Decolonization

I

Introduction

Decolonization, process whereby the non-self-governing territories (including colonies, protectorates, and condominiums) of Western imperial powers gained independence. The term’s usage is normally confined to the post-1945 period, when the British Empire, French Empire, Dutch Empire, Spanish Empire, Portuguese Empire and others either voluntarily granted independence to their former subject dominions or yielded to national liberation movements. (The forcible eviction of the colonial power by another outside power, as with Germany after 1918 or the end of Japanese control over Korea in 1945, is not usually classed as decolonization.) The administrative and judicial elements of this process were linked to the 20th-century decline in the ability of the European nation states to project economic and military power on a global basis.

II

General Causes and Characteristics

Three interconnected factors produced large-scale decolonization in the years after 1945. Opposition developed within the non-self-governing territories to the continuation of colonial rule. Some colonial powers introduced political and constitutional changes that aimed eventually to transfer power. Also power-political changes in the international system, linked especially to World War II and the developing Cold War, compelled disengagement from the colonies.

Organized opposition to colonial rule, often referred to as nationalist movements, emerged at different times and took different forms. Initially, political pressure for self-government or independence came from elite groups, but in India, the Indian National Congress had become a mass movement challenging British rule by 1918. In Africa, conversely, no anti-colonial party capable of appealing to broad sections of the population emerged until after World War II. The origins of such movements often lay in the social and economic changes taking place within the colonial territories, and in the desire to replace traditional sources of authority, who had often benefited from collaboration with colonial rulers.

Early political organizations demanding greater self-government and/or independence were given a boost by World War II. A war fought for freedom was interpreted by many educated Asians and Africans as a war that would lead to independence from colonial rule. In Asia, the Japanese conquest of the British, French, and Dutch territories destroyed the old myth of the invincibility and superiority of the white man. Many colonial subjects enlisted in the armies fighting against the evils of fascism and the racist ideas of National Socialism. They often served far from their native towns and villages and were exposed to new ideas and experiences, including Western ideas of freedom and democracy.

As colonialism was challenged, colonial rulers attempted to justify their roles. From the late 1930s in the United Kingdom, officials saw themselves as having a more active role in preparing peoples at less “advanced” stages of development for self-government. This process was seen as encouraging a Western democratic system and laying the foundations for the social and economic progress that had already taken place in Europe and North America. After World War II, and however exploitative European enterprises may have been, both France and Britain spent metropolitan taxpayers’ money to encourage social and economic development in their overseas territories, and to change the nature of colonial rule.

In the post-1945 period, the new international order also influenced the decolonization process. The weakening of all the Western powers apart from the United States also made it more difficult for colonialism to be maintained by force. By and large, those powers who tried to defeat anti-colonial movements by military means had only limited success. Their efforts were usually justified in terms of the Cold War and the overall Western interest in containing the Communist threat. Yet, while the Cold War could be a reason for maintaining colonial rule, from the mid-1950s it could also be a reason for ending it. The creation of independent states with pro-Western leaders was an important Cold War goal. It could mean a speeding up of the transfer of power in order to prevent more radical groups from gaining influence. In economic terms, new patterns of international trade emerged in the 1940s and 1950s that were based more on trade between the developed nations and less on the exchange of manufactured goods for produce and raw materials. While this was not necessarily a reason for decolonizing, it certainly provided no incentive to oppose it.

III

British Decolonization

As World War II approached, Britain had already granted independence to the white dominions of Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa. This experience made it acceptable for the Colonial Secretary, Malcolm MacDonald, to state in December 1938 that Britain’s ultimate aim was to bring its colonies to self-government.

By then, India, the largest and most-prized British possession, had already moved significantly towards this with the Government of India Act of 1935. The act transferred power at the provincial, as opposed to the national, level to elected Indian bodies. World War II, and the need for Indian support against the Japanese in the face of groups like the Indian National Army which were actually prepared to fight with Japan against British rule, led the wartime coalition government to promise India dominion status as soon as possible once the war ended. That this was granted as early as August 1947 was due essentially to the situation in India and to the determined efforts of the British prime minister Clement Attlee to proceed rapidly with the transfer of power. In India, not only was opposition to British rule significant, but the prospect of receiving political power heightened the divisions between the Hindu and Muslim communities in the subcontinent. In 1946 serious communal violence erupted, which added to Britain’s problems. The economic and political costs of continuing to govern India were too high for most Labour Party politicians to contemplate. The natural tendency of many Conservatives to cling to the imperial status of earlier years was also muted in the immediate post-1945 period, and British decolonization, although sometimes arousing opposition at home, never created the same kind of bitter divisions as occurred in France.

With India independent (and partitioned) in 1947, Burma (now Myanmar) and Sri Lanka quickly followed suit in 1948, despite the different nature of the political groupings in those two countries that could claim to have popular support. The more radical Burmese groupings who gained power from the British were not, however, seen to be as threatening as the Communist Chinese in Malaya who instigated the Malayan Emergency in 1948. In Malaya the fear of Communism was accompanied by the hope that more moderate political leaders could be encouraged to collaborate with Britain during and after the transfer of power, which was completed in 1957. As under colonial rule, collaborators were an essential part of decolonization, and closely involved throughout the empire in the establishment of elected legislative bodies that were intended to be precursors of Westminster-style parliaments.

The transfer of power in British Africa occurred somewhat later than in Asia, with Sudan leading the way in 1956, and Ghana, the first black African colony to attain independence, following in 1957. Initially, in the aftermath of World War II, the British expected that it would be several generations before their African colonies gained independence. They were forced to move much quicker than anticipated in order to try to keep control of the process. In this they were not entirely successful, but the transfer of power was much smoother in West Africa than in East and Central Africa. In the Central African Federation (formed in 1953 from Nyasaland and Northern and Southern Rhodesia, and broken up in 1963) and Kenya, the presence of white settlers led the British to try in vain initially to establish a representative system of government based on the concept of multiracialism, rather than straightforward African majority rule. Fighting rebels in Kenya from 1952, the British nevertheless abandoned multiracialism and moved rapidly to transfer power in Africa in the early 1960s. Fear of multiracial conflict, growing opposition to colonialism, the radicalization of African politics, and the economic and political importance of Europe (Britain applied to join the European Economic Community in 1961) contributed to an extremely rapid decolonization. Nigeria led the way in 1960, followed by Sierra Leone (1961), Tanganyika (now Tanzania, 1961), Uganda (1962), Zanzibar (1963), Kenya (1963), Nyasaland (now Malawi, 1964), Northern Rhodesia (now Zambia, 1963), and The Gambia (1965). The newly independent African states were not prepared as originally envisaged, and decolonization left them with many problems.

IV

French Decolonization

The nature of French colonial rule influenced the process of transferring power. In the 20th century the French had no tradition of preparing their dependencies for self-government. The French preferred to aim at the assimilation of individual colonial subjects into the French Republic by according them the same legal and political status as the citizens of metropolitan France.

After World War II the new constitution of the Fourth Republic created the French Union. Overseas territories would be part of a single indivisible republic, freely consented to, and citizens of the Union would receive greater representation in the French National Assembly in Paris; local assemblies in the colonies would only be advisory bodies. Qualifications for French citizenship were, however, subject to controls and the number of representatives from overseas France was strictly limited. The first challenge to the French Union came in 1946 in Indochina, where Vietnamese nationalists led by the Communist Ho Chi Minh seized power in the north of Vietnam. After a long and bloody war to incorporate the territories of Indochina into the French Union, the French were defeated in 1954.

France was then immediately involved in another large-scale conflict, the Algerian War of Independence. Algeria was an emotive issue for many of the French as it had been regarded as part of France in the same way as metropolitan departments. It had a large settler population, who were determined to remain part of France. As the conflict became more intense, with the use of torture on both sides, the first stage of French decolonization of black Africa took place in 1956. The passing of the loi cadre, an enabling law to permit constitutional change, led to the first moves towards self-government, with the establishing of territorial assemblies with real power. This abandonment of the centralization entailed in the French Union stemmed from the growing African realization that real power could not be obtained in Paris but only in the territorial capitals.

Pressures for change from within Africa were accompanied by the growing belief in France that the French Union could not be maintained without arousing international opposition. These changes in black Africa led in 1958 to the creation of the French Community, the replacement for the French Union under the Fifth Republic. The French Community invested control of defence and foreign policy in France, but gave internal self-government to its other members. All black African territories were offered membership or independence, but any territory choosing the latter would forfeit French assistance. Only Guinea chose independence.

The establishment of the Fifth Republic followed a military coup d’état in Algeria which, with the prospect of an army takeover in Paris, led to the constitutional transfer of power to General Charles de Gaulle. It took de Gaulle nearly four years to bring the fighting in Algeria to an end with the Evian Accords in 1962 that promised Algeria independence. By then the survival of an independent Guinea had led to demands from other black African states for independence outside the French Community. With de Gaulle keen to strengthen France’s role in Europe and the modernization of French industry under way, the economic and political attractions of formal empire were no longer so strong. All French black African possessions became independent in 1960, though the Franc Zone maintained a measure of economic control.