European Decolonization

Martin Thomas

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9780754625681
• eBook ISBN: 9781351938686
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European History
• Index: History

This collection brings together twenty-one key articles that explore the nature and impact of colonial withdrawal. Ranging across all the European colonial powers, the articles discuss various aspects of decolonization, including the role of political violence, changing popular attitudes to empire and the inter-actions between colonial conflict and Cold War.

Part I
Long-Term Perspectives

[1]
A Comparative Study of French and British Decolonization

TONY SMITH

Tufts University

INTRODUCTION

Despite the historical significance of European decolonization after the Second World War, there has been no serious interpretive account of it as an overall process. A number of excellent case studies exist analyzing specific policies or periods in the imperial capitals or in the colonial territories, and there are several chronologically complete surveys of the decline of European rule overseas. These have neither been directed nor followed, however, by studies attempting to conceptualize synthetically the entire period. In default of a wide-ranging debate over the character of decolonization as an historical movement, a kind of conventional wisdom has grown up attributing the differences in the British and French experiences to a combination of their respective imperial traditions and the governing abilities of their domestic political institutions. As yet, there has been no systematic attempt to separate carefully the chief variables to be analyzed, to assign them weights of relative importance, and to coordinate them in an historical and comparative manner. This essay hopes to open discussion of these questions.¹

While there were definite political options open to Britain and France in imperial policy after 1945, the historically conditioned realm of the possible precluded the adoption of certain courses of action. The material hardships following the Second World War combined with the clear ascendance of the two ‘anti-imperial’ powers, the United States and the Soviet Union, and with the increased maturity of nationalist elites throughout Africa and Asia to force a decided retrenchment of Europe overseas. In retrospect, we can see that the truly important political decisions to be made by Paris and London after 1945 concerned not whether the colonies would be free, but rather which local nationalist factions they would favor with their support and over what piece of territory these new political elites would be permitted to rule. What would be federated, what partitioned, who should govern and according to what procedures, constituted decisive issues where the Europeans continued to exercise a significant degree of control When the Europeans did not respect the historically imposed limits of their power, however, their policies were to meet with defeat. Thus, while the Suez invasion of October-November 1956 constituted a political crisis of the first order in Britain, it was the only occasion when colonial matters occupied such a position. In France, by contrast, the interminable wars in Indochina and Algeria cost not only the lives of hundreds of thousands of Asians and Africans but eventually brought the collapse of the Fourth Republic as well.

A comparative analysis of British and French abilities to withdraw from their empires after 1945 suggests four respects in which the British were favored. First, there was the legacy of the past in terms of ideas and procedures on imperial matters, precedents built up over the decades before the Second World War, which served to orient European leaders and organize their responses to the pressures for decolonization. On this score, the British proved to be ideologically, and especially institutionally, more fit than the French to cope with overseas challenges to their rule. Second, there was the international ‘place’ of Britain and France and especially the different relations maintained by the two countries with the United States. Third, there was the question of the domestic political institutions of France and Britain with their very unequal capacities to process a problem of the magnitude of decolonization. The French multi-party system with its weak governing consensus clearly was not the equivalent of the two-party system in Britain. Even had the French system been stronger, however, it is not evident it would have dealt more effectively with decolonization, for national opinion, and especially the ‘collective conscience’ of the political elite in France, was significantly different from that in Britain. The fourth variable to be analyzed directs attention from Paris and London to the character of the nationalist elites with whom the Europeans had to deal. Here, it will be argued that the situations in Indochina and Algeria presented France with serious problems that Britain was simply fortunate enough to escape (at least until Suez). The comparative study of European decolonization depends in important measure, that is, on the comparative study of colonial nationalism. Since this last factor is frequently neglected in favor of Eurocentric analyses of decolonization, the second section below will investigate it in some detail.

I

In terms of colonial ideology and institutions, the British experience prepared London remarkably well for the liquidation of empire after 1945. In a sense, one may mark the first phase of British decolonization as stretching from the Durham report of 1839 relative to Canada to the Statute of Westminster of 1931. By this series of measures, Britain created the Dominion system and institutionalized a procedure for gradually loosening control over her possessions. For a time, to be sure, the final character of the Commonwealth (as it came to be called after the turn of the century) remained in doubt. During the interwar years, however, it became clear that the sometime dream of ‘Imperial Federation’ whereby London would control the economic, defense, and foreign policies of the several allied Anglo-Saxon peoples would never come to fruition. Instead the measured progress from representative to responsible government and from there to Commonwealth status would culminate in the establishment of fully sovereign states. However grand in theory the ideas of a stronger federal structure may have sounded when proposed by men like Joseph Chamberlain, the experience of the First World War served instead to weaken the alliance. It was British entanglements, after all, which had involved the Dominions in warfare far from home at a cost of over 200,000 dead. It was wiser perhaps for them to imitate the United States and delay involvement in these ‘foreign’ affairs. Or better yet, the Dominions might make common cause with Washington, which emerged from the war appearing both militarily and economically better suited to lead the Anglo-Saxon world than London, Thus, the Balfour Declaration of 1926 only stated what had already been decided in fact: the sovereignty of the Dominions in all respects. The Statute of Westminster of 1931 served as a confirmation of the Declaration. Although the Ottawa Agreements inaugurating an imperial preference system were signed the next year, they failed to provide economic unity where political unity was lacking. The British Commonwealth of Nations was not to be a federal organization.

In these circumstances, the Government of India Act of 1935 must appear as the first major step in the decolonization process which began in earnest after 1945. For although the Act itself fell far short indeed of according independence to India, it was now undeniable that the ‘white’ Dominions would eventually be joined in their informal alliance by peoples of other racial stock. To the Indians, of course, this was scant satisfaction since not only the time of their independence but, more important, the politically most crucial features of their emerging state seemed to be outside their ability to control. But in London the Act was in many ways decisive. It reconciled the majority of popular and elite opinion to the eventual independence of this ‘crowning jewel’ of empire, considered along with the British Isles themselves to be the other ‘twin pillar’ of Britain’s international rank. Of course there is the mistake, encountered in the works of Britishers especially, of seeing in retrospect a grand design for decolonization that in fact did not exist. Closer inspection commonly reveals the British to have been following Burke’s sage counsel to reform in order to preserve: London made concessions more usually to subvert opposition to British rule than to prepare for its demise. So, for example, to see Indian independence in 1947 as necessarily following from the Government of India Act of 1935 which in turn unerringly confirmed the intentions of the Government of India Act of 1919 (itself the natural product of the Morley-Minto reforms of 1909) assumes a British gift for foresight which a detailed examination of the historical record makes difficult to sustain. What is lacking in these accounts is a sense of the conflicts, hesitations and uncertainties of the past and of the attempts to reinterpret or renege on the promise of eventual independence for India.

Nonetheless, the British did establish a tradition of meeting colonial discontent by reforms which associated the subject peoples more closely with their own governing. The prior evolution of the Dominion system did exert an important influence on the style of British policy towards India. And the ultimate decision to grant India independence and to permit her to withdraw if she wished from the Commonwealth did constitute a momentous precedent for British policy towards the rest of the colonies.

How limited, by contrast, was the French experience in handling political change within their empire. When in January-February 1944, a group of colonial civil servants met in Brazzaville, capital of the French Congo, to draw up proposals for imperial reorganization in the aftermath of the war, the many worthwhile recommendations they made—the end of forced labor and special native legal codes, the creation of territorial assemblies and their coordination in a Trench Federation’, the representation of colonial peoples at the future French Constituent Assembly— failed to deal with the truly central problem, the possibility of a colonial evolution towards independence.² That is, the French are not to be criticized for failing to provide complete and immediate independence to their colonies, but rather for their steadfast refusal to consider even eventual separation a viable political option. As the conference report preamble put it:

The ends of the civilizing work accomplished by France in the colonies excludes any idea of autonomy, all possibility of evolution outside the French bloc of the Empire; the eventual constitution, even in the future of self-government in the colonies is denied.³

Nor were matters to improve with time. Despite the rapid enactment of a host of unprecedented reforms proposed by the Conference over the next two years, there was no thought of conceding political advantages to colonial nationalists which might lead to independence. By the summer of 1947, this had been made clear on successive occasions to the Indochinese, to the Tunisians and Moroccans, to the Malagasies, to the blacks of West and Equatorial Africa, and to the Algerians. Indeed, the matter had become fixed by the Fourth Republic’s Constitution in the terms providing for the ‘French Union’ in its Title VIII.⁴

Experts in jurisprudence have convincingly pointed out the ambiguity and contradictions with which the final text establishing the French Union abounds. Its one central feature stands out clearly enough, however: the authority of France over the Union was beyond dispute. Neither in the immediate present nor in the future would there be a partnership among equals within this ‘federation’. The only significant power whatsoever conferred on the Union was that of pooling members’ resources for the common defense (article 62). But it was ‘the Government of the [French] Republic [which] shall undertake the coordination of these resources and the direction of the policy appropriate to prepare and ensure this defense’. In legislative matters, the Union was totally subordinate to the National Assembly (articles 71–2). Nor could foreign nationalists convert the Union into a platform from which to dislodge France from her overseas possessions, for its key institutions (the Presidency, the High Council, and the Assembly) were safely under metropolitan control (articles 62–6 and 77). What the Union assured, in essence, was that the peoples of the Empire would be neither French nor free.

A variety of reasons may be adduced to explain the French failure to develop before 1945 any mechanism which might have served as a bridge for the transfer of power to their colonial subjects after the War. The most popular explanation has been to assert that the French blindly trusted to their policy of ‘assimilation’ whereby the colonies would eventually be one with France. Recent scholarship has tended to suggest, however, that the notion of ‘association’, with its connotations of the eventual separate development of the colonial peoples, had grown increasingly important in French policy circles in the twentieth century.⁵ Or again, one might argue that the British experience with ‘informal empire’ had b...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Series Preface
• Introduction
• Part I Long-Term Perspectives
• Part II Post-War Problems and Confrontations
• Part III Decolonization and Party Politics
• Part IV Decolonization, Counter-Insurgency and Wars of Liberation
• Part V The Internationalization of Decolonization
• Part VI Forgotten Constituencies? Women and Returnees
• Name Index