Joseph Chamberlain

International Statesman, National Leader, Local Icon

I. Cawood, C. Upton, I. Cawood, C. Upton

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781137528858
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Social History
• Index: History

Winston Churchill described Joseph Chamberlain as 'the man who made the weather' for twenty years in British politics between the 1880s and the 1900s. This volume contains contributions on every aspect of Chamberlain's career, including international and cultural perspectives hitherto ignored by his many biographers. It breaks his career into three aspects: his career as an international statesman, defender of British interests and champion of imperial federation; his role as a national leader, opposing Gladstone's crusade for Irish home rule by forming an alliance with the Conservatives, campaigning for social reform and finally advocating a protectionist economic policy to promote British business; and the aspect for which he is still celebrated in his adopted city, as the provider of sanitation, gas lighting, clean water and cultural achievement for Birmingham – a model of civic regeneration that still inspires modern politicians such as Michael Heseltine, Tristram Hunt and DavidWilletts.

Part I

International Statesman

1

‘Intimately dependent on foreign policy’: Joseph Chamberlain and Foreign Policy

T.G. Otte

To examine the role of foreign affairs in Joseph Chamberlain’s political career may appear whimsical, quixotic even, like so much else in it. After all, beyond his position as a Cabinet minister, he had no official involvement in foreign policy. Yet, it is no eccentric exercise. Unlike so many other senior politicians of the period, Chamberlain had clear views on Britain’s external relations. For the most part, as the Earl of Kimberley noted in 1893, ministers ‘know and care nothing about foreign affairs’.¹ Not so Joseph Chamberlain. And, again unlike many of his colleagues, he had real influence on foreign policy-making. Indeed, it is impossible to make sense of Chamberlain as a political figure without giving some consideration to his views on Britain’s external relations.

This is more easily asserted in the abstract than demonstrated conclusively. To do so, moreover, is not without conceptual or methodological problems. As Chamberlain’s hands were not placed on the levers of the Foreign Office machinery, his views on foreign policy cannot be gauged by his political actions. The historian has to rely on private comments and public speeches instead, all of which were conditioned by the prevailing contemporary political winds. Frequently, they reflected Chamberlain’s frustrations with a particular course chosen. More often still, they were shaped by his calculations of personal or party political advantage. The historian, then, needs to be on guard more than might be the case with other political figures of the period.

Foreign policy nevertheless was crucial to defining Chamberlain’s position in government. It helped, more especially, to shape the dynamic within the Unionist coalition after 1895, stimulated his own thinking on imperial and external matters, and determined to some degree the parameters within which he could operate. To appreciate this, however, some thought needs to be given to the earlier phases of Chamberlain’s career. This chapter, then, like ancient Gaul, falls into three parts. After some reflections on Chamberlain’s political style and early forays into the field of Britain’s external relations, his position in the Unionist fold will be examined before distilling his general views on foreign policy and dealing more especially with his views on Britain’s so-called ‘isolation’.

It has become something of a truism to suggest that Chamberlain was the first modern politician in Britain. He accepted the idea of ‘party’, and he was the pioneer of a British version of machine politics. But beyond the quotidian concerns of the business of politics, his modernity also rested on his global conception of Britain as an imperial power.

‘Party’ also mattered in this context. Unlike most Tories and many Whigs, Chamberlain embraced ‘democracy’ as a necessary stage in humanity’s ineluctable progress, and he welcomed it. Unlike most Radicals, however, he had grasped that the advent of the age of the masses had altered the nature of politics, and that it made different demands of political leaders. While he advocated democratic reforms, he understood that democracy needed to be tamed so as to harness it to progressive purposes. This was the principal function of party organisation. It was an engine of power. Sustained by the idealist and material support of activists, in whose hands control of the party ultimately lay, it was geared towards constructive purposes. In sharp contrast to such arch high-Tories as Lord Salisbury, Chamberlain believed in the invigorating power of democracy, not least also with regard to Britain’s international position. As he explained to A.J. Balfour in 1886, he considered

a democratic government … the strongest government from a military and imperial point of view in the world, for it has the people behind it. Our misfortune is that we live under a system originally contrived to check the action of Kings and Ministers, and which meddles far too much with the Executive of the country. The problem is to give the democracy the whole power, but to induce them to do no more in the way of using it than to decide on the general principles which they wish to see carried out. My radicalism at all events desires to see established a strong government and an Imperial government.²

There was, of course, tactical diplomatic advantage to be gained from domestic support, as Chamberlain explained to his confederate, the Birmingham Congregationalist minister, Dr R.W. Dale, at the height of the Pendjeh crisis in the previous spring: ‘The great security for peace lies in impressing the Russians with the conviction that they cannot do as they like and that English opinion is united. Otherwise, the experience of the Crimean War will be repeated.’³

But beyond such practical considerations, Chamberlain’s comments are revealing on several counts. In the first instance, they are suggestive of his belief that the new political arrangements required leadership of a different type: ‘[P]art of my democratic creed is that if a scheme is truly absurd … people can be made to understand its absurdity.’⁴ It meant that political leaders had to educate the electorate. There was nothing especially novel about this. The educative impulse, after all, was rooted in the Liberal tradition, and had become deeply entrenched, certainly since Midlothian days. Chamberlain himself was shaped by his own Unitarian background, with its emphasis on rational exposition and scientific progress, and his youthful days as a Sunday School teacher at the Church of the Messiah in Birmingham’s Broad Street.⁵ Ministers, he observed to Gladstone, ‘cannot move much quicker or much in advance of those behind them, and English public opinion has to be educated quite as much as or more than English statesmen’.⁶

This conviction shaped Chamberlain’s thinking about political organisation. If party was an engine of power, it was also a vehicle for conveying to the public a programme of political action:

the platform has become one of the most powerful and indispensable instruments of Government … A new public duty and personal labour has thus come into existence, which devolves to a great extent … on those members of a Government who may be considered especially to represent the majority who are appealed to.⁷

This was the essence of Chamberlain’s political credo. Party and platform were to secure majorities; majorities mattered because they could be converted into positive action; and both reinforced the importance of leadership. Chamberlain’s determination to prevail was legendary already in his lifetime. Indeed, much of the force of his public persona rested on that very reputation. He was also not overly fastidious in the choice of his means or associates. His precise role in the murky doings preceding the divorce cases that damaged beyond repair the political careers of his fellow-Radical Sir Charles Dilke and Charles Parnell, the Irish leader, may never be established beyond reasonable doubt. Nor may the whiff of corruption ever be fully dispersed that clung to government contracts during the Boer War for Kynochs, the Birmingham-based cordite manufacturers, one of the three ‘giants’ of this industry, in which company his younger brother Arthur held a directorship.⁸ But there can be no doubt that Chamberlain thought of himself, and presented himself, as a man of action. As mayor of Birmingham he crushed municipal opposition – those on the receiving end called him ‘the Napoleon of Birmingham’;⁹ he elbowed one of the sitting MPs for the Midlands capital out of the way in 1876;¹⁰ he barged his way into the Cabinet in 1880; and, five years later, he threw down his ‘unauthorised’ gauntlet in challenge to Gladstone and the bulk of the Liberal party. There was, indeed, as Chamberlain himself perceived, something of ‘a Radical Autoritaire’ in his political make-up: ‘a Radical must be “autoritaire” if his radicalism was to serve any purpose’.¹¹

Directed towards practical ends, Chamberlain’s approach to politics was entirely rational, if confrontational and direct. He was suspicious of sophistries and subtleties, just as he was impatient with the compromises and concessions inherent in life at Westminster. Parliament existed to facilitate political action. For that reason he was wary also of Gladstone’s attempts to launch ideological crusades to mobilise Radical sentiments ultimately to preserve Whig dominance over the Liberal party. It was a form of inverted Whiggery on Chamberlain’s part. Party organisation and reform programmes were the means to heave men like him into the saddle, hence also his enthusiastic support for the 1884–45 franchise reforms. Here, indeed, is one of the many ironies of Chamberlain’s career. For a man who emphasised leadership, loyalty and discipline as much as he, his record is one of division and destruction; and in the 20 years after 1885 he left behind him a long trail of political debris. And for all his own aggressive political style, he was remarkably thin-skinned. Salisbury confessed never to have come across ‘so sensitive a public man … I never met anyone before who was disturbed by articles in the Standard.’¹² Still, Chamberlain’s political craft rested on the ability to identify and to exploit dividing lines. Politics was the art of defeating the opponent, whether by means of persuasion or by forcing him into a minority position.

The Gladstone acolyte and senior Treasury official, E.W. Hamilton, was not far of the mark when he reflected that Chamberlain ‘was not born, bred or educated in the ways which alone secure the necessary tact and behaviour of a real gentleman’.¹³ As for Chamberlain himself, he was not...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction: Did Joseph Chamberlain Really ‘Make the Weather’?
• Part I   International Statesman
• Part II   National Leader
• Part III   Local Icon
• Conclusion Joseph Chamberlain: His Reputation and Legacy
• Bibliography
• Index