ABSTRACT
The British Empire was generally accepted at the turn of the century to be an entity in which a major attack on one part would be construed as an attack on all, with an obligation for all to defend. With the emergence of self-governing dominions the theory evolved that a major war involved the participation of all, but the degree of participation was a matter for self-governing dominions to determine. In 1939 South Africa’s government was divided on the issue of whether it was bound to participate at all in a war in which the rest of the Commonwealth and Empire was involved ; indeed if Britain had gone to war with Germany over the 1938 Sudeten issue South Africa, and very probably also Canada, would have remained neutral. Germany’s 1939 attack on Poland provided the Old Commonwealth and Empire with a last flicker of unity. By 1945 the trend towards national individual foreign and defence policies which had emerged in the 1920s had reached a point at which it was clear that neither Britain nor any other self-governing Commonwealth member saw itself necessarily committed to mutual defence. The attainment of independence by the Asian nations, India, Pakistan, Burma and Ceylon (Sri Lanka), with their very different defence perspectives marked the finish of any total imperial defence unity. The British government made it clear it would assist neither side in the India-Pakistan conflicts, nor did it feel the need to offer more than weapons and diplomatic support (India’s specific requests) when China attacked India in 1962. Britain did assist Malaysia with troops (a force of division size) in the Indonesian ‘confrontation’ operations 1 but was not prepared to join Australia and New Zealand in their provision of units to fight in South Vietnam. Equally Britain found herself without any Commonwealth military support, and very largely without even political support, at the time of the Suez intervention in 1956. It is then the existence of self-governing dominions, to use the pre-1945 term, or fully independent Commonwealth members, therefore, that makes the pattern of British military relations with her former imperial possessions so very different from those of France. In matters military, these nations formed initially a pattern, later sometimes as an English-speaking assistant or surrogate, and sometimes a rival in the process of Asian and African decolonisation. And it was only by the free determination of several Commonwealth governments (but not all, as Pakistan and Ceylon did not participate) that the Commonwealth contribution to the U.N. Force in the Korean War came into being. 2
