Conclusion

Jean Paul Sartre's translator, Azzedine Haddour, once characterized his crucial role as an early Western critic of neocolonialism in terms of a head-on engagement with Africa's “thwarted decolonization.”^[2698] Yet this formulation says as much about the overburdened expectations of the idea of decolonization itself; expectations of a material prosperity and a freedom of action in world affairs that belied the resources and networks at the disposal of postcolonial states in a precariously polarized world.

The same expectations that would later give rise to the notion of the “failed state” led equally to the logic of “neocolonialism” in its insistence on the malign influence of external agencies “thwarting” the promise of postcolonial prosperity.^[2699] Frederick Cooper describes this as the problem of “unbounded” decolonization; of decolonization “as a step in a quest towards something else, something whose realization demanded more struggle and which still posited the existence of an enemy, now broadened to include neo-colonialism, the intrusion of western culture and western political intrigue, and the danger of enemies within.”^[2700] He argues that much of the disillusionment ascribed to the age-old, entrenched interests of colonialism should be understood in terms of the particularities of decolonization— the dynamic pathways out of empire rather than the stasis of empire itself.^[2701] In this sense, decolonization and neocolonialism were symbiotic, the frustrations of the latter feeding directly off the aspirations of the former.

But the disillusionment cut both ways. If Europeans had coined and cultivated the idea of “decolonization” as a means of shrugging off the moral burden of colonialism while mitigating the attendant sense of failure and loss, they too would find that the past could not be so easily put aside.

An editorial in The Times in August 1963 framed the dilemma in particularly revealing terms:

The ex-colonial powers assumed that when they handed over legal sovereignty to local governments, who were then able to conduct their own foreign and domestic policy, the past would be forgiven, if not forgotten, and the label “colonialist”—so damaging in the cold war—would no longer stick. A new label, however, is being stuck on in its place. This is the accusation of “neocolonialism,” which finds great favour in a number of African countries.^[2702]

The Times made no effort to disguise its disdain for African leaders who “shouted” and “bandied” such insults (noting that it had not been necessary in Asia to “discover” neocolonialism), and dismissed their accusations out of hand as a tedious whine to divert attention from their own leadership failings.^[2703] Yet clearly, something had stuck. From a European perspective, the ongoing frustrations and resentments of “thwarted decolonization” would continue to manifest themselves in countless ways, not least in the failure of Britain's “Commonwealth” or France's “Union” (renamed “Communaute” in 1958) to serve as multiracial vehicles for enduring metropolitan influence and prestige around the world.^[2704] The Times was to publish a further broadside in 1964 (anonymously penned by Enoch Powell), condemning the Commonwealth as a “giant farce.” For Powell, it was “the persisting illusion that there is a world elsewhere” that continued to fester in the British body politic, blinding the nation to its true character and destiny. Reaching for a medical analogy, he proclaimed that the time had come when “the wounds have almost healed... and the bandages can come off”—merely one of countless diagnoses of post-imperial “hangovers,” “hang-ups,” “maladies,” and “mindsets” that have been invoked ever since to account for any number of contemporary European ills, deriving variously from the unfinished business of empire's end.^[2705]

Recognizing that decolonization and neocolonialism had very specific, indeed formative resonances at the political hub of empire is not to impose some normative bind on concepts that have long since evolved from their German, French, and English origins.

As we have seen, colonial nationalists could and did appropriate these terms to their own ends, but understanding the interplay with their formative metropolitan connotations helps to sharpen our sense of how these ideas evolved into key concepts, and hence came to define one of the decisive transformations of the twentieth century. At the time when they were first conceived, decolonization and neocolonialism represented, each in their own way, a denial of the dynamism of the non-Western world, and an expectation (or suspicion) that somehow Europeans would continue to play the determining role, even in the management of their own decline. But the longer term legacies for imperial historians would suggest the opposite; a readiness to see the post-colonial world not only as a principal site of the emergence from empire, but also as a key determining influence on Europe's own post-imperial story.^[2706] Indeed, the spate of recent histories of the 500-year sweep of European colonialism has been largely premised on the precarious contingencies of European global preeminence, which has had the effect of subtly diminishing the scope, efficacy, and longevity of what we understand by “empire” in a European context.^[2707] Conversely, A. G. Hopkins's conception of decolonization as a species of “post-colonial globalization,” encompassing multiple agencies, causations, and locales, and casting the geographical and temporal frame of reference far wider than hitherto, suggests that the interpretative possibilities of “decolonization” have expanded exponentially since Moritz Bonn's pioneering efforts in the 1930s.^[2708] Bonn's concept, never static, continues to shift and reshape into challenging perspectives and new departures.

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Source: Bang Peter F., Bayly C.A., Scheidel Walter (eds.). The Oxford World History of Empire. Volume Two: The History of Empires. Oxford University Press,2020. — 1352 p.. 2020

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