Clive
Ponting – Decolonisation
Pimlico History of the 20th Century
DESPITE
THE belief expressed during the Second World War by the
colonial powers that the subject peoples of the empires
were totally unsuited to self-government, within twenty
years the colonial empires had effectively ceased to
exist. Why did this happen? Harold Macmillan, the prime
minister who presided over the rapid end of the British
Empire, wrote in his memoirs that the British people:
had
not lost the will or even the power to rule. But they
did not conceive of themselves as having the right to
govern in perpetuity. It was rather a duty to spread to
other nations those advantages which through the course
of centuries they had won for themselves.
This
attempt to describe a complex process as an act of
magnanimity by states who had only ever had in their
hearts the best interests of the people they ruled does
not bear even the most cursory scrutiny. The process was
less one of magnanimity, still less one where
large-scale revolt against foreign rule was the norm; it
was more a matter of redefining the links between the
core and the periphery. The core states found they were
able to retain their influence over the periphery by
methods other than direct political control, which had
lost much of its utility in the changed circumstances
after the Second World War.
Turkey
The end
of the colonial empires was part of the wider process of
declining European influence in the world in the
twentieth century. Early signs of this changing balance
were visible in the first thirty years or so of the
century in three states - Turkey, Iran and China. In
1900 all these states had seemed likely to fall under
European political control. However, they were gradually
able to ensure their formal independence, limit foreign
influence and begin the long process of building new
economies and societies. For more than two centuries the
Ottoman Empire had been the 'sick man of Europe'. Yet in
the early twentieth century it was, after Japan, the
second state to begin a process of 'modernization'
without direct Western intervention. The Young Turk
movement was founded in 1889 by an Albanian, Ibrahim
Temo. In 1908, acting through the Committee of Union and
Progress, the Young Turks staged a military coup and
forced the sultan to restore the relatively liberal 1876
constitution. Elections were held in late 1908 under the
control of local elites, but the power of the committee
depended on the army, especially the Third Army under
Enver Pasha and Mustafa Kemal. Defeat in the Balkan wars
and then entry into the First World War on the side of
the Central Powers limited the reforms, but the basis
had been laid for Mustafa Kemal, when he took power in
1923, to begin the process of 'Westernization' and
modernization within the new state of Turkey.
Iran
Under
the weak Qajar dynasty (a minority Turkman tribe which
had ruled since 1796), Iran seemed on the point of being
divided between the British and the Russians in the
early twentieth century. An elitist revolution which
created the first national assembly (the Majlis) in 1906
was countered a year later by an Anglo-Russian agreement
which created 'spheres of influence’, with the British
predominant in the south where the oilfields were
located. After the 1917 Revolution in Russia the British
took effective control of most of the country and,
although their troops were withdrawn in 1921, they
continued to dominate Iranian finances. In 1926 a new
ruler, Reza Khan, seized power and founded his own
dynasty. Nominally a nationalist whose aims were similar
to the Turkish nationalists', he found it difficult to
make any significant steps towards modernization. His
attempt to end the British oil concession in 1933 only
led to the imposition of a worse deal for the Iranians.
However, Iran survived as an independent state and
remained so despite occupation by British and Soviet
forces in 1941 and the imposition of Reza Khan's son as
the new Shah.
China
The
Boxer revolt in China in 1900 had already demonstrated
the strength of Chinese nationalism. Imposition of harsh
terms by the western powers after the occupation of
Peking only increased such feelings. After 1900 the
imperial government began its own programme of change,
designed to strengthen the state, which it hoped would
be along the lines of the successful Japanese reform
after the Meiji restoration. The education system was
remoulded along Japanese lines and over 100,000 modern
schools were opened by 1909. The old imperial army was
disbanded and new units were formed, organized along
western lines. New ministries of trade, police,
education, war and foreign affairs were established. The
first cautious steps were taken towards a parliamentary
system with the establishment of provincial assemblies
in 1909 (on a very restricted franchise) and a national
consultative assembly (but not a parliament) the next
year. Although these essentially conservative reforms
were not sufficient to win over the more revolutionary
groups, they went too far for the ultra-conservative
groups in the imperial court and government where the
child emperor Pu-yi was under the control of a
reactionary regent.
Growing
Chinese nationalism expressed itself in both
anti-Manchu-dynasty and anti-foreign sentiments through
the creation of numerous secret societies. Many of the
revolutionary leaders such as Sun Yat-sen were in exile
and therefore not influential However, the United
League, formed in 1905 by a fusion of the Revive China
Society, the China Revival Society and the Restoration
Society, did accept Sun Yat-sen's three principles of
nationalism, democracy and socialism. In practice these
principles were limited to being opposed to the Manchu
dynasty, advocating a representative government with
separation of powers and a land tax. Overall, there was
a highly optimistic belief that this limited programme
would bring about 'progress3, but it ignored the three
major problems facing China -peasant discontent (there
were over 280 peasant risings in 1910 alone), hostility
to existing political and social structures and huge
external pressures.
The
spark that brought down the imperial government was,
surprisingly, the decision to nationalize the railways
in May 1911. This alienated the local gentry who owned
the railways. Financing the programme with a £6 million
foreign loan alienated the nationalists. During the
second half of 1911 three disparate movements came
together: the gentry in the 'Railway Protection League',
peasant uprisings and army mutinies. In November the
Manchu dynasty was removed and once the revolutionaries
had accepted all treaties and loans made by the imperial
government, the Western powers reluctantly allowed them
to take power. Sun Yat-sen was in Denver when the revolt
began, but he quickly returned and was elected president
of the new republic on 1 January 1912, which became Year
1 of the new calendar.
The
main problem facing the new government, given its
dreadful inheritance, was whether it could organize and
unify China and begin the process of renewal. The high
level of foreign influence was combined with difficulty
in raising new loans from the west. Even when loans were
obtained, more Chinese assets had to be handed over as
collateral. Sun Yat-sen proved incapable of strong
leadership and resigned within six weeks, to be replaced
by a very weak parliamentary system (in which most MPs
belonged to more than one party). This was itself
replaced in late 1913 by a military dictatorship under
Yuan Shi-kai, who was supported by the consortium of
foreign banks which provided the loans necessary for the
administration to function. Britain and Russia refused
to recognize the new government until it had, in its
turn, recognized the autonomy of Tibet and Outer
Mongolia. On the outbreak of the First World War Japan
invaded and took over the German concessions in China.
In January 1915 it presented the 'Twenty-One Demands'
which would have turned China into a Japanese dependency
with Japanese 'advisers' in all the key posts and with
only Japan allowed to supply China with arms. The
Chinese government accepted despite popular opposition,
but the demands were opposed by the western powers,
especially the United States, whose own interests would
be affected. Between 1916 and 1919 a central state in
China existed in name only after the death of Yuan Shi-kai
and the emergence of regional military rulers.
A major
turning point came on 4 May 1919 when news of the Treaty
of Versailles reached China. Although China had declared
war on Germany in August 1917 and sent over 200,000
coolies to Europe to assist the Allies, the treaty
confirmed that the German concessions would not be
restored to China, but instead they would be given to
Japan. Student demonstrations and strikes by workers
across the country were a massive patriotic protest
against both the government, which was prepared to
accept the western demands, and the Japanese. It was a
spontaneous series of protests led by a new generation
of leaders (many of the key figures in the Communist
Party such as Mao Tse-tung and Chou En-lai began their
political careers in this way) and another example of
the strong current of Chinese nationalism. China,
despite the 1911 Revolution, had been unable to produce
the strong reforming government found in Turkey, but it
had survived as a political entity less through its own
strength than because of the divisions among the western
powers, who could only agree that a weak Chinese
government was better than a rival power taking control
of the country.
The
Fourth of May movement was only one aspect of growing
anti-western sentiment in the periphery, a belief that
indigenous cultures and values were important and that
national reassertion against the imperial powers could,
and should, be undertaken. In 1921 in his novel Batouala
the West Indian writer Rene Maran wrote of 'Civilization
- the Europeans' pride and their charnel house of
innocents', a view also expressed by the Indian poet
Rabindranath Tagore in his accusation, 'You build your
kingdom on corpses.' In February 1927 the first meeting
of the International Congress of the League against
Imperialism and Colonial Oppression in Brussels
declared:
The
development of the African people was abruptly cut short
and their civilization was most completely destroyed.
These nations were later declared pagan and savage, an
inferior race, destined by the Christian God to be
slaves to superior Europeans.
Five
years later Emile Faure, writing in Race negre argued:
Because for centuries a few vicious rakes and whores
succeeded in having palaces built for themselves at
Versailles, and temples elsewhere, they're called 'civilised'
. . . Peasant people, unambitious and hardworking, who
till the land, tend their herds and venerate their
ancestors, are despoiled and decimated by nations as
industrious as they are inhuman.
India
Political movements were beginning to emerge across the
periphery dedicated to achieving independence. One of
the first was the Indian National Congress founded in
1885, which by 1906 had adopted the aim of swaraj or
'home rule'. In neighbouring Burma and Ceylon there were
also nationalist movements, in the former under the
guidance of U Ottoma, leader of the General Council of
Buddhist Associations. In the 1900s a nationalist
movement, Sarekat Islam, was founded in the Dutch East
Indies. In 1919 a delegation seeking independence for
the Philippines was sent to the United States.
In
general the imperial governments were able to keep these
movements under control until the outbreak of the Second
World War. The only exceptions were in Egypt and India,
where the British faced major problems. Britain formally
declared Egypt a protectorate in 1914 although they had
occupied the country since 1882, ruling through a weak
king. Nationalist agitation increased in 1919 when the
British initially refused to allow Egypt its own
representation at the Versailles conference. In order to
contain nationalism and retain effective control, the
British recognized Egypt as formally independent in
1922, but subject to conditions giving the British all
the essential powers over military and foreign policy
that they thought they needed. The main nationalist
party -the Wafd - was a party of conservative, elite
landowners unwilling to risk any widespread nationalist
agitation that might undermine their social position. In
1936 after the first moderately free elections the Wafd
formed a government and the British negotiated a new
treaty. This restricted British troops to a zone along
the Suez Canal in peacetime, agreed a final withdrawal
in 1956, but allowed the British to re-occupy the
country in the event of war. The British retained
effective control and found nominal Egyptian
independence no hindrance to their military operations
during the Second World War.
The
situation in India was much more complex. At one level
(and in conformity with Harold Macmillan's argument) it
might seem that the British made a series of reforms and
declarations, in 1908, 1917, 1919, 1929 and 1935, which
were all designed to move India progressively along the
road to independence as Indian capability for
self-government increased steadily. In practice the
situation was much more complex. The British needed to
find a group of collaborators to help run India. The
princes provided this in their states, but in British
India a different solution was required. A permanent
British policy was to divide India into as many
different communities and political units as possible so
as to make it more difficult for a single movement
dedicated to removing the British to emerge. When the
Congress Party became stronger after 1919, the British
tried to limit its influence as far as possible.
In 1908
the Morley-Minto reforms set up local councils in
British India, elected on very restricted franchises to
provide both a group of Indians prepared to work with
the British and a vast patchwork of centres of power. In
1917 the British committed themselves to the
'progressive realization of responsible government', but
the phrase was so ambiguous it could mean almost
anything. In 1919 the Government of India Act (the
so-called Montagu-Chelmsford reforms) continued the
process started in 1908, of decentralizing power and
widening the group of local collaborators with the
British. Eight uniform provinces were created in British
India with limited local administration of those
policies which were unimportant to the British —
health, education, public works, agriculture and
industry - with all other powers being retained by the
governor. In New Delhi a powerless parliament was
created with a majority of elected members (fewer than 7
million people were allowed to vote). The viceroy
retained control of finance and could promulgate
legislation regardless of the wishes of the legislature.
Congress refused to co-operate with the reforms and a
campaign of nonco-operation and civil disobedience under
Gandhi was suppressed by the British. Between 1920 and
1939 the British were able to keep control of Indian
resistance and the various campaigns run by Gandhi.
These campaigns were acceptable to the socially
conservative groups which supported Congress in that
they were strongly anti-British and helped to divert any
enthusiasm the peasants might have for land reform or
economic change.
In 1929
the British committed themselves to eventual dominion
status for India, but the timescale remained carefully
undefined, as did the internal governmental
arrangements. The British were still determined to avoid
the emergence of a united India under Congress control
and the Government of India Act 1935 was designed to
ensure that the British aims were achieved. Control of
the provinces' mundane affairs no longer seemed very
important for the British and they did not recruit civil
servants for this role after 1924. Under the 1935 scheme
each province in British India was to have an autonomous
Indian government, although the British governor
retained the right to declare a state of emergency and
rule by decree. The electorate was small (about 10 per
cent of the adult population) and the distribution of
seats far from democratic - in Bengal, for example, a
few thousand Europeans controlled twenty-five seats and
17 million non-Muslim Indians controlled fifty seats.
These separate racial and religious electorates (a
separate Muslim electorate had been conceded as early as
1906) were part of the aim of fragmenting India as much
as possible. New provinces such as Sind and North-West
Frontier were created to provide areas with a Muslim
majority. The viceroy in Delhi retained full control of
all imperial matters, but his Executive Council was
carefully constructed to reflect the divisions the
British wished to emphasize in India. It was composed of
representatives not just from the major communities but
also from both artificial and minute social categories -
caste Hindu, Muslim, scheduled castes, Sikhs, Europeans,
Christians, Parsees, landlords and businessmen. The 562
princely states were excluded from all these
arrangements. A federation comprising all of India
(Burma became a separate colony) - the eleven provinces,
the small group of territories controlled directly by
Delhi and the princely states -was in theory possible
but in practice highly unlikely because the princes had
a veto. The Congress leadership wanted to refuse to
co-operate with such a deliberately divisive scheme, but
local Congress politicians, attracted by the possibility
of power in the provinces, forced them to change their
minds. The British were pleased that Congress had been
forced to collaborate with a scheme which ensured they
could never control a unified India, but worried that
Congress controlled all the provinces except Punjab and
Bengal when the new system began operating in 1937.
However, the new arrangements only survived for two
years before they collapsed at the outbreak of the
Second World War. In September 1939 the Viceroy declared
war without consulting any Indian politicians. This gave
Congress the excuse it needed to withdraw from the
British system by resigning from all its provincial
governments, leaving the governors to declare a state of
emergency and rule by decree. Congress could return to
the more congenial politics of opposing British rule.
The
Far East
The
crisis of imperial rule in the Far East came in 1940-2.
In the summer of 1940 the French and Dutch colonies were
left highly vulnerable following defeat by Germany in
Europe and Japan took over the northern part of
Indo-China. The most decisive event came with the
Japanese attack in December 1941, which led to their
occupation of the Philippines, Hong Kong, Malaya,
Singapore, the Dutch East Indies, Indo-China and Burma.
The carefully maintained facade of western superiority,
which was so vital for colonial governments because of
their military and administrative weakness, was
destroyed in a few months by an oriental power. It was a
blow to their prestige from which the imperial powers
were never to recover. In the major colonies - India,
Burma, Ceylon, Indo-China, the Dutch East Indies and the
Philippines - it proved impossible to restore effective
imperial rule after 1945.
In
1942, with Japanese troops on the borders of India, the
British tried to come to terms with Congress. The
negotiations failed because many in the British
government, especially Churchill, did not want the talks
to succeed and Congress was reluctant to take over
responsibility in the middle of a disastrous war.
Congress then shifted to a policy of 'Quit India' and
civil disobedience. The British were able to use force
to keep control and arrested the leaders of Congress.
However, by 1943 over a hundred battalions were being
used on internal security duties rather than fighting
the Japanese.
The
British believed they could continue to control events
and keep Congress from power at a national level. For
many it was still a racial problem. Leo Amery, the
Secretary of State for India during the war, wrote to
the viceroy:
If
India is to be really capable of holding its own in
future without direct British control from outside I am
not sure that it will not need an increasing infusion of
stronger Nordic blood, whether by settlement or
intermarriage or otherwise. Possibly it has been a real
mistake of ours in the past not to encourage Indian
princes to marry English wives ... and so breed a more
virile type of native ruler.
In
other colonies, in particular, Burma, the Philippines
and the Dutch East Indies, local nationalist politicians
were happy to work with the Japanese and they gradually
established positions from which it would be difficult
to dislodge them when the colonial powers took back
control at the end of the war. This problem was made
worse by the fact that no colony was fully reoccupied
before the Japanese surrender in August 1945 and the
resulting hiatus in power before colonial rule could be
re-established further strengthened the position of the
nationalists.
Ten
years after the war imperial rule in the Far East was
essentially over; only a few relatively unimportant
colonies were not either independent or clearly on the
road to independence. In the Philippines the United
States transferred power to the local oligarchy, which
had long dominated the economy and society, and in
return a compliant government granted the Americans the
extensive military facilities which were all that they
really wanted. The British had much greater difficulty
in finding any basis on which they could hand over power
in India without massive loss of face. During the war
the Muslim League, which demanded a separate Muslim
state of Pakistan, continued to co-operate with the
British and was in a strong position by 1945. Congress
was deeply opposed to a partition of India and also
continued to oppose the British insistence on a weak
central government based on a federation including the
princely states. The British tried, in a number of
different negotiating rounds, to reach a settlement, but
by early 1947 it was clear that their rule was beginning
to break down. The only option left was to announce a
date for withdrawal (August 1947) and negotiate the best
deal possible. In the end the solution was one which
none of the parties wanted and one that met none of the
British aims. The Muslims gained an independent
Pakistan, but it was weak and geographically divided and
hundreds of thousands of Muslims died in the communal
riots that followed the partition of Bengal and the
Punjab. Congress took power over a unified but shrunken
India. The British had to accept the domination of
Congress, the princes were left in the lurch to get the
best deal they could from Congress and the Sikhs, the
supposedly loyal warrior group, were left without their
own province or separate state. Most importantly, from
Britain's point of view, India refused to play the role
allocated to it by the British of being a bulwark of
British power and defence policy in south-east Asia.
In
Burma all attempts to slow down progress towards
independence failed and the British were forced to deal
with the man who had co-operated with the Japanese, Aung
San, in order to maintain some vestiges of control. The
Burmese nationalists insisted on becoming a republic on
independence and rejected any defence arrangements with
Britain. In the end the British had no power to impose a
different solution and Burma became independent in
January 1948. The only area where the British faced few
problems was in Ceylon, where they were able to hand
power over to conservative Sinhalese landowners and
obtain the military bases they regarded as essential. In
Indonesia the Dutch attempted to restore colonial rule
in the last months of 1945, even though the nationalists
under Sukarno had already declared independence in the
immediate aftermath of the Japanese surrender. There was
bitter fighting as the Dutch tried to gain control of
Java, while they also tried to impose a federation in
which the outlying islands, still under Dutch influence,
would provide a counterbalance to nationalist-controlled
Java. Once Sukarno had suppressed the Communists the
Americans pressurized the Dutch into a settlement and in
August 1949 a solution which sketched the outlines of a
Dutch-Indonesian union provided enough of a fig-leaf for
the Dutch to withdraw, leaving behind a unified
Indonesia.
Indo-China
The
colonies which provided the greatest problems in the
decade after the end of the war were in Indo-China. In
the months of chaos following the Japanese surrender the
Vietminh nationalists under the Communist Ho Chi Minh
(who had been backed by the Americans during the war)
were able to gain control in the north around Hanoi. The
French, with British assistance, controlled the south,
in particular Saigon. During 1946 the French tried to
negotiate a new form of colonialism based on a federated
Indo-China consisting of a French-controlled southern
Vietnam, monarchical Laos and Cambodia and Vietminh
control of the north. At the end of the year the French
decided to pressurize the Vietminh into a quick
agreement by bombarding Haiphong. They occupied Hanoi in
February 1947- The result was a growing guerrilla war
and Vietminh control of much of the north. By
emphasizing the anti-Communist rather than the colonial
nature of the war, the French gained increasing American
support. However, they were unable to control the
guerrillas and by 1954 they were also facing regular
units of the Vietminh army. An attempt to fight a large
conventional battle at Dien Bien Phu was a disaster and
led to the surrender of the French army in early May
1954. At this stage the great powers intervened to
divide Indo-China at the July 1954 Geneva conference.
Laos and Cambodia became independent and Vietnam was
split along the old wartime boundary of allied spheres
of interest — the seventeenth parallel. Both sides
promised to hold 'free elections3 in 1956 to produce a
unified Vietnam, but nobody really believed this was
likely. The United States took over the French role of
trying to build a coalition in South Vietnam that could
govern the country whilst the north was controlled by
the Communist Vietminh, who never accepted the division
of their country.
Although in the immediate post-war period nearly all the
colonial empires in the Far East collapsed, this was not
seen by the imperial powers as signalling the end of
empire worldwide. The British and French, in particular,
regarded possession of empire as a way of maintaining
their role in world politics and asserting their claim
to be substantial powers in an age dominated by the
United States and the Soviet Union. They began, almost
for the first time, programmes of economic development
within their empires, especially in Africa. The British
aimed to extract cheap minerals and food from within a
monetary area they controlled at a time when they were
very short of dollars. The French started constructing
mines and deep-water ports, as, to a more limited
extent, did the Belgians in the Congo.
Britain
was determined to hold on to its empire by force if
necessary and to create new structures to maintain
imperial control. In Malaya, after the failure of the
scheme to produce a unified colony out of the old
federation, the British found themselves by the late
1940s involved in a war against the Chinese community
and the Communists. The British allied with the Malays
against the Chinese and Indian communities in a vicious
guerrilla war involving the forced resettlement of
almost a quarter of the Chinese people in Malaya.
Britain fought in Malaya because it provided tin and
rubber which could be sold to the United States for
dollars and to retain Singapore as a military base. By
early 1954 the British had secured control of most of
the colony in collaboration with the Malays, who were
happy to see the Chinese community kept in a subordinate
position. In Africa the British were also trying to
create a new dominion - the Central African Federation -
from the colonies of Nyasaland and Northern and Southern
Rhodesia. The aim was to prepare the federation, which
would be run by the local white settlers, for
independence by the early 1960s.
In 1954
the British government carried out a review of the
future of its empire. The cabinet greatly resented the
fact that since 1947 a number of non-white countries had
achieved independence and entered the Commonwealth:
The
admission of three Asiatic countries to Commonwealth
membership had altered the character of the Commonwealth
... [and it] would be further diluted if full membership
had to be conceded to the Gold Coast and other countries
... It was unfortunate that the policy of assisting
dependent peoples to attain self-government had been
carried forward so fast and so far.
The
review concluded that colonies such as Cyprus, Malta,
Aden and Somaliland were never to be granted
independence; they were too important as military bases
on which Britain's continuation as a world power
depended. By the mid-1970s it was thought that only a
handful of colonies would be independent states: the
white-run Central African Federation, Malaya, a
federation of the West Indian islands and Nigeria and
the Gold Coast in Africa. The French too felt that
despite events in Indo-China they would be able to hold
on to the rest of their empire. As Rene Pleven, colonial
minister, put it: The African peoples want no other
liberty than that of France.' Similarly, the Belgian and
Portuguese governments were still determined to maintain
their empires.
During
the mid-1950s both the French and the British began new
and difficult military campaigns to hold on to parts of
their empires. On 1 November 1954 a revolt by the
National Liberation Front (FLN) in Algeria signalled the
start of what was to become the most vicious of all the
wars for colonial independence. The French government
under strong pressure from the determined and powerful
settler lobby (the pieds noirs) fought hard to defeat
the nationalists. Within a year nearly half a million
troops were in the colony. In early 1957 the tough
parachute troops under General Jacques Massu were let
loose on the capital, Algiers, in a brutal campaign of
reprisals, killings and torture, strongly supported by
the French public and the pieds noirs. By the end of the
year the French had regained control of the city. The
war brought about the fall of the Fourth Republic in
1958, when the government appeared to be willing to
negotiate with the FLN. This led to a general strike in
Algiers by the pieds noirs, an army takeover in Corsica
and the threat of a coup in France itself. General de
Gaulle took power, established the Fifth Republic and
backed continuing French rule over Algeria.
In the
summer of 1954 the British stated publicly that Cyprus
could never become independent. Their reasons were
essentially strategic - after finally agreeing to leave
the Canal Zone in Egypt they did not, for reasons of
prestige, want to make another withdrawal and they
intended that Cyprus should become their major base in
the Middle East. This meant opposing the demands of the
Greek community on the island under the leadership of
Archbishop Makarios for union with Greece, something
which was anathema to the minority Turkish population.
Guerrilla war began in April 1955 and a year later
Makarios was arrested and exiled in the Seychelles.
Wind
of Change
However, as these new military campaigns to sustain
empires were being launched, a reappraisal of imperial
policy began, which led to the almost total end of
empire within a decade. This was the result of a number
of factors. The humiliation of the failed Anglo-French
invasion of Egypt in the Suez crisis of 1956
demonstrated that neither was a world power capable of
acting on its own. This, combined with the emergence of
the European Economic Community with the signing of the
Treaty of Rome in 1957, produced a policy reappraisal,
particularly in France after de Gaulle's accession to
power. French interests seemed to be at stake in Europe,
especially in controlling the rising economic power of
West Germany. (The British arrived at the opposite
conclusion and tried to draw closer to the United
States.) Within the colonies it was also becoming clear
that, following decades of neglect, economic development
would be very expensive and it was unlikely that the
colonial power would see much benefit from the huge
investment required. The strategic situation had also
changed. The great imperial expansion of the late
nineteenth century had, to a large extent, resulted from
competitive pressures within Europe - the need to deny
territories to rival powers. After 1945 that was no
longer the case. There was no competition for colonial
possessions and any that became independent would not be
taken over by rivals. There was the possibility of an
expansion of Communist influence, but countering that
threat could be left to the Americans with their larger
resources. In this situation the economic rationale for
colonial possessions could be reassessed. The imperial
powers had always been concerned about their access to
certain raw materials, but it was possible to obtain
this without formal political control. The core powers
and transnational corporations dominated the world
economy and they were powerful enough to ensure that any
newly independent powers had little choice but to allow
continued access to the resources they controlled. The
imperial powers always relied on the collaboration of
certain groups within their colonies; independence would
therefore mean little more than handing over formal
political power to these groups while leaving the core
powers with access to the resources they required. In
this situation the task facing the imperial powers was
to select which groups would be allowed to take power in
the newly independent states. Once this process started,
with one state moving down the road of decolonization,
it was more difficult for others to resist and so the
process snowballed.
Gold
Coast - Ghana
The
first signs of this new approach can be traced back to
the immediate post-war period in the relatively stable
and prosperous Gold Coast colony. In 1946, as part of
the policy of economic development, the British decided
they needed a new group of collaborators to support the
changes. The old system of 'indirect rule' was
abandoned. Provincial legislatures, dominated by
conservatives, were established. They elected members to
the central Legislative Council, which had a majority of
Africans rather than British officials, although the
governor retained his absolute veto. This scheme might
have produced a new and larger collaborating group than
the rural chiefs who dominated under 'indirect rule',
but new leaders, in particular Kwame Nkrumah and his
Convention People's Party were able to gain the support
of the urban Africans. In February 1948 riots in the
capital Accra led to a breakdown in security and the
arrest of Nkrumah and other nationalist leaders. The
1951 elections, which the British expected the
conservative groups to win, instead saw the victory of
Nkrumah and the CPP, even though their support came
mainly from the coastal and urban elite. The British had
to release Nkrumah from jail and work with him. He was
happy to do this on condition that the CPP dominated and
the rural groups were excluded. Over the next six years
more functions were gradually transferred to the African
government, as both the British and Nkrumah wanted the
transition of power to be smooth. On 6 March 1957 the
Gold Coast became the first black African country to
become independent and changed its name to Ghana. The
transition was relatively straightforward: an African
group had emerged to take power, the country was of no
strategic importance to Britain, there were no white
settlers to complicate the process and the British
would, after independence, still be able to obtain what
they required.
The
political changes in the Gold Coast had an impact on
neighbouring French West Africa. Here, after 1945, the
French had been able to strike up an alliance with local
political groups and politicians who were interested in
bargaining with the French over patronage and positions
in the bureaucracy. Men like Felix Hophouet-Boigny in
the Ivory Coast did not represent mass political
movements and were no more than educated, elite
politicians interested in local power. In 1956 the
French offered them a deal similar to that in the Gold
Coast in the late 1940s -responsibility for local
affairs within the French empire - as a way of heading
off more radical demands and more radical politicians.
In 1958 de Gaulle, seeking to dominate a French
community in West Africa, offered a referendum. The
choice was between immediate independence with no French
help or membership of a federation with French aid and
control over foreign and defence policy, ultimately the
subjects that always interested the imperial powers. The
voting was rigged and all the French colonies except
Guinea under Sekou Toure voted in favour of federation.
Sekou Toure saw himself as another Nkrumah gaining the
prestige associated with independence, but the French
cut off all aid in retaliation. In practice the French
could not keep control of developments. The federation
of the remaining French colonies broke up in 1958 under
pressure from Houphouet-Boigny and two years later all
the French colonies in West and Equatorial Africa became
independent, partly because they did not wish to be seen
as lagging behind the ex-British colonies of Ghana and
Nigeria (which became independent in 1960). Nevertheless
the French retained a huge degree of influence over
their ex-colonies.
Algeria
General
de Gaulle faced a far more difficult situation in
Algeria, where he had to manoeuvre between the
nationalists, the settlers, their terrorist group the
OAS, and the army, some elements of which were prepared
to support the settlers. On taking power in 1958 he
seemed to symbolize the movement to keep Algeria French,
but almost immediately he began to search for new
solutions. In September 1959 he suggested three options,
none of which was the status quo or independence.
Algeria could secede from France without the Sahara,
which with its extensive oil and natural gas reserves
was also where the French conducted their nuclear tests.
Algeria could be fully assimilated into France, although
de Gaulle did not favour this option because he thought
too many Muslims and 'foreigners' would move across the
Mediterranean. Finally, there was the option de Gaulle
himself favoured, under which Algeria would have limited
self-determination but France would control foreign
affairs, defence and the economy. None of these options
was acceptable. The war against the nationalists
continued. The settlers barricaded part of Algiers in
January i960, but received no backing from the army, and
in April 1961 an attempted army coup failed, as did a
number of attempts by the OAS to kill de Gaulle.
Eventually de Gaulle agreed to negotiate with the
Algerian nationalists at the Evian conference, which
lasted for nearly a year before agreement was reached in
March 1962. The French gained hardly any of their
objectives. In particular they lost control of the
Sahara and hundreds of thousands of settlers left for
France. The most bitter of all the colonial struggles
ended after eight years of conflict with complete
victory for the Algerian nationalists.
The
Congo and consequences
French
policy, especially in West and Equatorial Africa,
increased pressure on other imperial powers to follow
suit. The Belgian Congo controlled a vast range of
important minerals and was a stable colony. For fifty
years the Belgian government had made no attempt to
promote local groups, other than a few chiefs with whom
they might collaborate. Then suddenly in January 1959
they announced that they intended to move towards
independence. As late as October 1959 the earliest date
envisaged was 1964. In mid-December the Belgians decided
on independence within a year and a conference with
local leaders in January i960 agreed on independence
within six months. Not surprisingly, there was a
political vacuum in the country as a few leaders
scrambled to create organizations which might be able to
govern the country and, more important, secure them
power. Politics fragmented along ethnic lines. The rapid
withdrawal of Belgian rule led to chaos and anarchy
within
weeks. The army mutinied against its European officers
in order to gain the pay and status it saw as one of the
benefits of independence. The premier, Patrice Lumumba,
was murdered and the mineral-rich province of Katanga
seceded under the leadership of Moishe Tshombe, who had
the backing of the Belgian settlers and the corporations
controlling the mining operations. It was another four
years before an elite group subservient to western
industrial interests gained power across the whole of
the country.
Events
in the Congo only increased the pressure on the
remaining colonial powers, especially the British, to
withdraw before they too were caught up in similar
disasters. The British had, in the late 1950s, given
independence to Malaya once the local elite agreed to
the continuation of the military base in Singapore and
to remain in the sterling area so that the British could
still benefit from the sale of tin and rubber on the
world market. They also agreed to grant independence to
the West Indian islands, as they were of no strategic
value (they had long been within the American sphere of
influence) and little economic benefit. The British felt
that they wanted to keep pace with the French and ensure
that there were a number of English-speaking African
states to balance the Francophone bloc. However, Britain
had no plans to end its empire in East Africa, where
they faced problems with the small group of white
settlers. In January 1959 a conference of governors,
Colonial Office officials and ministers suggested
independence could not be achieved before the mid-1970s
at the earliest. In April that year the colonial
secretary told parliament that he could not foresee a
date when Kenya could be independent. At the same time
it was still intended that the Central African
Federation should become independent under local white
settler rule. Such political developments as did take
place were designed to uphold the position of the tiny
number of white settlers. The ‘Mau-Mau' revolt among the
Kikuyu in Kenya was brutally suppressed and across East
Africa the aim was to develop so-called 'multi-racial
polities', which were, in practice, no more than a
fig-leaf for white 'leadership'. By the late 1950s the
Africans were allowed the same number of seats as the
whites in the Legislative Councils of both Kenya and
Tanganyika, but this was at a time when in the latter
colony there was one white for every four Asians and 430
Africans.
Accelerated decolonisation
The
events of 1960, with the mass of French colonies
becoming independent and the disaster in the Belgian
Congo, concentrated the minds of policy-makers in
London. The British, having neither the military
capability nor any over-riding economic reason to take
on massive internal security problems across Africa,
decided on a new, more ruthless policy. Colonies would
be forced to become independent and the white settlers
would be abandoned. Within four years all the colonies
in East Africa were independent and the Central African
Federation was dissolved, with Northern Rhodesia and
Nyasaland becoming independent but not the
white-settler-run Southern Rhodesia. As late as December
1959 the British refused to even consider universal
suffrage and responsible government for local affairs in
Uganda, yet in less than three years the colony was
independent. Tanganyika became independent in 1961,
Kenya and Zanzibar in 1963, Nyasaland (as Malawi) and
Northern Rhodesia (as Zambia) in 1964. Other smaller
colonies were pushed along the same road. Malta, which
had seemed so important for strategic reasons, was given
independence in return for the right to use the naval
base and other facilities for ten years. Cyprus became
independent, but Britain retained two substantial areas
on the island as its own sovereign territory to provide
military bases. Less strategically important colonies
followed: Gambia and the Maldives in 1965; Botswana,
Lesotho, Barbados and Guyana the next year; Mauritius
and Swaziland in 1968; and Fiji and Tonga in 1970. The
fastest scuttle of all came not in the Belgian Congo but
in British Somaliland. As late as February i960 the
colony still did not even have an elected majority in
the governor's Legislative Council. At this stage a
handful of local politicians demanded unification with
Italian Somaliland, which was due to become independent
in mid-1960. In May 1960 the independence conference in
London agreed to grant self-government on 26 June and
after five days of self-government a united, independent
Somalia came into existence. The British had moved from
colonial autocracy to independence in the space of just
four and a half months.
Elsewhere Spain divested itself of its small empire
relatively painlessly. It withdrew from its
protectorates in Morocco when the French granted
independence in 1956, Ifni was given back in 1969, but
the coastal towns of Ceuta and Melilla were retained.
The island of Fernando Po and the coastal area of Rio
Muni were united to form Equatorial Guinea, which became
independent at the end of 1968. The major problem was
the mineral-rich but largely uninhabited Spanish Sahara.
This was eventually split between Morocco and Mauritania
in 1976, although Algeria sponsored the Polisario Front
which claimed independence for the territory
Portugal resists
The one
European power not to follow the general trend of
decolonization was Portugal. At the very time that the
British, French and Belgian empires in Africa were
disintegrating, the Portuguese were making a major
effort to retain and develop their empire, despite the
loss of a few small enclaves such as Goa to India and
Ajuda to Dahomey. After i960 over 350,000 new white
settlers moved to Angola, but many of the old abuses, in
particular extensive forced labour, remained. The
problem the Portuguese faced was a growing revolt
against their rule from Guinea and the Cape Verde
islands to Angola and Mozambique. The successful
containment of these revolts until the mid-1970s was a
major burden - one in four adult Portuguese males was
serving in the armed forces. However, the empire was
maintained until a military coup in Lisbon in April 1974
unseated the right-wing dictatorship. The military
situation in Guinea was so bad that independence was
granted immediately and in Mozambique it was possible to
negotiate a deal with the FRELIMO rebels under Samora
Machel. Angola posed more difficult problems because of
the number of Portuguese settlers, the mineral resources
of the colony, the divisions along ideological grounds
between the nationalist forces and external
intervention, in particular from the United States. An
attempted settlement collapsed and the newly independent
country plunged into a long and bitter civil war. In the
Far East, Indonesia invaded East Timor in the 1970s and
imposed its rule in what was the last war of colonial
conquest in the twentieth century.
Southern Rhodesia
After
the wave of decolonization in the 1960s Britain was left
with one major problem - Southern Rhodesia, which had
been a self-governing colony since 1923. The white
minority was well entrenched and the constitution had
changed so that it was almost impossible for the African
majority to take power within any conceivable timescale.
When the Central African Federation was wound up,
Britain refused to grant independence to the white
government in Southern Rhodesia without a guarantee,
however convoluted, of eventual majority rule — given
the international climate of the 1960s any other policy
would have been impossible to justify. Eventually in
November 1965 the white government declared unilateral
independence. The white settlers were viewed
sympathetically by considerable sections of both the
population and Conservative politicians in Britain, and
the government decided against using military force to
remove the rebel government. In these circumstances, and
with only limited and poorly enforced sanctions in
place, a stalemate ensued. Attempts to reach a
negotiated settlement in December 1966, October 1968 and
late 1971 failed even though the British government was
not insisting on more than very weak guarantees about
majority rule at some point in the future. The Southern
Rhodesian government believed that, with the support of
the South African government, they would survive and
until 1974 they were able to contain the ethnically
divided nationalist politicians and the relatively weak
guerrilla forces. The situation changed radically with
the collapse of the Portuguese empire and the decision
by the new government in Mozambique to give major
support to the guerrillas. The South African government
also decided that, in the last resort, it was not
prepared to engage in a major war to prolong white rule
in Southern Rhodesia. By early 1978 the white government
had been forced to negotiate an 'internal settlement'
with moderate nationalists which excluded the guerrillas
and which left the whites effectively still running the
country. The British government was tempted to accept
this deal, but pressure from the Commonwealth at the
Lusaka conference in August 1979 produced a new
settlement. The white government finally gave up power
and a British governor took over as ruler. Elections
were held in March 1980 and, much to the annoyance of
the British, were won by the leader of the guerrillas,
Robert Mugabe and his ZANU Party, which took power on
independence. The only consolation for the British was
that a long-running problem had finally ended.
Long-term consequences
By the
mid-1960s all but a handful of the European colonies had
become independent. However, their inheritance from the
imperial powers was dire. When it became independent,
the Belgian Congo had just sixteen African university
graduates in the whole country and not one lawyer,
engineer or doctor. In the top three grades of the
administration there were 4,500 Europeans and six
Africans. The main reason for this appalling situation
was that the Belgians had not provided secondary
education for the local population. Although the Belgian
Congo was perhaps an extreme example, in most colonies
little had been done to prepare for independence. During
the decades of colonial rule little money or effort had
been invested in developing the economic and social
infrastructure necessary for self-government or in
providing a stable political base. Everywhere only a
weak administrative infrastructure was left behind. The
rush to independence only exacerbated an already poor
situation.
In
Asia, where societies had long been more developed than
in Africa, most ex-colonies finished up as authoritarian
one-party states. Only India managed to keep the
structure of democracy at a national level. In Africa
the situation was much worse. Apart from huge inherited
economic and social problems, the boundaries left by
European colonialism were artificial, reflecting deals
between the European powers rather than ethnic realities
on the ground. During the colonial period the imperial
powers had often created artificial chiefs and tribes
for their own purposes. This meant that most of the new
states were neither nations nor effective states. In
addition many countries were so small as to be hardly
viable. By 1980 twenty-two out of the forty-nine
independent states had populations of fewer than 5
million and nine had fewer than 1 million people. The
deals made at independence and the constitutions imposed
were usually the result of an agreement between the
imperial power and whichever group it judged was most
likely to take over the colony smoothly. Little thought
was given to the place of minorities or the general
acceptability of the new arrangements. As a result
factional groups came to dominate the new states: rich
landlords in the Ivory Coast, the Mossi in Burkina Faso,
the Shona majority in Zimbabwe and not the previously
dominant Ndebele, the 'protectorate peoples' in Sierra
Leone rather than the Creole descendants of the freed
slaves, the Malinke in Guinea. In many states the
divisions were fundamental - in Togo, Ivory Coast,
Kenya, Tanzania, Liberia, Zaire and Uganda no single
ethnic group made up more than a quarter of the
population. In Dahomey there was a three-way split
between the Abomey-JFou, Nagot-Yoruba and the Maga. In
the immediate post-independence period presidents from
each of the groups tried to dominate the other two and
failed and each tried an alliance of two against the
third and failed. Between 1970 and 1972 there was a
bizarre three-man presidency. The army coup in 1972 not
surprisingly also failed to resolve the ethnic conflict.
In some states, such as Tanzania under President Nyerere
and neighbouring Kenya under President Moi, the solution
was rule by a member of a small minority group who was
forced to balance between the major groupings.
In some
African states such as Ghana under Nkrumah and Ivory
Coast under Houphouet-Boigny, there was one-party,
authoritarian rule from the start. By the early 1960s a
similar situation prevailed in Senegal, Guinea, Mali,
Niger, Benin, Togo and Mauritania. Nearly everywhere the
constitutions imposed at independence disintegrated and
were ignored. In many states effective power rapidly
devolved to the army and military coups became
commonplace. Once the legitimacy of the initial
post-independence ruler was destroyed there was little
legitimacy for any successor; anybody who could find the
resources for a successful coup could take power and
claim the right to rule. Politics disintegrated into
clientelism, corruption and ethnic (real or imagined)
conflict. In some states, such as Sudan, Zaire and
Nigeria, civil war broke out over the secession of one
area of the country, but in general the colonial
boundaries were maintained because all states had a
vested interest in not disturbing the existing
arrangements however artificial they might be.
Inter-state conflict was generally limited and violence
was concentrated within the state. By the 1990s some
states such as Somalia, Liberia and Sierra Leone had
disintegrated into anarchy as economic decline,
political factionalism and recurrent coups took their
toll.
By the
end of the twentieth century the colonial empires that
had dominated the world in 1900 had almost ceased to
exist. In 1997 Britain returned Hong Kong to China
followed by the last Portuguese colony, Macao in 1999.
This ended European rule in Asia. It was symbolic of a
general trend throughout the century -the renaissance of
Asia. Of the British empire only a few territories
remained. They included those such as Pitcairn Island
(population 50) and Tristan da Cunha (population 300)
which could not become independent because they were too
small. Others were military bases leased to the
Americans, such as Ascension Island and the British
Indian Ocean Territories (Diego Garcia), from which the
population was forcibly removed in the late 1960s. In
Gibraltar and the Falkland Islands the British allowed
the local white population to exercise a veto over
incorporation into Spain and Argentina. The Dutch still
controlled Surinam and the French retained a small
empire once New Caledonia and Tahiti in the Pacific were
incorporated into France. The ultimate irony was that
the supposedly anti-imperial power which believed that
it did not possess an empire, the United States, was the
largest imperial power at the end of the twentieth
century. In total it controlled nearly 4 million people
including Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands in the
Caribbean together with the Pacific islands of the
Marshalls, Samoa and the Marianas. Most of the Pacific
islands were used for military purposes, including
nuclear testing. However, even on a generous estimate
the colonial empires in 1999 contained no more than 5
million people (less than 1 per cent of the world total)
compared with about 750 million (a third of the world's
people) only sixty years earlier. The end of empire
appeared to be a fundamental transformation in the
structure of the world. In practice the relations
between the core states and the periphery continued in
much the same way as before. Given the economic and
political power of the core, such an outcome was not
surprising