No Nazi Empire in Central Africa

The 2014 James Ford Lecturer, Susan Pedersen, Shenton Professor of History and the Core Curriculum at Columbia University, explains how a New College historian, William Ormsby-Gore, fell out of love with the League.

William Ormsby-Gore, later fourth Baron Harlech, was, for my money, the most significant and enterprising Colonial Secretary of the interwar period. He was in every Conservative government from 1922 until 1938, usually at the Colonial Office, and in on every major decision made about the Middle East and Africa in that period. He's also pretty much forgotten. Everyone remembers Churchill, the arch-imperialist, although his imprint on interwar imperial policy was far less; Leo Amery usually strikes a chord too, if more for his brutal send-off of Chamberlain in May 1940 (In the name of God, go!') than for his plans for imperial federation and East African union in the 1920s. Even Malcolm MacDonald is better known.

Why has Ormsby-Gore been forgotten? It didn't help that he wasn't much interested in posthumous fame. He didn't write a memoir, didn't save his political correspondence, and buried his papers in Aberystwyth. I trundled across the country by bus to peruse them (track work having closed the rail line), but found them pretty thin anyway. Private letters reveal a devoted son and a loving father, endearingly skipping public events to pick up a child from school or steal a holiday abroad. There were enthusiasms too — for travel, for colonial development, for commonwealth ideas — but Ormsby-Gore treated politics more as dynastic service than as greasy pole. This is probably fortunate, for if he had really wanted to reach the top, he could hardly have made a worse choice than to hitch his star to the cause of the League of Nations.

I gave the Ford lectures in Hilary Term 2014 under the title 'Internationalism and Empire: British Dilemmas, 1919-1939'. I used them to trace how British statesmen, intellectuals and ordinary citizens looked to the League to rebuild European security, foster international cooperation, and manage relations among imperial powers and their restive subjects after a cataclysmic war. I was interested especially in the mandates system, established at the Paris Peace Conference to administer the seized Ottoman and German territories under League oversight. That project of `internationalizing' empire was always contested: allied statesmen worried it would undermine imperial authority; German revisionists objected it was merely a cloak for annexation; colonial nationalists largely agreed with them. But for some twenty years a group of League officials collaborated with sympathetic (and largely British) statesmen to reconcile those rival interests and claims. Ormsby-Gore was at the heart of that effort. Indeed, the complex and poignant story of his engagement and then disillusionment with `Geneva' captures some wider trends. So let me give a brief account here.

Ormsby-Gore was born in Eaton Square, educated at Eton and New College (Modern History 1905), married into the Cecil clan, and then entered the Commons as a Unionist in 1910, at the ripe age of twenty-five. Inevitably he spent the war in uniform, and it changed his life. Seconded to the Arab Bureau in Cairo in 1916, he was struck by the depth of local mistrust. 'We rule here by fear & not by love or gratitude or loyalty,' he wrote to his mother. To win allies, Britain should instead embrace self-determination, and should do so for both Arabs and Jews. Having worked in Cairo to secure Hashemite support in exchange for promises of Arab statehood, in 1917 he became part of the circle in London that drafted the Balfour declaration. The following year found him in Palestine with Chaim Weizmann and the Zionist Commission, trying to secure agreement between Arabs and Jews.

Unsurprisingly, Ormsby-Gore was an early and outspoken supporter of the idea of the League of Nations. He was with the British Delegation at the Peace Conference when the mandates plan was agreed; when American support for the League evaporated and the empires looked to just annex their conquests, he was one of a small group of well-connected internationalists who pressed the British government to get the mandate texts written and the oversight apparatus set up. Well-connected and persuasive, perhaps to his own surprise he was named the first British member of the Permanent Mandates Commission — the League body that was to examine the imperial powers' administration of the mandated territories and to notify the League Council of any concerns.

Although no one quite realized it, he was an unusual choice. He was a young man in a collection of retired diplomats and colonial governors; he also had an agenda all his own. Some Commission members thought it their job to defend the imperial powers, others to protect the 'native' charge. Ormsby-Gore, by contrast, thought his job was state-building. 'You will probably think my ideas... revolutionary,' he wrote to the League official William Rappard early in 1921, but he thought the mandatory power 'merely the temporary guardian or trustee exercising such trusteeship on behalf of the League, with a view to the development of each mandatory area' — in Africa, and not just in the Middle East — 'into an independent state.' The language of the White Man's Burden would no longer suffice: 'in the coming century Europeans will have to alter very substantially their fundamental attitude towards the coloured people.' Ormsby-Gore was determined to push the Commission in an independent and progressive direction.

He was able to do this in part because, as he later told his successor Frederick Lugard, 'the whole Commission took anything from the British member largely because he was the British member'. In early meetings Ormsby-Gore opposed land concessions to Europeans in Africa, attacked the nonplussed Australian High Commissioner over the appropriation of Nauru's phosphates (the Commissioner was furious, but Ormsby-Gore felt 'very impenitent'), and argued that local inhabitants should have the right to petition the League themselves. Almost all imperial statesmen thought this latter a dreadful idea: a right of petition would encourage agitators, demagogues, and other unscrupulous folk. But Ormsby-Gore got his way, establishing a process and precedent that — while rarely securing redress — brought the words of the colonized into the halls in which their fates were decided.

In 1922, after only two sessions, Ormsby-Gore left the Mandates Commission to become Colonial UnderSecretary. Roles reversed, he would now appear before the Commission for interrogation — although, in those early years, his former colleagues gave him an easy time. They found Leo Amery, appointed Colonial Secretary in late 1924 in Baldwin's government, more worrisome. Amery was openly hostile to the League, determined to assert British sovereignty in Tanganyika despite the League mandate, and to unite it with Kenya and Uganda into a single dominion under white rule, a project known as 'Closer Union'. OrmsbyGore hated this plan, although as Amery's direct subordinate he had to tread cautiously, but after some quiet troublemaking behind the scenes, in early 1929 he came out into the open. The idea that East Africa should be amalgamated and governed along 'Kenyan' — that is, white supremacist — lines, he wrote for the record, was one 'that I have spent my whole energies for six years combatting.' He was delighted when political objections, the steady opposition of the Mandates Commission, and a German threat to haul Britain before the International Court took the whole question off the table.

For the whole of the twenties, then, Ormsby-Gore sought to bolster the authority of the League's oversight regime while also using that regime to promote a state-building programme far from accepted in his own party and milieu. In the late thirties, however, the institution he had built up turned against him. How was this possible?

The answer is, of course, that times changed. And when they did, those institutions were used for new ends. Ormsby-Gore succeeded J.H. Thomas as Colonial Secretary in 1936, when the League had been crippled by its inability to check the Italian conquest of Ethiopia and by the exit of the revisionist powers and especially of Germany. In the Weimar period Germany had used its position at the League to oppose annexationist moves by the mandatory powers while insisting on its own trading rights — a position compatible with the Ormsby-Gore's aims. The Nazi seizure of power, however, produced a sharp shift in policy. Rather than working to curtail imperial sovereignty, Germany would try to reclaim an empire of its own for his own purposes, Hitler put German colonial claims back on the table.

From 1936 until 1938, proposals for a new colonial settlement flooded the British press and percolated in Cabinet committees. Ormsby-Gore made his opposition clear. The idea that one could transfer peoples without their consent, he told his Cabinet colleagues, was 'obsolete'; transferring them to a Nazi state nothing short of criminal. But, to Ormsby-Gore's shock, many internationalists across the political spectrum thought Germany could be tamed if included in the imperial club; Foreign Secretary Halifax and Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain too hoped that an offer of territory in Africa might moderate Hitler's East European ambitions. In March 1938, the British Ambassador in Berlin thus unveiled a British plan to redistribute all territory in Central Africa (including that held by Belgium, Portugal and France), with Germany receiving a share. Hitler promised to consider it — but the following week annexed Austria instead. The British government learned the hard way that Hitler would not be deflected from his Eastern plans. The campaign for `colonial appeasement' utterly undermined the project of 'internationalizing' empire without making Europe any safer.

Ormsby-Gore's real disillusionment came, however, over mandated Palestine. He had the misfortune to be Colonial Secretary when Nazi persecution and rising anti-Semitism in other East European states greatly increased Jewish immigration into Palestine and drove the Arab population into open revolt. Ormsby-Gore, recall, had been a supporter of both Arab and Jewish statebuilding from the start, and it cannot be a coincidence that partition — the Peel Commission's bold solution to the rebellion in Palestine — was put forward on his watch. But the Mandates Commission was not sympathetic. Genuinely horrified by European anti-Semitism, they saw Palestine almost entirely as refuge for European Jews; Britain's role was simply to repress the rebellion and restore order so more could be accommodated. Ormsby-Gore, like so many statesmen who followed him, thought he could use the international arena to balance Arab and Jewish claims. What he discovered, however, was that — as Chamberlain's offer to Hitler had shown — Europeans would try to use international institutions and `internationalized' territories primarily to meet European interests or appease European hatred.

The partition plan in tatters, and his career as a front-rank politician over as well, in 1938 Ormsby-Gore went to the Lords as Lord Harlech. There, he placed the blame for the impasse in Palestine squarely on Geneva. The mandate text, he said, had been 'the bane of all administration by successive governments in Palestine'; the oversight apparatus had made flexible administration impossible. What Ormsby-Gore neglected to mention, of course, was that he had been one of the mandate regime's architects, had himself helped to draft that mandate text, and had in the twenties colluded with Geneva to combat Amery's annexationist plans. `Internationalization' — the process of displacing policymaking from the domestic to the international arena — had, for a time, served him well. But when conditions changed, and especially once the German problem trumped all colonial questions, the mandates regime was pressed to serve those other, European, ends.

Ormsby-Gore's experience with the League, running as it does from youthful enthusiasm to pragmatic collaboration to a kind of middle-aged disillusionment, mirrors the British experience as well.

The mandates system was created under British protection and for years worked to enhance British imperial authority and to contain those politicians — Leo Amery, Jan Christiaan Smuts — who had more conservative and also more racially supremacist aims. In the thirties that system fell into crisis, as it was pressed to deal with problems — notably the political antagonisms and human needs created by Nazi aggression — far beyond its capacities. But, while he could not see it at the time, perhaps Ormsby-Gore had the last word. For, once internationalized administration, imperial annexation, and territorial redistribution were all discredited, Ormsby-Gore's early commitment — 'the development of each mandatory area into an independent state' — became much more imaginable.

- SUSAN PEDERSEN

Columbia University (NY)

The Guardians: The League of Nations and the Crisis of Empire was published by Oxford University Press in May 2015.