VERTICAL VIOLENCE: DIFFERENCES IN METROPOLES’ POLICIES

The typical path to independence in phase 5 did not involve vertical violence. Of the roughly one hundred countries listed in table 7.1, in fewer than a dozen was there a sustained indigenous uprising forcefully opposed by local or imported troops acting under orders from a metropole.

Why the later decolonization phase was relatively peaceful will be explored in part 5. I note here that the incidence of vertical violence varied greatly from one empire to another. How a territory achieved independence was closely related to which European country ruled it. At one end of the spectrum was Portugal, whose rulers considered independence an unacceptable option. The one metropole that quietly accepted the loss of its major colony in phase 2 was the most adamant in refusing to accommodate pressures for change in phase 5. In 1951 the dictator An­tonio Salazar declared that his country’s overseas possessions were integral parts of Portugal. He took this move to avoid reporting to the United Nations on develop­ments in overseas territories. For if by a wave of the semantic wand the Portuguese empire no longer existed, there would be nothing to report to anyone. By “domes­ticating” the colonies and repressing all attempts peacefully to organize against Portuguese rule, Salazar and his successor, Marcello Caetano, virtually guaranteed that nationalist movements would turn to violence as the only way to assert their political claims. Through most of the 1960s and into the early 1970s the Portuguese fought three simultaneous wars—in Guinea-Bissau, Angola, and Mozambique— against nationalist movements.

The persistence, broad popular support, and guerrilla tactics of these move­ments ultimately proved decisive, not only in the field but also in Lisbon.

At the spectrum’s other end was Great Britain. Its experience with the white dominions set precedents for the gradual, peacefid devolution of power from Lon­don to settler communities. By the 1930s Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, and the Republic of Ireland were internationally regarded as sovereign states, though all except Ireland retained Commonwealth ties with the former ruler. The crucial test of whether the dominion precedent applied to non-Europeans was India. The British managed to govern the subcontinent with a firm hand during World War II, locking up inc leaders who in 1942 demanded their departure. But whether Britain was prepared at war’s end to hold on indefinitely, employing armed force if need be, was another matter altogether.

Three factors converged to push Britain toward rapid, negotiated withdrawal.

The first was the popularity and organizational resources of Indian nationalism. Nationalists greatly expanded their support base in phase 4 by arguing that Britain, having promised political advance during World War I, abandoned its commitments as soon as the war was won. Leaders of the inc were privately assured by a top British emissary in 1942 that India would move rapidly to self-government after the Axis powers were defeated.

Added to the prospect of vertical violence was the actual experience of hori­zontal violence. In 1945 and 1946 a rising tide of conflict between Hindu and Muslim communities engulfed many parts of the subcontinent. The Muslim League, led by a single-minded and tactically gifted lawyer, M. A. Jinnah, asserted that it represented all Muslims in India and was the only party speaking for their interests. This position directly challenged the inc’s claim to represent all the people regardless of religious affiliation. In 1940 the league called for a separate Islamic state to be carved out of British India. The league gained support among Muslims during the war years, for its leaders traveled about proclaiming the gospel of Pakistan. The inc, meanwhile, was ill-prepared to respond as its leaders were in detention for demanding Britain’s immediate departure. When communal violence broke out politicians in both par­ties were helpless to stop it. Even Gandhi’s desperate appeals for peace and tolerance went unheeded. British officials saw no reason they should be more successful than Indian leaders in resolving conflicts rooted in the subcontinent’s history, culture, and social structure and exacerbated by party competition. Did it not make sense to leave quickly, before more strife erupted for which raj officials would be blamed even if there was little or nothing they could do?

The third factor was British domestic politics. The Labour Party government that was elected shortly after Nazi Germany’s surrender was committed not only to rebuild a war-damaged economy but also to construct a welfare state. Labour’s electoral platform focused popular expectations and public finances on the home front.

On August 15,1947, following months of negotiations among British officials, inc, and Muslim League leaders, the world’s most populous overseas colony became independent as a secular India and an officially Islamic Pakistan.¹⁵ The diplomatic adroitness and personal warmth of the last viceregal couple, Lord and Lady Mount­batten, greatly facilitated the transfer process.

Peaceful decolonization of the white dominions in phase 4 set precedents for Britain’s negotiated withdrawal from its principal colony of occupation. India’s ex­ample, in turn, set a precedent for peacefully negotiated independence in other parts of the empire. The observation effect was powerfully at work here. Nationalists in Burma, the Gold Coast, Uganda, Jamaica, Fiji, and elsewhere learned that they would not have to threaten a war of national liberation to win sovereignty. British diplomats and colonial administrators learned that a negotiated departure was the best way to form positive relations with leaders and citizens of newly independent regimes.

That positive relations were possible after independence was shown when India, Pakistan, and Ceylon decided to seek membership in the Commonwealth.¹⁶ Almost all Britain’s ex-colonies subsequently took the same course.

More than forty British colonies attained independence in phase 5, the vast majority by peaceful negotiation. Violence did occur, however, in three territories. In Malaya and Kenya the British suppressed rural uprisings that were pushing not so much for national independence as for a more equitable domestic distribution of political rights and economic resources. Efforts to address grievances of the Chinese minority in Malaya and of the Kikuyu and other groups hurt by the land-alienation practices of Kenya’s white settlers substantially reduced rural unrest by the time colonial rule ended.

In Palestine the predictable outcome of the mandatory power’s contradictory policies in phase 4 was bitter conflict between resident Arabs and Jewish immigrants committed to making the Balfour Declaration’s “national home” for Jews a sovereign state. Horizontal violence became vertical as well when fighters from both sides attacked British administrators and soldiers for not acceding to their demands. Faced with a dilemma even more intractable and explosive than that in India, the Labour government referred the matter to the United Nations in 1947, then withdrew its forces early the next year. An impotent United Nations was handed responsibility for implementing a controversial partition plan. In the meantime Arabs and Jews waged war over a tiny, densely populated territory with immense religious meaning to both sides. Out of the war emerged the state of Israel, fulfilling the Zionist movement’s dream.

With respect to vertical violence Holland, France, and Belgium lay between Portugal and Britain. The Dutch were closer to the Portuguese end of the spectrum. The French experienced first the trauma of prolonged colonial warfare and then a series of peacefully negotiated transfers of power. The Belgian experience was closer to the British, though for reasons unlike those at work in Britain’s colonies.

Holland neither prepared for nor anticipated the independence of the Dutch East Indies. The official position in the 1930s was bluntly stated by one governor­general: “We have ruled here for three hundred years with the whip and the club, and we shall still be doing it in another three hundred years.”¹⁸ With the departure of Japanese forces in 1945, the Dutch were anxious to regain control of Java and the resource-rich outer islands. But they had not counted on the declaration of an independent Republic of Indonesia in August 1945 by Sukarno and Mohammad Hatta, nationalists they had jailed for sedition in the 1930s. Dutch officials negotiated when necessary with republican leaders, in late 1946 reluctantly acknowledging na­tionalist claims to control sizable portions of Java and Sumatra. At the same time they did everything they could to return to the prewar dispensation. In two separate police actions between 1947 and 1949 Dutch forces seized many of the outer islands and captured most of the Javanese territory held by nationalist troops. In response, Indonesian guerrillas escalated attacks on government installations and Dutch- owned plantations.

The bitter struggle came to an end in 1949, largely through intervention by the United Nations and the United States. The United Nations provided a public forum which India and the Soviet bloc used to attack Holland for imperialist aggression. The Americans, after being assured that Indonesian nationalists were not procom­munist, privately threatened Holland with loss of Marshall Plan funds if it did not withdraw. A compromise agreement in November 1949 transferred sovereignty to a federal United States of Indonesia, designated a partner in a vaguely defined Dutch- Indonesia Union. But such was the ill will and suspicion Indonesian leaders har­bored toward Holland that they withdrew from the union five years later and in 1957 expropriated Dutch business assets.¹⁹

In the decade following World War II the French were no more prepared than the Portuguese or Dutch to preside peacefully over the dissolution of empire. French citizens were acutely aware how easily their homeland had recently been subjugated. Politicians who founded the Fourth Republic in 1946 were upset over the limited role Free French forces played in designing Allied war strategy, to say nothing of the absence of French participation in the American-Soviet-British conferences at Yalta and Potsdam that shaped the postwar world. France’s wartime experiences offered abundant evidence of its loss of great-power status. Why should it tolerate further debasement by giving up territories that were still symbols of greatness?

Unlike the British, the French did not experiment during phases 3 and 4 with devolution of power to settler communities. The closest analogue to the white do­minions, Algeria, was not defined as a colony. Legally its populated coastal zones were departements of France, as integral to the metropole as Savoie, Seine-Maritime, or Pas-de-Calais, and as off-limits as they to secessionist appeals. Fourth Republic politicians had no precedent to call upon that might have made decolonization, with or without a settler presence, appear other than defeat. There was no Common­wealth to cushion the fall psychologically. Neither were arrangements in place for terminal colonial elections whose results could be interpreted, as they were by Lon­don officials, as fulfilling the imperial mission.

An additional contrast stemmed from the political upheaval France experi­enced and Britain avoided in phase 2. The French revolutionary tradition spoke of liberty, equality, and fraternity as universal values. Events after 1789 gave these values concrete form by planting republican institutions in French soil. The revolutionary tradition enabled overseas expansion to be justified not only as the expression of a nation-state’s interests, but also as an effective way to diffuse universally valid norms and institutions. From this perspective, colonized peoples experienced true liberty when they were incorporated within Greater France. To desire liberty from France was a contradiction in terms, an irrational rejection of the noblest of human ideals.

Such arguments were advanced throughout the life of the Fourth Republic (1946-58). They resonated with leaders on the right, for whom appeals to universal­ism were convenient rhetorical cover for retaining national power and prestige. But the same arguments also appealed to many on the left, for whom French global prominence was a means to advance the old revolutionary ideals. Except for the French Communist Party, which after 1947 was excluded from ruling parliamen­tary coalitions, a consensus developed across party lines that France should oppose movements calling for independence. French left-wing politics lacked an equivalent to the moderately anti-imperial stance of Britain’s Labour Party. Whereas Prime Minister Attlee considered Indian independence compatible with socialism’s do­mestic and foreign policy goals, Prime Minister Guy Mollet of France, also a so­cialist, vehemently opposed the struggle for Algerian independence as an affront to the left’s ideals.²⁰

These factors explain in part why the French were willing and able to deploy force to retain their empire. Factors specific to Vietnam and Algeria help account for the extensive vertical violence that occurred during 1946-54 in Vietnam and 1954-62 in Algeria. Vietnamese nationalism was linked to communism in the person of Ho Chi Minh and in the tightly disciplined Vietminh organization he led. Ho’s lifetime goal was to liberate Vietnam from the control of foreigners, whether French, Japa­nese, or American. One of his early aliases was Nguyen ai Quoc, Nguyen the Patriot. “Vietminh” translates as “league for the independence of Vietnam.” Ho was also a communist of long standing. A founding member of the French Communist Party who lived in Moscow intermittently during the interwar years, he was also the leading founder of the Indochinese Communist Party in 1930. Far from thinking national liberation to be at odds with international communism, he regarded the two as compatible and ultimately complementary.

Others did not see it that way. Or rather, others perceived Ho and the Vietminh as partisans of one cause or the other but not both. The source of Ho’s popular appeal within Vietnam was his fierce nationalism. The source of the fear and loath­ing he generated among French decision makers was his identity as a dedicated communist. The selective misperceptions of Vietnamese peasants gave them a com­munist government far more manipulative and repressive than they had had in mind when supporting their nationalist hero. The selective misperceptions of the French— and of the Americans after them—meant that in fighting to keep Indochina free of communism foreigners found themselves battling Vietnamese nationalism. In the postwar era of awakened anticolonial fervor this task proved too formidable even for great powers.

Communist Viet Cong forces, under the tactically brilliant leadership of Vo Nguyen Giap, carried out protracted guerrilla attacks on French military outposts. From March to May 1954 the Viet Cong besieged heavily fortified French positions in Dien Bien Phu, a remote site close to the Laotian border.²¹ The decisive Viet Cong vic­tory there led to a government crisis in France, departure from Vietnam of a humili­ated French army, and international negotiations in Geneva. The ambiguous out­come of the Geneva conference was de jure recognition of Vietnam’s independence and the country’s de facto partition into communist and noncommunist segments. The stage was set for two decades of postcolonial violence that combined in one mighty conflagration a civil war, an international war, north-south issues of auton­omy versus neocolonialism, and east-west issues of communism versus capitalism.

In Algeria the special circumstance was not the ideology of nationalist leaders but the territory’s status as part of France and the presence of a vociferous settler community. Settlers from France, supplemented by others from Spain and Italy, took the best land for their wheat farms, vineyards, and olive orchards. By the 1940s they were also a sizable working class and small-business element in the coastal cities. Colons, as they were called, enjoyed the rights of French citizens. Their interests were effectively expressed in Paris by representatives to the National Assembly and well- organized lobbies. Colons adamantly opposed anything that might enhance the economic or political status of the vast majority, of Arab or Berber descent, who were Muslim. With few exceptions Muslims were disenfranchised prior to World War II, hence unable to exercise the rights to which Algeria’s incorporation into the metro­pole presumably entitled them.

The war stimulated nationalist sentiment among Muslims and gave rise to hope that things would soon change for the better. The successful British-American invasion of North Africa in 1942 dislodged Nazi collaborators and enabled Free French forces led by Gen. Charles de Gaulle to wrest control of Algiers. The presence of British and American forces highlighted the Atlantic Charter their leaders had signed earlier. Did not the charter’s words describe the Algerian people, “forcibly deprived of sovereign rights and self-determination” for more than a century? Presi­dent Roosevelt’s personal envoy in Algiers, Robert Murphy, met on at least one occasion with the prominent Muslim leader Ferhat Abbas. Their discussions may have encouraged Abbas to abandon an earlier stance favoring reform within the colonial system and to issue, in February 1943, his “Manifesto of the Algerian People” demanding a majority-ruled Algerian state free of French control.²² British officials, their own imperial interests firmly in mind, backed away from the radical implica­tions of what Churchill had signed. A directive to the Arabic-language service of the British Broadcasting Corporation in August 1943 stated, “All references to the Atlan­tic Charter, other than hard news, must be avoided, since its application to French North Africa raises controversial questions.”²³

France fought to free itself from German rule and to deny freedom to others. The paradox was highlighted by events in Setif, a town about 150 miles east of Algiers. On May 8,1945, the day the world celebrated the surrender of Nazi Germany, about eight thousand Muslims converged on Setif for a victory march of their own. They carried nationalist banners, one with the slogan, “For the Liberation of the People, Long Live Free and Independent Algeria.” Some marchers displayed the green and white flag of Abd-el-Kadir, redoubtable leader of armed resistance to French in­vaders in the 1830s and 1840s. The subprefect, insulted and terrified by the message these symbols conveyed, tried to have the banners seized. The ensuing fracas trig­gered an angry outburst in which Muslims massacred almost two hundred colons in Setif and surrounding areas. The French retaliated with dive-bombers and offshore cruiser guns against more than forty Muslim villages, while the enraged colons went on unimpeded lynching expeditions throughout the countryside. By the most con­servative estimate a thousand Muslims were killed following the Se tif massacre. The least conservative estimate, widely believed in the Muslim community, was between forty-five and fifty thousand.²⁴

It was now the Muslims’ turn to be enraged. The massive scope and indiscrimi­nate character of the slaughter radicalized the populace in much the same way the Amritsar massacre transformed Indian political attitudes a quarter century earlier. Repression by the army and by colons had the intended effect of crushing armed resistance—but only for a few years. In 1954 a group of young Algerians, meeting clandestinely on the day the fall of Dien Bien Phu was announced, formed an organi­zation later known as the Front de Liberation Nationale (fln). On November 1 the fln launched coordinated attacks against targets throughout the country. Thus began a war that lasted until 1962, when an accord reached at Evian, Switzerland, affirmed Algeria’s independence and turned power over to the fln.

The conflict was marked by horrific brutality on both sides against civilians as well as soldiers. Its intensity signaled the clash of powerful interests and values. Yet, ironically, the Algerian war made possible a new and dramatically different pat­tern of peacefully negotiated decolonization. The first signs of change were seen in France’s other North African territories, Morocco and Tunisia. There too national­ism had been stimulated by World War II. Prominent leaders in Fez and Tunis opposed France’s resort to force against fellow North Africans. They knew that the campaign against the fln deprived Paris of resources to launch similar attacks against them. In 1956 French authorities, confronted by capably led mass movements in both territories, reluctantly consented to Moroccan and Tunisian independence.

The second change occurred in the metropole. In military terms the French army was more successful in Algeria than in Vietnam. But its successes did not translate into defeat of elusive yet ever-present fln guerrillas. Moreover, Fourth Republic leaders found themselves increasingly criticized at home and abroad, on the left for brutally prosecuting the war, on the right for not fighting more vig­orously. In May 1958 colons in Algiers took to the barricades to overturn a metro­politan government they considered hopelessly effete. When they were supported by key military officers stationed in Algeria, civilian authority in Paris collapsed. The Fourth Republic’s demise brought World War II war hero General de Gaulle out of self-imposed retirement and into national life. A Fifth Republic was formed with power concentrated in the hands of de Gaulle as its first president.

Because of the general’s lifelong record as an outspoken proponent of French global greatness, the army and colons were confident he would intensify the struggle against the fln. But de Gaulle had come to believe that the Algerian war, while not lost, could not be won. Slowly, carefully employing for public consumption the grandiose but delphic phrases of which he was a master, he set himself on the path of negotiation that would lead to the end of “Algerie fran^aise.” Remarkably, he sur­vived the numerous attempts on his life by colons and soldiers convinced he had betrayed them.

President de Gaulle quickly seized the initiative to redefine France’s relations with its remaining colonies, most of them in sub-Saharan Africa. He announced that a referendum would be held in September 1958 posing for voters in each territory the choice between association with a vaguely defined French Community and full political independence. He strongly favored the first option and campaigned hard for the community in highly publicized visits to Africa in the summer of 1958. The fact remained, however, that for the first time a French leader had spoken of inde­pendence as a possibility. And, for the first time, voters in each colony could express their views on future relations with the metropole.

The leading party in several French African territories, the Rassemblement Democratique Africain (rda), did not demand independence during the Fourth Republic era. Many leaders, after election to the National Assembly in Paris, secured high positions within the French political system and negotiated successfully from within for policy reforms.²⁵ To critics arguing that African politicians had been coopted by France’s strategy of politically assimilating its colonies, the response was that leaders were coopting the French system to serve African interests. Most rda leaders were not disposed to break with France after hearing de Gaulle’s description of referendum options. Clearly, a vote for independence would be costly, with France withdrawing administrators, technical personnel, and financial support from the offending territory. The impact of such moves on the small, impoverished, vulner­able economies of French Africa could be disastrous.

Primarily for these reasons, leaders in all territories save one recommended— and received from their electorates—a mandate for membership in the French Com­munity. In the remaining colony, Guinea, a popular and articulate leader named Sikou Touri asserted, “Liberty in poverty is preferable to slavery in affluence” and took a strong stand for autonomy. Guinea’s voters followed Tours’s recommenda­tion, with the result that independence was declared following the referendum. The French retaliated as expected. But having a tightly organized political party at home and taking adroit diplomatic initiatives to locate alternative sources of support, Guinea managed to survive de Gaulle’s campaign to prove that independence could not work.²⁶

Leaders whose territories opted for the community were impressed by—and envious of—Guinea’s new status in world affairs. They intensified their efforts to negotiate for independence without the heavy costs de Gaulle had threatened to attach to it. Negotiations proceeded rapidly. In i960 fourteen French African territo­ries gained independence and joined the United Nations.²⁷ In exchange for abandon­ing formal control French authorities extracted policies favoring their country’s in­terests. Agreements signed at the time—many not publicly revealed until later—kept the new states in the franc zone, maintained colonial-style banking and educational systems, and in some countries assured a continuing French military presence.²⁸

The violent struggle in Algeria thus had the unexpected effect—mediated through political crisis and regime change in the metropole—of transforming France’s colonial policy. The new policy, coupled with initiatives by Guinea’s leader, opened up possibilities for negotiated transfers of power elsewhere. The vast major­ity of France’s colonies gained sovereignty peacefully, in large measure because France learned from bitter experience in Vietnam and Algeria that fighting to retain an old empire in the new international setting was futile and counterproductive.

Belgium’s huge African colony, the Congo, also gained independence in i960. The change involved minor levels of vertical violence. But this was not due to advance planning for evolutionary change of the sort that marked British policy. On the contrary, a near-complete absence of planning for any kind of change led to panicked departure at the first serious signs of Congolese nationalism. Prior to 1959 a tight administrative grip on the populace, combined with minimal communication links among a multitude of widely dispersed ethnic groups, restricted organized expressions of anti-Belgian sentiment. Pent-up feelings were powerfully expressed, however, by riots in the capital city, Leopoldville, in January 1959. The timing was influenced by the referendum held a few months earlier in French territories. Leo­poldville was across the river from Brazzaville, capital of the French Congo and one of the cities visited by de Gaulle during the referendum campaign. If the French Congo could choose independence, many of Leopoldville’s residents wondered why the far larger, wealthier, and more strategically located Belgian Congo should not do the same.

Belgium’s policy was to provide primary education and health care for the population in hopes that these rudiments of a welfare state would create an econom­ically productive and politically contented work force. Shocked that Leopoldville’s Africans, who should have been grateful for benefits conferred upon them, were instead looting European private property and attacking the symbols of Belgian rule, the colonizers reacted forcefully. Colonial troops killed about fifty Leopoldville resi­dents, these deaths mobilizing still more Africans into the political arena. In the aftermath of the riots, new political parties proliferated throughout the colony. The one thing on which party leaders agreed was that the Belgians should leave. Beyond that was profound disagreement over who should replace them and whether power should be centralized or shared with provinces and local districts. The government, aware that the situation was fast moving beyond its control, shifted from repression to bargaining. Congolese party leaders and Belgian officials met in January i960 and agreed to hold elections for a national legislature in May. Independence was set for June. The Congo, it seemed, was aiming to set a world record for compressed political change.

On schedule, the Belgian king, Baudouin, flew to Leopoldville for the indepen­dence ceremonies. The two most important Congolese party leaders had radically opposed visions for the Congo: Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba was an ardent nationalist and President Joseph Kasavubu, an ethnically oriented federalist. The self-congratulatory, paternalistic tone of Baudouin’s remarks drew an eloquently bitter retort from Lumumba. In the days following independence it became clear that the Belgians, while willing to turn over formal responsibility for central government affairs to elected Congolese, did not intend to give up de facto control of the coun­try’s armed forces or its vast mineral resources. Within two weeks of independence Belgian paratroopers landed in the Congo. One goal was to suppress a mutiny of Congolese soldiers against Belgian officers in the Force Publique. The other was to lend logistical support to a secessionist movement in mineral-rich Katanga Province. From the outset the new Congolese regime faced formidable external and internal opposition from the very country that had created the Congo.

Civil war, government instability, and widespread anarchy marked the first three years of Congolese independence. Belgium’s armed intervention contributed to the assassination of Patrice Lumumba, weakened the central government, and bright­ened Katanga’s prospects for secession. In these respects there was a strong vertical component to the postcolonial horizontal violence wracking the huge country.²⁹

In summary, the extent of vertical violence varied greatly from one empire to another. Metropolitan leaders’ attitudes toward the loss of overseas territory strongly influenced whether nationalist movements resorted to force or went to the bargain­ing table. Because the metropole with the most colonies was willing to tolerate losing them, and because the second largest empire eventually learned from bitter experi­ence the value of negotiating with nationalists, the overall pattern of phase 5 decolon­ization was remarkably peacefill. Of the wars for independence that did take place, a high proportion was fought against metropoles with few colonies.

Several factors explain why European countries varied so widely in responding to colonial nationalism. At the symbolic as well as material level, overseas territories helped Portugal to compensate for its small size and economic backwardness. Losing an empire was intolerable to the Salazar/Caetano regime, for it would dramatize how insignificant a player on the world scene Portugal had become. The regime was able to sustain a war strategy for years because it was authoritarian, more adept at repress­ing and dismissing critics than a democratic regime would have been. France’s history of military defeat in Europe from 1870 through 1940 and its demotion from great­power status at Allied conferences held in 1945 may have led it to value colonies highly on compensatory grounds, hence to fight to retain them. At the other end of the scale, Britain’s confidence that its high international standing did not rest solely on having an empire, its close relationship with the United States, its long record of accommo­dating settler demands for autonomy, its tradition of exporting parliamentary in­stitutions to the colonies, the relative ease with which these parliaments could be peacefully captured by nationalist movements, the Commonwealth as a mechanism for regular postcolonial interaction, Labour Party qualms about imperialism—all these predisposed the greatest metropole to treat decolonization as unfortunate but not calamitous. Features specific to the geography, political history, economics, and culture of each metropole shaped its response to the prospect and reality of decline.