form of government modeled on the United States. However, by this time the Western Allies were growing increasingly concerned about the Soviets’ intentions as regards China. When Zhukov torpedoed the introduction of the new constitution by demanding that it only take place following the trial of Kuomintang leaders (not, with hindsight, a completely absurd demand), the Western Allies interpreted this as an attempt to buy more time for the communists to build up their internal structures ahead of a takeover.

With the other four Pacific powers opposed to their proposals, the Soviets eventually backed down in October 1947 and consented to the establishment of a civilian government. Sun was appointed the provisional President and Wang as the provisional Prime Minister, with a rump federal parliament made up of a mix of communist and nationalist appointees. The plan was for federal and provincial elections to take place in June 1948 but these were postponed when Soviet-backed communist forces in the upper Yellow River valley rose up in revolt in March. The outbreak of hostilities seems to have been occasioned by Wang’s concerns that his party was going to do significantly worse than he had anticipated and he reasoned that the only way he could rely on the Soviets to back an attempted coup under the nose of the Western Allies was if he forced their hand.

The conflict would rage for the next three years, primarily in northern and western China. At the same time, a communist insurrection erupted in Korea against the re-installed Japanese colonial government. At the UN, General Secretary Roosevelt attempted to garner backing for a military operation to be launched in support of the Chinese provisional government but these moves were vetoed by the Soviets, who did not want to be seen to be sanctioning the crushing of a prominent communist party, even as their support for the Chinese communists was some way short of what Wang seems to have initially anticipated. Limited deployments of Commonwealth and American troops in coastal cities and the surrounding countryside (notionally to protect their own positions but, in practice, in close coordination with democratic forces) did take place, as did Soviet deployments in Manchuria and western China, although also to a limited extent.

By the end of 1951, the communists had been forced from eastern China, Korea and Manchuria, retreating to their bases in Turkestan and Mongolia, where they received Soviet backing to stop them completely collapsing. With the democrats unable to decisively destroy the communists and the communists unable to effectively counter-attack, the war settled into a stalemate and the Soviets began putting feelers out to the Western Allies, resulting in a ceasefire in November 1951. This was followed up by the Geneva Conference in April 1952, attended by Soviet, Commonwealth, American, Japanese, Dutch and French representatives, along with delegations from China (both democratic and communist), Korea (both democratic and communist), Mongolia, Turkestan, Manchuria and Tibet, all overseen by the UN. Key to the conference going ahead was the defection of Zhou Enlai and his allies from Wang’s clique, confirming that he would be willing to take part in elections in a democratic China. In July, the parties agreed to the Treaty of Geneva, which acknowledged the 1948 Chinese constitution and agreed to hold elections in February-March 1953. In addition, China recognised the independence of Manchuria, as well as re-confirming the independence of Tibet, Mongolia and Turkestan. The treaty also provided for the independence of Korea and Formosa from Japan, including the restoration of the Korean monarchy. With Beijing now considered too close to the border with a potentially hostile Manchuria, the capital was moved to Nanjing on 1 January 1953. As the historian Jonathan Spence noted, the Fourth Republic had accidentally created the territory of the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom ninety years later.

The months following the signing were marked by mass movements of people, with communist hardliners making the vast trek to Turkestan or Mongolia, while ethnic populations on the wrong side of the new national lines attempted to move to the ‘right’ country. There was widespread violence and estimates of the number of deaths range from several hundred thousand to up to 5,000,000 (in addition to the 4,000,000 military and civilian deaths in the 1948-51 fighting). In addition, the Americans suffered 8,000 casualties and the Commonwealth 3,000. Soviet casualty figures are unknown.

In the subsequent elections, Sun Li-jen ran for President as an independent and was elected with 62% of the vote over Zhou, who stood as the candidate for the Democratic Socialist Party (as the Chinese Communist Party was renamed). Despite his service as a general in the Kuomintang Army, Sun was generally well regarded as a unifying figure in China and abroad, being thought to have fought an ‘honourable war’ in Malaya and admired by many former communists for his opposition to Chiang after 1944. In the elections to the federal parliament, the majority was won by the Progress and Development Party, a centre-right party made up of some of the more ‘liberal’ (and untouched by war crimes allegations) members of the Kuomintang. Yu Hung-chun became Prime Minister, his pre-war record largely spotless.

Upon taking office, Sun and Yu confirmed that they intended for China to avoid alliances with any of the Soviet, Commonwealth or American spheres, which served to allay the fears of the Democratic Socialists that an anti-communist crackdown was coming.

 

[Rattigan]

The War of the Running Dogs: The Commonwealth and the Malayan War, 1948-61

Fijian (left) and Maori (right) Commonwealth troops on duty during the Malayan War c. 1950

As they had done in India, a key challenge for Labour’s foreign policy was navigating the question of decolonisation in Southeast Asia in a way which was, firstly, just on the colonised inhabitants and, secondly, did not deal a blow to British prestige. In Malaya the British had exerted colonial control through a patchwork of sultanates, protectorates and crown colonies. However, while he was at the Colonial Office, Douglas Jay had reasoned that responsible government would be better served through a single administration. To this end, in 1948 he combined them all into the single crown colony of Malaya.

The result was that the British colonial government got their fingers badly burned: the sultans were none too pleased about this reduction in their power; and the entrepots formerly known as the ‘Straits Settlements’ had large Indian and Chinese populations who were uncomfortable about joining a state dominated by ethnic Malays. Public opinion in the new colony swiftly turned against the union and, a year later, Jay was forced to reorganise the colony once more. North Borneo was transferred to the administration of Sarawak, which was once again governed as a single unit. The settlements of Penang, Malacca, Singapore and Labuan were then separated from Malaya to be administered together. The Sultanates were left large internally autonomous under a loose colonial umbrella. Although it came about awkwardly, the British had proved themselves to be responsive to popular opinion and committed to orderly and speedy decolonisation.

However, tensions remained, not least because of the continuing economic problems that were afflicting Malaya, as the peninsula’s export-based economy struggled to adapt to the new Lismore System. In June 1948, a general communist insurrection began and many, at the time, expected the Commonwealth to abandon the Malayan rulers to their fate. However, the ICS and civilian governments immediately confirmed that they intended to fight the insurgents. This was not an easy choice for some of the latter to make - the tax rises associated with maintaining the military expenditure to fight in both Malaya and China is generally regarded as having contributed to the fall of the Curtin government in Australia and the St Laurent government in Canada (both in 1949), for example. In 1949, Jay published a white paper calling for independence for Britain’s far eastern colonies in 1964, provided that the colonies were not still in a state of conflict. This was then endorsed at a Commonwealth Foreign Ministers’ Conference (with only South Africa and Rhodesia dissenting, both governments concerned about an influx of non-white influence in the Commonwealth).

The same year that the Commonwealth had provided a path to independence for Malaya, the communist insurgency spread to the Dutch colony of the East Indies. The Dutch had successfully re-occupied the colony easier than many suspected in 1945, something probably helped by the fact that many of the local nationalist leaders had enthusiastically embraced the Chinese invaders in 1940-45. By 1949 however, a generation of communist rebels emerged looking for independence immediately without the taint of collaboration. Following a loss of control of the countryside by 1950, Dutch officials were rumoured to be getting ready to negotiate and exit. However, they were persuaded to prolong the war following an agreement that they would receive Commonwealth resources and aid if they too published a roadmap to self-government along the lines of Jay’s offer to the Malayans.

Over the next 12 years, the fortunes of the war would wax and wane, with the final surrender of the communist insurgents coming in April 1960. (They were greatly helped by the Soviets cutting off their under-the-table support for the insurgents in 1958, following secret talks with the Commonwealth.) As promised in Jay’s 1949 white paper, the Federal Kingdom of Malaya, the Federation of the East Indies and the Kingdom of Sarawak would all achieve independence on 1 January 1964, with each country forging their own destiny. The former Dutch East Indies would receive their independence exactly a year later, with the states of Java, Borneo and East Indonesia becoming independent members of the Benelux Union.

The Malayan War (as it was known in the Commonwealth) became important outside of the UK for a number of reasons (films about the conflict were a mainstay of British ‘New Wave’ cinema in the 1960s, for example) and its effect on the domestic politics and cultures of the various Commonwealth and Imperial nations were significant. Of particular note was the way that soldiers from the non-white Empire and Commonwealth were, by necessity, integrated into the Commonwealth forces, rather than being segregated into their own colonial units, performing with distinction and further heightening these nations’ sense of dignity and selfhood as equal partners in the Commonwealth. The valour of the black Rhodesian soldiers is credited with igniting Commonwealth-wide support for their simmering civil rights movement. Fijian soldiers also performed bravely and they have since been regarded as key to advancing calls for them and the other Pacific Islands to exercise self-government.

 

[Rattigan]

The P-Word: The Failure of the Dominion of India, 1948-51

Images of Imperial Failure: Kashmiri troops in action against Pakistani forces in November 1950 (top); General El Edroos surrenders the Hyderabadi army to India in September 1950 (bottom)

The transition to independence in India has been relatively painless, and figures such as Slim, Nehru, Liaquat Ali Khan and H.S. Suhrawardy received praise for their competent and statesmanlike handling of events. However, over the first three years of its existence, the notional federal government (referred to here as “the Dominion,” for clarity) faced considerable and, ultimately, secular challenges. In the first place, the Pakistani state that did emerge under Slim’s division was only 70% Muslim and its continued attachment to the Dominion government frustrated many political constituencies, including Muslim thinkers who sought an Islamic state, Punjabi landowners and industrialists concerned about the regulations and land reform proposed by the INC-dominated political leadership in New Delhi, and merchants in Karachi who sought to attract greater prestige for themselves out from the shadow of Bombay, Delhi and Calcutta. In Bengal, religious conflicts were more pronounced (not helped by centuries of the two communities being played off against each other by the British and prior rulers) and in 1949 the government installed the separate religious constituencies that British imperial officials had been anxious to avoid. The INC leadership in India Proper (referred to here as “India”), meanwhile, was anxious to avoid further Balkanisation of the subcontinent and was already dissatisfied with the loss of eastern Punjab and western Bengal in 1948.

Matters came to a head in 1950-1, over the question of the future status of the non-Dominion states on the subcontinent. While the remaining French possessions had acceded to the Dominion as part of India in 1948, negotiations for the Portuguese possessions to join the Dominion had come to nothing by 1950 and the princely states of Kashmir, Hyderabad and Sikkim flatly refused to join in 1948, declaring and asserting their own independence. While the case of Sikkim is curious, the refusal of Hyderabad and Kashmir to join the Dominion struck at the core of the self-identities of Indian and Pakistani elites. Although Slim was firm with most of the princely states that they should join the Dominion, he had decided that it was simply not worth it to try and coerce these three final states and instead they had signed standstill agreements with the Dominion in 1948, carrying over previous arrangements with the Raj ahead of further talks to take place at a “further date.”

As an independent state, Hyderabad had a population of nearly 20,000,000 people, its own currency (albeit one pegged to sterling), post office, military and public transport system. It was clearly capable of becoming an independent state and had a long and proud history of its independent relationship with the British Crown and the Mughals and Marathas before them. Its location in the middle of the subcontinent, however, made it important ideologically for the Nehru government to pursue its incorporation into India as a matter of urgency. Things came to a head in the spring of 1950, when stories leaked out that the Nizam of Hyderabad was in negotiations with the Portuguese over purchasing their remaining territories in order to give his state access to the sea.

A similar situation was going on in Karachi over Kashmir. Although this province was not as economically powerful as Hyderabad, it was still ideologically important for Pakistani intellectuals (it was in the name after all). Similarly, the Maharaja and his government there were equally clear that they were perfectly capable of going their own independent way and had a history of direct relations with the British throne.

Although the Dominion government had theoretical command over the whole Dominion’s army, it was clear to everybody that such command was just that: theoretical. The power that the Dominion government had was, ultimately, that of persuasion and it was one which ebbed away over the course of 1949-50 when it became clear that, while Slim himself was committed to making the Dominion working, Dominion Prime Minister C. Rajagopalachan felt no such compulsion and was openly colluding with Nehru’s Bombay government.

As a final gambit, in August 1950 Slim publicly announced that he would refuse to allow Dominion troops to be ordered into battle against Hyderabad and Kashmir, urging instead a continuation of talks between the relevant leaders. But this was a bluff and everybody knew it: if some Dominion units did decide to follow Indian or Pakistani orders, Slim could not count on the remainder of his army to put down the mutiny. Furthermore, the chance of intervention by troops from the wider Commonwealth was minute to nothing, partly for ideological reasons but also because of their continued involvement in China and Malaya. As such, Nehru simply ignored Slim and announced that he would be commandeering the Dominion forces in India to launch an invasion of Hyderabad. This was accomplished in 5 days in September and ended with the surrender of the Hyderabadi armies and the flight of the Nizam.

Following Nehru’s lead, Liaquat Ali Khan announced similar measures with respect to the Dominion troops in Pakistan. An invasion of Kashmir began on 22 October 1950. Although it was not as swift a success as India’s invasion of Hyderabad had been, the Dominion government made it clear that they would not come to the Maharajah’s aid and he surrendered and acceded to Pakistan on 1 January 1951. Suhrawardy made the same declaration with respect to the Dominion troops in his territory but was restrained from launching a similar invasion of Sikkim in May 1951.

Despite the ending of hostilities, the aftermath of the events of the previous year had made it clear that the Dominion could not control its own army anymore and was simply no longer a viable state. Attlee and Gordon-Walker urged Slim and Rajagopalachan to try and make the Dominion work but both recognised the situation on the ground. Representatives from the Dominion, India, Pakistan and Bengal drafted the Simla Agreement in June 1951, dissolving the Dominion on 2 July 1951 and bringing Pakistan, India and Bengal into existence as independent states.

The Dominion thus failed as a long-term political project and arguably helped push the radical sections of the INC into adopting a republican constitution in 1953 and withdrawing from the Commonwealth. The consensus at the time was certainly one of failure. This was a view echoed by Perry Anderson in his ‘The Indian Ideology’ (2012), who saw the Dominion as a failed last-ditch attempt to enforce British military and economic hegemony over India Proper. Winston Churchill famously denounced the Dominion as “a crooked attempt to partition India and run roughshod over its traditions under the pretence of not doing so.” However, Ramachandra Guha in ‘India After Slim’ (2007) saw it as a reasonably successful delaying action that paved the way for a partition and transition to independence more peaceful than it otherwise might have been.

 

[Rattigan]

Diplomacy with a Difference: The Ottawa Declaration, the Treaty of London and the End of Empire

John Strachey at his desk during the Ottawa Conference


The first decade of the postwar era was a remarkable period for Commonwealth relations, which would culminate in the Treaty of London on 1 June 1953. During this time, tremendous changes were put in place to rationalise the Commonwealth’s structure and speed up the transition of the remaining colonies to independence or Commonwealth membership. The central driver of these changes was a change to the world status of the UK: to put it simply, in 1900 the UK was a global power and so had a special relationship with the Commonwealth; in 1950, the UK was a global power because it had a special relationship with the Commonwealth. In addition, other Commonwealth nations such as Australia, Canada and, later, Pakistan would rapidly attain a level of wealth and global influence which meant that the UK could no longer dictate to them and, from then on, would have to be, at best, a first amongst equals.

Since the early Edwardian period, Commonwealth unity had mainly been expressed at the level of the military. The Royal Navy and, after 1919, the Royal Air Force were shared resources with all Commonwealth nations contributing a portion of their budget towards it (a process that was the subject of intense backroom discussions every five years) and by 1945 the land forces were so closely enmeshed that they were effectively a single organisation for all practical purposes. When the British nuclear deterrent was revealed to the world in 1951, it was rapidly integrated within the Commonwealth’s overall military forces. Alongside the military, the hotch potch of preferential tariffs, the MPC and the Fuel and Steel Treaty meant that the Commonwealth nations were, for practical purposes, fiscally and economically reliant upon one another.

Politically, developments like the Balfour Declaration and the annual meetings of prime ministers created a shared political culture amongst senior politicians of member states. The social democratic parties of these countries formed the Commonwealth Progressive Alliance of Socialists in 1946, an annual meeting of party delegates to share policy and electioneering ideas. Outside of the realms of high politics and macroeconomics, the introduction of the Commonwealth-wide licence fee to pay for the CBC further cemented its role as the premier global broadcaster, linking together the nations of the Commonwealth in a shared musical, artistic and sporting culture. In terms of consumer products, ‘British’ Canadian butter, New Zealand lamb and Caribbean sugar were regular sights on British dinner tables.

Perhaps, therefore, Commonwealth unity was inevitable. However, to the extent that individuals can be responsible for such grand historical changes, perhaps nobody stands out more, in this context, than John Strachey, whose tireless work as Commonwealth Secretary since his appointment in 1951 did more than anybody to set the stage for the Ottawa Declaration and the subsequent London Treaty. The initial impetus behind the organisation of a prime ministers’ conference in Ottawa in March 1953 was to handle the administrative details of India’s departure following the ratification by the Lok Sabha of a republican constitution in November 1952. However, it was clear from the beginning that India wanted to leave the organisation and so the arrangements for her to do so in fact occupied relatively little of the discussion. Instead, the conference was dominated by how to rationalise the disparate Commonwealth structures left behind by previous generations.

In April, the Ottawa Declaration reaffirmed that the supremacy of the British Crown was a paramount requirement for membership of the Commonwealth (although other monarchies were allowed on the proviso that they acknowledged the suzerainty of the British monarchy), giving India an easy way out. The text of the Declaration also sketched out the creation of independent Commonwealth structures to better manage the organisation in the future, all of which were to be signed into being at the London Conference in May.

The eventual agreement was signed as the Treaty of London on 1 June 1953. The Treaty created a free trade area and customs union between the signatory states, including structures for ministerial meetings to coordinate foreign and trade policy, the guarantee of continued visa-free movement within the block and a roadmap for the accession of new members. It also created the institutions of the Commonwealth Assembly and the Commonwealth Cabinet to coordinate the drafting and passing of future regulations. Winston Churchill was offered, and accepted, the position of the first President of the Commonwealth Cabinet, a role which was then thought to be largely honorary (and was a useful way for the Labour government to get him out of domestic politics ahead of the 1953 election). The Commonwealth Assembly would develop greatly over the next few years but initially it was envisaged as a largely technocratic body. As such, its membership at its first meeting in 1953 was appointed and no provisions were made to elect it. Michael Collins (the Liberal Irish First Minister 1935-50) was appointed as the inaugural Speaker of the Assembly. Although he was a Liberal, Attlee and Strachey favoured his appointment because he was generally of progressive sympathies and had been a noted and competent First Minister.

The original members were as follows:

1. Australia
2. Bengal
3. Canada
4. Ceylon
5. New Zealand
6. Newfoundland
7. Pakistan
8. Puerto Rico
9. South Africa
10. United Kingdom

 

[Rattigan]

This New Dark Ocean: The Megaroc Project

The Space Artist: R.A. Smith, President of the Commonwealth Space Agency, 1951-1959

Boldly Going Where No Man Has Gone Before: Megaroc-6 blasting off from its launchpad in Western Australia, March 1953


In the aftermath of the World War, all of the world’s great powers were scrambling to master rocket technology. The United States managed to snatch the Germany’s finest minds under the Operation Paperclip programme and the Soviets managed to occupy many of the old German research facilities. Britain, meanwhile, had to make do with salvaged rockets that had been used as the basis of a V-1 and V-2 bombing campaign and whatever else they had been able to pick up.

In October 1946, the military unit known as T-Force began to prepare technical readouts of German rocket weapons and conducted experimental launches from a base in northern Germany. Although two of the launches suffered from engine failures upon launch and the third and final one failed to reach full orbit, there was enough there for R.A. Smith of the British Interplanetary Society (‘BIS’) to put forward a design for sending a manned object into space and returning it to Earth safely. Operating under the utmost secrecy, the BIS presented their proposals to the Paymaster General Manny Shinwell in December 1946 for a project known as ‘Megaroc.’ Although the project was more than slightly whimsical when compared to the Attlee government’s other reforms, the amount of money requested wasn’t too large and Shinwell agreed to provide funding for your years.

By 1950, the Megaroc Project had failed to send a rocket into space but had done enough to justify a much larger infusion of cash from SWF funds distributed by the government. In 1951, an agreement was reached with the Canadian and Australian governments to collaborate on the project, which resulted in the creation of the Commonwealth Space Agency (‘CSA’) in October 1951. Working in collaboration with scientists from Canada and Australia, the existence of Megaroc was kept secret from the public at large, with scientists sequestered in launch pads and labs in Western Australia.

Under this new set-up, Smith’s plans for manned spaceflight were put on the back-burner behind plans for an unmanned satellite, which, it was theorised, could be used for espionage and defence purposes. Smith, however, remained vitally important to the project, chairing the CSA from its foundation. Flights which reached the ionosphere and the upper atmosphere had been achieved before the final breakthrough came in March 1953, when Megaroc-6 was launched into an elliptical low Earth orbit. The satellite orbited the Earth, sending back signals to its controllers, for three weeks before its batteries died. From then on, it orbited silently for two more months before falling back into the atmosphere and being recovered by the CSA.

The launch immediately caused an international incident, with both the Soviets and the Americans taken completely by surprise. The secrecy with which the CSA had operated stirred a media panic in the United States and a more private political one in the Soviet Union about the perceived technological superiority of the Commonwealth. Tennessee Senator Estes Kefauver used the so-called “rocket gap” to argue for more spending on research and development and burnish his own presidential ambitions. Meanwhile, the so-called ‘Megaroc Shock’ in the Soviet Union looked, for 48 hours, like it might even cause the fall of Tukhachevsky.

In the long term, the launch of Megaroc-6 was the spur to an enormous number of programmes in the Commonwealth, ranging from defence to education, as well as spurring a newfound interest in space around the world. In the short term, the launch boosted the position of the government in the polls, which had been lagging for some time. Over 1953 and 1954, the governments of Canada and Australia (respectively) held elections which resulted in their governments being re-elected. It has also been considered a key reason why Attlee went to the country in the autumn of 1953.

 

[Rattigan]

The New Elizabethans: The General Election of 1953

By the time the Treaty of London was signed, the British economy had staged a dramatic recovery from the damage done by the War. This was staged partly with the help of a housing and infrastructure construction boom (in this way the UK could effectively use People’s Home programmes twice over to recover from two different crises) and also through money made available by the SWF and the Keynes Plan (the latter of which was extended in September 1945 to September 1955). In the decade after 1945, British society became more commercialised and average earnings and standards of living rose steadily, standing at nearly double their nearest European competitor by 1955.

Notable British success stories in this period were in new high tech industries as the manufacturing economy successfully continued to pivot away from heavy industry. In particular, the De Havilland ‘Comet’ became the world’s first commercial jet airliner in 1952 and it fast outpaced its competitors to become the leading aeronautics company in the world by 1960 (although this was no doubt helped by a number of high profile accidents suffered by its American competitor Boeing). Furthermore, the British motor industry remained near-hegemonic in the Commonwealth and dominant in European and South American markets. Of particular note was the firm Rootes Motors Limited, which purchased the entirety of the German Volkswagen company in 1946, proceeding to strip the contents and transport as much of it as they could back to Britain, resulting in the production of the famous ‘Rootes Beetle’ in 1948. Rootes was often bracketed with the brands MG, Rover, Austin, Morris and Jaguar as the ‘Big Six.’ Taken together, the British automobile industry accounted for nearly 52% of the world’s exported cars.

Alongside these successes, the influence of the SWF was could be seen in a number of experimental sectors, although these would not be felt to their fullest extent until further on in the 1950s. As we have already seen, the involvement of the SWF was key to the focus of the British nuclear industry on civilian electrical applications as well as warfare. When giving out SWF funds directly, Keynes set a pattern that would be adopted by his successors: rather than investing in particular companies, the SWF invested in sectors, encouraging competition and stimulating innovation. On the other hand, when money from the SWF was given to the government for investment, they tended to adopt a more statist approach. A good example of the former was the burgeoning British computing industry and a good example of the latter was the British (later Commonwealth) space agency. As we have seen, the CSA was a notable propaganda victory for the Commonwealth and a key factor in Attlee’s decision to go to the country in September 1953, while we shall read more about the computing industry in the future.

Buoyed by the strong economy, the Megaroc Shock and Churchill’s departure from Parliament, Attlee dissolved Parliament and called an election for September 1953. Despite canny timing and a shrewd campaign, Labour nevertheless suffered the fate of most parties in power and lost seats, although they retained a workable majority of 14. Gwilym Lloyd George had assumed the leadership of the Liberals in the wake of Churchill’s defection and received praise for managing to cobble together a decent enough campaign that saw a net gain of 13 seats, mainly in urban suburbs and the Irish countryside. Five of those seats came at the expense of the Liberal Nationals, who now entered a period of protracted and terminal decline.

The Conservatives, still under the leadership of Anthony Eden, dropped the harder right aspects of their 1949 manifesto and made a gain of three seats. Certainly a success on its own terms, these gains managed to cement the party’s continued existence but it did little more than that. The Conservatives remained as far from relevance as ever. As the Conservative MP Harold Macmillan noted in his diary, when he had first entered politics, a gain of three would have been disastrous and he was apprehensive about the celebrations they caused amongst younger party workers.

 

[Rattigan]

The Wind of Change: Decolonisation in Africa and the Caribbean

John Strachey delivering his famous speech at the opening of the Rhodesian Parliament in 1953


Under John Strachey's direction the British government undertook a thoroughgoing program of imperial reform that put many colonies on the fast track to independence. This was the result of a number of interlocking causes: in the first place, there was a kind of anti-imperialist idealism (at least in Strachey’s case) but this was never dominant; in the context of the Lismore System, there was also an imperative to develop colonial governments in order to achieve a trade balance; there was also the military realisation (first noted in the sacking of Auchinleck in India) that the Commonwealth could no longer repress the Empire into line (if it ever could - much of British power had always been a bluff); finally there was also the general desire of British authorities to remain ahead of the curve when it came to reform and not allow nationalists and anti-colonial activists to dominate the conversation. This last factor meant that, once there was a native elite in the colonies who were able to articulate and disseminate their own ideologies, events could very quickly take on a momentum of their own. By the 1950s this was the case in many of Britain’s African, Asian and Caribbean colonies, an ironic legacy of the policies of infrastructure and educational improvements initiated by Joseph Chamberlain at the Colonial Office in the 1880s.

Aside from the most famous examples of India, Ceylon and Burma, the process of decolonisation began with the two possessions Britain had seized from Spain in 1874: Puerto Rico and the Philippines. The former remained majority hispanophone and more closely connected with the cultures of Latin America than with the rest of the British caribbean. Since the 1910s, the island had also experienced a great deal of economic growth, partly stimulated by the stationing of a Royal Naval base there, and by 1945 was effectively a modern industrial economy. Although the Philippines remained a predominantly agricultural and export-based economy, it had also remained stubbornly unassimilated with the British colonies and Commonwealth nations nearest them. It was also only narrowly pacified (an insurgency ran off and on well into the 1890s) and its occupation by the Chinese during the World War had further increased the gulf between it and the rest of the Anglosphere. Both nations, too, had nationalist and powerful local elites who were, at best, skeptical of continued British domination.

Postwar Puerto Rico was dominated by Luis Munoz Marin, under whom the country organised a convention on independence which produced a constitution. Following negotiation with Westminster, the constitution was put to the country by a referendum on 3 July 1951. The constitution passed easily and Puerto Rico achieved independence exactly a year later. This example was important in the Philippines and the archipelago’s local elites began to pressure the British to give similar concessions. Strachey was sympathetic to the idea and in October 1952 agreed to a timetable to independence in 1957, which passed off without notable hitches. Following independence, Puerto Rico remained within the British sphere and became a full founding member of the Commonwealth in 1953 (partly, it was suspected, because Munoz Marin wanted to encourage emigration to the UK as a way of handling overpopulation). The new Philippine government, however, had no such qualms and adopted a republican constitution in 1958, leaving the Commonwealth.

Things were a good deal more complicated in Africa, not only because the relative levels of economic and educational development remained lower but also because of the fraught question of race. In private, Strachey was dismayed by the formalisation of the apartheid policies in South Africa by successive National Party governments, but was prevented from making too strong a public statement against it by the terms of the Balfour Declaration. Concerned by the white-dominated and Afrikaner-influenced government of Southern Rhodesia, before the Ottawa Declaration and the signing of the Treaty of London Strachey chose to use the UK’s residual powers under the Balfour Declaration to revoke responsible government in Southern Rhodesia and amalgamate it with that of Northern Rhodesia and Nyasaland (colonies with small to negligible white settler populations and black presences in colonial governance). At the same time, the Westminster government set out a 10-year plan for the new Central African Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland (commonly referred to simply as ‘Rhodesia’) to become a full member of the Commonwealth providing that certain political and civil rights reforms were successfully undertaken.

At the opening of the new Rhodesian Parliament in the capital city Chamberlain in August 1953, Strachey delivered a speech noting that a “wind of change is blowing through Africa” and warning unnamed white colonists to make peace with black majority rule. The first Rhodesian Prime Minister was New Zealand-born Garfield Todd, an opponent of white-minority rule. Todd introduced a series of reforms to improve the lot of black citizens, including increasing the number of schools, allowing them to buy alcohol and increasing the number of blacks eligible to vote from 16% to 59%. He was supported in this by a vocal civil rights movement. The Rhodesian government also incorporated the African Affairs Board, set up to safeguard the interests black Africans and empowered with the power to review and potentially even throw out racially discriminatory legislation.

The economic rationale behind the amalgamation was also not seriously questioned, with Northern Rhodesian and Nyasalandic businesses gaining access to larger Southern Rhodesian markets and infrastructure being rolled out across all three regions. The only opposition came from conservative minded whites in Southern Rhodesia and from the South African government, who were concerned about their increasingly isolated position in the Commonwealth and were furious at Strachey’s Chamberlain speech.

 

[Rattigan]

The Passing of the Last Edwardian: Attlee into Gaitskell

On 12 November 1955, Attlee announced that he would retire on 26 November, the tenth anniversary of his victory in 1945. Tired after a tumultuous decade as Prime Minister, over 15 in the Cabinet and just under 20 as leader of his party, Attlee felt that the time was right for him to go. Importantly, he also judged that his preferred successor, Gaitskell, now had enough of a parliamentary power base to succeed him as leader. Attlee gave Gaitskell advance notice of his decision, allowing the younger man the time to prepare his leadership team and sound out allies and potential allies in secret. Under the changes to the leadership rules agreed in 1942, there would be two rounds of voting, the first between all the candidates (who had to be MPs) and the second between the two candidates with the highest number of votes. Nye Bevan, father of the NHS and long-term Health Secretary, stood as the candidate of the party’s left and Herbert Morrison, a giant of London politics and decade-long frustrated Lord President, also stood.

In a spirited campaign, Gaitskell’s superior organisation told and he won the only ballot of MPs on 25 November, taking 221 MPs (nearly 60% of the parliamentary party) with him.

Aware that he had been elected only by Labour MPs, Gaitskell was stung by criticism from his internal critics and the Liberals that he lacked a popular mandate. In February 1956 Labour did better than expected in local council elections and Gaitskell decided to strike while the iron was hot and dissolved Parliament and announced a general election to be held on 30 April. Labour campaigned with the slogan “You Know Labour Government Works” and their efficient national campaign outclassed the Liberals, who seemed oddly underprepared (despite having called for Gaitskell to face the public beforehand). Gwilym Lloyd George, it appears, was too concerned with dealing with internal party business and handing over to his chosen successor to properly focus on the surprise electoral challenge.

The campaign itself was largely unsurprising, with Labour’s machine in control and the Liberals and the Conservatives nowhere near where they needed to be to fight it. The only major talking point came on 19 April, when the Sol-1 (the CSA’s first attempt at manned spaceflight) exploded on the launch pad, killing Lionel Crabb, its sole crewman. Lloyd George attempted to use the incident to criticise Labour’s record on space but these rather fell flat when he couldn’t point to a strong Liberal plan in opposition. When Crabb’s wife gave an interview to the ‘Daily Mirror’ in which they came out in support of Gaitskell, any momentum the Liberal’s might have had behind them was instantly killed. (The interview itself was transparently a stunt because Crabb and his wife had in fact been separated for three years at the time of his death, something no newspapers saw fit to mention at the time.)

On polling day, the results were quietly devastating for the opposition parties. Labour won their fourth successive general election with an increased majority, picking up an extra 47 seats. The Liberals lost a total of 50 seats, including to independents. The Conservatives and National Liberals more or less stood still, losing 1 and gaining 3 seats, respectively. For the Conservatives, the results were especially bad: although they had recovered from their near-annihilation of 1945, their loss of a single seat in this election cemented the permanence of their third-party status. Eden was, or had been, a dashing and charismatic figure but now saw his career disappearing in a puff of changed political culture. In ill health, he retired from the leadership of the party and soon went on well-attended speaking tours around the Commonwealth and the United States, a relic of an earlier time.

The leadership fight and subsequent election had allowed Gaitskell to prove his point to his internal opponents and unify the party under his hegemony. Cleverly, Gaitskell used this position to reach across the aisle to the Bevanites, co-opting younger members and securing the loyalty of older ones. Prominent Bevanites to enter the cabinet were Harold Wilson as President of the Board of Trade (under the watchful eye of Gaitskell’s trusted lieutenant Evan Durbin, who had become Chancellor when Gaitskell had won the leadership in November 1955) and Barbara Castle as Education Secretary. He also brought in fresh blood from across the parliamentary party, with George Brown, Roy Jenkins and James Callaghan becoming Agriculture Secretary, Commonwealth Secretary and Minister for Labour, respectively. Junior ministerial posts, of Transport Minister and Foreign Office Undersecretary, were given to Anthony Benn and Denis Healey, respectively.

With the economy continuing to grow, Gaitskell’s government did not face immediate problems on the domestic front. Although the Keynes Plan officially came to an end in September 1955, a combination of the close economic links between the Commonwealth member states and the general British economic recovery meant that the shortfall was barely noticed (if, as some economists have argued since, it really existed meaningfully at all by this stage) and did not put stress on the nation’s finances. In this context, Gaitskell’s government pursued a number of reforms to improve health and improve the environment in British cities and workplaces. The most notable of these were the Factories and Office Act 1957 and the Clear Air Act 1958, both of which formed the basis of the ‘Health and Safety’ legislation that would be pushed further via Commonwealth law in the 1960s.

In terms of infrastructure, by the late 1950s British infrastructure was beginning to be put under strain and Gaitskell’s government would be involved in kicking off a lively national discourse around transport and energy infrastructure that would last, off and on, for the next four decades. Key to these debates, in one form or another, would be Benn. He was the primary author of the government’s ‘Modernisation and Re-Equipment’ plan of 1958, which set out an ambitious plan to electrify the whole of the country’s railways and repair and replace a number of rail lines. These reforms successfully turned the railways back into the premier passenger moving service in the UK, successfully regaining the status they had lost to the car industry in the 1920s and ‘30s.

The desire to cut car numbers was influenced not only by practical concerns but also worries over the country’s energy independence. The 1950s was a time of relatively cheap oil but many were concerned that this relied on a set of circumstances - namely a peaceful Middle East typified by close relations between Britain and Arabia - that could change at any moment. The Iranian Revolution of 1953 - in which the Shah was forced by street protests to appoint a government headed by Mohammad Mosaddegh - was thought of as a potential portend of things to come. Although the British government had decided against ousting Mosaddegh in 1953, his government had not proved friendly to the Commonwealth and was, while not a Soviet puppet like Armenia, certainly more pro-Soviet than anything else. Furthermore, although the oil and natural gas fields of the North Sea had the potential to solve domestic consumption issues, the SWF was adamant that they should be exploited for predominantly export and investment purposes. This left most British people still using coal, stocks of which were rapidly depleting. Thus, the government began to cast around for alternative energy sources.

The answer that was alighted upon in the end (indeed, with hindsight, probably the most obvious solution) was the nuclear industry. A small number of nuclear plants were already on-line by 1956 (and more popping up around the Commonwealth as part of the Atoms for Peace programme) and the world’s first purely civilian nuclear station was opened in December 1957. In 1958, Durbin and Callaghan co-authored a white paper setting out a plan to transition the UK energy-mix primarily to nuclear power by 1970. A new generation of power plants were constructed between 1956 and 1961, using British-designed pressurised water reactors. Although these plants were owned and operated by private companies, the technology was owned by the SWF and leased to private contractors, guaranteeing a further income source for the organisation. Costs were further kept down by the publication in 1959 of the National Spent Nuclear Fuel Strategy, which rapidly attained the status of a holy writ in administrative circles and ensured that there has been a consistent policy of reprocessing and storing spent fuel in the decades since then.

 

[Rattigan]

Black Star: Ghana, South Africa and the First Cracks in the Commonwealth

Kwame Nkrumah at the Prime Ministers' Conference, March 1957


The primary foreign affairs issue to face the first Gaitskell ministry was very similar to that which had faced Attlee towards the end of his premiership: that of decolonisation and Commonwealth relations. The creation of the Rhodesian Federation had been the last gasp of British autocratic power with regard to its colonies (and, even then, had only succeeded because it had the support of the crucial duo of Canada and Australia) and now the process of Commonwealth accession would have to proceed with the consent of the other member states.

Fortunately however, the Gaitskell ministry and the Commonwealth bureaucracy found themselves generally united in the belief that cooperation with local African nationalist elites was necessary in order to stop them falling out of the Commonwealth sphere of influence. An early example of this was the bringing into government of Jomo Kenyatta’s New Africa Party in 1952. More generally, Strachey took inspiration from Rhodesia, where events after 1953 were proceeding unevenly but not in a manner completely contrary to British liking. The Todd government and a civil rights movement led by the radical Joshua Nkomo were making inroads into progressively expanding the franchise and ending property and racial qualifications.

At a Commonwealth meeting in 1956, the Commonwealth Cabinet and heads of government formally adopted the ‘Commonwealth Communique on Independence.’ The Communique agreed that smaller so-called ‘unproductive’ colonies would be amalgamated in federal or confederal structures and put on a fast track to independence. Only the South African government was opposed. This move would, in theory, ready the soon-to-be former colonies for independence in an international economic world governed by the Lismore System but it also served a more cynical realpolitik purpose: the combining of several colonies into devolved administrations would keep an Anglophilic elite in charge at a federal level while allowing tribal and older colonial and anti-colonial elites to have certain powers below them.

To this end, the Federation of the East Indies was founded in 1957, amalgamating the colonial administrations of Singapore, Malacca and Penang. The Federation of the West Indies followed the next year, combining the remaining Anglophone colonies in the Caribbean. A year after that, the Federation of the South Seas was founded, consisting of all of the British possessions in the Pacific apart from Papua New Guinea (which remained under Australian administration). In 1960, the most significant amalgamation occurred, with the Federation of East Africa combining the governments of the colonies of Uganda, Kenya, Zanzibar and Tanganyika. The Commonwealth Parliament had voted on all of these amalgamations and most of them had been a formality but the creation of East Africa provoked a storm of protest from the South African delegates, who protested that the creation of another racially mixed African Commonwealth member state was designed to isolate them (which, in fairness, was not untrue). Their entire delegation voted against the reorganisation and were joined by a handful of the more extreme right wing delegates from other member states. While this was not enough to prevent the approval by a landslide, it left South African increasingly obviously isolated and mistrustful of her Commonwealth colleagues.

However, Strachey’s schemes proved to be much less successful in western Africa, where the colonies were already large enough to float as independent countries and local colonial elites were pushing for independence within the shortest possible time. They were also the countries where colonial governance had been most extractive and dictatorial, meaning that the British rhetoric of trusteeship (which seems to have been mostly genuinely held, if unevenly acted upon, in Asia, east Africa and Rhodesia) was more or less entirely empty. In the Gold Coast, for example, pro-independence politicians won the legislative elections in 1946 and formed the Convention People’s Party (“CPP”), headed by Kwame Nkrumah. While the British and Commonwealth authorities hoped the CPP’s popularity would founder on their governing record, Nkrumah proved to be an effective administrator (within the strictures of the limited powers of the Gold Coast’s assembly) and the CPP won a further majority in 1951 and nearly three quarters of the seats in 1956. The CPP passed a motion calling for independence in August 1956 and, at a summit with Commonwealth prime ministers in November 1956, Nkrumah informed them that he would pass a unilateral declaration of independence if the Commonwealth didn’t agree to independence within a year.

Stunned, the prime ministers agreed to Nkrumah’s timetable. However, there was an immediate stumbling point over the question of whether or not the new nation of Ghana would join the Commonwealth. It had been generally assumed that they would but, now, the isolation and opposition of South Africa became important. While the amalgamations could be approved by a simple majority in the assembly, the accession of new member states had to be approved both by the assembly and then unanimously at a joint meeting of the cabinet and the prime ministers. South African Prime Minister Hans Strydom vetoed the accession (something that, ironically, Nkrumah was only too happy with) and instead the Gold Coast became independent as the Republic of Ghana on 1 January 1958.

 

[Rattigan]

A bit more of a bird's-eye update today, covering Gaitskell's domestic agenda and the remainder of African decolonisation, in very general terms. Next time we will be going into more detail about Rhodesia and South Africa.

[EDIT] I've just realised that I forgot to put in the infobox initially. Many apologies.

* * *​

"These Very Boring, Very Rich People": Britain under Hugh Gaitskell

Castle's Children: Two boys play in the first free state daycare opened up under the Castle Education Reforms, September 1961

With the economy performing well and people generally happy with the performance of the government, Gaitskell called an election for the spring of 1960. A loss of 18 seats could not disguise the iron grip that Labour had on Parliament or the formidable electoral machine that the party had developed over the previous decades. A majority of 40 was more than enough to pass most of Gaitskell’s domestic agenda and lock Labour in for at least another decade of power and possibly beyond.

The new(ish) leaders of the Liberal and Conservative parties, Iain Macleod and Jo Grimond respectively, proved popular in the press (who made great fun of the fact that both had stood, unsuccessfully, for the other party in 1945) but this did not translate into significant electoral gains. The Liberals’ overnight gain of 20 seats still left them 112 seats behind Labour and the Conservatives even lost a seat. Both leaders sought to stake out new ground for their parties, the Liberals focusing on personal responsibility and deregulation and the Conservatives trying to stake out a reputation as a ‘country party.’ But what results there was going to be from these tactical shifts, if any, clearly had yet to materialise.

Reflecting Labour’s position as the new establishment, policy-making was relatively quiet on the domestic front during Gaitskell’s second term. The most important domestic reform that the government undertook was the decision to take on education reform. In 1960, Barbara Castle introduced substantial reforms providing for the phasing out of the old two-track scheme in favour of a nine-year period of compulsory schooling (ages 7-16) with free daycare for children (1-7) and an optional two further years (16-18) to be followed by either undergraduate degrees (18-21) or polytechnic qualifications (18-22). The reforms were phased in over five years, beginning in the 1961/62 school year. Other important reforms undertaken during this period included the introduction of guaranteed maternity leave (one year with the option of a further six months). Castle thus emerged as one of the major figures in the cabinet.

Other than that, Gaitskell’s second ministry was light on the domestic policy front. The ministry was enlivened occasionally by scandal, the most notable of which was the resignation of Richard Crossman in 1962 over the revelation that his chief of staff was a Soviet agent, but little to serious affect the smooth administration of the governmental system. The Telegraph gossip columnist Auberon Waugh would write in September 1962 that Britain at this time was “a boringly efficient country, full of boringly efficient people and run by boringly efficient minds.” Only two weeks after that column appeared, the Beatles would release their first single, ‘Love Me Do,’ which may or may not have changed Waugh’s mind.

On foreign and imperial policy, Gaitskell’s second ministry would be deeply involved in African affairs. More shall be said elsewhere about the various crises in the Congo, Rhodesia and South Africa. But the government also had to face the challenges of decolonisation in its western African colonies. These three colonies - Nigeria, Gambia and Sierra Leone (British Cameroons having been incorporated into Nigeria and French Cameroons in 1958) - all favoured the path taken by Nkrumah rather than that being pursued by the colonies in southern and eastern Africa. The reasons for this ranged from these colonies’ different ethnic histories - having only a very small to negligible white settler minority - to the coincidence that many of their leaders were intellectual adherents of Nkrumah’s pan-Africanism. They were also the colonies where the ‘trusteeship’ in which it was said the British held their colonies on behalf of the locals had been most cynically and unsatisfactorily applied. While many British politicians were dismissive of the ambitions of these African leaders, Strachey and Gaitskell understood that to stand in their way would be to end up having to support reactionary and undemocratic elements. This, it was believed, would only open up avenues for the Americans and Soviets to exploit.

To this end, in late 1960 Gaitskell passed on an unofficial order to colonial administrators to speed up the process of decolonisation, with a vague target being handed down of trying to get it done by 1970. At the same time, the governments of the soon-to-be-independent states were encouraged to enter into agreements with the Commonwealth (known as the ‘Afro-Commonwealth Treaties’ or ‘ACFs’) which guaranteed a continued supply of credit from the Commonwealth.

The results of these directives would take some time to bear fruit, with Nigeria achieving independence in 1963, Mauritius in 1968, Gambia in 1970 and Sierra Leone in 1971, all as republics. The ACFs gave these countries a degree of stability while also guaranteeing enough money to enable their leaders to undertake their desired social reforms and the ‘Africanisation’ of their economies. However, over the years many people, both inside and outside Africa, have come to criticise the ACFs as making the newly-independent countries overly-dependent on the Commonwealth, creating the concept of ‘Anglo-Africa’ which would recur in those countries’ politics down the decade.

The experience of west African decolonisation (and the failure of the Dominion of India a decade previously) taught an important lesson to British officials. No longer would they attempt to cultivate one figure as their man to whom independence could be granted (as they had done with Nkrumah). Rather, the progress towards independence would be focused on building up institutional relationships both within the country and between the country and the Commonwealth. This would, theoretically, not only make the newly-independent countries less liable to have their futures changed by the beliefs of one person. But it would also, again theoretically, make a multi-party democracy more likely to develop.

 

[Rattigan]

Rainbow's End: South Africa and the Rhodesian Bush War

The White Man's Last Stand - C.R. Swart and H.F. Verwoerd at the emergency prime ministers' conference, May 1961

Selous Scouts (left) and Rhodesian soldiers (right) during the Bush War


Strachey’s strategy in East Africa and Rhodesia had so far been criticised for a number of reasons. Figures on the political right lamented the end of empire and on the left argued that he was simply finding new ways to control colonised states. As the 1950s turned into the 1960s, and it became clear that Westminster would not be changing tack and would be supported by a majority of the Commonwealth, the policy faced increased opposition from white settlers. Since the Devonshire-Webb Report of 1926, successive British governments had made attempts, with a greater or lesser degree of enthusiasm depending on political flavour, to keep to its commitments. In particular, it continued to resist pressure from South Africa to permit the creation of white minority administrations in Northern Rhodesia (3% white) and Kenya (4% white).

The amalgamation of the Rhodesias and Nyasaland into a single federation governed by a liberal and moderately pro-civil rights government headed by Garfield Todd had managed to keep the lid on trouble since 1953. However, Todd’s success in staying in power thanks to the progressive expansion of the franchise to blacks and the support of the civil rights movement lead by Joshua Nkomo (hardly an uncritical one though - Todd once described him as “my closest ally and worst opponent”) had pushed many conservative white settlers towards the avowedly white supremacist Rhodesian Front Party (“RF”). On 11 November 1960, a bomb exploded inside the Parliament Building in the capital city Chamberlain. Initially timed to go off while the lower house was in session, it detonated early but nonetheless managed to kill seven parliamentary workers and injured 21 more.

A white supremacist paramilitary group known as the Selous Scouts claimed responsibility for the attack and began a campaign of violence, mostly consisting of bombing campaigns in predominantly black towns and city neighbourhoods. The RF claimed to be entirely separate from the Scouts (a claim regarded as, at best, dubious by most observers) but provided support for them within Parliament and even a veneer of political legitimacy. Although the force of international opinion was against the RF’s and Scouts’ position, Todd was concerned about the ability of his government to put an end to the violence. The Scouts often attacked with weapons that looked military-grade, raising questions of loyalty not only about some of the upper echelons of the Rhodesian officer corps but also the South African government. Certainly, the British South Africa Police (the incongruously-named Rhodesian police service) and the Rhodesian Army proved notably ineffective at putting down the paramilitary.

A meeting of prime ministers and the Commonwealth Cabinet was hastily convened in Nairobi in November 1960. C.R. Swart, the South African prime minister, proposed that the South African government would act as a mediator between the Scouts/RF and the Rhodesian government. This proposal was given short shrift by the other prime ministers, who (correctly) observed that such an attempt at mediation would suffer from a complete lack of trust from black Africans and seriously undermine the (relatively) peaceful process of decolonisation across the continent. Instead, the majority of the delegates agreed with the New Zealand Prime Minister Walter Nash’s suggestion that troops be sent from across the Commonwealth. When it became clear that the proposal was going to go forward to a vote, Swart, Eric Louw (the South African member of the Commonwealth Cabinet) and the rest of the South African delegation symbolically departed the conference early.

Although it was a symbolic move that went some way to satisfying their supporters’ distaste for what they now often called the “Black Commonwealth,” few in the years afterwards thought that Swart’s move was a good decision. With the cracks now unavoidable in the unity of the ‘Old Dominions’ who had previously served as the unofficial high table of Commonwealth decision making, the space was opened up for new countries to step up and take a bigger role. To this end, Pakistan’s prime minister Ayub Khan and its member of the Commonwealth Cabinet, Feroze Khan, put aside their domestic political disagreements to become two of the major figures of the conference. Of particular note was Feroze’s proposal, adopted by the Cabinet and the ICS, that the troops sent to Rhodesia include Maori units from the New Zealand army, mixed-race regiments from Canada and the UK and the Queen’s African Rifles. Both Ayub and Feroze argued strongly that the Scouts’ insurgency be referred to as a “rebellion” in the conference’s official communique.

The ICS issued a formal request for troops to be sent from every Commonwealth country, a legal nicety that had been a formality on the other occasions where it had been issued. This time, however, Swart flatly refused to honour the request, catalysing another emergency prime minister-Commonwealth Cabinet conference in May 1961. By this time, a ‘Big Four’ of the prime ministers of the UK (Gaitskell), Canada (John Diefenbaker), Australia (Harold Holt) and Pakistan (Ayub) had formed a united front which saw Commonwealth unity and integrity as the most important thing at this moment of crisis. The practical result of this conclusion was that South Africa would either have to be brought into line or expelled. Holt had been in favour of allowing South Africa to remain in the Commonwealth almost up to the beginning of the conference but he was eventually brought round to the expulsion gambit on the basis of preserving greater Commonwealth unity. Diefenbaker, who regarded apartheid as morally unjust and an international embarrassment, appears to have been key in bringing the disparate leaders round to the Big Four’s position and keeping them united.

Swart and Louw seem to have been out of touch with the real decision-making of their opponents and attempted to call the Big Four’s bluff, refusing their offer to remain in the Commonwealth and participate fully in its decision making. Instead, they allowed their nation’s expulsion to be put to a vote. By all accounts, they were terribly surprised when, with South African representatives excluded from the meeting, the remaining representatives at the conference voted unanimously to expel them.

In purely military strategic terms, the expulsion was a mistake: South Africa adopted a republican constitution and the national party moved even further to the extreme right when the virulent Afrkanner nationalist and former Axis-sympathiser Hans van Rensburg won the subsequent election to the nation’s new Executive Presidency. Under van Rensburg, South Africa began to send overt military aid and supplies to the Rhodesian rebels. Nevertheless, the Commonwealth’s united front was a rebuke to many strategists, both Soviet and American, who thought it might be possible to exploit racial divisions within the Commonwealth to peel certain member states off from the others. Furthermore, the symbolic message of ‘zero tolerance’ towards the apartheid government was an enormous boon in efforts to encourage African and Asian nationalist leaders to believe that the Commonwealth was negotiating towards their independence in good faith.

The superior numbers and resources of the Commonwealth forces ensured that they were in complete control of the major population centres by the end of 1962. The Scouts continued a bombing campaign, operating out of bases in South Africa or the Rhodesian bush, but they lost their political cover when the RF signed a peace agreement in April 1963 and Rhodesia was admitted to the Commonwealth as a multi-racial democracy on 31 December 1963. Violence, however, would continue at a lower intensity until the surrender and arrest of the final Scouts paramilitaries in November 1968.

 

[Rattigan]

Battleground Africa: Decolonisation and Superpower Strategy in the Congo, 1960-64

The two faces of humanitarian aid in the Congo: Commonwealth troops preparing to clear Congolese insurgents from Katanga (top); a Swedish UN peacekeeper watches over children in a refugee camp in eastern Congo (bottom)


One of the more unexpected long-term results of the expulsion of South Africa from the Commonwealth was the intervention of the Commonwealth in the unfolding Congo Crisis. Former Belgian Congo had achieved independence on 1 July 1960, following campaigns lead by the Congolese National Movement (“MNC”). However, on independence a number of issues remained outstanding, not least the future of the country as a unitary or federal nation. The MNC was the largest of the new country’s political parties but faced concerted opposition from the Kongo-supremacist Bakongo Alliance (“ABAKO”) of Joseph Kasa-Vubu and the pro-federalist Tribal Association of Katanga (“CONAKAT”) led by Moise Tshombe.

Within a week of independence being achieved, certain units of the army mutinied and violence broke out between white and black communities. The Benelux army was deployed to the country, notionally to ‘protect’ the white population but in practice to support the secession of the mineral-rich Katanga and South Kasai provinces. That same month, the UN requested that Belgium withdraw from the region and sent in peacekeepers, although Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjold refused to allow UN troops to be used to actually fight the secessionists. An attempt by the Congolese President Patrice Lumumba to go around the UN and request direct assistance from both the Americans and the Soviets was opposed by the army, which overthrew and executed him in 1961.

Over the course of 1960-61, the Congolese army was able to regain control of most of the country but proved unsuccessful in its attempts to overthrow the secessionist governments, leading to a stalemate. Things changed in September 1961, when a plane carrying Commonwealth diplomats en route to ceasefire negotiations was shot down outside of Leopoldville. Although the precise order of events surrounding the shooting remains unclear even to this day, the Commonwealth was quick to point fingers at the Congolese government. When Hammarskjold continued to prevaricate over expanding the UN peacekeepers’ mission, Gaitskell took the lead and argued at the next Prime Ministers’ conference that November for Commonwealth support to be sent to aid the secessionists.

Commonwealth support for Katanga and South Kasai had two strands: one idealistic and one more cynical. From the idealistic point of view, the Commonwealth could point to the liberal tradition of self-determination. Lester Pearson, the newly-installed Prime Minister of Canada travelled to Elizabethville and met with Moise Tshombe, now the President of Katanga, and praised him as the protector of his people’s rights. There was undoubtedly some validity in this position: after all, as many pointed out, when a region has a different language and culture from the rest of the country and has fought a three year war for independence, it ceases to become clear why that region should be forced to stay. But we should not forget the other reason why an independent Anglophilic Katanga was interesting for Commonwealth strategists: namely its vast mineral resources. With the expulsion of South Africa from the organisation, the Commonwealth was anxious to have a steady supply of uranium for its ambitious nuclear energy plans.

At first, Commonwealth support took the form of economic aid and the provision of munitions and supplies. However, from May 1963 this expanded to actual military support mostly from special forces. These operations were tacitly supported by Hammarskjold, who perceived this as the only way to end the crisis. Supported by the Commonwealth troops, Katanga and South Kasai successfully cleared Congolese incursions into their territory by the autumn of 1963. The facts on the ground were accepted pursuant by the Luluabourg Treaty of June 1964, in which the Congo accepted the independence of Katanga and South Kasai (the two provinces would merge into the single Federal Republic of Katanga a month later). That same month, Tshombe signed an agreement with the Commonwealth to allow Commonwealth mining agencies to begin extracting uranium, in return for substantial investment in Katangan infrastructure.