The Collapse of British Power [Anglais] [Broché]

Contrary to what another reviewer wrote, this is the first of four excellent books written by Correlli Barnett on the topic of British Decline from 1918 to the post-WWII era. I cannot praise this book highly enough. It is a passionately-argued chronicle of Britain's many failures to right the course of the ship of state, leading the country from its victory in 1918 to its perilous near-defeat in 1940.

Barnett writes about "strategy" in the broadest sense, evaluating factors such as education, social conditions, diplomacy, the military, and others, to develop an overall assessment of the national condition.

Barnett places the blame for Britain's decline on the weakness and vacillation of its political elites. He argues that the nation's leaders came to eschew what they saw as the distastefully aggressive implications of Realpolitik, instead embracing such half-baked and idealistic notions as world disarmament. In effect, the nation fell prey to the feeble idea that the moral force of the League of Nations was an acceptable substitute for actual military power, with disastrous consequences for both Britain and the world.

There are many other equally provocative arguments in the book which the brevity of this format prevents me from discussing.

Empires rise and fall. We all know that. It's simply part of the passing of time on one level. But, of course, there are particulars on why an empire falls:Corruption at various levels, incompetent leadership, threats from abroad etc.. Gibbon, famously, wrote a magisterial 8 volume work on what went wrong with the Roman empire, and it still stands for a benchmark of this type of opus. In it he skillfully narrates all the military and political vicissitudes that led to the foundering of the Roman ship of state. Barnett, on the other hand, has the answer in one tsunami that sank the empire of merry old England: All her leaders of the 20th century through WWII were educated in Victorian public schools that, under the philosophy of Dr. Thomas Arnold, turned them into, ahem, creampuffs and pansies. This is the most succinct way of putting it. As silly as this premise seems at first glance, the book is extremely well-documented and one comes away feeling that Barnett has a point, though he overstresses it a bit much. Barnett is what I would call a Machiavellian nostalgist. He yearns for the days when crass English barons batttled it out with mattocks and halberds without qualms concerning world peace or evangelism or tea parties or knowledge of Greek and Latin or any of the things that went into making British culture what it was in the early part of the century. But just as you are about to chuck the book as the work of an unbalanced mind, you are confronted with mounds of carefully documented statistics showing that the British did indeed fall behind Barnett's two nemeses, the United States and Germany, in modern industrialization: the production of ball bearings, mechanical lathes etc. primarily because of trade unions, Liberalism, and the fact that the best minds of the country had been indoctrinated with the Romantic notion that industrial interests were beneath them, according to Barnett. Barnett's figures bare this fact out both before the Great War and between the wars. This is all very interesting but beside the point of why one should read the book, in my opinion: 1) It gives an intensely well-documented account of the culture of appeasement in the British inter-war cabinets and 2) It is very funny. The funniest chapter is perhaps the one on India, which Barnett regards as a useless sort of "Jewel and the Crown" affair which existed simply so British viceroys could be carried about in rickshaws and wallow in the White Man's Burden in the voluptuous East. Of the other non-white colonies (besides Malaysia) he is even more dismissive, regarding them as drains on the mainland and characterizing them as "stone-age" or "pre stone-age." He pulls no punches and some of those punches hit dead center in the solar plexus of the British empire of the time. The interwar cabinet members are frequently characterized as Bertie Woosters with a sprinkling of Jeeveses in the Chiefs of Staff to help them out all too seldomly. What one ends up with is a sort of side-angle view of the empire's demise. But a richly elaborate one. It's no secret that Britain was nearly bankrupt at the START of WWII due to mismanagement of her resources. Whether this mismanagement was due to Wordsworth, Shelley and the Bloomsbury circle is another matter. It's also no secret that a small island cannot reign over the globe forever. As Churchill put it after WWII, "the world has grown large around us."...Still, what if it hadn't?

This is the fourth and final book by Corelli Barnett tracing the demise of the British Empire from World War I onwards (and more importantly HIS view of the causes), specifically centering on the debacle of Suez.
The entire series present a cogent and well argued case (reams of statistics!)and continually identify HIS key causes: -
*the social and class system (with its denigration of industry as "mere trade")
*the education system which provided a wealthy elite with an "effete" education and the rest of us with almost none at all
*the failure of either side in industry (bosses or workers) to adapt to technological advance
*the failure to plan strategically
*the failure to see the Empire for what it really was (a drain on resources and a political encumberance).
This latest book adds an unhealthy involvement with U.S. foreign policy as an additional complication.
While he is right in many respects the unfortunate repetition of earlier arguments (and the statistics that go with them) make this book heavy going.
His partisan attitude has also become more strident with each successive book - here it has reached the point where the arguments seem almost secondary to the denigration of key postwar figures. His contempt for his own compatriots comes through clearly - you know he is enraged at the fact we voted for a welfare state at the end of World War II instead of a "dirigiste" industrial policy. Well we are a democracy, and after six years of total war preceded by ten years of Depression, people have a right to vote for Social Security, a free Healthcare system and subsidised municipal housing if they want to!
It would perhaps have been more interesting if Barnett had skipped a few decades and applied his ideas to more recent history. Many of the elements he identified in the series remain part of the United Kingdom's political and economic psyche - a burdensome entaglement with the assorted states of the "British Commonwealth" as the Empire has now become (the Queen allegedly is "very fond" of it), coupled with a belief that we carry "weight and influence" with the U.S. (ha! ha!)if not with the rest of the world.
All in all? Perhaps one book too many from Barnett.