DECOLONIZATION AS MOMENT AND PROCESS

"DECOLONIZATION" is a technical and rather undramatic term for one of the most dramatic processes in modern history: the disappearance of empire as a political form, and the end of racial hierarchy as a widely accepted political ideology and structuring principle of world order. One can pin down this historical process by using a dual definition that, instead of keeping the process chronologically vague, anchors it unequivocally in the history of the twentieth century. Accordingly, decolonization is

(1) the simultaneous dissolution of several intercontinental empires and the creation of nation-states throughout the global South within a short time span of roughly three postwar decades (1945–75), linked with

(2) the historically unique and, in all likelihood, irreversible delegitimization of any kind of political rule that is experienced as a relationship of subjugation to a power elite considered by a broad majority of the population as alien occupants.

Decolonization designates a specific world-historical moment, yet it also stands for a many-faceted process that played out in each region and country shaking off colonial rule. Alternative attempts at a definition accentuate this second dimension. The historian and sinologist Prasenjit Duara, for example, puts less emphasis on the breakdown of empires and more on local power shifts in specific colonies when he defines decolonization as "the process whereby colonial powers transferred institutional and legal control over their territories and dependencies to indigenously based, formally sovereign, nation-states." He, too, adds a normative aspect: the replacement of political orders was embedded in a global shift in values. This dissolution signifies a counterproject to imperialism in the name of "moral justice and political solidarity."

It is equally possible to ask, quite concretely and pragmatically, when the decolonization of a specific territory was completed. A simple answer would be: when a locally formed government assumed official duties, when formalities under international law and of a symbolic nature were carried out, and when the new state was admitted (usually within a matter of months) into the United Nations. A more complex (and less easily generalizable) answer would weave these trajectories toward state independence into more comprehensive and intricate processes of ending colonial rule and extending political, economic, and cultural sovereignty.

Decolonization can thus be described at different levels, and even its exact time frame may vary according to the thematic or regional focus. Vagueness and ambiguity are part of the historical phenomenon itself, and they cannot simply be defined away. From a global perspective, decolonization has its "hot" and most decisive phase in the middle of the twentieth century during the three decades following the Second World War. The core period of decolonization, however, needs to be incorporated in a longer history with less sharply defined chronological margins. This long history of decolonization harks back to the years following the First World War, when anticolonial unrest took on a new dimension and colonial rule itself was subject to major transformations, and it extends to the many aftershocks palpable up to the present.

People all over the world have used different words to describe these dramatic transformations and the world they thought would supplant a world of empires. Compared with concepts such as "self-determination," "liberation," or "revolution" (and their many linguistic and cultural variations) — and also to other popular categories applied to contemporary history, like "Cold War" or "globalization" — it is a somewhat anemic word derived from administrative practice that has become the most common term for this process. "Decolonization" is not a category that historians or social scientists thought up in retrospect. Traces of the concept may be found before 1950. The term, which can be attested lexically since 1836, found some theoretic elaboration in the writings of the German émigré economist Moritz Julius Bonn in the interwar period. Yet, we only find it used with any significant frequency beginning in the mid-1950s, that is (as we know in hindsight), at the apex of those very developments the term describes.

Initially it was a word from the vocabulary of administrators and politicians confident of being able to keep abreast of the unfolding historical dynamics. What now appears to us as its cool and technical character actually reflects a political idea that was widespread at the time. Following the Second World War, the political elites of Great Britain and France, the last remaining colonial powers of any consequence, believed that they could engineer the transfer of power to "trustworthy" indigenous leaders in the colonial territories previously under their control, and that they could manage this transfer in accord with the colonial ruling elites' own ideas. It was hoped that these transitions would be long and drawn out — in other words, lasting decades rather than a few years — and that they would take place peacefully. There was also the expectation that the newly independent states, not without gratitude for many years of colonial "partnership," would cultivate harmonious relations with their former colonial powers. With this in mind, decolonization was understood as a strategy and political goal of Europeans, a goal to be reached with skill and determination.

Only in a few instances did the actual course of decolonization bear much semblance to this kind of orderly procedure. The confidence to keep the exit from empire under firm control was called into question by historical reality, the momentum of numerous self-reinforcing tendencies, speed-ups, unintended consequences, or mere historical accidents. While a number of colonial experts faced the inevitable end of colonial rule in Asia after 1945, almost all of them were united in believing that colonial rule in Africa would last — an erroneous belief, as would soon become apparent. For them, decolonization was thus a constant disappointment of the imperial illusion of permanence. It marks a historical juncture at which the exact outcome was anything but certain from the outset. Competing options were considered, negotiated, overtaken by events, and sometimes swiftly forgotten. This presents historians today with a great challenge: how, in hindsight, to avoid trivializing this openness to the future as experienced by contemporaries into a superficial impression that everything had to happen the way it did.

Even if it may have proceeded peacefully in some cases, the process of decolonization on the whole was a violent affair. The partition of India in 1947 (at about 15 million refugees and expellees, the largest forced migration condensed into any comparable twentieth-century time period), the Algerian war of 1954–62, and the 1946–54 war in Indochina are among...