Momentum Gathers: The 1950s
It was into the 1950s, while these subtle lexical shifts were in progress, that the idea of “decolonization” re-emerged (initially in French) as part of a wider re-evaluation of Europe's overseas fortunes in the wake of Indonesian independence in 1949, and France's deteriorating hold on Indochina.
The initial impetus came from the eminent scholar of Africa (and former colonial administrator) Henri Labouret, in his 1952 study, Colonisation, Colonialisme, Decolonisation, the first book in any language to include the term in its title. Like Moritz Bonn, Labouret placed his subject in the context of the “phases of history”—the fifth and final being that of “triumphant Liberalism” which aspired toward the independence of colonized peoples. “One may call this,” he pronounced, “the phase of Decolonisation”33 The term made its first appearance in Le Monde as late as 1955, in quotation marks to signal its relative novelty.[2627] [2628] As one contemporary observer noted, French debates about the fate of the colonies in the 1950s tended to stop short of envisaging any complete colonial liquidation, reserving the more tangible expression “transfer of power” (transfert de pouvoir) for British contexts (with South Asia specifically in mind).[2629] Conversely, the British press used the term to refer to anyone but themselves—the French, Italians, Dutch—again, invariably in quotation marks.[2630]While these semantic nuances were unfolding, the material realities of decolonization were beginning to bite. From early 1953, the Mau Mau insurgency in Kenya launched a wave of violent attacks on settler homesteads, prompting a British counterinsurgency campaign of increasingly repressive dimensions.[2631] The following year, French forces suffered a major defeat at the hands of the Viet Minh at the siege of Dien Bien Phu, which toppled the French government of Joseph Laniel and brought a new administration more amenable to colonial nationalist aspirations, led by Pierre Mendes-France.
An independence settlement was negotiated in Geneva in July 1954, overwhelmingly supported by the French National Assembly and a population that had grown weary of the material and human cost of the war. The following year, Mendes-France proceeded to enter into negotiations with nationalist leaders in Tunisia and Morocco, culminating in independence for both countries in 1956. Algeria posed a more acute problem, due to the presence of more than a million French settlers and a commonly held conviction that the territory formed an integral part of metropolitan France (due to the designation of the three occupied territories as French departements in the 1343 Constitution). Thus, with the outbreak of violent insurrection by the Algerian Front de Liberation Nationale (FLN) in 1954 (and notwithstanding the fate of French Indochina), Mendes- France could confidently assert: “Between Algeria and the metropole, seccession is unthinkable.”[2632] It was significantly the French minister for the interior, Francois Mitterand, who assumed political responsibility for the Algerian uprising, and who framed the issue in the starkest terms to the Assemblee Nationale in 1954: “Algeria is France: And who among you would hesitate to use any means to preserve France?”[2633]Meanwhile the epicenter of colonial conflict was shifting to the eastern Mediterranean. The Suez crisis is often seen as a watershed of imperial power; the moment that signaled a rapid deterioration in British and French self-confidence in their dealings with the colonial and postcolonial world. In July 1956, after several years of nervous jockeying over Britain's future position in the Canal Zone, President Nasser of Egypt made the bold move of nationalizing the Anglo-British Suez Canal Company, in fulfillment of a desire to rid the Canal of the last taint of colonial influence. It left the British government of Anthony Eden exposed to ridicule, and threatened Britain's strategic and economic position in the wider world, cutting off access to the sea lanes of India and the Far East and placing the supply of Middle Eastern oil at risk.
For France, it aggravated bitter tensions with Nasser over his suspected involvement in stirring armed rebellion in Algeria, Morocco, and Tunisia. Thus, both governments had reason to want to eject the Egyptian military regime by force. But when the United States government made clear its opposition to any military solution, the inherent weakness of the British and French position was exposed. To launch an unprovoked military strike would have invited accusations of wanton imperial arrogance, but to do nothing was regarded as a sign of vulnerability that would only bring encouragement to colonial nationalists elsewhere in the world. The solution eventually chosen was the infamously foolhardy “collusion” with Israel in November 1956, whereby Britain and France agreed to intervene in a crisis orchestrated by an unprovoked Israeli attack on the Canal Zone.[2634]The failure to secure US backing proved to be the unmaking of the entire venture, leaving Britain and France embarrassingly isolated in the UN General Assembly (which voted 64 delegates to 5 in favor of a US ceasefire resolution) and prompting a precipitous run on the pound sterling. It was this latter threat that forced the British to agree to ceasefire terms and an ignominious withdrawal, leaving the French high and dry with no choice but to follow suit. Eden's health quickly collapsed and he was forced to leave office, further aggravating perceptions of a major calamity. Eden himself had once described the Canal as “the swing-door of the British Empire,” and it is therefore not hard to discern why the Suez crisis has become routinely regarded as a last-ditch effort to preserve the imperial mantle.[2635]
Yet the precise link between Suez and the subsequent pace of decolonization is sometimes overstated. The claim that it punctured imperial pretensions virtually overnight tends to assume a uniformly critical reaction from British and French public opinion. Yet newspaper evidence suggests that the response was far more fragmented, and that it took considerable time—perhaps decades—for the “lessons” of Suez to sink in.[2636] G.
C. Peden goes so far as to suggest that Suez was no more than “an eddy in the fast-flowing stream of history,” arguing that very few policy reversals can be traced directly to Suez and citing Eden's own verdict that the crisis had “not so much changed our fortunes as revealed realities.”[2637] This in itself, of course, could influence expectations and perceptions. The vulnerability of sterling to Britain's imperial overstretch had been long suspected, but never so starkly demonstrated as in November 1956. Thus it is hard to demur from Cain and Hopkins, for whom Suez was decisive in highlighting “the contradiction between upholding sterling and funding the military operations needed at times to defend Britain's world role.”[2638] These tensions were borne out over a longer timeline, however, according to later developments that remained largely unforeseen in 1956. The impact in Britain was in any case more clearly discernible than in France (a fact that is often overlooked), where Dien Bien Phu and the Battle of Algiers would come to occupy a far more prominent place in postcolonial public memory.[2639]