The Routledge Companion to Decolonization

Dietmar Rothermund

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2006
• ISBN:
  9781134250981
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

This is an essential companion to the process of decolonization – perhaps one of the most important historical processes of the twentieth century. Examining decolonization in Africa, Asia, the Caribbean and the Pacific, the Companion includes:

• thematic chapters
• a detailed chronology and thorough glossary
• biographies of key figures
• maps.

Providing comprehensive coverage of a broad and complex subject area, the guide explores:

• the global context for decolonization
• nationalism and the rise of resistance movements
• resistance by white settlers and moves towards independence
• Hong Kong and Macau, and decolonization in the late twentieth century
• debates surrounding neo-colonialism, and the rise of 'development' projects and aid
• the legacy of colonialism in law, education, administration and the military.

With suggestions for further reading, and a guide to sources, this is an invaluable resource for students and scholars of the colonial and post-colonial eras, and is an indispensable guide to the reshaping of the world in the twentieth century.

II
THEMES

THE CONTEXT OF
DECOLONIZATION

THE DISINTEGRATION OF THE WORLD ECONOMY

Decolonization was precipitated by the disintegration of the world economy during the period from 1914 to 1945 which was marked by the sequence war–depression–war. Before 1914 the dominant countries were linked in a kind of economic world federation of the gold standard.¹ This federation had an unnofficial capital, the City of London. According to economic doctrine, there was no monetary policy which supported the gold standard. The free flow of gold automatically adjusted international prices. Prices would rise in the country which attracted gold and decline in the country which had to export it. This would lead to a reversal of the flow in due course. The balance could be upset if a country which attracted gold decided to hoard it so as to maintain internal price stability.
This is exactly what the USA did after the First World War. The war had put an end to the economic world federation of the gold standard, but then several countries adopted it again so as to restore the old stability. The USA, however, refused to follow the rules of the game and kept its gold locked up in Fort Knox. This was done for purely domestic reasons, but it deeply affected the world economy nevertheless.

In the ‘golden age’ before the First World War, the City of London could control the unofficial world federation because it was the clearing house for all major financial transactions and could maintain an uninterrupted flow of gold. This also helped to secure the British empire although the majority of British investment was made outside the empire than within its confines. Interest payments on these investments were so enormous that they provided the City of London with the critical mass required for keeping the ‘world federation’ going. This was drastically changed by the First World War from which Great Britain emerged indebted to the USA as well as to its own people as it had contracted a huge internal war debt. Moreover, the interest payments on investment abroad were reduced to less than one-third of their former dimensions. In spite of this Great Britain returned to the gold standard in 1925 at the pre-war parity to the US dollar which it maintained only with great difficulties until it was forced to abandon the standard under the impact of the Great Depression in 1931. The vain attempt at reviving the gold standard after the First World War proved to be a distaster.²

The ‘Crumbling of Empire’was precipitated by the Great Depression, but at the same time the depression stiffened imperial resistance to decolonization. The depression years witnessed a contraction of international credit. Some countries defaulted on their debts, some devalued their currencies, others introduced strict exchange controls. The British economist Joan Robinson coined the term ‘beggar thy neighbour’ for the economic nationalism that prevailed in this period. Each sovereign state tried to improve its position at the cost of others. There was one exception: colonial governments could not default nor manipulate their currencies as they were controlled by their imperial rulers.³ The fierce debates on the exchange rate of the Indian rupee and the action of the Secretary of State in dictating terms to the Government of India on behalf of the Bank of England in 1931 is a case in point.⁴ The focus of colonial rule was narrowed to the interest of the creditor in controlling the debtor. The access to colonies as suppliers of raw materials was no longer of importance as the Great Depression had led to such a steep fall in the prices of raw materials that anybody could buy them cheaply in the world market. Trade in these commodities declined in terms of value but not of volume during the years of the Great Depression.

Since the control of trade in colonial commodities was no longer a lucrative affair, the metropolitan powers had to refine their methods of exacting a tribute from their colonies. As Moritz Bonn put it: ‘currency control . . . may be a convenient cloak for downright coercive exactions’.⁵ In adopting such methods, the colonial rulers provided grist to the mill of economic nationalists in their colonies. The quest for self-determination was enhanced by acute economic grievances which will be discussed in the chapter on colonialism and neocolonialism later on (p. 258). At this stage it may suffice to stress that the disintegration of the world economy accentuated the conflicts between the rulers and the ruled in the colonies.

The Second World War affected different levels of the colonial relationship. The most visible result was the participation of millions of colonial soldiers in the imperial war effort. Moritz Bonn had written in 1938: ‘colonial levies are being employed in a European civil war’.⁶ He could not yet know at that time what enormous dimensions these ‘levies’ would have. The British Indian army had about two million soldiers in the field at the end of the Second World War. Probably about half a million African soldiers were recruited by the British and the French in various colonies. Most of these soldiers had to be demobilized after the war. They had been trained in modern warfare and their loyality could not be taken for granted. For many, their experiences during the war had been unpleasant and they told their countrymen about these when they returned home. Another result of the war was the change in credit relationships. India, which had earlier been kept on a tight leash by the British as it was a substantial debtor, emerged from the war as a creditor of Great Britain. This greatly facilitated the grant of independence to India which also had to shoulder the burden of taking care of the demobilized soldiers, a burden which the British were eager to relinquish. But even more important in the field of credit relationships was the abject dependence of the European powers on the USA which had funded most of the war expenditure and then also provided financial help for European post-war reconstruction. The cards were thus stacked against the European colonial rulers after the war.

THE CHANGING CONTOURS OF WORLD AFFAIRS AFTER THE SECOND WORLD WAR

The period from 1945 to 1975 which encompassed the emancipation of the majority of former colonies was influenced by rapid changes in the global context of the respective policies. The years from 1945 to 1948, which witnessed the termination of Japanese rule in East Asia, the decolonization of South Asia by the British and of the Philippines by the Americans, saw at the same time the return of the Dutch and the French to their colonies in Southeast Asia and the rise of postwar imperialism in Africa. The Cold War also began at that time and changed American policies which had earlier encouraged decolonization but then became obsessed with checking the advance of Communism, which it now perceived in a global perspective. This American obsession was reflected in conflicting trends of American policy with regard to decolonization. On the one hand advances in decolonization were demanded so as to reduce the targets of Communist propaganda or intervention, while on the other hand there was an interest in maintaining military bases throughout the world. Strategic positions occupied by European colonial powers were valuable in this context. These powers were sometimes perplexed by the alternating currents of American policy. The Cold War turned briefly into a hot one in Korea. The Korean War then led to a sharp rise in commodity prices and this once more enhanced the value of colonies that produced raw materials. Colonial rulers made plans for stimulating production in their colonies in Africa. Post-war imperialism received a boost and further decolonization was postponed. But the commodity boom collapsed in the mid-1950s and dreams of increased colonial production also evaporated. At the same time the French experienced a terrible defeat in Vietnam and in the wake of this they also took initiatives to decolonize Tunisia and Morocco. However, they were then faced with the outbreak of a new war in Algeria.

In 1955 the Bandung Conference emitted a global signal of Afro-Asian solidarity and broadcast the demand for further decolonization. Nasser returned to Egypt from this conference greatly encouraged in his defiance of the British and the French who then wanted to teach him a lesson in 1956. The joint intervention of the British and the French at Suez in 1956 turned out to be the final act of imperial bravado. President Eisenhower’s angry reaction to this conspiracy of the imperial powers changed British and French policies. So far they had profited from being NATO allies in an intensified Cold War. But now Eisenhower put them in their place and they were forced to reconsider their overseas expenditure on defence and colonial control. The wave of decolonization culminating in the early 1960s was due to this new constellation. It was an irony of fate that the USA got involved in the Vietnam War in the mid-1960s. This preoccupied the Americans to such an extent that they could not pay much attention to the unfinished business of decolonization. The Portuguese empire thus eluded international pressure for many years. Its sudden downfall was caused by internal developments rather than by global power relations. There was, of course, the attraction of joining the European Community which promised greater economic benefits to the Portuguese than clinging to the African colonies. Resistance to their rule in these colonies had caused enormous losses to the Portuguese. The revolution led by military officers in April 1974 was a reaction to these losses. The final phase of Portuguese decolonization in Angola in 1975 then led to a unique confrontation of Cuban troops and South African troops – a rather new dimension of international relations in the era of decolonization. The attraction of the European Community (EC) which had induced the changes in the orientation of Portugal had earlier influenced British and French decisions also. But whereas France belonged to the founder members of the EC, Great Britain had to wait because General de Gaulle successfully obstructed its entry to the club until it was finally permitted to join in 1971. Even before this date, however, British interest in the emergent EC had diminished the attachment to colonial rule. The European expansion which had fostered imperialism was not revived; economic growth within the EC was no longer based on colonial exploitation but on the profitable interaction of industrialized countries.

The 1970s marked the end of the period of decolonization in most parts of the world; there remained only some smaller colonies which were still held by the colonial rulers – some of them even to the present day. In some cases this was not due to the diehard perseverance of the colonial rulers but to the material interests of the colonized. Where they had free access to the metropolitan country and also derived other economic benefits from their continued status as a colony or ‘overseas territory’, they preferred this attachment to independence. The United Nations maintains a register of such territories and it received in 2002 an official request from the people of American Samoa who wished to be struck off that register because they had no intention of achieving independence. It should also be mentioned that some colonies have been so devastated by their colonial rulers by the testing of atom bombs, etc., that they are hardly in a position to survive on their own and continue to depend on their imperial masters.

NATIONALISM AND THE RESISTANCE TO COLONIAL RULE

Nationalism is a hybrid ideology which may show various characteristics from right-wing chauvinism to a radical quest for self-determination. Its origins have been traced by many scholars but their findings are rather disparate. In his pioneering study Nationalism and Social Communication Karl Deutsch has highlighted the importance of the print media in spreading the message of nationalism.⁷ A more or less standardized national language and widespread literacy were preconditions for this kind of social communication. In dealing with African and Asian nationalism one is at a loss in this respect. If one adopts Deutsch’s criteria, nationalism would not have had a chance in Africa and Asia. Benedict Anderson, an Indonesia expert, has tried to go beyond Deutsch in his book Imagined Communities. Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, but he also stressed print capitalism as an important factor in the spread of nationalism.⁸ Strangely enough, his book contains no reference to Deutsch’s work. Ernest Gellner in his Encounters with Nationalism has tried to trace the social foundations of this ideology, but like Deutsch he concentrates on Europe.⁹ The social change caused by the bourgeois revolution and industrialization is seen by him as the major reason for the rise of nationalism. However, the most militant form of nationalism in Europe arose in a country which was rather backward and had hardly been touched by industrialization: Poland. This was highlighted by a contemporary British historian, Lord Acton, in his essay Nationality, published in 1862, one year before the Polish national revolt which was brutally suppressed by the powers which had partitioned Poland among themselves.¹⁰ Marx and Engels had commented on the fate of Poland even earlier and had pointed out that the joint oppression of Poland was the common bond of Austria, Russia and Prussia.¹¹ It was the very denial of national existence which was the mainspring of Polish nationalism. In this way it had much in common with African and Asian nationalism.

This denial-driven nationalism was rather different from the established nationalisms of France and Great Britain which had experienced their national consolidation as a result of the emergence of royal power in earlier centuries. This self-assured nationalism was projected abroad; its most striking feature being a strong corporate solidarity. In fact, the maintenance of colonial rule was possible only because the members of the respective European nations subordinated their individual ambitions to the interests of their nations. This was clearly perceived by the subject people; they felt that the lack of such corporate solidarity among themselves had led to their subjugation. Therefore nationalists in countries under colonial rule turned to the cultural resources of their people in order to construct such a corporate solidarity. But indigenous traditions often included ideas and practices justifying vertical and horizontal segmentation rather than comprehensive solidarity. Therefore creative nationalists turned to a solidarity traditionalism, i.e. a selective interpretation of traditions which implied solidarity.¹² In India such attempts were based on Hindu monism which stresses the identity of the one and the many and thus cuts across social segmentation; in Africa concepts like negritude or ujamaa (community spirit) served the same purpose. Those who highlighted such concepts did not present them as modern reconstructions but as inherent qualities of the respective ‘national character’. There was, of course, also the contrasting approach of liberal ‘nation-builders’who realistically assessed the impediments to national solidarity and relied on political education and institution-building instead of conjuring up traditions. But both approaches could blend in the thoughts and actions of individual nationalists. Jawaharlal Nehru is a case in point. He was a rational nation-builder who knew about the importance of political institutions, but he was also influenced by the solidarity traditionalism derived from Hindu monism. Thus he used to speak of ‘Indian socialism’ as a cultural resource; this was similar to Nyerere’s reference to ujamaa.¹³ The rhetoric of national agitation would often produce a syncretism of reconstructed traditions and rational nation-building. Whereas there were many debates on the nation as such, both Indian and African nationalists hardly discussed the national territory. The Indian nationalists looked upon it as a given fact and did not acknowledge that the actual boundaries of the India they lived in had been fixed by the British. Similarly African nationalists conceived of Africa as a given entity and initially thought of one united African nation. Pan-Africanism was their nationalist ideology.¹⁴ This was an inspiring idea and helped them to forget about the dismal reality of artificial colonial boundaries. But as decolonization progressed, the African nationalists were caught in the net of these boundaries and had to accept them as defining the arena of their political life. While pursuing their quest for political power within such boundaries they still held on to such...