The Cold War and Decolonization

10 Key excerpts on "The Cold War and Decolonization"

• 

  eBook - PDF

  Paths to a New Europe

  From Premodern to Postmodern Times

  • Paul Dukes(Author)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Bloomsbury Academic

    (Publisher)

  Such an observation is reinforced in the context of the realisation that these two new empires were rising up on the shoulders of the old. Britain, France and other European states were losing not only their conti-nental but also their overseas influence to these rivals, who struggled with each other to fill as much as possible of the resulting power vacuum. To put it simply, the Cold War was intimately linked with decolonisation, the other principal characteristic of the years follow-ing 1945. The Cold War was not a completely new type of conflict. Indeed, the term had been used by a Spanish writer describing the struggle between Christians and Muslims as far back as the fourteenth century: ‘War that is very strong and very hot ends either with death or peace, whereas cold war neither brings peace nor gives honour to the one who makes it.’ 6 Almost certainly the Greeks and Romans had a word for it, too. What was new about the Cold War that arose after 1945 was its global scale and the very extensive nature of the death that would follow should it ever become hot. Similar to the fourteenth-century mutual hatred of Christian and Muslim was that of capitalist and Communist, which did much to bring about the disruption of the Grand Alliance, made a mockery of the United Nations, and impeded balanced historical assessment. Certainly, neither extreme of interpretation is correct. Whatever the enormity of his crimes and the depths of his depravity, Stalin did not have a master plan to take over eastern Europe, then western Europe, later the world. On the other hand, while the businessmen of the USA were hoping for greater profits in the post-war period, they were not conspiring for an ‘Open Door’ of free enterprise so wide that it would immediately take over the economy of the Soviet Union and of all other European states for their own purposes. 435 THE COLD WAR AND DECOLONISATION, 1945–1968

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - ePub

  Remaking the World

  Decolonization and the Cold War

  • Jessica M. Chapman(Author)
  • 2023(Publication Date)
  • The University Press of Kentucky

    (Publisher)

  Truman articulated fears of a renewed Soviet assault on Iran, and the communist orientation of Ho Chi Minh’s Vietnamese government took on a newly sinister cast. Armed with a dramatically increased defense budget, the United States made a fateful commitment to support the French War effort in Indochina, and to recognize the alternative noncommunist government installed by the French in southern Vietnam. The Cold War and Decolonization had begun to intersect in ways that would only deepen and determine each other’s courses in the decades that ensued. By and large, though, the Truman administration continued to have little interest in the Third World beyond its direct implications for the superpower conflict and the disposition of European allies. The globalization and militarization of the American strategy of containment paved the way for a reorientation of the Cold War toward the decolonizing world, but it was not until President Dwight D. Eisenhower took office in January 1953—and especially after Stalin’s successors launched a game-changing “economic offensive”— that the United States began to confront the Third World in a concerted way. 24 The Cold War Meets the Third World In the mid-1950s, the pace of decolonization picked up rapidly. The number of nation-states doubled between 1955 and 1965 as former colonies claimed their independence. As the focus of the Cold War shifted to the Third World, the conflict assumed a more multipolar character. While the Soviet Union and the United States ramped up their competition for influence in the developing world, the People’s Republic of China (PRC) started to challenge Soviet primacy in ways that would heighten superpower intervention in the global process of decolonization and impede efforts to establish peaceful coexistence between Moscow and Washington

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - PDF

  Barbarians and Civilization in International Relations

  • Mark B. Salter(Author)
  • 2002(Publication Date)
  • Pluto Press

    (Publisher)

  23 The Third World was described primarily as a site of the East–West conflict. Throughout the period of decolonization, postcolonial states were never treated autonomously within mainstream IR theory. They were seen as having moved from the control of European states to that of the US or the USSR. The stance of non-alignment presented an attempt at independent foreign policy, about which many Cold War theorists were sceptical. While realist scholars praised 118 Barbarians and Civilization in International Relations the bipolar nature of the Cold War for bringing ‘peace’ to the latter half of the twentieth century, Acharya argues that, in fact, the Cold War exacerbated a large number of Third World conflicts. 24 These postwar theorists represent an important core of mainstream IR theory in the 1950s and 1960s. The use of imperialism to describe any grab for power that upsets the international balance has the effect of removing European imperialism from special consideration. This elision of all imperialisms leads to a miscalculation of how postcolonial states will (inter)act in the post-independence system. THE HINTERLANDS OF WESTERN CIVILIZATION: DECOLONIZATION AND THE DISCIPLINE This section traces some of the discipline’s responses to decolonization through an evaluation of four important textbooks. Schuman’s International Politics (6th edition, 1958) and Schwarzenberger’s Power Politics (3rd edition, 1964) will be treated in some depth, while less extensive analyses will be made of Holsti’s International Politics and Organski’s World Politics . It will also look at some other important voices in the discipline at this time, notably Cecil Crabb and Ali Mazrui, who speak to these new states and International Relations. What is striking about these authors, despite later characterizations, 25 is that they do attempt to take decolonization seriously.

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - PDF

  The Age of Equality

  The Twentieth Century in Economic Perspective

  • Richard Pomfret(Author)
  • 2011(Publication Date)
  • Belknap Press

    (Publisher)

   Superimposed on the ideological confl ict between the First and Second Worlds were old-fashioned geopolitical struggles for spheres of influence.  When Cuban revolu-tionaries overthrew the government in 1959, this was a threat to U.S. hegemony in the Western Hemisphere, and when the USSR supplied missiles to the new regime it brought the world to the brink of war in 1962. Even after the crisis was resolved by Soviet missile withdrawal, the USSR continued to pour large amounts of financial aid into Cuba in order to ensure the success of the only communist regime in the Western Hemisphere. Starting with Ghana in 1957, a wave of decolonization swept sub- Saharan Africa, creating a new Cold War theater. The superpowers became involved in the frequent conflicts between competing domes-tic groups in arbitrarily constructed nations, leading to the most bitter civil wars when fueled by competition for control over natural resource revenues as in the attempted secessions of Katanga from Congo  or Biafra from Nigeria. Both superpowers, as well as ex-colonial powers such as Britain and France, were content to support autocratic rulers whose regimes were far from the ideals of either communism or liberal democracy, as long as they were on the right side when it came to votes at the UN, supply of raw materials, or other matters of importance to the major powers. Influential Third World leaders tried to dissociate themselves from the Cold War clash of systems and superpowers. India, Indonesia, and Yugoslavia led the nonaligned movement, but this was viewed with suspicion by the United States and the USSR, both of which tended to see countries as either their friends or their enemies.

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - PDF

  The Making of Global International Relations

  Origins and Evolution of IR at its Centenary

  • Amitav Acharya, Barry Buzan(Authors)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • Cambridge University Press

    (Publisher)

  112 112 5 The World after 1945: The Era of the Cold War and Decolonisation Introduction This chapter picks up the story of international history from where we left it in Chapter 3 at the end of the Second World War. We argued there that the Second World War produced many major changes in GIS both normative and material, enough to count as a transition from the version 1.0 Western-colonial GIS established during the nineteenth century, and continuing after the First World War, to version 1.1 Western-global GIS after 1945. We call it version 1.1, rather than 2.0, because although the changes were many and big, they were changes in the system/society rather than changes of it. International relations was still set up as a system of states, and many of its defining primary institutions remained in place. The next section summarises briefly the continuities and discontinu- ities from the pre-1945 GIS. The one following looks in more detail at the main themes of version 1.1 GIS during the period from 1945 to 1989: the era of the Cold War and decolonisation. Continuities and Discontinuities from the Pre-1945 World As argued in Chapter 3, there was a lot of continuity between the period before 1914 and the interwar years. The main discontinuity came from the First World War itself, with the scale of death, destruction and cost creating a great shock wave that amplified the defence dilemma to a suf- ficient extent to call into question the viability of great power war. By contrast, the Second World War generated several major changes to the material and ideational structure of GIS (Buzan and Lawson, 2014a). It also far outpaced the First World War in the scale of death, destruc- tion and cost, but added to this the spectre of nuclear weapons, which massively further amplified the fear of war, and made the possibility of humankind committing species suicide clearly apparent to all. While the

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - PDF

  Cataclysms

  A History of the Twentieth Century from Europe’s Edge

  • Dan Diner, William Templer, Joel Golb, William Templer, Joel Golb(Authors)
  • 2008(Publication Date)
  • University of Wisconsin Press

    (Publisher)

  Its results show that the Cold War was a powerful historical accel- erator. From being a cauldron of nationalism and war, Western Europe became a domain of international compromise and pros- perity. Such success was probably due to the Atlantic Revolution and its universal republican sponsor—the United States. Atlantic values and ways of life thus took possession of the Continental European polities, civilizing their institutions. Of these, the Fed- eral Republic of Germany was certainly the most profoundly al- tered. Simply by virtue of its division, Germany was denied the possibility of constituting itself as a nation. It found itself in the altogether providential situation of being exclusively a society. It was precisely this feature of the old Federal Republic that allowed the West German polity, more than any other in Europe, to inter- nalize the structural and institutional effects of the external neu- tralization process. Decolonization and the Cold War 249 • The great neutralizing of previous history through the agency of the Cold War was brought about by the language and orga- nizations of economics. It was much easier to regulate differences, enmities, and conflicts in an integrative process grounded in quan- tifying semantics and symbolism than in questions of grand poli- tics and national security, which involved fundamental principles and existential motives. In this manner, the European Economic Community, set up in Rome in 1957, provided a far more solid and durable foundation for Europe’s gradual unification than the admirable but abortive EDC. The neutralization of Europe’s differences probably took the only viable course: it emigrated from the center—from politics, which had been contaminated by the legacy of history—to the periphery, the realm of economics. There, for decades, it practiced that forgetting of diverse pasts that makes politics possible in the first place.

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - PDF

  The United States and Decolonization

  Power and Freedom

  • D. Ryan, V. Pungong, D. Ryan, V. Pungong(Authors)
  • 2000(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  However, the anti-colonialism of Roosevelt’s wartime administration continued to weaken and was to have little or no impact on American policy towards decolonization in Africa or elsewhere. Initially this was because of the strategic concerns of the US military, who opposed inter- 168 national controls over former colonial territories in the Pacific, where they required unfettered use of military bases. By the end of the 1940s the fears of a lack of markets had proved exaggerated and Cold War con- cerns had assumed overriding significance in dictating US attitudes to Africa and decolonization. In many respects African decolonization and US policy from this point on can be seen as adaptations to the require- ments of the Cold War. In order to understand the dilemmas produced by the Cold War, it is important to distinguish military requirements for hot war from the military and political requirements of the Cold War. The two were quite separate, with the political struggle against left-wing movements, par- ticularly those controlled or influenced by Moscow, always assuming precedence over the military threat of the Soviet Union. NATO’s alleged military importance or the strategic importance of Africa were never seen as overriding the battle for the hearts and minds of nations and peoples who were deemed likely to fall prey to the political tenets of communism. It was of course the case that America’s NATO partner had an enormous political significance, especially during the 1940s, when the Cold War was an essentially European concern. Yet by the time John F. Kennedy became president, the relative importance of Africa as a Cold War battleground had dramatically increased and the future stability of the continent was more and more in doubt. Essential to American perceptions of the anti-colonial struggle in Africa was the fear that communism would take over nationalist move- ments, particularly if legitimate demands for freedom were resisted.

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - PDF

  Western Civilization

  A Brief History, Volume II since 1500

  • Jackson Spielvogel(Author)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • Cengage Learning EMEA

    (Publisher)

  Chapter Outline and Focus Questions 28-1 Development of the Cold War Q Why were the United States and the Soviet Union suspicious of each other after World War II, and what events between 1945 and 1949 heightened the tensions between the two nations? How and why did the Cold War become a global affair after 1949? 28-2 Europe and the World: Decolonization Q Why and how did the European colonies in Africa, the Middle East, and Asia gain independence between 1945 and 1965? 28-3 Recovery and Renewal in Europe Q What were the main developments in the Soviet Union, eastern Europe, and western Europe between 1945 and 1965? 28-4 The United States and Canada: A New Era Q What were the main political developments in North America between 1945 and 1965? 28-5 Postwar Society and Culture in the Western World Q What major changes occurred in Western society and culture between 1945 and 1965? THE END OF WORLD WAR II IN EUROPE was met with great joy. One visitor to Moscow reported, “I looked out of the window [at 2 A.M.], almost everywhere there were lights in the window—people were staying awake. Everyone embraced everyone else, someone sobbed aloud.” But after the victory parades and celebrations, Europeans awoke to a devastating realization: their civilization was in ruins. Some wondered if Europe would ever regain its former prosperity and importance. Winston Churchill wrote, “What is Europe now? A rubble heap, a charnel house, a breeding ground of pestilence and hate.” There was ample reason for his pessimism. Forty million people (both soldiers and civilians) had been killed during the last six years. Massive air raids and artillery bombardments had reduced many of the great cities of Europe to heaps of rubble. An American general described Berlin: “Wherever we looked we saw desolation. It was like a city of the dead. Suffering and shock were visible in every face.

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - PDF

  American Visions of the Netherlands East Indies/Indonesia

  US Foreign Policy and Indonesian Nationalism 1920-1949

  • Frances Gouda, Thijs Brocades Zaalberg(Authors)
  • 2002(Publication Date)
  • Amsterdam University Press

    (Publisher)

  CHAPTER SEVEN The Emerging Cold War and American Perspectives on Decolonization in Southeast Asia in the Postwar Era On December 1, 1945, the US ambassador in The Hague, China specialist Stan-ley K.Hornbeck,sent a confidential telegram addressed to President Truman and the US Secretary of State,James Byrnes.In his lengthy cable,Hornbeck speculat-ed about the ways in which developments in the Netherlands East Indies might negatively affect America’s interests. He thought that if Dutch political influence in the region were to become even more “tenuous” or vanish altogether, and if there was not an “adequately compensating substitution” of either British or American political power,then a political vacuum might very well emerge.Such a void, in turn, could easily invite an influx of political forces from a variety of “other quarters.” Hornbeck predicted that these new political incursions would emanate from an Eastern rather than a Western corner of the world – he men-tioned the possibility of both China and Japan, in this context – but it was far from inconceivable,he added, that there might also be a “Soviet contribution.” 1 Hornbeck proceeded to paint a gloomy picture of a bifurcated world commu-nity in the near future.

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - PDF

  International Development

  A Postwar History

  • Corinna R. Unger(Author)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • Bloomsbury Academic

    (Publisher)

  Against this background, politicians were eager to use all instruments at their disposal to maintain at least some control over the increasingly complicated international situation. It was in this context that foreign assistance gained immense popularity as a highly flexible tool to influence the development process of so-called Third World countries. Yet as much as the use of aid was associated with the political opportunities and crises of the time, we should not forget that foreign assistance was more than a political tool employed by former imperial powers, new superpowers, or small nations. Foreign aid had evolved as an approach to address global and regional inequalities out of the global situation produced by the Second World War and the new international structures emerging from it. What representatives from the industrial countries understood as the complexities of decolonization and the Cold War in the early 1960s had not existed as such in the late 1940s. Similarly, Western European governments looked at development assistance much more as a tool to maintain influence in former colonial regions or to promote business interests than as a Cold War tool the way the Soviet Union and the United States did. Development aid DECOLONIZATION AND THE COLD WAR 101 effectively contributed to the internationalization of politics. As multilateral assistance gained in scope, international organizations claimed an increasingly influential position in global governance issues, and the foreign policy interests of different nation states became increasingly entangled and institutionalized in new bodies like the Development Assistance Committee and the multilateral development consortia. From the point of view of the so-called developing countries, the growing popularity of development aid in the international arena presented opportunities as well as dangers.

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book