After 1945 members of the British royal family found unanticipated
employment as ceremonial representatives on those many occasions when
political power was transferred from Great Britain to its former colonies. The
quick retreat from empire, generally labeled "decolonization," was one of the
major characteristics of postwar world politics and stands as striking proof
that the older Eurocentric state of global affairs now only has a place in the
history books.
However, few were the prophets who had imagined the end of the
empire would occur so quickly and completely. During the interwar years
theorists estimated that colonies would remain part of political reality for
perhaps another century. Even in the early 1950s, more than one experienced
observer assumed that European rule in Black Africa could possibly continue
until the year 2000. Such predictions were all grossly wrong. Within two
decades empire was over in Africa too.
The singular fact of decolonization was the outward political ease with
which most of it was accomplished. With few exceptions, negotiation and
peaceful retreat, not bitter resistance, was the pattern. True, Europeans
perceived what lay ahead if they did not negotiate, but for the most part the
transferal of power was made without severe animosity, such that the
ceremonies attended by members of the British royal family were decorous
enough to appear in the Sunday pictorial supplements at home.
After the war the politics of the colonial world were altered by the
appearance of mass-supported parliamentary parties, whose objective was to
play the role of loyal opposition. In some regions, notably South Asia, politics
had already been further advanced. Gandhi's efforts should be recalled, and
parallel in time with them was the growth of a Communist party in
Indochina under Ho Chi Minh. In North Africa there were also important
political factions demanding an end to colonial rule. Yet by and large, the
mass-supported party was a postwar phenomenon, and one born in a
promising environment of political change. The major colonial powers,
Great Britain and France, were already restructuring their colonial
administration and their principles of rule.
Just the alterations in the official names by which these two great
empires were called is an indication of the new mood of the times. The
British Empire had become the British Commonwealth of Nations in the
interwar period, but after 1945, it reappeared as the Commonwealth of
Nations. The removal of the qualifying adjective suggested an official equality
of the participating units. The French Empire was reclassified as the French
Union in 1945, and then was redesignated "The Community" when General
Charles de Gaulle returned to political power in 1958.
It is true that the French still hoped for a unified and integrated
colonial community, while the British moved more toward autonomy and
self-government. But both nations recognized that political change was
necessary. By allowing colonial affairs to move from administration by
Europeans to political participation by local populations, the home
governments encouraged the move toward local government. The colonial
councils, primarily appointed
and consultative bodies in the prewar system, now became elective and
responsible agents of government. It was in this changed environment that
the parliamentary parties of the colonized peoples appeared.
By the 1950s, within a decade after their formation, these parties were
transformed from a parliamentary to a nationalist status. Their leaders no
longer saw the future as one in which they ought to work within the context
of colonial government, but rather one in which they would direct the
destinies of new nation-states.
As the political intentions of the colonial elites changed, the response
of the colonial governments altered also. One after the other, the colonies
were granted independence. Where a colonial administrative unit had stood
one day, an independent nation stood the next. The vast majority of colonies
in Black Africa, the Caribbean, and Oceania received independence in this
peaceful manner.
However, there were two instances of severe colonial warfare, both of
which proved the dire effects European resistance could precipitate.
In both Indochina and Algeria the French were determined to
maintain their political status. In both colonial regions the outcome was
extended warfare of a bitter sort. Between 1947 and 1954 the French in
Indochina fought against the guerrilla armies of Ho Chi Minh. The war was
an effort made by the French to prevent the collapse of empire immediately
after World War II, and it was an effort on the part of Ho Chi Minh to make
the provisional republic he had declared in 1945 a political reality. Finally, the
French found themselves in a military debacle at Dien Bien Phu in the winter
and spring of 1954. The Vietnamese forces had surrounded the French
garrison there and soon were demolishing it. This French failure on the
battlefield led to negotiation at the diplomatic table. In July of 1954, at Geneva,
the French government recognized the existence of the People's Republic of
North Vietnam. Ho Chi Minh had triumphed, but the war in Indochina
would continue again in 1956, this time with the Americans replacing the
French.
Beginning in November of 1954, and in part as a consequence of Ho
Chi Minh's success, a National Liberation Front in Algeria engaged the
French in guerrilla warfare. Determined not to allow a repetition of
Indochina, and anxious to provide support for the large white settler
population in the area, the French government eventually mounted a major
military effort against the Algerian nationalists. Fighting continued until 1962
when the government of General de Gaulle finally negotiated a peace that
assured an independent Algeria.
The struggle in both Indochina and Algeria proved that guerrilla warfare
was an effective means of wearing down the enemy. The excessive cost in
lives and money of retaining colonial domination was one that sapped
French national strength. Gaining the support of the local population,
engaging in hit-and-run operations that disrupted military supply lines and
frightened the local French populations, the guerrillas forced the French to
increase the
number of troops needed for policing activities. It was calculated that one
guerrilla could hold down ten to twenty regular troops.
Guerrilla warfare - or its threat - was therefore a most useful, because a
most dreadful, tactic available to the colonized peoples. It disrupted any
semblance of colonial order, and it effected an isolation of the colonial
authorities from the masses of the people.
Whether by force or through negotiation, the European retreat from
empire was as quick as it was total. But the effects of the imperial age
continued.
The Significance of Colonialism
Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru (1889-1964) of India once wrote that
the "shock value" of European imperialism was all important. He meant that
European culture, with its scientific and technological base, aroused other
cultures from their centuries-old complacency or traditionalism.
The dichotomy between the "traditional" and the "modern," to which
Nehru was alluding, has no doubt been exaggerated. Old and new were not
always in opposition and, quite obviously, no culture has ever remained
fixed. But the European colonial world, centered in the Eurafrican and
Eurasian cities, did suggest a different pace and way of life.
Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that the colonial world was
one of two cultures. The introduction of a wage-based economy, of a modern
transportation system, of new techniques in medicine and - equally
important - of a value system based on the principles of change and material
progress, altered the old order. The North African driving a donkey cart
equipped with pneumatic tires is one example of such change, as is the Hindu
peasant listening to his transistor radio. These daily scenes of the incongruous
should not lead to the conclusion that the two cultures were consciously
blended.
What occurred in the colonial setting was juxtaposition, not
intermixture. Few of the benefits of European culture and fewer of the most
important positions in colonial society were open to the African and Asian
populations. Except for the small elites previously discussed, and except for an
emerging commercial bourgeoisie most noticeable in the port cities of
Southeast Asia, North and West Africa, access to the European side of the
colonial world was highly restricted. In his remarkable colonial novel, A
Passage to India (1924), the English author E. M. Forster depicts a lawn party
held by some Indians for some British. He refers to it as a "bridge party," the
irony being that there was a great gap between the two peoples, even though
they were assembled on the same lawn.
If not a multiracial society, the Europeans provided a model for
political and economic development that served as a major legacy of the
imperial age. The very fact that the colonies emerged as nation-states,
structured on European principles of national sovereignty and republicanism, and functioning with administrative bureaucracies, is an indication of the effects of alien rule.
Moreover, in developing a counter-ideology with which to combat
imperialism and the cultural smugness it implied, the indigenous leaders of
Africa and Asia sought to adapt their own past to contemporary uses. The
reformulation of local, precolonial history was often along the romantic
nationalist lines that characterized similar European development a century
before. Finally, a European trained military element, one of the most
"modernized" segments of society, became a major political force. Many of
the contemporary rulers in Africa in particular acquired their first public
service in the European colonial armed forces.
Whether the term "modernization" or "Westernization" is used to
describe the many social and economic alterations which made the world take
on a common appearance, the fact remains that a primary agent in the process
of change was European imperialism. Recently, critics have asked if similar
change would not have occurred without colonial imperialism. The question
is an interesting hypothetical one. But it in part contains its own answer. Only
in the last two decades of European empire, in the period since World War II,
were the most striking alterations in indigenous societies effected. It was at
the time when colonial empire moved from political domination and
administration to technological improvement that the "one world" of jet
aircraft, television, industrial pollution, and four-lane highways appeared.
Concomitant with this Westernization, there was a new form of
colonization taking place in Europe itself. For the first time since the era of
the Viking invasions in the ninth century, Western Europe was the setting
for a significant immigration of peoples whose homes were outside of the
Continent. By the middle 1960s, over five hundred thousand Algerian
workers were in France, and another one hundred thousand were found in
Belgium and Germany. At the same time residents of the Commonwealth
holding British passports appeared in large number in Great Britain. Indians
from East Africa, blacks from Jamaica and Barbados, Pakistanis from the
Indian subcontinent, resettled in the former seat of empire where they hoped
to find economic opportunity. Finally, in the Netherlands there was a small
but significant community of Moluccans who fled their native islands when
the territory was turned over to the Indonesian government at the time of
Dutch decolonization.
The presence in Europe of around 2 million emigres from the various
colonial empires is explained chiefly by economic reasons. Crowding
populations and limited opportunities in the decolonizing regions made
Europe appear to be a continent of opportunity. Moreover, the economic
surge - "the European miracle" - of the 1960s created a temporary labor
scarcity on farms, in mines, and in factories. The colonial emigres formed
something of an itinerant, alien proletariat, primarily interested in earning
enough money to send to destitute families at home. However, the presence
of such a significant new racial component led to social tensions and in
England to an
outbreak of racial violence. Moreover, as industrial unemployment increased
in Europe in the 1970s many working-class Europeans saw the colonial
proletariat as an immediate economic threat. Racism, formerly considered by
Europeans to be a unique national condition of the United States, appeared in
all of its ugliness in Europe.
The problem of temporarily displaced populations is in part a measure
of the failure of the "revolution of expectations" in the former colonial
world. Decolonization turned out to be a false promise for many Asians and
Africans who realized that the economic order of the world was not
dramatically changed as a result of the departure of the colonial
administration.
After Imperialism
In the 1950s the French coined the expression "The Third World" to
distinguish that vast portion of the globe that was removed from the West
(Europe and the United States) and the Soviet Union. Originally, the term
applied primarily to those newly emerging states which had no desire to
affiliate with either of the two major world power blocs. It was at Bandung, in
Indonesia, that the first sense of Third World solidarity was expressed in 1955.
There, some twenty-nine nations from Africa and Asia convened in
conference to condemn colonialism. Chou En Lai, foreign minister of the
People's Republic of China, stated the purpose of the conference clearly: "The
epoch when the Western powers controlled our destinies is over. The peoples
of Asia and Africa must now guide their own destinies."
Since Bandung, the Third World nations have become as wary of
Soviet intentions as they have of American. Both "superpowers" seem to be
peddling influence, and on occasion both have found their technical
assistance staffs sent packing by suspicious governments. In 1973 the
Egyptians forced the Russians to leave, and in 1977 the Ethiopians forced the
Americans to leave.
Such suspicions of the technologically advanced, militarily powerful,
and economically rich nations have, in one form, been structured into an
ideology of "neo-colonialism." According to this theory, Western influence
remains as strong as it was before in the colonial regions, even though
European flags and the personnel who served under them have left. Neo-
colonialism suggests that economic exploitation continues, now primarily
maintained by the multinational corporation and international aid rather
than by the colonial administration.
The great amounts of military aid and capital investment made by the
former colonial powers and the United States, notably in Africa, was the
factual basis for neo-colonialism. It has been argued that such money and
equipment could be manipulated to control the policies of the new sovereign
states. And with the resources of large international conglomerates like
International Telephone and Telegraph (ITT) and Unilever, domestic policy could be
turned to the advantage of the foreign investor. Arguments such as these
engendered new concerns. The first president of Ghana, Kwame Nkrumah,
warned of a "new scramble for Africa, under the guise of aid."
Neo-colonialism is another form of ideological protest against the
economic disparity in the contemporary world. The Third World is the world
of poverty, of hunger, of exceedingly low per capita income. It remains
dependent upon, hence sensitive to, the wealthy part of the world, which the
West primarily occupies.
Conclusion
Like the battleship, empire was made obsolete by the Second World
War. A creation of nineteenth-century power politics, such empire depended
on a set of cultural values in which paternalism was a pivotal concept. The
relationship of colonial ruler to colonized people was frequently symbolized
in the statuary found in colonial city squares: the figure representing Europe
was a sturdy adult; the figure representing the local population was a
dependent child.
Different concepts of authority issued forth after 1945. In a belated way,
the Wilsonian principle of "self-determination of nations" was realized on a
worldwide scale. Hitlerian imperialism, the most horrendous form yet
imposed, cast a gloomy shadow across all forms of empire. The United
Nations stood for a new spirit of parity, of equality among nations. It is true
that the long-vaunted principles of Western liberalism, particularly the
notion of self-sufficient individuals deciding their own political fate, were
seldom translated into the daily life of citizens living in the new nations.
Military dictatorship and one-party rule were far more common than the
English "Westminster Model" of parliamentary rule with a loyal opposition.
Nonetheless, decolonization meant a world of quite different political
proportions.
Europe is no longer the center of a political network cast over the
Tropics. Now European chiefs of state make official visits to African and
Asian capitals as frequently as leaders of the nations of the Third World come
to Europe. Ours is an age of many lines of international diplomatic traffic. All
roads do not lead to Rome-nor to Paris or London.
NEXT: Chapter Fifteen: An Era of Booming Success
