THE ROUNDTABLE GROUPS

Roundtable Groups at the Center of the Agenda of Global Government

There does exist and has existed for a generation, an international Anglophile network which operates, to some extent, in the way the radical Right believes the Communists act. In fact, this network, which we may identify as the Round Table groups, has no aversion to cooperating with the Communists, or any other groups, and frequently does so. I know of the operations of this network because I have studied it for 20 years and was permitted for two years, in the early 1960s, to examine its papers and secret record.

The Council on Foreign Relations is the American branch of a society which originated in England ... [and] ... believes national boundaries should be obliterated and one-world rule established.—Carrol Quigley (Tragedy & Hope)

The Council on Foreign Relations is the US branch of the Royal Institute of International Affairs in Britain.

Chatham House, also known as the Royal Institute of International Affairs, is an independent policy institute headquartered in London. Its mission is to provide authoritative commentary on world events and offer solutions to global challenges. It is the originator of the Chatham House Rule.

Under the Chatham House Rule, anyone who comes to a meeting is free to use information from the discussion, but is not allowed to reveal who made any particular comment. It is designed to increase openness of discussion.

The institute is registered with the UK Charity Commission. Chatham House is independently funded. It receives discretionary support from its membership and other individuals, and receives funding for its research and other activities from governments, the private sector, and charitable foundations.

https://info.publicintelligence.net/MilnerGroup.pdf

The creation in September 1909 of the Round Table Movement marked a turning point in the debate on federalism and in its application both at home and in the Empire. Having been imbued with the Imperial ideology produced by Oxford in the late Nineteenth century, for the Round Tablers federalism was a political and constitutional form to be filled with an historical content: the British Empire. The dominant ideas at Oxford at the time included Burke’s theory of organic unity, social Darwinism, the absolute certainty of the superiority of ‘white culture’ (and in particular English), the sense of responsibility towards non-Europeans, and finally the idea of Imperial mission. The writers who mostly influenced the intellectual development of the Round Tablers were Freeman, with his theory of the linear development of the principle of self-government following the Anglo-Saxon experience of the parliamentary system, and T. H. Green, with his Hegelian concept of development and social reforms as a moral duty.6 The Oxford approach to Imperial questions seemed, according to Ronald Robinson, “unmistakable,” characterized by the “high moral tone, the lofty view which Mansergh called ‘largess of mind’,” and the inclination “for tracing philosophical antithesis through long historical perspectives, for presenting the Imperial record teleologically in terms of an ideal end.” The Round Tablers were imbued by a climate, “where philosophy was linguistic, and secular skepticism poured on religiosity.” The Round Table developed and propagated a political ideology which would have promoted and accompanied the transition from a British leadership of the Empire into an equal partnership among its component parts. The alternative to organic union would have been disruption, as happened to the Athenian ‘insular’ Empire, finally defeated, on the sea, by an alliance of two ‘continental’ powers, Sparta and Persia. The invention of the principle of representation, and of federal government, they thought, were contributions which the Anglo-Saxon political tradition had offered to the development of the principle of self-government invented and experimented with in Athens, making thus possible its application to the national, and then to the supranational levels. The deep meaning of their mission sprang from the awareness of living at a time of crisis, which could be overcome only through the extension and application of the democratic principle beyond the nation-State, seen as the cause of international anarchy. If it were not possible to achieve that goal within the English-speaking peoples, who were the most advanced in the art of responsible and democratic government, they believed that nobody else could have succeeded. The British Empire in fact appeared to the Round Tablers as the most congenial organization of States to start with, in order to create and consolidate a federal nucleus set for enlargement. The Round Table’s main argument supporting the case for a closer Imperial union was based on the growing Anglo-German rivalry, which represented a renewal of the traditional rivalry between the continental and the insular systems, which in their essence were antagonist. If the continental system was based on centralization of powers, autocratic and militaristic by nature, the British was based on the liberties of the individual citizen, decentralization, and representative democracy. Continental pressure brought the British governments to slow down and limit the process of devolution of powers from the centre to the periphery of the Empire—an Empire which was itself an economically and politically evolving entity, bound to be re-defined on the basis of the principle of equal partnership. As soon as the Round Tablers realized that the Dominions needed to go all the way through the full exercise of national sovereignty before being ready to federate, they turned to the United States, and envisaged a period of time during which through Anglo-American co-operation and alliance it would be possible to restore the necessary international economic and political stability to give time for federal ideas to take root. Economic and political co-operation between Great Britain and her thirteen rebellious former colonies was then regarded by the Round Table as the only practical solution to the problem of world instability, inherent in the political division of the world into sovereign States. The place of the Round Table Movement in the history of the British Empire could be compared to that of the sun at noon, the moment of its greatest radiance but also the beginning of a rapid and inexorable decline. What the Round Tablers attempted to do was to reverse that inexorableness. Could the history of the British Empire diverge from the fate which marked all the empires in the course of history? This was the challenge which the Round Tablers took up. The aim of this volume is to discuss the strategies and means employed in this fascinating venture.

The creation of The Round Table, a quarterly journal devoted entirely to Imperial and foreign affairs, which was produced by the London office in collaboration with colonial editors, and “to which all workers and all important statesmen in the Dominions could be induced to subscribe,” is perhaps the most relevant and lasting contribution of the movement to the evolution of the federal idea, and the consolidation of a political culture which inspired the processes of Atlantic and European unification. The magazine launched the movement worldwide, and became “the recognized organ of the groups in all parts,” influencing those in a position to influence public opinion. The journal was “not intended so much for the average reader, as for those who write for the average reader.” It was an elitist journal which provided “food for thought,” having in each issue three or four lead articles, with the addition of chronicle articles from each Dominion. The Round Table preached the gospel of Anglo-Saxonism first developed by Dilke, Fiske, and Hawkins.15 London was, at the beginning of the century, the centre of a worldwide system of metropolitan political journalism, providing “the ‘live rails’,” as Curzon observed, “for connecting the outskirts of Empire with its heart.” The Round Table was the only journal completely devoted to Imperial and foreign affairs. Other journals like the Westminster, the Edinburgh, and the National Reviews, the Pall Mall Gazette, and Blackwoods only occasionally dealt with Imperial and foreign policy. The first number of the journal appeared in November 1910, and its print-run was of 3,500 copies, gradually increasing to 6,500 by June 1914. Subscribers were more numerous in the Dominions than in the United Kingdom. By 1918 The Round Table had “won an established and influential position” throughout the British Empire, with sales of around “ten and a half thousand,” being the “largest and most widely-distributed circulation of any political quarterly magazine in the British Empire.”

The Round Table was not, as the Imperial Federation League, a simple pressure movement inspired by federalist values, but a political organization, with a significant rooting in all the major peripheral centres of the Empire; with almost unlimited financial resources made available particularly by the Rhodes Trust; with a magazine widely recognized as authoritative in matters of Imperial and foreign policy; and especially with a small group of young men who devoted to the federalist cause most of their lives. Two of them, Lionel Curtis and Philip Kerr—the two musketeers, or the Castor and Pollux of the movement, as they were defined by their contemporaries—left the deepest mark in the battles of the movement. “I am only a blade in the scissors,” Curtis wrote to Kerr in 1927, “and cut nothing unless I am hinged with you.” But the relationship was never easy. Curtis tended to patronize his friend ten years younger, who thought that Curtis’s veneration for the Empire was a kind of idolatry. Kerr could not share Curtis’s “transcendental confidence that one is divinely inspired in one’s political operations.” However, according to Lionel Hitchens, Curtis “imposed a spirit into the Kindergarten which they would never have had” without him.

Milner had been the link between the two phases of ‘Imperial federalism’, the British ‘old school’ of imperialism (represented by the Imperial Federation League, Cecil Rhodes, Joseph Chamberlain, Lord Rosebery, and Lord Salisbury), and the ‘new school’, represented by the Round Table. Milner drew his power and influence on the formation of British Imperial and foreign policy from heterogeneous social forces of which he was a sort of intersection point. On one side, Milner had in Rhodes the incarnation of capitalist exploitation and accumulation of wealth in colonial Britain. On the other, there was Stead, who offered Milner the foundations of the Imperial ideology, providing a base of legitimacy and perpetuation of an Empire which included within its borders one fourth of the world’s surface and of its population, largely completely subject to the rule of a British Parliament and Cabinet. Then, Milner could also rely upon Reginald B. Brett (later Lord Esher)—a director of Rhodes’ British South African Company, and adviser of Edward VII and George V—who facilitated the rise of the ‘outsider’ Milner into the British foreign and Imperial policy decision-making inner circle.

Without the creation of an ‘external threat’, the attempt to bring about the political union of the Empire would have been doomed to failure. In order to survive, the Empire desperately needed the Hun, the opposed, in ideological, political, and economic terms. Without an ‘external threat’ the Empire would possibly have disintegrated before 1914, and the United Kingdom might have been precipitated into a civil war in order to prevent the secession of Ireland. The creation of the ‘external enemy’ was certainly not the only cause which generated World War I, but in Weberian terms it could be considered as the ‘adequate cause’, namely the cause without which the course of events would have been different. The arsenal provided by the joint action of The Times, The Observer, Oxford and London academic institutions, the Rhodes Trust, a number of imperialist organizations, and King Edward’s entourage, gave Milner a tremendous fire-power which—as shown during the July 1914 Irish crisis—made the difference. Milner’s most formidable weapon was however represented by his young men. Educated at Oxford, and assembled in South Africa after 1904 with the task of rebuilding the social and political fabric wounded by the war, the future members of the Round Table all came, with few exceptions, from the British aristocracy and the Anglican Church. Back in London in the summer of 1909 after having accomplished—without the direct involvement of their master—the Milnerian design of the political union of the four South African former colonies—Transvaal, Orange River, Cape and Natal—the young men of the so-called Milner’s Kindergarten founded the movement in the Welsh country house of Lord Anglesey, in the autumn of that year. In the space of five years, the movement became, according to Lloyd George “a very powerful combination—in its own way perhaps the most powerful in the country.” The passage of Lloyd George from number 11 to number 10 Downing Street in December 1916 owed much in fact to Milner and his Kindergarten, so that two of its members, Kerr and Waldorf Astor, followed him as his private secretaries. Lloyd George could then witness how each member of the Kindergarten brought “to its deliberations certain definite and important qualities,” and behind the scenes they had “much power and influence.” This was a judgement shared by the New York Times, which, following Kerr’s early resignation as Lloyd George’s Private Secretary in 1921, identified in Kerr and his associates the real ‘power behind the throne’.

Created in an effort to halt the decline of an Empire which had reached its apogee, and representing the most advanced and well organized expression of British nationalism, the Round Table with its actions produced precisely the opposite results on all fronts, by accelerating the break-up of the Empire and demonstrating how the federalist culture is the exact opposite to the nationalist one. In trying to reconcile opposites—Empire and federation—the Round Table in fact witnessed and to some extent produced the Empire’s crucifixion. And it was just the application of federalist schemes to former colonies which served to speed up its break-up. In the beginning, opposites attract each other, but in the end they exclude themselves each in turn. Hence the widespread phobia for federalism in Great Britain today. Once this contradiction exploded, there remained however on the field—over the rubble of the Empire, and of the Irish and Indian civil wars—a political culture which nurtured both the European federalist movements—with the birth of the Federal Union, with the federalist conversion of Altiero Spinelli, and with the action of Jean Monnet—and the Atlantic federalist movement, with the long loyalty to the cause by Clarence Streit.

At this point it would be up to the Americans to continue the agenda of the British Empire through the establishment of the Council on Foreign Relations and the Trilateral Commission in league with Chatham House.

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