Wartime Exigencies

These pressures would prove increasingly difficult to resist with the onset of the Second World War. The Fall of France in June 1940 effectively cut off the French Empire from the metropolitan nexus of colonial administration, handing over re­sponsibility to the vulnerable Vichy regime.

The emerging military preponderance of the United States and the Soviet Union, each of whom championed (outwardly) anti-colonial political philosophies, further signaled the limits of Europe's imperial reach into the postwar world. Even before US entry into the war, the principle of “self-determination” was inscribed into the Atlantic Charter of August 1941 as a means of persuading Britain to relinquish its colonial em­pire as the price of American material support.

Yet the more immediate effects of the war were to be felt elsewhere. On 8 May 1945, as crowds gathered in Paris to celebrate the unconditional surrender of Nazi Germany, an Algerian nationalist was shot dead during a victory parade in the town of Setif, triggering an insurrection that resulted in widespread bloodshed.^[2617] Similar reverberations were felt after the Japanese surrender a few months later on 15 August. Within two days (and with the tacit approval of the vanquished Japanese administration), Indonesia’s Declaration of Independence was cere­moniously broadcast from Sukarno’s home in Jakarta, marking the beginning of a protracted armed struggle with Dutch forces fighting to regain control over their lost colony.^[2618] Meanwhile in Indochina, the Viet Minh launched the ‘August Revolution’ against the return of French colonial rule and by September 1945 their leader, Ho Chi Minh, had proclaimed the Democratic Republic of Vietnam, marking the beginning of the descent into the Indochina War.

Yet on the whole, these developments did not strike contemporaries as the ingredients of a singular, aggregated “decolonization” movement. Although appearing sporadically in political discourse in the 1940s, Moritz Bonn’s con­cept failed to attain the intellectual traction to lend new shape and meaning to the pressures brewing in the colonial world. It was widely assumed during the course of the war that Europe’s Far Eastern colonies would be restored following the Japanese defeat—expectations that would result in protracted military operations in the Dutch East Indies, French Indochina and the Malayan peninsula. The anti-colonial rhet­oric of the two major Cold War protagonists did not—again, initially—translate into concrete political or material measures that would restrain the imperial aspirations of postwar European governments. By the end of the War, American anti-colonial zeal had given way to a more cautious assessment of the value of Europe’s colonial empires as a check on Soviet designs. Secretary of State George C. Marshall made the position clear in February 1947: “It should be obvious that we are not interested in seeing colonial empire administration supplanted by... [the] Kremlin”^[2619]

Nevertheless, both British and French colonial administrators recognized the need to place their colonial empires on a more legitimate postwar footing, adopting a new rhetorical and policy orientation toward the notion of “development.” This had elements of both altruism and self-interest. From the perspective of postwar indebtedness, stimulating the production of colonial commodities (particu­larly those that could earn scarce dollars) offered a vital means of reviving ailing European economies.^[2620] These objectives fit snugly with new legislative measures to increase the welfare and standard of living of colonial peoples, partly as a means of meeting the demands of colonial trade unionists and nationalists, but also to meet international criticism of colonialism.

This was attended by a thorough overhaul of imperial nomenclature. According to the received wisdom of the day, Britain was not losing an empire but building a Commonwealth—a moment signaled in 1949 when the “British Commonwealth” was redubbed the “Commonwealth of Nations” (as a concession to India to re­main in the club, despite trenchant opposition from Australia and New Zealand).^[2624] Meanwhile, the French Empire was renamed the “French Union,” and the colonies became territoires doutre-mer. In both cases, the aim was to maintain and develop the political influence and economic returns of overseas imperial holdings, if nec­essary under a new name—not least because the old names were rapidly losing their gloss. In 1948, Canada's Vincent Massey decried the “American tendency to endow the words ‘colony' and ‘empire' with a connotation they have long since lost”; namely, the wholly negative connotations of oppression and exploitation.^[2625] His views were echoed in more prosaic terms by Winston Churchill on the cam­paign trail during the 1950 general election. “We mustn't use the word ‘empire,'” he chided his audience, “it's naughty.”^[2626] Over the next decade, “Commonwealth” would quietly supplant “empire” and “imperial” in the names of countless organiza­tions and occasions, ranging from the Royal Empire Society to “Empire Day.”