Antony Best

THE ‘GHOST’ OF THE ANGLO-JAPANESE ALLIANCE: AN EXAMINATION INTO HISTORICAL MYTH-MAKING

Even though the argument runs counter to much of the detailed scholarship on the subject, Britains decision in 1921 to terminate its alliance with Japan is sometimes held in general historical surveys to be a major blunder that helped to pave the way to the Pacific War. The lingering sympathy for the combination with Japan is largely due to an historical myth which has presented the alliance as a particularly close partnership. The roots of the myth lie in the inter-war period when, in order to attack the trend towards internationalism, the political right in Britain manipulated memory of the alliance so that it became an exemplar of ‘old diplomacy’. It was then reinforced after 1945 by post-war memoirs and the ‘declinist’ literature of the 1960s and 1970s. By analysing the origins of this benevolent interpretation of the alliance, this article reveals how quickly and pervasively political discourse can turn history into myth and how the development of myths tells us much about the time in which they were created.

‘We are virtually at war with Russia’: Britain and the Cold War in East Asia, 1923–40

Despite the fact that the Bolshevik Revolution took place in 1917, the Cold War is typically seen as a conflict that only emerged in the aftermath of the Second World War. This paper questions that orthodox interpretation by studying the tense relations that existed in the inter-war period between Britain and the Soviet Union. In particular it looks at Anglo-Soviet rivalry in East Asia in the mid-1920s when the Comintern inspired the Kuomintang in China to challenge British commercial interests in that country and the consequences that this competition had for relations down to 1940 and beyond.

“Our Respective Empires Should Stand Together”: The Royal Dimension in Anglo-Japanese Relations, 1919–1941

In the inter-war period court diplomacy played an important role in Anglo-Japanese relations. Both governments saw the exchange of high-level royal visits and the conferment of decorations, such as the bestowal of the Order of the Garter to Emperor Hirohito in 1929, as a useful means of indicating respect and the desire for continued co-operation. Even as late as 1937 Prince Chichibu’s attendance at King George VI’s coronation was intended to lead to closer ties. This article demonstrates that the neglected field of court diplomacy and diplomatic protocol can provide a useful parallel commentary on more overtly political events. *An earlier version of this paper was published as “Oshitsu-gaiko kara mita Nichi-Ei kankei 1919–1941” Y. Ito & M. Kawata (eds), Nijuseki Nihon no tenno to kunshusei-kokusaihikaku no shiten kara 1867–1952 [The Emperor and Monarchy in Twentieth Century Japan From an International Perspective] (Yoshikawa Kobunkan, Tokyo, 2004) pp. 273–302. The author would like to thank the editors of that volume and Yoshikawa Kobunkan for their permission to publish this revised version in English.

Intelligence, diplomacy and the Japanese threat to British interests, 1914–41

This contribution looks at the ways in which the intelligence releases in the 1990s have helped to illuminate previously unknown or misunderstood aspects of the Anglo-Japanese relationship from 1914 to 1941. Although attention in the media has been focused on the release of the Security Services records, these are of limited use in this area of study. Much more significant are the diplomatic intercepts that were collected by the Government Code and Cipher School, which not only add new angles to old questions, but also reveal British suspicions of Japan in areas not previously studied, such as Japanese pan-Asianism.

‘The Jackal’s Share’: Whitehall, the City of London and British Policy Towards the Sino-Japanese War, 1937–9

Ever since the 1970s, when the first studies appeared of British policy towards East Asia in the 1930s, it has been accepted that this decade was marked by the existence of a ‘dual diplomacy’ within Whitehall. What is meant by this is that during much of the 1930s the Foreign Office was unable to exercise its usual monopoly over foreign policy because of the assertiveness of the Treasury during Neville Chamberlain’s tenure as chancellor of the exchequer. This led to an uncomfortable scenario wherein the Foreign Office’s efforts to maintain equidistance between Japan and China was undermined by the amateur diplomacy of the Treasury, which was convinced of the need and practicability of securing a rapprochement with Japan.

Book Review: The Wars for Asia, 1911–1949 by S.C.M. Paine

Slovenes formed an overwhelming majority (94 per cent) of Carniola’s population. In 1904 Šusteršič’s party finally managed to win an overall majority in the diet. Šusteršič strove to integrate representatives of the Slovene minorities of the neighbouring crownlands into his party, after 1910 even adding to it a partnership with the Croatian States Rights Party. In the long run, though, the more conservative instincts of Šusteršič and his Carniolan clique of ‘beati possidentes’ clashed with the more radical approach of, say, Styrian and Carinthian Slovenes, as well as with the Christian Social undercurrent in his own backyard; both of these resented Šusteršič’s conservative approach and occasional collusion with governments in Vienna. These differences came into the open once the First World War opened an alternative vision of Yugoslav unity. Šusteršič’s links with the Croatians did not produce any results as Croatia belonged to the Hungarian ‘half’ of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the Hungarians consistently vetoed any tendencies towards ‘trialism’, i.e. a Yugoslavia within the framework of the Habsburg monarchy. In the spring of 1917 a declaration in favour of a Yugoslav solution received tens of thousands of signatures from Slovenes. In the autumn of the same year, Šusteršič was voted out of office as the leader of his party, his place being taken by Anton Korošec, a priest from neighbouring Styria. To some extent his former achievements had come to haunt him: the more nationalist Slovenes from outside Carniola he had integrated into the Pan-Slovenes – and Bishop Jeglič, who for once sided with Šusteršič’s critics in 1917. Yet, as Jeglič was the first to admit, Šusteršič’s defeat was far from being a foregone conclusion: among the backbone of the party, the Carniolan clergy, a majority were clearly unhappy with their bishop’s decision, even more so as the outcome of the war was far from certain in the winter of 1917–18. A few months later, though, Jeglič’s stand was vindicated by the collapse of the monarchy. Šusteršič himself was forced to go into temporary exile in October 1918. He did not accept his banishment graciously. In 1920 he was supposed to have schemed with the Italians to destabilize the newly founded Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes. When he returned to Ljubljana in 1923, he unsuccessfully tried to found a party of his own that was supported by Serb centralists, of all people. Andrej Rahten deserves thanks for skilfully investigating the different shades of grey in a political landscape that has too often been painted in the stark contrasts of simply black and white. The disintegration of the Habsburg monarchy proved to be a complex game where almost everyone kept hedging their bets until almost the very end.

The British Empire’s Image of East Asia, 1900–41

In recent years historians have become increasingly interested in trying to understand the nature of the interaction between the West and East Asia during the imperialist age. In the light of the advances made over the past three decades by post-colonial history, much of this new work has dwelt on the impact that the arrival of Western ideas had on the countries of East Asia and the consequent cultural, economic and even linguistic challenges that the latter faced.’ However, the danger with this focus on the ‘victims’ of imperialism is that the interests and ambitions of the imperial powers themselves tend to be forgotten or at best treated as if imperialist behaviour, wherever it took place in the world, was constant.2 Another problem, which is linked to this, is the assumption that the imperial powers had fairly static and uniform views of those that they controlled and/or interacted with. That this mental straitjacket should exist is rather surprising, for it is surely self-evident that political events and the evolution of any observer’s ideological and cultural beliefs have a transformative effect on the way in which s/he views the world.’ In order to demonstrate how Western views of Eastern societies and polities could evolve, this chapter looks at the changing images that Britain had of East Asia in the period between 1900 and 1941 and relates how these were influenced both by events and ideological innovations, and how perception in turn had an effect on the political and diplomatic process.

The Leith-Ross Mission and British Policy towards East Asia, 1934–7

This paper provides a fresh overview of the much-debated Leith-Ross mission to China in 1935–6, in which Britain assisted the Chinese governments efforts to establish a new currency. It demonstrates that the mission should be understood primarily as an attempt to revive Britains economic and political stake in East Asia. It argues that, while the government in London undoubtedly wished to see the amelioration of the tense relationship with Japan, the history of the mission demonstrates that it was not prepared to make significant sacrifices that would undermine British interests in China. It thus criticises the contention that the mission should be understood primarily as an exercise in appeasement and contends that in practice it constituted a challenge to Japans claim to regional domination.

The Road to Anglo-Japanese Confrontation, 1931–41

Despite the termination of the Anglo-Japanese alliance in 1923, relations between Britain and Japan remained stable, if not as close as they had once been until the end of the 1920s. However, from the start of the Manchurian Crisis in September 1931 the friendship between the two countries began to disintegrate, and they entered into a prolonged period of mutual antipathy which eventually culminated in the Japanese assault on Britain’s Eastern Empire on 8 December 1941. There were intermittent attempts during this troubled decade to address and overcome these feelings of hostility and to find a new common ground, and this subject has become central to the historiography of Anglo-Japanese relations in this period. Much of the literature has dealt in particular with the attempts at reconciliation between 1933 and 1937, and some Japanese scholars have gone so far as to contend that Britain tried during these years to appease Japan, but that the latter refused to accept its overtures. There is, however, a danger in focusing on how close Britain and Japan came to a rapprochement; that is, that one can forget just how serious were the political, strategical, economic and ideological factors that drove them apart. The object of this chapter is to study these divisions and account for the inability of the two states to overcome them.