How decolonization shaped the postwar world order
Conventional geopolitics accounts of the postwar world order leave out one essential feature: decolonization.
The old empires of Europe left their colonies ineptly. The American Alliance and the Partition of Eurasia, however, created conditions for the new forms of imperial world order. Early hopes for the final fall of empires were raised. Visions of a free world of nations were spoiled. “We are living in a revolutionary age of transition,” said one leader of Indian independence, Jawaharlal Nehru.
But this transition was contested. It was not a story of national liberation, nor the march of democracy, nor thwarted idealism of the non-aligned movement, nor unified rebellion of colonised peoples against European powers.
In his account of the post-1945 world order, John Darwin wrote that:
Decolonization is often equated with the end of colonial rule, but this is much too narrow. It is far more useful to think of it as the demolition of a Europe-centred imperial order in which territorial empire was interlocked with extraterritorial ‘rights’. (p. 441)
The overthrow of this European-centred imperial order was slow. It was not until 1975 that Portugal left East Timor. It was not till 1980 that the British white settler colonial regime of Rhodesia became the independent republic of Zimbabwe. It was not until 1990 that British and American sponsored apartheid was replaced by a truly post-colonial regime in South Africa. Britain left Hong Kong in 1999. In the 2020s African states of Niger, Mali and Gabon overthrew aspects of French colonialism that extracted resources from their countries. France still holds New Caledonia as a colony. Britain still claims the Falkland Islands. The USA remains determined not to lose Taiwan in the way it “lost China” in 1949.
Darwin makes clear that decolonization was not a tidy handover of European colonial rule to American-style national independence. Other forms of dominion were engaged.
The bases, enclaves, garrisons, gunboats, treaty ports and unequal treaties (as in Egypt or China) that littered the Afro-Asian world were as much the expression of this European imperialism as were the colonies and protectorates coloured red, blue, yellow or green on the old imperial maps.” (p. 442)
Disputes over the control of this vast network continue to this day. This complex network makes the narrative of decolonization intricate. The failure to prevent new forms of empire taking control of this network explains why many in the Global Majority today talk of neocolonialism and a need for decolonization 2.0.
Two other features of colonialism metamorphosed through Nehru’s age of revolutionary transition. First, the imperial-industrial world continued to extract the resources and commodities of the Global Majority. Second, the First World assumed it was more civilised than the Second and Third Worlds. Darwin described the ideas of this imperial order before 1945.
This ‘imperial order’ imagined a cultural hierarchy in which the progressive capabilities of North-West European (and Euro-American) societies were contrasted with the (sometimes picturesque) ‘stationary state’ in which non-Western cultures were presumed to be stuck.” (p. 442)
After 1945, despite decolonization, doctrines of cultural hierarchy reemerged. Ideas of American Supremacy and Western Civilization were rebuilt on the shattered cultural prestige of European empires. Despite this lingering illusion of greater insight, Western civilization did not define the postwar world. It was not a garden built by Europe amidst a jungle of disorder. The USA did not shape the world in its image. The contested postwar world order emerged from the unequal conflicts between empires and those who resisted them. Any order was only glimpsed in the chaos of changeable flows of ideas, power, people, and resources across the whole world.
Below I present for paid subscribers my reading guide to the account of decolonisation in the post-1945 world order presented in John Darwin, After Tamerlane: the Rise and Fall of Global Empires 1400-2000. You will get:
My reading guide to the section “Decolonisation” (pp. 441-468)
My tips for further reading, including primary sources documents from the 1955 Bandung Conference and recent books on South Asia, Indonesia and Africa
My audio-mini reading and commentary on the great essay by Rabindranath Tagore, Crisis in Civilisation (1941).
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