(7) DECOLONIZATION

(1941-1997)

Running through the Second World War, and even more so emerging from it as one of its primary effects, was decolonization – involving as it did, a combination of imperial cession or surrender without major conflict, and more dramatically, numerous wars of decolonization or independence.

Of course, the decolonization we’re speaking about here was primarily that for the modern European imperialism over non-European states or populations which reached its height in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

There had already been a major wave of that decolonization with the wars of independence in the Americas – firstly with the American War of Independence for the British colonies that became the United States, secondly (skipping that of Haiti) with the Spanish American Wars of Independence for almost all the Spanish colonies in Latin America, and thirdly with the independence of Brazil from Portugal.

That essentially saw the former European empires in the Americas, primarily those of the British, Spanish and Portuguese empires, as independent nations – although there remained some colonies or imperial possessions of those and other European empires in the Americas, particularly in the Caribbean.

Spain never really bounced back, even more so after losing the most significant of its imperial possessions to the United States in the Spanish-American War, and to some extent that is also true of Portugal after the independence of Brazil. However, Portugal and other European imperial nations reached their height of imperial power in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, with expanded empires in Asia and Africa.

It was that height of imperial power that saw the most famous wave of decolonization during and after the Second World War, albeit it had its origins rising through the cracks in the European imperial edifice that had opened up with the First World War.

Those cracks opened even further with the defeat and occupation of European imperial powers – France, Belgium, and the Netherlands – by Germany, as well as the preoccupation of the foremost European imperial power, Britain, with fighting Germany.

And the wave took shape as its postwar tsunami that swept aside the European empires, including that of a victorious but exhausted Britain, firstly in Asia and then in Africa. The most decisive event for that wave taking shape was the fall to (and occupation by) Japan of their Asian imperial possessions in 1941-1942. Although Britain was to regain its Asian empire from Japan – and those of allies such as France in Indochina – like Humpty Dumpty after his fall, Britain and other European imperial powers couldn’t put their empires back together again.

To some extent, the Second World War itself was a war of decolonization, albeit with some ironies or paradoxes – fought to free or liberate nations under Axis occupation, both the old-fashioned colonial style empires of Italy in Africa or Japan in Korea (as well as Taiwan and other territory taken in the First Sino-Japanese War), but also the new colonial empires Germany sought to forge as its lebensraum in Europe and Japan as its Co-Prosperity Sphere in Asia.

Of course, that war of decolonization was formally directed only against the Axis powers, but was least implicit to other empires in declarations by the western allies from the Atlantic Charter onwards – foremost by the United States, consistent with its rhetoric of declaring itself for decolonization such as its own war of independence, but also by Britain, with implications for itself as the world’s largest empire.

The United States was not the only principal combatant in the Second World War to declare rhetoric of decolonization or anti-imperialism, including for its own imperial possession of the Philippines. The Soviet Union also declared such rhetoric, even as it reclaimed or expanded beyond former Russian imperial territory effectively as its own new empire.

On the Axis side, Japan famously declared its own rhetoric of decolonization or anti-imperialism but only against European (or American) imperialism of course, not its own – “Asia for the Asians” with itself as the Asians. However, Japan did indeed turn out to be the most effective agent for decolonization by its defeat of European empires in the war, albeit a role it had played to varying extent from the outset of its rise as a great power and its defeat of Russia in the Russo-Japanese War.

Even Germany, engaged as it was in what it declared to be colonial imperialism in Europe – indeed with stated explicit models such as British colonialism, except with Russia as Germany’s India – found common cause as well as allies from decolonization movements elsewhere, particularly against its British antagonist, ironically enough including those from India. .

The process of decolonization, whether by war or otherwise, continued for decades after the Second World War – I’ve drawn the line for my end date for this entry with Britain returning Hong Kong to China, given that it was Britain’s last Asian colony that had been occupied by Japan.

 

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