Clearing the Decks: Ireland, India, the Middle East

Abstract

An imperial system threatened by major enemies is bound to try to rid itself of peripheral responsibilities in defence that may detract from its principal concerns; if the legions can be recalled, it is safer to recall them. If political means can be found for reducing the call upon military resources, then the search for such means becomes an acceptable object of policy. Neither the overt arguments in favour of the particular policies adopted nor the arguments against them may be framed in precisely this fashion; arguments over relations with the Irish Free State, over the constitutional evolution of India and over Britain’s interests in and policies towards Egypt, Iraq and Palestine had their own content and momentum. Links between them have always been accepted: the interplay of the Irish and Indian national movements; the Middle East as the point at which British and Indian interests were linked; the asserted concern of Arab and Moslem countries with the Arab-Jewish conflict in Palestine. Historians, in treating them independently of each other, only mirror the facts that the issues normally concerned different sectors of the United Kingdom bureaucracy and excited different elements in the Parliamentary and political worlds. Perhaps only Churchill among leading political figures, with his instinct to see the external world in terms of global strategy, showed a lively interest in all the problems involved. But in the routine work of the Committee of Imperial Defence and the Chiefs of Staff and in the deliberations of cabinet, matters affecting one or other area required constant attention.1