A Patriot's History of the Modern World (36 page)

However, the problem all along was that the Balfour Declaration—whatever intention Britain had of living up to it—constituted only a single statement by one government. Weizmann and his allies, therefore, drafted a plan for a Jewish state in Palestine under British authority. Then on January 3, 1919, Weizmann and Faisal signed a bilateral agreement acknowledging the creation of independent Jewish and Arab states. Perhaps at that time, more than any other, the reality of “Middle East peace” was closest:
both men agreed their people had suffered under colonialism and promised to work together.

Fittingly, even as those with the most to lose—the Arabs and Jews—moved toward harmony, the French destroyed the moment. Sylvain Lévi, a Jewish French confidant of the Jewish Baron Edmond de Rothschild who had a personal grudge against Weizmann, spoke. He shattered the case laid before the delegates by warning that newly arriving Jews would disrupt the region, and alluded to the “Bolshevik” influences of the Russian Jews. Perhaps when contrasted against the pro-Zionist arguments it wasn't much, but given that many of the delegations were wary of
any
potential dislocations or upheaval that might cause future problems in the Middle East, the discussion of the Jewish state became a nonstarter.

Quickly, the Versailles delegates dropped the Palestine issue and moved on to the disposition of Germany, leaving the Palestinian porcupine for England to hold. Still full of hope, Weizmann sailed to Palestine, where hostile British officers almost prevented him from landing. Then the Zionists discovered that the British government would give them no land at all and that they had to raise funds to buy every tract. “We found we had to cover the soil of Palestine with Jewish gold,” Weizmann dourly noted.
¹¹⁴
Over time, Jews would continue to trickle into Palestine, until in July 1937 Britain announced yet another special commission under Lord William Peel, who reported that “Arab nationalism is as intense a force as Jewish [nationalism]…. The gulf between the races is thus already wide and will continue to widen if the present Mandate is maintained.” There is “no common ground” between the Jews and the Arabs, he continued: “Their national aspirations are incompatible.”
¹¹⁵

Frameworks for De-colonialism

Unlike the Americans, who had established a logical, sensible policy for admitting new peoples into the Union as full citizens (i.e., Hawaii) or setting them on a genuine road to independence (as seen in the Philippines), the Europeans lacked any such framework, let alone an effective one, in spite of their centuries-old experience with colonies.

Thus the ironic phenomenon unfolded in which colonial states demanded democratic rights they had never understood or practiced (or, often, even seen up close) from nations that were only in the infancy of learning how to operate democratic institutions themselves. Germany and Russia still had functioning kings as late as 1917 in Russia's case, 1918 in
Germany's, and Belgium still had one. France had experienced a shocking turnover rate in the type of government (empire, monarchy, republic) it enjoyed, careening from Napoléon to Louis XVIII to Louis Philippe to Napoléon III to the Third Republic in less than a century. Only England and Holland had long histories of peaceful, nonrevolutionary self-government. Nevertheless, it was to the democratically dysfunctional European nations that the colonies looked for role models.

After the Treaty of Versailles, the French colony of Cameroon requested “the right to choose the [European governing power that supervised it]” and demanded civil rights, security for chiefs, and an end to land expropriations. South Africans insisted on universal suffrage in 1921, and the African National Congress (ANC) in 1923 issued a “declaration, statement or Bill of Rights” that endowed the Bantu and non-African coloreds with “liberty of the subject, justice and equality for all classes in the eyes of the law.” It also called for “democratic principles” of equality of treatment and citizenship in the land, “irrespective of race, class, creed or origin.”
¹¹⁶
These were admirable sentiments, almost never seen in action in the mother countries, and certainly glassy-eyed romantic notions given the absolute absence of the recognition that tribes still dominated most of the African colonies.

Europeans ignored such appeals. Instead, they displayed their possessions proudly at international gatherings. From May to November 1934, the Colonial Exhibition in Paris attracted eight million visitors. It was elaborately staged to celebrate France's colonies, including African and Tunisian pavilions with natives dressed in traditional garb. A previous counterdemonstration, the anticolonial exhibition in 1931, had drawn only four thousand.
¹¹⁷
Soviet attempts to agitate within the colonies mostly floundered. Two Soviet Africanists working at the Russian African bureau collaborated with nationalist Albert Nzula of the Orange Free State to publish
The Working Class Movement and Forced Labor in Negro Africa
(1922). The book was astounding given that the Soviets were “busy turning the Ukrainian farm belt into something resembling Leopold II's Congo Free State.”
¹¹⁸
It had little impact, and Nzula later died in Russia due to overdrinking, passing out, and lying in the freezing Moscow streets for hours as people walked by.
¹¹⁹

Despite the illusion of a commonwealth of cheerful brown, black, and yellow people pulling together for the mother country, the reality was quite different. The Great War had produced ever new and more severe problems
for the European colonial empires, not the least of which was their eventual disposition. A few had already seen the future: Frederick Lugard's book
The Dual Mandate in British Tropical Africa
(1922) argued that “the civilized nations have at last recognized that while on the one hand the abounding wealth of the tropical regions of the earth must be developed and used for the benefit of mankind, on the other hand an obligation rests on the controlling power not only to safeguard the material rights of the natives, but to promote their moral and material educational progress.”
¹²⁰
But there is no indication that policymakers gave it much more consideration than they had Nzula's tract.

Britain held out the possibility of national independence for its colonies, and in India's case, virtually promised it. Critics maintained that even in the case of India, the British weren't serious; apologists that independence was only a matter of when, not if. Not so: while going through the motions of independence, Britain circled, constantly searching for the perfect time and ideal process, neither of which could ever appear in the real world.

Other European countries wandered aimlessly with their colonial policies. France was in the process of absorbing large numbers of foreigners from its colonies, giving citizenship to some 2.3 million between 1889 and 1940, while allowing another 2.6 million foreign noncitizens to remain in the country. This was in keeping with European notions that people from the empires could be assimilated on a slow basis into the homeland. On the other hand, many French politicians had no intention of granting millions of Algerian Muslims citizenship. In 1920, the resident-general of Morocco, Marshal Hubert Lyautey, called for a “radical change of course” for Algeria and its Muslim population, and the governor-general of Algeria, Jean-Baptiste Abel, warned that if France refused to admit Algerians into their national structure, “beware lest they do not soon create one for themselves.”
¹²¹
Rather than Algerians becoming French, settlers (known as
colons
) populated Algeria and exploited the locals. Lyautey likened
colons
to Germans in their racism.
¹²²

The vast pool of native manpower enticed French officials, who not only looked back at the staggering losses from the war, but also looked forward at the potentially higher German birth rates. Only through empire could France generate the numbers needed to offset potential European threats—armies that would never materialize, but which remained tantalizingly near in 1939, when the minister for the colonies promised to raise two
million native troops for the defense of France. Then there was the ever-present need for raw materials. This, too, preoccupied the French at Versailles, where the Mosul oil fields were part of a “Greater Syria” France coveted. Instead, Lawrence of Arabia had put the Arabs in physical (if not political) control of Damascus, leaving only Lebanon for
la Mère-patrie
. Instead of oil, France obtained a beautiful port plus the headaches of keeping the Lebanese Christians—Lebanon was formed to provide a state in which Lebanese Maronite Christians would predominate—and the local Arabs separate, foreshadowing the no-win “peacekeeper” role the United Nations would adopt unsuccessfully in future decades. French colonies in Africa gobbled up capital, and the French share of investment going to territories rose to almost half of all French investment, mostly in Algeria. A more neglected colony was French Indo-China, which, like Morocco, was overpopulated with European bureaucrats—more than in all of British India.

For most Europeans, the colonies were a net drain, and had been since the 1700s, at least insofar as the spotty data reveals. One study of British investment in their empire concluded that colonial finance played only a minor role in capital markets, returns on investment were low relative to domestic investment, and imperialism was a net cost to the taxpayers.
¹²³
With few exceptions, African and Asian territories were money losers. Rubber, tin, and diamonds paid off, but capital poured into independent states in Latin America seldom produced a return, and in any event, merely getting products to market demanded expensive and permanent construction and maintenance of railroads, port and harbor facilities, communications, hospitals, and schools. In India, from 1891 to 1938 the British laid forty thousand miles of railroad track, doubled the number of irrigation facilities, and created a postal and telegraph system. France built the Congo-Ocean Railway from Point-Noire to Brazzaville, but at horrific cost. One estimate put the number of native workers who died on the project at sixteen thousand, and the construction led to the revolt of the Gbaya people near French Cameroon in 1928 and the subsequent Kongo-Wara War. European railroads in Africa reduced transport costs by 90 percent, but still profits were elusive. Not surprisingly, then, foreign investment abroad shrank for every leading colonial power between 1914 and 1930.
¹²⁴

Whatever gains that were realized came from work gangs and forced labor, supplied in part through imperial justice meted out to noncitizens. Under such a system, there was no motivation for natives to invest in their
colonized homeland themselves. South of the Sahara, for example, the opportunity for French citizenship was even more remote than in Algeria. By 1936, only two thousand nonwhites held French citizenship in lower Africa, leading to the steady flight of blacks to neighboring British provinces where infrastructure was better and there was greater opportunity for employment.

Colonial economic structures thus produced uneven growth at best, leading critics to maintain that “forced development” did not work, regardless of benevolent intentions. Statistics tended to indicate that top-down development failed. Excluding the years of the Great War, from 1870 to 1946, India's GNP grew at only .5 percent per year or less. Ghana grew at 1.3 percent from 1870 to 1913. Overall, African growth during the imperial years was .6 percent from 1870 to 1913 and .9 percent from 1913 to 1950. But these numbers failed to tell the whole story, and the dark fact may well be that Africa's growth rate
only
managed to achieve such pathetically weak rates
because of
European investment and interference. At any rate, it seemed to matter little what policy was overlaid on top of the territories. Free trade models, instituted by the British and Dutch, seemed no better than protectionist frameworks erected by France, Spain, Italy, and, for some time, the United States.

Whatever the purpose of the initial investment, colonial powers usually discovered it was no inexpensive matter (a lesson the Americans had learned in the Canal Zone). Once built, factories and plantations could rely on native labor, but seldom did they profit from the “networking” benefits of highly skilled employees who made incremental improvements in the production process. High-skill jobs were therefore imported from the colonial power and retained at home. To a large degree, advanced economies tended to invest in one another—Isaac Singer built his grand sewing machine factory in Scotland, where it employed fourteen thousand—rather than in the undeveloped backwaters of Africa and Asia. Natives who lacked skills made poor wage workers, and attempts to bring vast numbers of them into the wage economy proved fruitless. According to economist E. J. Berg, less than 5 percent of sub-Saharan Africans worked for wages at any time during the year as late as 1950, producing demands to import Pakistani and Indian laborers, who added yet another ethnic tension to the mix.
¹²⁵
In the Boer republics during the late nineteenth century more than ninety thousand workers were recruited from England to provide skilled and semiskilled labor—a move that ultimately cost the Boers their nations.
English workers claimed they were discriminated against by not being allowed to vote; England took the side of their countrymen, and after two costly wars, England brought the Boers to heel and combined the Cape Colony, Natal, Transvaal, and Orange Free State into the Union of South Africa, a British dominion. There was a lesson here, but one missed by Western politicians.

Another lesson that Progressive politicians refused to learn was that colonies needed first to develop at least some of the underpinnings to American exceptionalism in order to avoid tyrannies and establish democratic republics. Since Europeans themselves did not have checks and balances in their political systems, they were not inserted into colonial governments. Private property became something maintained by force rather than law, and combines of government and private corporations established crony capitalism in which influence in government was vastly more important than ideas, hard work, and business efficiency. Common law was missing altogether; indeed, all laws were promulgated by high officials, often located outside the colony; religion was normally autocratically administered; and a form of serfdom throughout the native population was institutionalized. Given these deficiencies in colonial social and political structures, democracy did and would remain a pipe dream, understood only in propaganda slogans, for many long years to come.