Each week, the Gaggle Book Club recommends a book for Gagglers to read and—most important—uploads a pdf version of it.
Our practice is that we do not vouch for the reliability or accuracy of any book we recommend. Still less, do we necessarily agree with a recommended book's central arguments. However, any book we recommend will be of undoubted interest and intellectual importance.
Today's book club selection is Correlli Barnett's powerful historical polemic from 1972: "The Collapse of British Power." The work examined the reasons for the dramatic decline of Britain from its pinnacle of global dominance in the 19th century to its much-diminished role in the mid-20th century.
During the 1960s and 70s, the subject of Britain's decline became something of an obsessive preoccupation among Britain's ruling circles. Newspaper editors and columnists, academics, retired politicians and generals, industrialists of middling success, members of the House of Lords, TV documentary-makers would daily weigh in with explanations for what went wrong and advocate for an urgent change of course. Every country on the planet had supposedly done really well since 1945; poor old Britain, on the other hand, was having to endure slow economic growth rates, perpetual industrial strikes, balance of payments crises and runs on the pound. Nowhere was former U.S. Secretary of State Dean Acheson's famous quip--"Britain has lost an empire but has not yet found a role"--repeated more eagerly than in Britain.
"The Collapse of British Power" was Barnett's contribution to this debate. Some of what he said covered familiar ground: Britain had not prioritized scientific and technical education, it had not invested sufficiently in manufacturing industry, its upper classes had preferred careers in the City of London rather than on the factory floor, its governments abjured establishing state-industry partnerships in the manner of, say, Germany and Japan.
However, Barnett added something original to the mix. According to him, Britain's ruling class had become too morally pious to take on its rivals. What had happened was that the country's elite had undergone a drastic transformation during the 19th century. The brutal, ruthless, avaricious men who had conquered the world during the 18th century acquiring colonies, territories and markets with scant concern for morality or the well-being of the people they now subjected to their rule, disappeared from the scene. In their place came leaders, filled with idealism and moralistic, righteous zeal. Instead of seeing the world as a source of fabulous riches to exploit, they saw it as a place to reform, to elevate, to civilize, to Christianize. In Barnett's view, there was no way such noble, idealistic aspirations would imbue Britain's leaders with the right credo to run a huge empire. What the 18th century adventurers had seized for Britain, their 19th century successors would toss away in a fit of moralistic, idealistic fervor.
The downward spiral, in Barnett's telling, began in Victorian Britain, which emphasized charity, public service and the country's civilizing mission but neglected industrial modernization and strategic planning. While Britain had pioneered the Industrial Revolution, by the by the late 19th century its industries were failing to keep up with technological advances. This was a consequence of inefficient and under-capitalized businesses, a lack of technical education and an over-reliance on financial and service industries. Ultimately it was a consequence of a cultural predisposition among the ruling elite toward a classical education rather than toward scientific or technical training--an attitude that left Britain poorly equipped to compete against contemporary rivals such as Germany and the United States.
Barnett was also scornful of Britain’s imperial ambitions, arguing that its global commitments far exceeded its resources. Maintaining a vast empire as well as a world-dominant navy distracted Britain from addressing domestic industrial and economic problems. Barnett is particularly critical of Britain’s inability to acknowledge the limits of its power after 1918, insisting on keeping its empire going while undertaking myriad military commitments on the European continent.
Most intriguing is Barnett's critique of the appeasement policy that British leaders pursued during the 1930s. One might have expected a critic of living beyond your means and of undertaking dangerous, unfulfillable commitments, to be sympathetic to the approach of political leaders such as Neville Chamberlain, who justified appeasement as a pragmatic policy grounded in British national interests. In their view, since there were no British national interests involved in any border dispute between Germany and Poland, it made little sense for Britain to go to war against Germany over Danzig. Wouldn't this be exactly the kind of strategic foresight that, Barnett complained, was sorely lacking among generations of British leaders?
Yet, strangely enough, Barnett has little time for appeasement, a policy he believes to be grounded in the moralistic and idealistic mindset of Britain’s ruling class. Barnett contends that British leaders, while ostensibly pursuing pragmatism, were fundamentally unprepared to think strategically in terms of power politics. Their cultural aversion to force and to the realities of power left them unprepared to rearm decisively or to confront aggressive powers early.
While Barnett acknowledges that a measure of pragmatism underlay the policy of appeasement, he nonetheless takes aim at the belief in collective security through the League of Nations and on the reliance on diplomacy over military deterrence. He claims that this idealism fostered a sense that war could be avoided through negotiation, even in the face of an aggressively revisionist Germany.
A central element of Barnett’s critique is that Britain's political and intellectual leadership misjudged the nature of the international system. Despite all evidence to the contrary, they retained a belief that the League of Nations, multilateral diplomacy and collective security. In Barnett's view, Britain’s leaders should have recognized earlier the need for rearmament and for the creation of military alliances in order to contain Nazi Germany. Their lack of strategic realism, needless to say, was rooted in the moralistic and idealistic cultural and intellectual traditions of Britain's leadership.
Barnett's argument here is not particularly convincing. The appeasement policy wasn't particularly moralistic or idealistic. Chamberlain never took the League of Nations seriously. Britain's leaders were desperate to avoid another war with Germany a mere 20 years after the last one, particularly when there really wasn't any need for a war. Britain's fundamental interest was to maintain its vast sprawling empire, and Hitler had no interest in threatening it--at least not in the foreseeable future. Why then prepare for war with Germany? How would this help Britain in the slightest?
Britain's World War II fight, starting in September 1939 and ending in May 1945, brought the country to its knees. It led--as it was bound to do--to the rapid liquidation of the empire, and to the country's subordination to the United States. That was indeed the total collapse of British power.
