THE IMPERIAL DESTABILIZER: WORLD WAR II

The three kinds of violence described in phase 2 figured in phase 5 as well. In general, however, phase 5 involved less pervasive hegemonic conflict and less extensive verti­cal and horizontal violence than phase 2.

Several metropoles were invaded in the wars of each phase: Holland, Spain, and Portugal by French revolutionary or Napoleonic armies; Holland, Belgium, and France more than a century later by the Germans. Countries whose territory was invaded and whose leaders were muzzled or forced into exile were obviously unable to control what happened in their overseas holdings. Interestingly, however, in both phases it was not during wartime, when metropolitan capacity was at low ebb, but in the immediate postwar period that the major movements for independence took shape and asserted themselves. In several cases the trigger was the metropole’s effort to reassert prerogatives it enjoyed before the war. The dynamics of this pattern are explored at greater length in part 5.

World War II occupied only the first few years of 1940-80, whereas European great powers fought intermittently for more than half the length of phase 2. World War II did not pit the major metropoles against each other. In contrast, wars con­nected with the French Revolution and the rise of Napoleon involved struggles at home and abroad among the three leading imperial states: Britain, France, and Spain. World War II thus saw to a far lesser degree than the earlier period situations in which metropoles encouraged their enemies’ colonies to break away. On the other hand, Japan’s role in World War II posed a more serious non-European threat to the global status quo than anything experienced in phase 2.

World War II had a much greater impact on overseas possessions than the hegemonic wars of phase 2. Intense fighting raged in Southeast Asia, North Africa, and Oceania.

World War II mobilized bodies. It also changed minds. Far more than any previous global conflict, this war had an ideological dimension, one directly relevant to colonialism. To be sure, President Wilson’s Fourteen Points were potentially appli­cable. But Wilson’s speech was delivered in the final year of World War I, and it did not pretend to articulate the war aims of countries other than the United States. In contrast, the Atlantic Charter of Prime Minister Winston Churchill and President Franklin Roosevelt was issued at an early stage in the war (August 1941, before the United States had formally entered), and it signaled the shared objectives of the “first new nation” and the world’s greatest imperial power. The charter’s third point stated that the signatories “respect the right of all peoples to choose the form of govern­ment under which they will live; and they wish to see sovereign rights and self- government restored to those who have been forcibly deprived of them.” Churchill, a lifelong defender of empire, made it clear in a parliamentary speech a few weeks later that these words applied only to territories forcibly conquered by the Axis powers.

Opinion leaders in the colonies readily perceived the broader import of the Atlantic Charter and repeatedly referred to it when prodding metropoles to acceler­ate the transfer of power. In October 1941, for example, the London-based West African Students Union sent a memorandum to Deputy Prime Minister Clement Attlee noting that “Great Britain has proclaimed her determination to re-establish and support the national independence of the countries of Europe, of Ethiopia, and of Syria, but what of West Africa?”⁸ India’s Legislative Assembly discussed and passed without dissent a resolution that the Atlantic Charter should apply to India.

Churchill’s clarification only fanned the flames of discontent. Reginald Coup­land, a professor who lived in India during 1941 and 1942, wrote, “It is difficult to exaggerate the disquieting effect of [this statement]... a feeling, if not of distrust, at least of a new and uncomfortable suspicion, began to spread beyond nationalist circles. Moderate-minded Indians, who still valued the British connexion... were shaken, for the moment, at any rate, in their faith.” The Burmese nationalist leader Ba Maw referred bitterly to this episode in his memoirs: “To all for whom words, honestly used, must mean what they say, the words of the Atlantic Charter were clear. The Burmese believed that they meant what they said. Churchill, however, did not.” Speaking to the Burmese legislature in February 1940 when it debated a resolution declaring war, Ba Maw asserted, “West of Suez freedom is an unqualified war aim, but east of Suez it is not so.”⁹

Complementing the anti-imperial element in Allied war aims was the anti­racist element.

Just as Europeans were shocked in World War I to discover that weapons of destruction they had earlier aimed at Asians and Africans were being turned upon themselves, so they were dismayed in World War II to discover that the ideas they employed to justify conquering Asians and Africans were being turned against themselves.

The hypocrisy of the Allies’ stance on race was not lost on politically aware individuals in the colonies. The response in most cases was to support the Allies, since the struggle was against an unambiguously evil doctrine. But support came with one qualification: that metropoles dismantle or democratize their empires after the war to put into practice the admirable values for which they claimed to be fighting. The war thus induced a climate of expectation that self-determination would soon be universally applied. The failure of imperial powers to move quickly after 1945 to satisfy this expectation generated a volatile mix of frustration, anger, and sense of betrayal that fueled nationalist movements worldwide.

World War II fundamentally altered the distribution of global power. By war’s end Western Europe lay in self-inflicted ruin, many areas reduced to rubble for the second time in thirty years. Troops from two countries outside the region—the United States and the Soviet Union—had played decisive roles in defeating the Nazis and were quartered on European soil. By taking the lead in developing nuclear weapons and the airborne means to deliver them, the United States and the Soviet Union rose to transcontinental superpower status. As their relations deteriorated from wartime alliance to ideological and geostrategic rivalry, Europe became one of the principal arenas in the Cold War between the alliance systems they led. Not only was the world no longer dominated by Europe; a region that had penetrated the rest of the world for centuries now found itself penetrated by outside forces.

Metropoles found it increasingly difficult in this setting to retain possessions that were, after all, both cause and consequence of an earlier hegemony. Colonial rulers shifted to defensive mode as they came under mounting criticism from several quarters at once. From the colonies came organized opposition by nationalist move­ments whose morale had been raised and whose base of popular support expanded by the war.

Superpower involvement in decolonization added a layer of complexity not present in phase 2. The outcome of independence struggles depended not only on relations between colonizer and colonized but also on the stance one or both super­powers adopted toward these struggles. Whether a superpower became involved, and on whose side, depended on whether a nationalist movement was perceived to be friendly or hostile to its geostrategic interests and ideology. Phase 5 decolonization was the quintessential North-South issue. But it took place in the context of an East- West struggle pitting capitalist, liberal-democratic countries against communist, one-party states. One could not understand the process without referring to all four cardinal points of the compass.

That East-West rivalry could affect decolonization struggles in far-reaching and tragic ways was most clearly shown in Vietnam from the late 1940s to 1975 and in Angola from the early 1960s to the late 1980s.¹² The Cold War also meant that newly independent states had to develop, at short notice, a position on the American- Soviet rivalry. Should a country that had just decoupled from western Europe align itself with the power to the west or east of Europe? Or could a neutral, nonaligned policy, a third way for a Third World, be staked out? Such questions made no sense and were therefore not posed in phase 2. But they could not be avoided after 1945.

Placed collectively on the defensive by the sheer fact of having empires, metro ­poles played down old rivalries and emphasized shared interests in preserving what they could of the pre-1940 world order. Britain and France, bitter enemies in phases 1 and 2, ardent rivals for most of phase 3, found themselves in the same camp in phase 5, defending their colonial records against critics in the United Nations and other international agencies.¹³ In 1956 the two countries formed a military alliance in the invasion of the Suez Canal Zone, the very area they had so fervently contested less than a century earlier.