The Conjuncture of 1945

World War II was catastrophic not just for the losers, but for France, Britain, the Netherlands, and Belgium.^[2902] It brought to an end a pattern of struggle for mastery in Europe that goes back to the collapse of the Roman Empire: attempts to build something on Rome's scale, countered not so much by the national sentiments of subordinated peoples as by the resources commanded by rival empires.

For a time, the world seemed bipolar, dominated by two states that represented themselves as something different from the empires of old.^[2904] The USSR was an in­consistent opponent of “Western” imperialism, putting Soviet interests first. The United States was an inconsistent ally of Britain and France, occasionally invoking its anti-colonial past and well aware that it had more to gain, given its economic and cultural might, from a world of nation-states open to world markets than the more closed worlds of empires. It pulled its punches after making some anti-colonial noises in the 1940s,^[2905] but when it feared that supporting the colonial machinations of France and Britain would jeopardize its struggle against communism, notably in the Suez Crisis of 1956, it put its Cold War objectives first. France and Britain, meanwhile, came to realize that once the world of empires had collapsed, they had other means to ensure access to resources than holding colonies. Western European empires needed so desperately to sell the resources of their colonies that no one had to fear that colonial monopolies or imperial preference would exclude others from these primary products.

The post-war crisis of the inter-empire world order gave activists in the colonies possibilities for mobilization that had been contained in the 1920s and 1930s: not just for independence, but escalating demands for equality and new resources within the empires,^[2906] alliances within or across empires, joining the cause of communist revolution with Russian or Chinese assistance, playing off Cold War rivals against each other, forming federations or confederations. Fear of one challenge forced colo­nial powers to take other challenges more seriously. The mixture of radical and mod­erate, violent and non-violent politics was a volatile one.

France, the Netherlands, and Britain, soon after 1945, saw their imperial positions unravel beginning in Asia—the loss of control over Indochina, Indonesia, and India.^[2907] But they did not initially think that the imperial game was ending. France and Britain sought to reinvigorate the economies of African dependencies, while recognizing that they had to seek new ways to incorporate indigenous elites into imperial gov­ernance. “Development” became the watchword of postwar colonialism—a concept that emphasized that economic change was supposed to be of mutual benefit, giving colonized people a stake in empire.^[2908]

France was the most explicit about the way in which its power was to be recast in a new form of complex sovereignty and differential governance. A small—but vocal— group of overseas political leaders, including such future heads of state as Leopold Sedar Senghor and Felix Houphouet-Boigny, were brought into the constitution­writing process, and when their colleagues realized that their consent was necessary for the new postwar constitution to have any legitimacy overseas, they got their minimum demand inscribed in the constitution: for the quality of the French cit­izen to be extended overseas, with the added proviso that unlike metropolitans, the citizens of 1946 did not have to come under the French civil code.^[2909] The citizenship provisions gave a measure of plausibility to the French government’s assertion that, of its own volition, it had ended empire, although what it had turned empire into was not so clear.

World War II was not the first time that one, or even several empires faced a crisis, but it was the first when not just particular empires but the common understandings and frameworks for rivalry among empires were seriously threatened. The world had been organized around non-e quivalences, through hierarchies of power and exclusionary claims to civilization. Ideas of popular sovereignty and self­determination had been set forth in some places and at some times, but they were only applied to some of the world’s peoples. What was beginning to totter in the 1940s was the ethical and institutional basis for the co-existence of categorically different kinds of polities, some avowedly imperial, others professing a national conception of themselves, still others reduced to the status of protectorate or other form of dependency, recognized in international law or otherwise.