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 the most conspicuous instances of violence in the second half of the twentieth century. Between 1945 and 1949, a bloody chaos held sway on the islands of Indonesia. In all these cases, it is practically impossible to give a precise count of the number of victims. The picture becomes even more dismal when we add the Korean war (1950–53) and the war the United States waged against Vietnamese national communism (1964–73) as follow-up wars of decolonization, and when we also include those civil wars that took place immediately or shortly after decolonization (in the Congo, Nigeria, Angola, Mozambique, etc.). The confrontation between rebels and colonial powers was often conducted with extreme brutality. State archives — many of them lost, deliberately destroyed, or still inaccessible — often provide only fragmentary evidence of this brutality. In some cases — for example, Kenya — its extent has only come to light recently, partly accompanied by spectacular court cases over the European states' responsibility. Other episodes of large-scale violence, such as the gruesome (and successful) repression of a major uprising in French Madagascar in 1947–49, have vanished almost completely from public memory outside the country concerned.

As a political process, decolonization has by now passed into history. If in 1938 there were still approximately 644 million people living in countries categorized as colonies, protectorates, or dependencies (not counting the British dominions), today the United Nations registers only seventeen populated "non-self-governing territories" having a total population of about 2 million inhabitants "remaining to be decolonized." Not all of these remaining colonial subjects — for example, the 32,000 inhabitants of Gibraltar — feel a strong urge toward full national self- government. Even while this great transformation was still under way, the concept of decolonization broke loose from the illusions harbored by European actors at that time and acquired a broader meaning. As a shorthand label, it designates what the historian Dietmar Rothermund has called "perhaps the most important historical process of the twentieth century."

SOVEREIGNTY AND NORMATIVE CHANGE

From another perspective, the vanishing of colonialism represents the end of Europe's overseas empires. Even if not synonymous with it, decolonization is at the center of what has been dubbed "the end of empire." Decolonization thus meant more than a profound rupture in the history of formerly colonized countries; it was more than a mere footnote in the history of Europe. As the "Europeanization of Europe," decolonization led to "Europe falling back on itself," altered the position of the continent in the international power structure, and interacted with the supranational integration of Europe's nation-states, which reached its first culmination in 1957 with the establishment of the European Economic Community (EEC), the forerunner of the present European Union (EU).

Overseas empires in which white-skinned Christian Europeans dominated nonwhite non-Christians had been gradually built up since around 1500. They were hardly ever systematically planned, and they were usually expedited by an interplay of hazy vision and improvised exploitation of opportunities. All these empires were patchwork, and none was consistently organized down to the last detail. The non-European territories were subordinated to their respective European metropoles as "colonies" in a wealth of different legal constructions. The political idea of nationalism with its goal of the independent nation-state changed little about colonial realities during the nineteenth century. Only in Spanish- speaking South and Central America was a large empire replaced by a multitude of independent states.

On the eve of the First World War, the British Empire was the only true world empire, since it also included Australia and New Zealand, in that it was represented on every continent. Three additional features made it unique. First, within the geographic boundaries of Europe, it also ruled over Europeans: Malta (since 1814) and Cyprus (since 1878) were British colonies; Corfu and the Ionian Islands had been so from 1815 to 1864. Ireland had an independent special status within the United Kingdom that was viewed as colony-like by Irish nationalists. Second, within the British imperial structure, there were several countries that were self-governing, that is, they regulated their political affairs themselves in democratic institutions and procedures under loose supervision by the British Crown. Starting in 1907, the generic term "dominions" became customary for these countries. Ever since several individual possessions were bundled together into the Union of South Africa in 1910, the "dominions" became the four proto-nation-states of Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa; in South Africa, however, the black majority was excluded from political participation, a tendency that was aggravated even more around the middle of the twentieth century. Third, alone among all the European colonial powers, Great Britain had the military resources (especially at sea) and economic strength (especially as the center of world finance) to exercise a preponderant international influence even beyond its colonies or outside the "protectorates" it administered somewhat less directly. It is possible to speak of such an "informal empire" on the eve of the First World War, especially in China, Iran, the Ottoman Empire, and parts of Latin America. The term "British world-system" has been suggested to designate this conglomerate of "formal" plus "informal empire."

The other empires were smaller, based on area and population. The French Empire was present in Southeast Asia, North and West Africa, the Caribbean, and Polynesia. Portugal laid claim to control over territories in southern Africa (especially Angola and Mozambique); Belgium, over the heart of the African continent with its share of the Congo. The German flag waved over a collection of colonies scattered among Africa, China, and the South Seas, and the Italian flag flew over Libya since 1911, while the Netherlands possessed in the "East Indies" (today's Indonesia) one of the most population- and resource-rich colonies in the world. Only the Spanish Empire, once powerful and extensive, had been reduced to mere remnants of its early modern self since the loss of Cuba and the Philippines that followed its defeat in the war of 1898 between Spain and the United States. With the exception of the German colonial empire, all these empires survived the First World War and even saved themselves, however battered, for a time beyond the Second World War. By 1975, they had disappeared. The oldest of the European overseas empires, the Portuguese, was the last to dissolve.

Decolonization came at the end of widely differing imperial trajectories and timelines. In the case of Spain and Portugal, it put the seal on a protracted, though unevenly phased, history of imperial contraction. France experienced a second major colonial breakdown after a first period of defeat overseas from 1763 to 1804. Britain was used to a long and complex history of imperial metamorphosis; nowhere else did decolonization come as less of a surprise. The Dutch, symbiotically tied to what they saw as a huge model colony of considerable stability, clung with particular tenacity to their own illusion of permanence. The much more short-lived Japanese Empire collapsed during the final apocalypse of the Second World War, leaving not even scope for a decision to retreat. For the United States, decolonization confirmed an already existing preference for tools of informal empire, temporary military occupation, and a worldwide string of enclaves and military bases over formal territorial rule.

From out of a world of imperial blocs and dependency relations there emerged in the "short" twentieth century a mosaic of politically autonomous states, each of which jealously defended its "sovereignty," even if with symbolic gestures alone. The concept expressed negatively as de-colonization, as the removal of foreign rule, can also be reinterpreted positively: decolonization as an apparatus for the serial production of sovereignty, as a kind of sovereignty machine that produces political units, standardized according to templates of international law: a series of states, each with a defined national territory, its own constitution, legal order, government, police, flag, and national anthem. Seen this way, decolonization is comprehensible as a statistical trend: on the one hand as a reduction in the number of colonies from 163 in 1913 to sixty-eight in 1965 and to thirty-three in 1995, and on the other hand as an upward curve showing the quantitative increase in subjects of international law, in other words, of states that were recognized by the already existing community of states as having equal rights and subject to no higher authority.

The League of Nations was founded in 1919 by thirty-two such sovereign states, nine of which were from Latin America; in all of Asia, only Japan, China, and Siam (Thailand since 1939) were represented; in Africa, only South Africa and Liberia (the latter was a de facto US protectorate). Strictly speaking, founding members Canada, New Zealand, Australia, and South Africa, as British dominions, did not constitute fully sovereign nation-states; this is what they would first become in 1931 via the Statute of Westminster. And the fact that the classic colony India figured among the League of Nation's founding members should be understood, in part, as a symbolic way of honoring India's military service, and partly as a concession awarding Great Britain, the strongest power in the new international organization, a second vote in disguise.