Britain in Global Politics Volume 1

From Gladstone to Churchill

C. Baxter, M. Dockrill, K. Hamilton, C. Baxter, M. Dockrill, K. Hamilton, C. Baxter, M. Dockrill, K. Hamilton

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781137367822
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: British History
• Index: History

This volume of essays focuses upon Britain's international and imperial role from the mid-Victorian era through until the immediate aftermath of the Second World War. Individual chapters by acknowledged authorities in their field deal with a variety of broad-ranging and particular issues, including: 'cold wars' before the Cold War in Anglo-Russian relations; Lord Curzon and the diplomacy of war and peace-making; air-power as an instrument of colonial control; Foreign Office efforts to frame and influence the historical narrative; Winston Churchill's alternative to, and the pursuit of, policies of 'appeasement'; British responses to conflict and regime change in Spain; the Secret Intelligence Service and British diplomacy in East Asia'; Neville Chamberlain and the 'phoney war'; efforts to combat American misperceptions of Britain in wartime; and British-American differences over the future of Italy's colonial possessions. This collection, along with the accompanying volume covering theperiod after World War 2, is dedicated to the memory of Professor Saki Dockrill.

1

‘A Very Internecine Policy’: Anglo–Russian Cold Wars before the Cold War

T.G. Otte

Whether or not each epoch is equal to God, as Leopold von Ranke once suggested, certainly each new generation of historians creates a new version of the past, one that suits its needs or tastes or that, at any rate, suggests itself as a plausible reconstruction of past occurrences. This is also relevant for the study of the post-1945 East-West conflict. The Cold War is generally seen as the key organising principle of the second half of the short twentieth century. So ingrained, indeed, is this view in the intellectual habits of today’s political leaders and commentators – and not a few scholars, too – that they tend to cast back wistful glances at the ‘familiar certainties of the Cold War and its alliances.’¹

In so doing, they reflect their particular present and its preoccupations. The past is not immutable, however; and, as John Lewis Gaddis has argued, the history of the twentieth-century Cold War ‘is bound to look different when viewed through the binoculars of a distant future’.² This chapter makes no pretence at knowing what this future might look like, or what its binoculars (a very twentieth-century instrument) might reveal to the interested spectator. Instead, it seeks to tackle one notable feature of the extant literature on the history of international relations, that is its restrictive use of the term ‘cold war’ as having specific application only to the latter part of the twentieth century.

The reasons for this lacuna are manifold, the reluctance to extend research to the period before 1945 being one of them. This omission is all the more curious since the ideological and strategic challenge posed by Russia in her post-1917 Soviet guise is well documented.³ Another reason is the ‘double-teleology’, centred on 1914 and 1939, that is still inherent in much of the literature on nineteenth- and twentieth-century Great Power relations. Generations of historians have plotted Europe’s descent into war in 1914 as a succession of gradually escalating crises. And in a similar manner, with one notable exception, they seem content to focus on the familiar stops along the route to the continent’s final destination of renewed conflict in 1939/40 – Paris, Geneva, Locarno, Stresa and, finally, Munich, Prague and Warsaw.⁴

The focus on the Central and later the Axis Powers masks the more complex realities of international politics; it also distorts a proper understanding of British foreign policy in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Having to maintain an empire with global reach and global interests, Britain’s foreign policy élite took a larger view of the world, one whose horizon stretched beyond the environs of Paris, Berlin or Vienna. The empire may well have been acquired ‘in a fit of absentmindedness’, but its very existence, and the need to safeguard it, inculcated broader understandings and sophisticated appreciations of the tools available for this task. In this context, the concept of ‘cold war’, that is sustained, systematic antagonism below the level of actual hostilities, is particularly pertinent. Britain’s antagonistic relations varied in focus and intensity. Its attendant phenomena, such as arms races or détente, were as familiar to the Earl of Clarendon or Sir Edward Grey as they would be to later twentieth-century foreign secretaries. And just as the Marquesses of Salisbury and Curzon recognised the utility of buffer states for the purposes of containment strategies, so Viscount Palmerston or Sir Austen Chamberlain were aware of the ideological dimension of these earlier cold wars.

What follows here, then, is not so much a histoire événementiel of Britain’s external relations; rather it is a meta-diplomatic history that focuses on the strategic calculations that lay beyond the quotidian concerns of the British foreign policy élite. The principal emphasis of what follows is on Anglo-Russian relations. This is partly for reasons of space, but even more so because Russia was the most important variable in the calculations of British policy-makers. Nevertheless, it is this author’s contention that aspects of the ‘cold war’ concept can equally be applied to relations with France and Germany during different phases of the long nineteenth century.⁵

* * *

Nineteenth-century British foreign policy revolved around two strategic objectives: the maintenance of an equilibrium in Europe, and the containment of Russia in the East. For the former, relations with France and later Germany were key, though no balance was viable without Russia; the latter object entailed the need to cultivate ties with most of the other Powers, especially Austria and then Germany, but also France. Russia was thus a necessary element of European politics and a potential threat to British interests in Europe and beyond; and that invested Russia with a special importance.

Concerns about Russia ran like a golden thread through the texture of British policy in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It is one of the ironies of history, therefore, that George II’s alliance with Russia in 1743, to protect his Hanoverian interests, marked the latter’s arrival as a Great Power on the European scene.⁶ For much of the eighteenth century, with the exception of the Seven Years’ War, British statesmen thought it necessary ‘to include Muscovy in their general system of alliances with the maritime powers’.⁷ Russia was regarded as a useful check on French ambitions in Central Europe and, more especially, the Eastern Mediterranean. The Earl of Chatham, indeed, confessed to being ‘quite a Russ’, who hoped that as a result of Russia’s advance in the Near East ‘the Ottoman will pull down the house of Bourbon in his fall’.⁸ Russia’s advance in the Black Sea region, however, opened up a new dimension of international power politics. It was the younger Pitt who came to regard it as a potential threat, the first British politician to stipulate a strategic nexus between Constantinople and Britain’s Indian possessions and other Eastern interests. Pitt was unsuccessful in blocking Russian expansionism, perhaps most egregiously in the Ochakov affair in 1791. But he and his successors remained on the alert. Since 1807, for instance, a naval squadron operated in the Baltic Sea to keep watch on Russian movements in Northern Europe.⁹

British policy towards Russia after 1815 was by no means passive, however. It aimed at the double containment of Russian power in the East, and focused on two key points of geopolitical significance, the Turkish Straits and the terrestrial counterpoints of this maritime defile, Herat on the Afghan-Persian frontier and the Khyber Pass in India’s troublesome north. This containment strategy did not preclude cooperation, as was demonstrated by George Canning’s attempted realignment with Russia during the Greek crisis of 1825–6. For Canning, cooperating with St. Petersburg was a means of restraining its ambitions and of undermining the Neo-Holy Alliance.¹⁰

Cooperation with Russia was nevertheless intermittent. Between them, the 1828 Russo-Persian and 1833 Russo-Turkish treaties of Turkmanchai and Unkiar Skelessi helped to crystallise British thinking about Russia in the East. The threat anticipated by William Pitt in the late 1780s now shaped Anglo-Russian relations, and would continue to do so until at least 1907. Geopolitical calculations were now paramount. When, for instance, Russia absorbed parts of Khorassan in the spring of 1834, Lord John Ponsonby, the ambassador at Constantinople, warned that she now occupied a commanding position along the northern rims of the Turkish and Persian empires, which would ‘open a free passage for Russian troops in the direction of Bagdad’.¹¹ The ensuing Anglo-Russian contest for the allegiance of Persia in the aftermath of Turkmanchai also affected other aspects of British diplomacy in the East. Given Persia’s growing importance, for instance, Palmerston, usually a stout advocate of an ‘ethical’ foreign policy, was forced to tone down his anti-slavery policy so as not to offend Persian sensibilities on that score.¹²

The events in the Levant in 1832–3 reinforced British suspicions of Russian expansionism. The first Mehmet Ali crisis drove the Ottoman Sultan, Mahmood II, into the Tsar’s warm embrace at Unkiar Skelessi. The consequence, Palmerston calculated, was ‘that Russia would become the Umpire between the Sultan and his subjects, would exercise a species of Protectorate over Turkey, and the Sultan would be bound to adopt the quarrels of Russia’.¹³ Palmerston, more especially, had come to view Russia as an inherently expansionist Power, driven by a sense of messianic mission; and in this he came to echo Pitt: ‘No reasonable doubt can be entertained that the Russian Government is intently engaged in the prosecution of those schemes of aggrandizement towards the South, which ever since the reign of Catherine have formed a prominent feature of Russian policy.’ He gave little credence to Russian assurances to the contrary: ‘notwithstanding these declarations, it has been observed that the encroachments of Russia have continued to advance on all sides with a steady march, and with a well-directed aim, ... [the] extension either of her influence, or of her territory’. With Austria passive and British and French military and naval power overstretched, Russia had made ‘an enormous stride [at Unkiar Skelessi] towards the accomplishment of her designs upon Turkey’. The close proximity of her fleet and troops to the Bosphorus, moreover, placed Russia in a strong position to take advantage of renewed internal turmoil in the Sultan’s dominions. It was in Britain’s strategic interest to prevent Turkey from ‘becom[ing] the Satellite of any other Power’, and to preserve ‘the integrity and independence of the Turkish Empire as an important element in the general Balance of Power’.¹⁴

From now on, until the eve of the First World War, albeit with varying degrees of intensity, Britain was committed to the idea of reforming the Ottoman Empire in order to preserve it as a bulwark against Russian expansionism. Palmerston and other Whigs, more especially, were wedded to this notion. Axiomatic to Palmerston’s policy was the assumption that Russia was inherently expansionist. Her Drang nach Süden could not be tamed; but it could be contained. ‘[L]arger and more serious encroachments have been made by Russia upon the territorial limits, and upon the political independence of Turkey during the reign of the present Emperor, than during any equal period of former time’, Palmerston concluded. St. Petersburg’s

vast military arrangements, ... its naval preparations, & the extensive fortifications which it is constructing at extreme points of its territory, obviously serve as the basis of offen...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introduction: Saki Ruth Dockrill, No Ordinary Professor
• 1  A Very Internecine Policy: AngloRussian Cold Wars before the Cold War
• 2  Curzons War and Curzons Peace
• 3  Markers of Modernity or Agents of Terror? Air Policing and Colonial Revolt after World War I
• 4  Addressing the Past: The Foreign Office and the Vetting of Diplomatic and Ministerial Memoirs during the Years between the World Wars
• 5  The Secret Intelligence Service and China: The Case of Hilaire Noulens, 19231932
• 6  Strategy and Foreign Policy in Great Britain, 19301938: From the Pursuit of the Balance of Power to Appeasement
• 7  Thank God for the French Army: Churchill, France and an Alternative to Appeasement in the 1930s
• 8  Britain and the Spanish Connection, 19311947: Non-intervention and Regime Change
• 9  To Gamble All on a Single Throw: Neville Chamberlain and the Strategy of the Phoney War
• 10  The Committee on American Opinion on the British Empire, 19421944
• 11  The Colonial versus the Anti-Colonial: The Failure of AngloAmerican Planning on the Future of the Italian Colonies, September 1943June 1945
• Index