Strong Societies, Weak States: State-Forms in the Early Interregnum

Strong Societies and Weak States: State-forms in the Early Interregnum, Franz Neumann, 1959​

If the long 19th century gave birth to the delimited, national bourgeois public-sphere, the Great War inaugurated the emergence of a new, mass public sphere, frequently dominated by proletarians but not exclusively composed of them. This period - and the active, populist mass societies it created - produced deeply contradictory effects on modern states. On the one hand, all states underwent a process of enlargement, accumulating police, surveillance, military, and economic powers. The limited, Liberal polity of the 19th century died sometime in 1917, with the “totalization” of the Great War. The increasing size of the states was not merely a response to the narrow military needs of the war, but also to the crucial task of managing domestic opinion and broiling discontent amongst national proletariats. The enlargement of the state during the war went hand-in-hand with the rapid organization of counter-hegemonic institutions. For the state to successfully wage its battle against the internal enemy, it was required to enlist the forces of patriotic society.

Yet the growth of the state was hardly a consensual process. It provoked dissent and resistance from a variety of sectors. The metastasis of the state during the Great War provoked the further growth of civic society; intended to cement the authority of traditional ruling elites, it ended up dispersing authority more broadly throughout society. In a historical irony, a variety of factors conspired to weaken the power and relative autonomy of both the revolutionary and conservative states. Italy and Germany both possessed a high degree of legitimacy, yet since they emerged organically from the endogenous forces of an emerging counter-hegemonic proletarian society, their state-forms were wedded closely to the organs of worker’s democracy, and consequently were often ineffective at undertaking autonomous, directed action. This is reflected in the low level of militarization in each of these societies and the ease with which local organs of worker’s power could frustrate the decisions of the central government.

Britain presents the most interesting example in the capitalist camp. The rapid growth of Britain’s state-industrial and surveillance sectors did not lead to a substantially stronger British state by the end of the First Revolutionary Era. Although it had survived a genuine imperial crisis, it also found itself constrained by its own domestic population. The extraordinary measures undertaken during the first year of the First Revolutionary Era were not sufficient to produce a pacified civil society; on the contrary, domestic repression created a labour movement committed to the transformation of the British state. Haldane’s Liberal government may have emerged from elements of dissident civic society, but found that its own project of reform unleashed forces which it had trouble controlling.

The defining element of the early interregnum era was the strength of civic society and the weakness of central states. This was also the essential precondition for peace between the leading bourgeois and proletarian powers. So long as the Central European bloc believed that renewed warfare would lead to a defeat of their governments, they would pressure their Soviet partners to adopt a less belligerent diplomacy. So long as the leadership of Britain and China felt that its domestic populations would revolt at the mention of armed conflict, they would make clear to the Americans that they would not support a policy of “rollback”.

America and the Soviet Union were the two relative exceptions. Each managed to mobilize and enlist the forces of civic society into the service of the state, though this was never a completely seamless process. Nonetheless, it was aided by the fact that each became party-states in which the institutions of the Communist and Republican parties were frequently conterminous with those of the state. This was not a “total” process in either case: in both the Soviet Union and the United States, legislative and executive authority remained vested in the official organs of the state, but their dominance by a single party - though frequently composed of multiple competing fractions - allowed for an easier assertion of autonomous state-power. Each society’s militarization and leading role in inter-bloc conflicts likely had something to do with the relative autonomy of their states from society.

While strong societies and weak states may define the early years of the interregnum era, this formula will do more to occlude than illuminate if we do not examine the particular instantiations of this principle in various state-forms. We thus move to a survey, first of the primary state-forms of IntRevMar, and then of the Atlantic Union, keeping in mind that our efforts here are not to produce an exhaustive enumeration of state-forms but merely to describe the most prominent and significant examples.

The State-forms of Interregnum-Era IntRevMar: A five-fold typology ​

_1) Multi-Party Dual-Power States

_In Germany, Czechia, and Finland, some form of national legislature was preserved along-side new institutions dedicated to embodying worker’s power. The preservation of old forms of bourgeois democracy inside the new worker’s states is likely related to the presence of a substantial middle-class element in all of these societies at the time of the revolution, as well as a history of pre-existing bourgeois-democratic institutions. Bicameralism did frequently serve as a break on the power of the new states, though more important here, particularly in Germany, was the worker-councils and cooperative sector, as well as the directive system introduced by Luxemburg, which obligated representatives to follow the instructions of their constituents. The reforms introduced in the early 1920s, which substantially strengthened the worker-councils by setting obligatory minimum hours and investing them with powers of oversight over both state and union-controlled enterprises, ended up paradoxically limiting and expanding the central government’s planning capacity, constraining its capacity to act unilaterally but also creating a broad network of potential loyalists.

The internal differentiation of state-organs and presence of powerful, relatively autonomous organs of worker’s power produced a heterogeneous economy, which incorporated elements of central and regional planning through delegative bodies. Typically, the scale of planning was smaller than in the Soviet, Hungarian, Polish, and Dutch cases, with a greater place for market mechanisms in select sectors. The success of the national economy depended on an often bureaucratically tortuous process of negotiation, compromise, and coordination between the workers-councils, cooperatives, unions, and national/regional planning and financial bodies. In Germany, the reforms of the first Luxemburg ministry placed a greater emphasis on the central planning bodies vested in the executive committee and the worker-councils, while in Finland and Czechia, the process remained more rooted in enterprises and regional congresses.

Arguably, this multi-layered structure was more suited to the differentiated industrial economies of Central Europe than it was to the agrarian economies of the east, in which a significant industrial sector was just beginning to emerge. Its sheer complexity acted to limit the pressure that could be placed on it by the state, though significant action was possible when proletarian society and its elected representatives in the central government acted in unison, as occurred in the first Luxemburg ministry (1920-1926) and in the late 30s, as international tensions flared.

2) Unified Party-States

So-called “Party-States”, with a singular Party administering a highly centralized economy, emerged in The Netherlands, the Soviet Union, Poland, and Hungary. These tended to arise, as Luxemburgist scholars have noted, when there was either an underdeveloped industrial proletariat or a significant and irreconcilable class with significant power that opposes a dictatorship of the proletariat. In the Dutch example, these were the Calvinist bourgeoisie and Catholic petite-bourgeoisie; in the Russian, they were the remnant landowning class and the peasants. One-party rule is necessitated by the difficulty of establishing genuine proletarian dictatorship in such perilous conditions.

Typically speaking, unified party-states possessed a highly centralized administration, and sought to plan the national economy through the party. In most cases, significant proletarian democracy existed, but it was internal to the party. The vibrancy of the party’s internal factions varied: In the Netherlands and the Soviet Union, internal factions waged an ongoing battle for control of the party and were allowed to develop relatively unimpeded, while in Poland and Hungary, there was significantly less room for dissent.

While party-states generally permitted a greater relative autonomy of the state, they also had significant weaknesses. Only a small portion of the population were members of the party, which meant that many individuals had little meaningful participation in politics. This could even include significant sections of proletarians, particularly those employed in casual labour rather than factory work. The government had to find a way of proving its legitimacy to these citizens. In both the Netherlands and the Soviet Union, mandatory party membership for all urban laborers was gradually introduced as a means of including these individuals in the polity, but for some time, party-states continued to have a greater difficulty in reaching those outside of its core supporters.

In terms of the concrete configuration of class-power, unified party-states frequently possessed a greater than typical presence of intellectual and bureaucratic elites in key organs of decision-making. In the Russian case, this has been traced to the instrumental role of the Tsarist intelligentsia in organizing the socialist movement. Efforts were nonetheless frequently made by the intellectual class to include a larger proletarian element in government; these largely bore fruit by the late 1920s, though intellectuals and educated bureaucrats continued to exercise a disproportionate influence in the decades to come, leading some critics to classify these societies as “Proletarian and Bureacratic-Intellectual Dictatorships”.

3) Worker and Peasant’s States

In Bulgaria and Croatia, the conditions of the Great War and First Revolutionary Era revolutionized the peasantry, opening up room for an alliance between the rural masses and a small but growing urban proletariat. Bulgaria presents the ideal-typical form of the worker and peasant’s state: an unlikely alliance between the revolutionary Agrarian Socialist Party and the Narrow Socialists overthrew the reactionary Bulgarian state at the beginning of the First Revolutionary Era, and waged a successful civil war against its loyalists in the east. Thereafter, the sharing of power between worker and peasants was institutionalized in a system of quotas and separate electorates: workers and peasants were each guaranteed a number of seats in the All-Bulgarian People’s Congress. In reality, this arrangement benefited the workers, who were a smaller portion of the population but received an outsize representation at the highest levels of politics.

Similar arrangements were achieved in Kurdistan and Croatia. The nationalist, left-populist Agrarian Kurdish People’s Party was forced into a perpetual power-sharing agreement with the initially far smaller Kurdish Communist Party, whose membership was primarily composed of urban laborers in Mosul. In practice, the institutional structures of Worker and Peasant’s states acted as a break on drastic programs of urbanization and industrialization, though compared to pre-war societies dominated by national-conservative and centrist peasant’s parties, the urban proletariat had a far greater voice in government. Capitalist market-relations tended to persist in the country-side, but were eliminated relatively early-on in the large cities, where the relative lack of an industrial base made the task of taking existing enterprises into the hands of the state far easier.

4) Worker’s Associative Federation(s)

The exigent circumstances that gave birth to the Worker and Peasant’s Republic of Italy produced a strange and novel type of polity, what was in effect a federation of autonomous self-governing regions. More than any other state-form, perhaps, this clearly limited the central government’s freedom of action, requiring it to constantly consult with the over twenty-five Chambers of Labour in order to pass meaningful legislation. Perhaps this is part of the reason why the Italian government turned relatively early to the one domain in which it was permitted some autonomy: foreign policy. Italian-funded organizations, from the religious to the cultic to the manifestly political, would play a vital role in the struggle against imperialism.

What is the class and material basis for the relatively unusual form of the Italian state? Unlike in Germany and Britain, unions were always relatively weak, enlisting only a fraction of the total working-class. Worker’s councils did play a prominent role in the revolution, but they were typically related to more narrowly economic tasks than in Germany. In several areas, peasants and landless laborers were vital parts of the socialist movement, but the socialist party itself only held the support of a plurality of workers, with many others adhering to traditions of syndicalism and anarchism. Several recent studies have demonstrated that worker’s culture in Italy was distinctly associational; strikes, for example, were frequently organized in neighborhoods rather than at workplaces. In the north, a particularly robust system of cooperatives existed in symbiotic relationships with their local communities.

The Italian state reflected both the regional unevenness of Italy’s political economy- the deep divide between the Mezzegiorno and the northern Genoa-Turin-Milan industrial triangle - as well as the libertarian, associational culture of the workers. This was hardly an unalloyed good. The petty hierarchies and inequalities of working-class neighborhoods under capitalism came to be reified on the national scale. Skilled workers quickly came to dominate the new cooperatives, and their representatives entrenched themselves in most of the socialist-run Camera del Lavoro. A system of patronage emerged between leading cooperatives and the regional banks which at times made it difficult for new enterprises to emerge. National economic planning was almost impossible to achieve, and over the first ten years, the Italian economy showed a trend toward localization, with trans-regional enterprises suffering declines in output. Needless to say, the peculiar structure of the Italian state created nearly insuperable barriers to the long-term building up of state capacity; only with the structural reform of Togliatti would Italy begin to assume a more typical developmental course.

5) Sozialstaats

In Orthodox Marxist theory, the Sozialstaat ought, perhaps, to have been an impossibility: a state run by the representatives of workers, with the capital-owning class excluded from government, and yet retaining most of the essential characteristics of capitalism. Many have been tempted to treat the Sozialstaat as a transitional form, not least because of the subsequent history of Sweden, Denmark, and Serbia. Yet we must insist on studying this strange phenomenon as it was, without the distorting lens of hindsight.

In Scandinavia, the Sozialstaat emerged in an emergency situation, with a worker’s revolution appearing to be a live possibility. The radicalized Social-Democratic leadership came to government with the promise of averting revolution; they used the opportunity to permanently shift the balance of economic and political power without, however, seizing control of the means of production and thereby formally reneging on their promise. Because the institutional forms of bourgeois democracy were preserved and the Social-Democratic Party was incapable of achieving a parliamentary majority on its own, a cross-class alliance was necessary to maintain power. In the Swedish and Danish cases, this involved a partnership with progressive elements of the professional middle-classes and rural farmers, who favored continued trade relations with the emerging socialist bloc in Europe.

Sozialstaats did not possess a traditional market economy. The state and unions adopted some elements of planning, even involving the setting of quotas in certain instances, but did not violate the core principle of capitalist wage-relations. Capital itself, however, was rigidly regulated, subject to the dictates of the state, which meant in practice that it was forced into channels which disproportionately benefited the unionized work-force, middle-class professionals, and independent small farmers.

Contrary to stereotype, the Sozialstaats were not powerful, tyrannical states. Repression was applied selectively, and typically within the bounds of the law. The vast majority of repressive measures directed at capital itself came through regular legislation, passed with the support or abstention of labour’s allies. Capital owners continued to be wealthier than those who did not own the means of production, though their capacity to make political interventions through so-called “capital strikes” was severely constrained.

The central state did not have substantial freedom of action. Leaders of Social-Democratic Parties were forced to tread a thin line that placated an activist left, met the demands of union leaders for patronage, and ensured the loyalty of middle-class and peasant allies. Over time, the left-wing of Social-Democracy was empowered and the union rank-and-file grew restive, further pressurizing and limiting the options open to Social-Democratic leaders. As everywhere, a strong society asserted itself against a weak state.

The State-forms of the Interregnum-Era Atlantic Union: A five-fold typology ​

1) Bourgeois-Parliamentary Quasi-Democracies

Britain remained, along with its white colonies, one of the last few remaining bourgeois parliamentary democracies. Norway, too, belongs in this category. Yet whereas most British colonies might still deserve the appellation “liberal”, this was not true of Britain itself. The extraordinary measures introduced at the beginning of the First Revolutionary Era, rescinded in part but never entirely retracted, meant that “bourgeois” democracy took on a distinct and novel form. Previously, “bourgeois democracy” might be understood as a state-form in which parliamentary institutions seamlessly ensured the predominance of bourgeois interests in government. However, the strength of the British Labour movement made such a democracy impossible to achieve; a new form of “quasi-democracy” was necessary, in which the electoral vestiges of traditional parliamentary democracy were preserved but the state dedicated itself, through whatever means possible, of preventing the entry of Labour into government.

The liberalism of Haldane’s reform agenda can easily mask the fact that many of the repressive policies introduced under the conservative government remained in place; the decision to rescind the most blatant and brutal was a matter of expediency rather than principle. Perhaps the most obvious indication of the character of the new state is the bipartisan, liberal-tory coalition which coalesced in 1928, when it appeared that Labour might achieve a plurality of votes - and potentially an absolute majority of seats - in the 1929 parliamentary election.

In truth, the pressures on the British system were too great for a complete relaxation of war-time measures. There was, on the one hand, the threat from domestic labour, perceived as a revolutionary fifth column by many, even if the objective probability of a genuine social revolution had long dissipated by the mid-20s. Then there was the potential for a further revolt in the colonies; the emergence of a socialist bloc across much of Europe incited both real and imagined unrest across Britain’s vast colonial domains, necessitating a constant expansion of police powers. Finally, there was the narrowing fiscal straitjacket which threatened to suffocate the British state: the declining position of British exports against resurgent American industries meant that Whitehall confronted perpetually declining coffers, and hard decisions had to be made. Cutting colonial administration would create openings for anticolonial nationalists and socialists, while attacking welfare programs would enrage labour. American loans might help forestall a turn to fiscal austerity, but these came with conditions - the opening of markets, the lowering of tariff barriers - which would imperil crucial British industries. In such a situation, Britain could not afford to be a “Liberal” democracy. The continuing existence of emergency laws was a testament to its extraordinary political predicament.

Norway and South Africa did not have Britain’s international commitments, but were in a comparable position. Each had a strong domestic labour movement with a radical faction. Domestic repression directed at Labour had failed to decisively neuter proletarian political power, necessitating the continued employment of illiberal measures. While Social-Democratic and Labour parties were nominally permitted to participate in elections, a cordon sanitaire was constructed against their active participation in government.

2) Liberal Settler Democracies

Multi-party Liberal Democracy only remained a genuine reality in the three white settler colonies of Australia, Canada, and New Zealand. Despite swelling social radicalism among urban workers and some farmers, none of these societies felt the need to resort to extraordinary measures to contain labour protest. Several factors conspired to bring this about. Firstly, the rising cost of grain throughout the First Revolutionary Era ultimately had a politically stabilizing effect on the country-side, especially when domestic politicians refused British requests to embargo the revolutionary states in Europe. Secondly, following the overwhelming sacrifices these nations made to Britain during the Great War, they largely refused to assist the mother country during the First Revolutionary Era, something which Britain could not do much about. Demobilization could therefore occur earlier, and many soldiers managed to return to the land, where they made heady profits from the agricultural boom.

In the Australian and Kiwi case, the presence of an expansionist Japanese power also produced patriotic sentiments and disfigured what class consciousness existed amongst the working peoples. A left-wing split from the Labour Party failed to make significant inroads in parliamentary elections, and Labour itself insisted on strictly reformist, progressive-capitalist policies, in contrast to its English counterpart.

The relative weakness of civil society made these states stronger, and permitted them a greater freedom of action. They were also courted by both Britain and America over the interregnum period, a circumstance that they could use to their advantage by obtaining cheap loans and favorable trading terms. Cracks in the social compact only began to emerge in the early 30s, when the Soviet mechanization of agriculture and continuing American and Chinese gains in agricultural productivity sharply reduced global grain prices.

3) Electoral Party-States

Though their ruling parties had differing political programs, the political systems of America and Japan converged in the 1920s. Both of them came to be, for lack of a better term, “Electoral Party-States” in which the dominance of a single, leading party sat uneasily with the continuing existence of the formal institutions of bourgeois multi-party democracy. In each case, the leading parties had extraordinary ambitions that emerged in times of crisis. These ambitions could be most easily pursued in the framework of a party-state; however, even though each party could win elections by large margins, each was also unable to fully resolve the internal contradictions of its own programme and had to watch as the forces of opposition steadily organized and began to win back a modicum of political power.

In the American case, the modern Republican Party emerged from the unprecedented crisis of the Williams Jennings’ Bryan Presidency and the First Revolutionary Era. Its leading figure, Elihu Root, was committed to an expansive vision of American global commercial and military hegemony. To accomplish it, he envisioned the construction and maintenance of a cordon sanitaire around Europe, the creation of the world’s largest navy, the managed, gradual decolonization of the British Empire under American tutelage, and ultimately, the “rollback” of the socialist bloc in Europe proper. Domestically, this would require a new “partnership” between the forces of American capital and industry and an enlarged American state.

This new Republican Party attempted to represent an almost impossibly wide coalition: middle-class anticommunists, conservative Great Plains farmers, military men, New York financiers, mid-western industrialists, West Coast shipping interests, xenophobic anti-immigrant northeasterners, white emigres, and middle managers of emerging industries. “Almost” is the operative word here, for in the Presidential elections of 1920, 1924, and 1928, they won well over sixty percent of the vote. In part, this had to do with the weakness of their political opponents, but it also owed something to the capaciousness of their vision and their eventual success in stewarding America out of economic depression.

Republican dominance of national government created a network of “revolving doors”: individuals were funneled between party institutions and government positions. Since the 1924 and 1928 general elections were mostly a formality, the crucial space of political contestation shifted to Republican primaries and conventions. Unprecedented sums of money flowed into the party’s coffers. The very shadiness of these processes kept the Republican Party mostly sequestered from broader forms of democratic accountability. In this sense, the American party-state had considerably more freedom of maneuver than Britain or its colonies.

Yet there were also ample forces acting to limit executive power. Internal fights in the Republican Party between “internationalists” and “nationalists” forced presidents such as Hoover and Root to act as conciliators; though Hoover himself was more sympathetic to the internationalists, he consistently positioned himself closer to the middle of the two factions in an attempt to maintain party cohesion and unity. More importantly, perhaps, the vast mobilization of civil society begun in the early 1920s, in the “All-American Leagues” and anticommunist crusades, had taken on a life of their own despite the best efforts of NBII head Edgar Hoover. Organizations such as the KKK and Anti-Bolshevik Society displayed an unhinged fanaticism that frequently discomfited Republican politicians, and sometimes even conflicted with their broader goals, such as when Hoover’s attempt at achieving a bilateral alliance with Japan met domestic protest from reactionary groups.

Let us move onto Japan. Yukio Ozaki’s Kenseikai also came to power at a time of extraordinary crisis, and employed this crisis as a means to establish its dominance over the party-system. The humiliation that the Japanese military suffered following their defeat in the Eastern Seas War permitted Ozaki to reduce their overweening influence over politics, while the loss of prestige of the old genro class, to which Ozaki himself belonged, gave him the political breathing room necessary to embark on a programme of democratic reform. The central role Ozaki played in the passage of universal suffrage and labor rights laws won his party a mass constituency; his commitment to international trade and multilateralism, meanwhile, allowed him to forge an alliance with the emerging business class. In return for the largesse of the government, the leaders of the burgeoning Zaibatsu would support Ozaki in his programme of social and political reform.

The conservative elements opposed to Ozaki resorted to the crude methods of assassination and political terror, both of which only strengthened the hand of the Prime Minister, who in the mid-1920s began employing more forceful measures to suppress the already-struggling opposition. Like his American counterparts, however, Ozaki was never able to entirely eliminate potential political opposition, and by the early 1930s, contradictions were beginning to emerge in his own coalition between the burgeoning Japanese trade unions and the big industrialists. Moreso, perhaps, than the Republicans, the domestic politics of the Kenseikai depended on a particular global configuration of power, in which Japan’s position as a non-aligned middle power between Russia and America permitted it an important freedom of action in international affairs and helped Japanese exports find ready markets. When these conditions ceased to exist, the Japanese state started to appear far weaker.

4) Conventional Party-States

In China and in Mexico, more conventional party-states emerged in which electoral competition occurred strictly within the dominant party. Despite the ostensibly more secure position of the Chinese Kuomintang and Mexican Institutional Revolutionary Party, these states were in fact much less sturdy than their American and Japanese counterparts. Each were dependent upon American largesse and investment for continued social stability, and each mixed a revolutionary rhetoric of anti-colonial nationalism with a politics that was, in fact, oriented toward balancing their relationship with their American patron with their own statist national-developmentalist projects.

In China and Mexico alike, the new party-states struggled to contend with centrifugal forces, which included not merely alternative nationalist and revolutionary-socialist visions but also regional actors who frequently objected to the government’s centralizing tendencies, at times assuming the politics of revolution or nationalism to do so. Both did haltingly attempt to represent the varied ideological currents present in the broader nation. They were stifled, however, both by their alliance with America and the growing importance of a new quasi-comprador capitalist class. The crackdowns on left-wing factions did not, however, strengthen the party-states. Instead, they alienated many among their core base of supporters, fomenting the proliferation of rival organizations with their own claims to legitimacy.

5) Multinational Colonial Protectorates

We would be remiss not to discuss one of the central innovations of the First Revolutionary Era, which lasted longer than several of the other state-forms adumbrated here: the multi-national British colonial protectorate, in which British power undergirded the continued existence of continental-European colonies. These were themselves a diverse bunch, ranging from the Dutch East Indies, which at one point held a population of over one million anticommunist dutchmen, to the relatively sparsely populated Anglo-French Central African colony, in which British colonial officials successfully convinced their French counterparts to adopt the policy of indirect rule. Arguably, the South African province of Southwest Africa and nominally British Cameroon followed a similar pattern, with South African and British administrators coming to an uneasy modus vivendi with German colonial officials.

In certain cases, British colonial officials exercised real power on the ground. This was the case in the French African colonies which fell bloodlessly into British hands during the First Revolutionary Era. Despite some efforts to recruit French administrators, Britain was not always capable of doing so, though they achieved increased success in the late 20s, as more of the middle-class left Valois’ France. In contrast, the upper echelons of the Anglo-Dutch East Indies, also known as the Kingdom of the Netherlands, was almost entirely staffed by Dutchmen, with some indigenous Javanese, Russian emigres, and mixed-race individuals serving in lower-ranking positions. The same pattern was evident in Anglo-French Indochina.

In both moral and material terms, these colonies were dependent upon the British Empire. In many cases, the “mother country” had ceased entirely to exist as anything but an imagined community of emigres, stripping away a crucial prop of colonial legitimacy. Widespread unrest embroiled Vietnam and the East Indies when news spread that the traditional colonial rulers either lacked a homeland or were struggling to maintain it against revolutionary insurgencies. Britain, the last great imperial power, provided a new locus of legitimacy. It was almost unimaginable that the multifarious colonial protectorates could continue to claim the right to rule in a world in which the British Empire had ceased to exist.

Of course, Britain also provided very crucial material assistance to these fragile states, in the form of naval protection, assistance with domestic surveillance, and a formal guarantee of independence. Without this, it is quite possible that other powers, such as Japan and the United State - or even the Soviet Union - would have sought to extend their influence in a far more aggressive manner.

Like Britain, these states were caught between opposing political pressures, significantly weakening their freedom of maneuver. On the one hand, they had to meet Britain’s demands for revenues, its stringent trade terms, and its increasing interference in colonial policies. On the other hand, they needed to find some way of placating a restive domestic population, often while only possessing a fraction of the resources which they previously did. This was a recipe for weakness, and a recipe, too, for eventual social transformation.