Paths Not Taken

British Labour and International Policy in the 1920s

Henry R. Winkler

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2000
• Print ISBN: 9780807857571, 9780807821718
• eBook ISBN: 9780807866344
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: British History
• Index: History

Distinguished historian Henry Winkler examines the changing and often contradictory views that characterized the British Labour party's approach to foreign policy from the end of World War I through the 1920s. He documents the progression from Labour's general indifference toward international issues before World War I, to its almost total rejection of the prevailing international order after the war, to its eventual grudging acceptance of the need to work for international cooperation through existing institutions. In the early 1920s, the Labour party began to abandon its earlier positions of pacifism and class struggle in favor of a more pragmatic approach to foreign affairs as party leaders recognized the possibility that they might one day come to power. Central to the shift in policy were such leaders as J. R. Clynes, Norman Angell, Arthur Henderson, Hugh Dalton, Philip Noel-Baker, and Will Arnold-Forster, who rejected traditional policies and who supported the League of Nations and, more tentatively, collective security. According to Winkler, these positions might have offered a viable alternative to the ruling Conservative party agenda had they not been undermined by the disintegration of the entire European order in the 1930s.

Originally published 1994.

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CHAPTER 1

THE BACKGROUND

Foreign policy was hardly the primary focus of the Labour party. But foreign affairs influenced the efforts to create a more equitable society at home, and Labour, like other groups, had to confront international issues whether it wished to or not. The account of Labour’s effort to deal with the larger world is in many ways the story of its growing maturity as it gradually became a significant force in British politics.

In a few brief years after World War I, the Labour party made good its position as successor to the shattered and demoralized Liberals. Founded at the beginning of the century, it was still a relatively small third force as late as 1918, claiming to speak as the political representative of the working class, but dwarfed in the shadows of the two older parties. By 1929, its leaders had twice formed a government. Although Labour had not succeeded in winning a majority in the House of Commons, it had established itself beyond question as the constitutional alternative to the Conservative party.

The speed of Labour’s emergence could hardly have been predicted by even the most optimistic of the party’s managers. The electoral history of the party since its striking early success in 1906, when the Labour Representation Committee had returned twenty-nine members to Parliament, gave no hint of the possibilities of the future. While German Social Democracy, for example, seemed on the surface to be growing increasingly more powerful despite constitutional shackles, its British partner limped along without any success to match the 1912 electoral victories of the German Socialists. It was true that Labour representation in the House of Commons increased to forty and then to forty-two in the two elections of 1910. But these were hardly figures upon which to base any expectation of a rapid triumph. Indeed, in the tense period of industrial unrest between December 1910 and the outbreak of war, it seemed to some observers that the loose federation established in 1900 was in danger of breaking up completely. The appearance of syndicalism no less than the increasing turn to direct action among the trade unions challenged the tactics being pursued by the leaders of the party. In particular, a substantial minority felt frustrated by the policy of parliamentary collaboration with the Liberal government of Herbert Asquith.¹ Their exasperation was fed by the fact that during these years the party suffered several losses in by-elections and was unable to win a single additional seat. Once the war broke out the electoral truce froze the political status quo to the further impatience of certain groups within the movement, although there appears to be no sufficient warrant for believing, as some claimed, that the truce itself, rather than the general attitudes of the electorate, worked significantly to the disadvantage of the Labour party. In any case, when Labour faced the voters in Lloyd George’s coupon election of 1918, at which support of the wartime coalition was the major criterion of acceptability, its final return of fifty-seven official members of Parliament was actually a smaller proportion of its candidates than had been the case in 1910.

After 1918, Labour entered upon its period of most spectacular growth. In a certain sense it may plausibly be argued that a Labour party as such did not really exist before that year. On February 26, at the annual conference, a new constitution, drafted largely by Arthur Henderson and Sidney Webb, a key figure in the Fabian Society component of the party, was accepted by the delegates. Previously a loose federation of affiliated societies, the Labour party now became a national organization, with local branches in every parliamentary constituency and open to all “workers by hand and brain” who subscribed to its program. For the first time the labor movement had the means to build up an effective electoral machine throughout the country. Equally important, the new constitution made it increasingly possible to attract recruits from among individuals, such as professional people, who had until now been largely ineligible for direct membership. The process of change, however, was slow and often contentious. Historian David Marquand has commented on how much the Labour party, in the early twenties, remained a loose federation of local bodies and special interests rather than a unitary organization with a single purpose, “full of fissures,” as he put it, “between the trade unions and the I.L.P., between the I.L.P. and the Divisional Labour parties, between different unions and different sections of the same union, between ‘intellectuals’ and manual workers, between pacifists who had been in prison during the war and patriots who had spoken from recruiting platforms, between ‘Right’ and ‘Left,’ between respectability and revolt.”² Despite the tension and the controversy, the years between 1918 and 1931 were years of growth and transformation for the party. As it became heir to the mantle of the declining Liberal party, Labour was forced to rethink its attitudes and reformulate its programs in terms of the realities of responsible office rather than as the propaganda of a small minority.

The reshaping of the Labour party’s policy was most striking in the field of foreign affairs. Labour felt its way slowly toward a policy that was first partially tried out in 1924 when Labour was in office, was implemented with relative consistency by its second government between 1929 and 1931, and, in theory at least, was the platform upon which it took its stand in the tragic decade of the thirties.³

The decade after the war was generally a period of hope. To most people in Great Britain the victory of 1918 brought a sense of security and self-confidence that lasted until well into 1929. From a military point of view the postwar settlements left the British Isles as safe from any immediate threat as they were ever likely to be. Like their French counterparts, British statesmen were concerned with the exploitation of victory. Whereas France was obsessed by the fear of renewed German aggression, British planning for a time was generally based upon the thesis that no major war was to be anticipated for at least ten years. It is common to conclude that this assumption reflected a peculiarly British belief that it was unnecessary to look ahead more than a decade. In reality, whatever may be thought of their accomplishments, British policy makers attempted to take advantage of their hypothesized margin of safety to promote a relatively long-run strategy of foreign policy.

That strategy reflected notions of Britain’s role that may have been suitable for a wealthy, contented power, but hardly appropriate for a nation no longer able fully to defend its stake in the external world. Despite the underlying optimism of the immediate postwar era, the United Kingdom emerged from almost five years of battle greatly weakened. On virtually every level of power—strategic, political, economic—Britain’s nineteenth-century preeminence was challenged. Above all, the acceleration of prewar trends made more critical her dependence upon overseas trade to pay for food and raw materials. Because the standard of life of her people was so exposed to the vagaries of a complicated international system, the restoration of that system was judged to have crucial importance for Britain. As a result, the safeguarding of national security, particularly in relation to Europe, came to be equated very largely with policies designed to promote general economic recovery and, as a corollary, to foster the general pacification of the continent.⁴

In the 1920s, it was considered almost blasphemous to hint at the possibility of another war.⁵ For a time most Englishmen took it for granted that the world was entering a new era of tranquillity, during which such international difficulties as obviously existed could be gradually reconciled by some process of peaceful adjustment. High hopes for the creation of a more secure world were not confined to a tiny minority outside the mainstream of British sentiment. “Advanced” opinion in all parties and at all levels assumed that disarmament would systematically be achieved and that the outlawry of war and aggression was only a matter of time. Even Conservative leaders, more “traditionalist” in their approach, anticipated a long period of constructive consolidation—which they thought they had achieved when they accepted the Locarno agreements in 1925.

In this atmosphere the diverse Labour attitudes on foreign affairs were forged into an operative program for the Labour party. There was from the start a bitter reaction to the handiwork of the Allied statesmen who had crafted the settlement at Versailles. But that very spirit of disillusionment reflected the optimistic conviction that a better international order could be achieved—and that it was being frustrated by the lack of vision of the men who held the reins of power. This sense of the possible was of course considerably reinforced by the growing political strength of the Labour party as the decade unfolded.

The shock of war triggered significant changes in Labour’s outlook on international matters. Before the conflict, working-class interest in foreign affairs was sporadic and slight.⁶ The workers newly enfranchised in 1867 and 1884 directed their political attention much more toward domestic issues than toward the obscure complications of external relations. Despite the enormous increase in British productivity over half a century, despite, indeed, the undoubted rise in the standard of life of the “average” worker, millions on the land or in the drab industrial slums continued to live in squalor and poverty. Of necessity working-class organization was primarily concerned with the “condition of England” question. The new unionism, sweeping through the ranks of unskilled and semiskilled labor toward the end of the century, dramatized the urgency of the struggle for economic and social advancement. It soon brought the strength of added numbers to a trade union movement hitherto dominated by the established craft organizations of highly skilled workers. But even when the new unionists had persuaded the chiefs of the Trades Union Congress of the need for political action, the very circumstances that induced the leaders of organized labor to redirect their efforts into the channels of the parliamentary process made it certain that they would give short shrift to questions of international consequence.

In similar fashion the socialist societies whose establishment paralleled that of the new unionism were largely occupied with a thoroughgoing criticism of contemporary social and economic institutions. Both the Social Democratic Federation, Marxist in its inspiration, and the Independent Labour party, deeply rooted in the nonconformist tradition, worked to arouse the social conscience of their time to an awareness of the intolerable conditions hidden behind the facade of industrial society. Until about the turn of the century, there is little evidence that either group, the withering SDF and the more vital ILP, paid other than lip service to an internationalism that, if genuinely embraced, might have led to a modest comprehension of foreign policy issues and their relation to domestic problems.

Not even the Fabian Society, select, small, and almost exclusively intellectual, lifted its eyes far beyond the horizon off the British shores. The Fabians gave modern British socialism much of its doctrine, but it was a doctrine whose concrete application virtually ignored foreign affairs. Organized to “permeate” the existing political parties, these middle-class intellectuals reluctantly moved toward cooperation with trade unionists and working-class politicians in the creation of a new political party. But the purpose for which such a party was envisaged remained the achievement of the “gas and water” socialism of the Fabians. Ambivalent on the issue of imperialism that came to a head during the Boer War, they tended to be silent on other international questions until the First World War made imperative some stand on the most crucial issues of the time.⁷

In large measure, the prewar Labour party inherited this indifference to the world of diplomacy and foreign policy. Formed by its constituent groups to promote legislation “in the direct interest of labour,” the Labour Representation Committee of 1900 was forged into a full-fledged party on the anvil of such measures as the Taff Vale decision, which made it possible for a trade union itself to be sued for damages caused by its members in the course of a trade dispute.⁸ Understandably, the new party found virtually all of its energies absorbed in the struggle to defend workers’ rights through the medium of Parliament. The most prominent leaders of the Labour party, Keir Hardie and Ramsay MacDonald, each in his own way, were committed internationalists, yet neither was particularly effective in educating the labor movement to the dangers that confronted it in the years before 1914. In the House of Commons the two were the major and frequently the only spokesmen on foreign affairs for the small parliamentary Labour party, pressing for better relations with Germany, warning against being used to promote the purposes of Tsarist Russia, pleading for release from the oppressive burden of armaments that plagued every major nation.⁹ As a result, while it is possible to discover occasional pronouncements by party leaders on foreign affairs, it seems clearly out of touch with the “feel” of the prewar period to emphasize their importance.¹⁰

This is not to say that the Labour party had no international outlook before 1914. Enough commentators have written about the “internationalism” of Labour’s background to make it unnecessary to stress the point, but it is wise to keep the conception in proper perspective. The Labour party and some of its constituent societies were indeed members of the Second International. On occasion the party joined with its fellow members in denouncing imperialism and colonial exploitation, branding militarism, and stressing the international solidarity of the working classes. But the legend of socialist solidarity, to be broken so irreparably when the European armies marched in 1914, even before 1914 represented an aspiration rather than a reality of international life. As far as the British Labour party was concerned, it was, in a certain sense, a member of the Second International by sufferance. Non-Marxist, unwilling to subscribe to the thesis of class warfare, it was made eligible for membership by a compromise formula that hardly concealed the deep rifts separating it from its more doctrinaire fellows. Perhaps it is symbolic of the pro forma character of the labor movement’s participation in the International that even the Trades Union Congress sent delegates for a long time, despite the fact that it can hardly be argued that the TUC treated its participation seriously. On the other hand, the theoretical position of the Independent Labour party encouraged its more prominent role in the organization, and for a time Keir Hardie’s support of the general strike against war made him a leading figure, although it is difficult to discover that his position garnered any widespread support at home.¹¹ There is in sum little evidence of any genuine temper of working-class “internationalism” among the rank and file of the labor movement, and its presence among the leaders of the Labour party can perhaps be more plausibly related to the myths of labor solidarity than identified as a fundamental motivating force within the party before 1914.

Much more important than the influence of socialist internationalism was the heritage that the Labour party received from the liberal tradition of the nineteenth century. “That power politics are wicked and must be subjugated to the rule of law; that Britain must stand for applying morality in international affairs and, in particular, for helping small nations to achieve their independence; that rich and fortunate nations have an obligation to raise up the backward colonial peoples; that the elector everywhere wants peace if only the politicians will allow it; that what [the] British above all hate is a bully who breaks the law”—these, Labour’s left-wing intellectual R. H. S. Crossman once wrote, are the essential components of that liberal tradition in foreign policy.¹² Fundamentally, he argued, such an approach was much less a policy than a moral repudiation of the evils of power politics. It was an expression of the liberal conscience, and its main function was that of protest against the excesses of traditional British policy.

In the early twentieth century the spokesmen of that conscience were as much the leaders of the Labour party as the official representatives of Liberalism. The prewar internationalists of the Labour party tended to be vague, imprecise, never really sure whether to support a policy of collaboration by sovereign states or to advocate the absorption of competing nationalisms in some broader world sovereignty. Their uncertain position almost exactly paralleled that of a minority of dissident Liberals who were moved, in the years before 1914, to reject the imperial and diplomatic maneuvers of their own party as they had opposed those of the Tories.¹³ In both cases, the “liberal” protest—a kind of cri de conscience—stands out much more clearly than any proposals for an alternative policy.

Perhaps the most instructive example of the essentially liberal character of the influences molding Labour’s attitudes toward international affairs is to be found among the currents of pacifism that ran so strongly in its ranks both before and after the First World War. It is apparent, of course, that there were advocates of a doc...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1. The Background
• 2. Labour and the Paris Settlement
• 3. The Aftermath of War
• 4. The Beginnings of Change
• 5. Labour’s Uneasy Success
• 6. Alternatives to Locarno
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index