The Problem of Diplomatic Unity

Abstract

The thrust of Dominion nationalism in the 1920s was not a crude movement towards secession but an attempt to manoeuvre into a position where commitments to assist the UK in diplomatic and military crises became optional rather than obligatory. Hertzog and Mackenzie King could have secured this objective by laying formal claim to rights of neutrality in a future war. But although such claims were sometimes made on the political platform, especially by the former, neither did so in official discussions or at an Imperial Conference. Both were too conscious of the relationship between the Commonwealth association and their own internal political stability, a relationship largely to be explained in terms of large English populations, to adopt such a radical separatism. For Britain, too, the chief significance of Commonwealth relations lay in its international dimension. Beneath all the verbiage of Whitehall discussions lay the fundamental concern that Dominion assistance in war should be protected from erosion, whatever else might be conceded to ‘modern times’. The UK could have countered the political implications of constitutional change by an outright rejection of those neutralist and secessionist principles so often culled by Dominion politicians from the Balfourian mixture. Such action, however, would only generate a politics of confrontation which the British officials were determined to avoid.