Diplomacy and Decolonization

JOHN DARWIN

As the Cold War recedes deeper into the past, it becomes easier to see that
the key event in the second half of the twentieth century has been the break-
up of colonial rule or semi-colonial domination across vast areas of Asia,
Africa, the Middle East and the Pacific. The confrontation between East and
West may have been decisive for the fate of Europe. But in much of the
extra-European world, the Cold War had a walk-on part in the larger drama
of decolonization, or can be seen realistically as only one element in the
struggle to save, seize or share out the domain of the Old Colonial Powers:
Britain, France, the Netherlands, Portugal and Belgium. As the chapters in
this book reveal, the shape of the world by the end of the twentieth century
and its astonishing proliferation of nation states, many of almost
microscopic size or resources, cannot be explained simply by invoking the
rise of the superpowers, the play of ideological conflict, or the irresistible
rise of anti-colonial nationalisms. Decolonization was not a pre-ordained
path, but a chaotic process on which accidents of timing and the variables
of regional or local politics exerted a crucial influence. Explaining it
requires (among other things) a careful reconstruction of the diplomacy
through which the colonial powers sought, but often failed, to safeguard the
substance of their imperial interests against the intrusion of other great
power influence (sometimes commercial, sometimes political), the
indifference or irritation of opinion at home and the hostility of their more
'extreme' opponents in colonial politics. As Jack Gallagher showed more
than 20 years ago, we will make little progress in unravelling its causes
unless we take seriously the complicated interplay between domestic,
colonial and international politics, and view cautiously the claims of any of
them to primacy.'

Here our first task is to think carefully about the meaning of decolonization
as a phase or process in world politics. Among anglophone writers (this is
mainly a vice anglais) the tendency has been to define decolonization so
6 INTERNATIONAL DIPLOMACY AND COLONIAL RETREAT

narrowly as to render it useless as a term for the great transformation

brought by the fall of empires. Typically it is used to denote the award of
sovereignty to a colonial territory, or the immediate events leading up to it.
The effect is to ignore the economic, social and cultural components in the
break-up of empires and to treat 'independence' as a moment at which (for
both old colony and former mother-country) history begins anew. Worse
still, by making a piece of constitutional folderol the defining criterion of
whether or not decolonization has occurred, it excludes from view - and
useful comparison - the fate of all those countries, starting with China,
where the Western powers had fashioned a colonial economy and culture
but with only limited recourse to orthodox methods of colonial rule. It
promotes a meaningless distinction between formal dependencies
sometimes of trivial economic or strategic value, and 'veiled protectorates'
like Egypt, whose control was thought vital to British world power and
where anti-British nationalism was a revolt against a status that was colonial
in all but name. It is a strange paradox that while almost all historians of
imperial expansion acknowledge the necessity to include regions of
'informal empire' in the study of imperialism, much of the work on imperial
contraction and decolonization has proceeded on an exactly opposite
assumption.
If decolonization as a concept is to help us to understand the making of
modern world politics, it has to be treated as something more than the
handiwork of constitutional lawyers. Usefully defined, it was the break-up
or dismantling of what became after c.1890 a 'globalized' system of
imperial domination centred upon Europe. Colonial rule and the informal
predominance secured by military occupation (as in Egypt), unequal
treaties, gunboats and garrisons (as in China) or agreed spheres of
diplomatic monopoly (as in Iran or Ethiopia) were its political aspect.
Ideologically, it rested upon dogmas about the 'standard of civilization' and
the right of civilized states to abrogate the sovereignty of the 'uncivilized' ?
But it was also an economic system (of sorts) which imposed (where
possible) an 'open economy'3 on extra-European regions and a division of
labour between commodity-producing colonials and their industrialized
masters. It assumed and asserted a cultural hierarchy in which the belief-
systems, literatures, and artefacts of the extra-European world were
sometimes admired for their charm but invariably discounted as inimical (in
the grand words of the Government of India's annual report) to 'material
and moral progress'. It licensed the transfer of populations: Europeans
where practical, as the necessary agents of economic advance; Afro-Asians
as migrant labour. In patchwork colonial zones, with no imaginable
'national' future, the mingling of alien communities was thought
DIPLOMACY AND DECOLONIZATION 7

unproblematic. This was the regime - untidy, unjust and imperfect-which

defined the relations between Europe (including its American and Japanese
junior partners) on the one hand and much of the extra-European world on
the other for most of the 60 years after 1890. It was the framework within
which the bilateral relations of colonial power and colony were conducted.
It prescribed the limits of semi-colonial freedom for states like Egypt, Iran
or even China. It formed a crucial part of the diplomatic chart by which
great power statesmen set their course.
By 1950 much of this great political and diplomatic structure, together
with the economic and cultural elements embedded in it, was badly
damaged. By the late 1960s it had disintegrated almost completely. In its
place grew up an international order which reversed the values and scrapped
the rules of 'global colonialism'. Huge inequalities remained as the dynamic
of world politics. But colonial rule disappeared, as did most of the apparatus
(garrisons, treaty ports, spheres of influence) through which informal
empire had been imposed. Upholding national sovereignty became the
supreme international value, and its infringement required covert action or
specious invocations of comradely solidarity. The open economy
throughout most of the ex-colonial world was replaced by policies of 'para-
protectionism':4 import substitution; exchange control; and a 'licence-raj'.
Expropriation and nationalization destroyed old commercial immunities.5
Multinationals and branch-plants replaced agency houses, concessions and
absentee proprietors as the characteristic form of foreign enterprise.6 If the
old cultural hierarchy persisted, it came under an increasingly furious
'multicultural' assault and its core belief in the differential capacity of
ethnic groups was repudiated so fiercely by the intellectual mainstream in
the West that in some cases even its expression became illegal. Last, but far
from least, the demographic imperialism which had authorized the
migration of Europeans to permanent residence in Afro-Asia, and justified
their assumption of social leadership on arrival, was spectacularly reversed.
Movement from the ex-colonial world to the old metropoles now dominated
their demographic relations and led to a neatly inverted debate about the
rights of Afro-Asian 'settlers' in Europe. Almost every important feature of
the old colonial (and semi-colonial) landscape had disappeared. And of
course, it was the cumulative, interactive impact of all these changes, not
simply the conferment of a new-made sovereignty in parts of Afro-Asia,
which brought about what we think of as the post-colonial world.
How had this astounding transformation come about? In this book the
focus is upon the ways in which the struggle between the colonial powers
and their enemies affected or was affected by the arena of international
politics. After 1945 most of the Old Colonial Powers found themselves
8 INTERNATIONAL DIPLOMACY AND COLONIAL RETREAT

dangerously ill-equipped for the task of reasserting their colonial and semi-
colonial prerogatives. Yet for the most part they attempted to do so because
vital national interests still seemed at stake in faraway colonial provinces
and because, to an extent which is easily overlooked in hindsight, it was not
yet clear that the preconditions allowing Europe's domination-through-
colonialism had ceased to apply generally. To appreciate the task that faced
them, and the reasons for their confident assumption that the age of empire
was not yet over, we need first to examine the international foundations on
which Europe's imperialism had rested since the classic era of rivalry and
partition in the 1890s.

II

European colonialism has a long history but it was only in the later
nineteenth century that the European powers made their primacy effective
across most of the globe. The partitions of Africa, Southeast Asia and the
Pacific, the occupation of Egypt, the quasi-protectorate asserted over
Ottoman Turkey after 1878, the policy of spheres in China (already half-
chained by the unequal treaties of 1842 and 1858-60) Russia's conquest of
the Central Asian khanates: all these served notice that the world was now
a 'closed system' under the management of the European Powers and their
associates. In the Americas, the United States was treated as an honorary
member of the Imperial Club. In the whole of Afro-Asia only Japan had
preserved real independence and could stake a claim in the imperial future.
The most astonishing feature of this process was the amicability with
which the international share-out was conducted. Historians are fond of
evoking an atmosphere of cut-throat rivalry and, following Lenin, like to see
partition as the prelude to Armageddon in 1914. But despite the scale of the
territorial gains at stake, the popular excitement they sometimes aroused,
the extravagance of geopolitical prediction and the machinations of sub-
imperialists like Cecil Rhodes, Captain J. B. Marchand, Admiral Alexeiev
or Carl Peters, no two European powers went to war over an imperial
question between 1885 and 1914. The strains of competitive co-existence
were sometimes intense; but, revealingly, it was with their extra-European
associates that two of the Old Colonial Powers in Europe blundered into
war, in 1898 and 1904. During Britain's dangerous isolation during the
Second Anglo-Boer War (1899-1902), Russia, France and Germany
considered and rejected the option of a coalition to divide the spoils of
British expansion.7
All this suggests that a prime factor in the breakneck diplomacy of
partitions, spheres and claims was a recognition by European leaders that,
DIPLOMACY AND DECOLONIZATION 9

however seductive the colonial vista, it could not be allowed to unsettle the
European balance or threaten European peace. That consensus was made
possible by the conservatism of the most powerful European states: the
quiescence of pan-European ideologies of revolutionary change on the one
hand, or of notions of a 'holy alliance' against liberalism on the other. It was
powerfully reinforced by the knowledge of Britain's vast naval advantage in
the extra-European world. And whatever their national or cultural
differences within Europe, European elites held a shared belief in the
superiority of European civilization over all others, the imperative of the
'civilizing mission', the legitimacy of intervention in 'uncivilized' states
and the morality of colonial rule. Confronted by a serious anti-Western
challenge, like that of the Boxers, the Imperial Club (including Japan) was
even capable of joint action to repress it.
From this willingness to settle their colonial differences, grudging and
bad-tempered as it often was, Europeans derived several benefits, which
contributed to their global primacy. Partition by agreement meant that
colonial states did not have to be garrisoned against colonial neighbours.
Where European militarism proliferated in the extra-European world, it was
usually where partition was anticipated (as in China) or incomplete (as in
Central Asia). Elsewhere, under the doctrine of 'effective occupation',
colonial armies were lightly armed, or paramilitary forces were deployed
for internal 'pacification'. With little incentive to administer their remoter
provinces closely, colonial rulers had ample scope for collaborative
bargains. They built shoestring 'shallow states', whose running costs were
designed to make little impact on metropolitan budgets. Here was a formula
for imperialism without (domestic) tears. The practice of competitive co-
existence and ideological solidarity in the colonial world also ruled out great
power sponsorship of colonial and semi-colonial resistance movements or,
as Cubans and Filipinos discovered, ensured a smooth passage from one
form of imperial supervision to another. Indeed, there was little in
international politics to encourage the nationalist aspirations of colonial
peoples. The real issue was the practical limit of European control, not its
necessity or justification.8 The main task of imperial diplomacy was
managing the endemic disputes, which arose where the demarcation of
colonial domains had still to be finalized.
Of course, the international imperialism of the late nineteenth century,
however unlike the blood-soaked mercantilism of the previous century, was
no guarantee of a durable regime of co-operative primacy. Running through
it were three 'genetic' flaws. It depended ultimately upon the stability of
great power relations in Europe and on the skill with which ministers and
dynasts regulated social upheaval at home and in Europe's own semi-
10 INTERNATIONAL DIPLOMACY AND COLONIAL RETREAT

colonial zones in the Balkans. The end of peace in Europe, or even a drastic
shift in the relative weight of the European powers, was bound to ignite the
latent conflicts of the imperial world. Secondly, for all the heroic scale of
their cartographic diplomacy, the Europeans' partition of the world was
dangerously incomplete. They had divided where division was easy. But in
the Near East and East Asia, where their interests were least easily
reconciled, agreement had been elusive. Here competition and co-existence
were finely balanced9 and combustible elements abounded in local politics.
Finally, European primacy had flourished in a propitious economic climate:
European output had grown rapidly and a wide zone of free trade and
monetary stability (through the gold standard) had extended the
international economy. But if these conditions went into reverse,
collaboration between rival imperialists, as well as between colonial rulers
and ruled, was certain to become much harder.
Indeed, the First World War brutally exposed the defects in Europe's
claim to global paramountcy. Fighting between Europeans spread rapidly to
Africa and the Pacific. In the Near East and East Asia, where the pre-war
balance of imperial interests was particularly delicate, the status quo was
thrown into confusion by the intervention of local powers. In Europe itself,
total war wrecked the old diplomatic system and ended with the downfall of
the three dynastic empires. With the prospect of revolution in Europe in
1919, American endorsement of national self-determination, and the surge
of anti-European nationalism in Turkey, Egypt, the Arab Middle East, India
and China, the familiar landscape of imperial diplomacy disappeared. In
Britain, the main guardian of the old order, there were nightmare visions of
an unholy alliance between Soviet commissars and Asian nationalists.10 In
India, an embattled Viceroy categorized Gandhi as a Bolshevik. In East
Asia, the price of American support to restrain Japan seemed to be the
surrender of the treaty privileges on which British interests had depended
since the 1840s." To some anxious die-hards the end of empire was in
sight.12
But the colonial order did not implode and the crisis of empires passed.
In the Near East, Soviet diplomacy proved less seductive and Soviet power
more limited than had been feared.13 Arab, Egyptian and Indian
nationalisms were appeased and divided. Even in China, where the assault
on pre-war imperialism had gained most momentum, the alliance of
nationalism and communism collapsed by 1927. The enemies of the old
order had turned out to be weaker than they had seemed at the height of
revolutionary excitement in 1919-21.
In part, then, the slackening of anti-imperialism reflected the internal
divisions of the colonial and semi-colonial movements and the unbroken
DIPLOMACY AND DECOLONIZATION 11

military capability of the colonial powers. But there were deeper reasons for
the surprising durability of empires in an age of nationalism. With
remarkable success, colonial rulers were able to insulate their subject
populations from external political influence, even if they had to tolerate
some ideological 'contamination'. There was no white knight to break open
the prison house of colonial peoples. If colonial loyalty could not be taken
for granted, there was little danger that it would be transferred to a rival
great power patron. France and Britain emerged as victor powers. The most
restive members of the old Imperial Club had been dispossessed and their
imperial assets transferred or safely neutralized. The United States retreated
into its hemispheric preoccupations, except in East Asia where private
commercial interests briefly pursued a strategy of business imperialism in
partnership with Shidehara Japan. The international authority set up to
police the new world order of 1919 embodied by default the pre-eminence
of the great colonial powers. There was nothing in the mandate system
incompatible with the 'old diplomacy' of spheres and informal empire.
Even the League's watchdog on mandates was staffed with European
colonial 'experts'14 and tactfully relied on the self-reporting of mandatory
governments. Once the British and French had settled their differences in
the Near and Middle East, there was little scope for local powers (like
Turkey or Iran) to challenge their partition diplomacy. Even in East Asia
where British policy-makers feared encirclement by a tacit coalition of
Chinese nationalists, American financiers and Japanese zaibatsu, anti-
imperialism had succumbed to internal discord and economic turbulence by
1930, leaving the treaty structure largely intact.
The fly in the ointment was the Great Depression. Before 1914s a
buoyant world economy had eased the tensions of global partition. Britain's
adherence to free trade made the gargantuan scale of its empire more
palatable to industrial competitors. The prosperity brought by commodity
production made empire more acceptable to colonial elites. But after 1930
these props to imperial stability gave way. In Europe, depression helped to
trigger the Nazi revolution and its diplomatic sequel, the revisionist
partnership of Germany and Italy forged in 1936. In East Asia, the fragile
liberalism of the Shidehara period collapsed. Japanese anger at Western
criticism of their Manchurian policy was sharpened by resentment at the
protectionist imperialism practised by the British after 1932. The 'Greater
East Asia Co-prosperity Zone' was Japan's riposte to the tariff walls, trade
blocs and barter deals by which the Western powers secured their share of
shrinking world trade. The 'new order' for Asia eventually proclaimed in
1938" signalled the repudiation of Japan's former role as an ambivalent
associate of the Old Colonial Powers. Now Tokyo was committed to tearing
12 INTERNATIONAL DIPLOMACY AND COLONIAL RETREAT

down the colonial order across East and Southeast Asia. Meanwhile, for
colonial and semi-colonial peoples in Afro-Asia and the Americas, the
benefits of imperial collaboration were discredited by rural hardship and the
crash of markets.16
Thus between 1936 and 1939 the international colonial system of which
Britain and France were the principal guardians looked more and more
vulnerable to external attack and internal subversion. Of the world's great
powers only two remained in the Imperial Club. The five outside were
committed ideologically either to its destruction or to the drastic
reallocation of its benefits." Not surprisingly, in some parts of the colonial
and semi-colonial world, local opposition was encouraged by the prospect
of 'liberation' from without, or levered new concessions from jumpy rulers.
In the Middle East, where German and Italian influence was strongest, and
strategic anxieties greatest, the British and French made reluctant
concessions to Egyptian,'8 Syrian,19 Turkish20 and Palestinian21 demands.
Closer to home, the Chamberlain government abandoned its economic war
against Eamon de Valera, premier of the Irish Free State, and surrendered
the naval bases retained since the Anglo-Irish treaty of 1921. With the
Anglo-American trade agreement of 1938, London tried to ease the
commercial resentments of the great neutral whose resources would be
critical in any future war by lowering its imperial tariffs.22 Meanwhile, both
Britain and France searched fruitlessly for ways of defusing the antagonism
of their two European enemies, calculating that so long as Europe was at
peace the great archipelago of European colonialism would be safe enough
against internal revolt and even the threat from Japan.
This was not absurd. For all the symptoms of imperial unease in the
1930s, the growing regional dominance of Japan in East Asia, the nightmare
of a tripartite onslaught on Britain's overstrained imperial defences, and
Anglo-French humiliation over the Rhineland and Czechoslovakia, it would
be premature to conclude that by 1939 the seemingly rickety structure of
European imperialism was about to collapse. In India, where anti-
colonialism had mobilized most effectively, the prospect of real
independence still seemed infinitely remote on the eve of war. In Egypt and
Syria, the 1936 treaties (abortive in Syria's case) gripped them firmly to the
military infrastructure of their imperial 'allies'. However unsympathetic
they were to the imperialism of Britain and France and the lesser colonial
powers, it seemed unlikely that either the United States or the Soviet Union
would collaborate actively in their destruction with Germany, Italy or Japan.
And to many anti-colonial nationalists, the three 'have-not' powers seemed
to threaten forms of imperial domination even more brutal and exploitative
than those against which they were struggling. It was, after all, the decadent
DIPLOMACY AND DECOLONIZATION 13

liberalism of the Western Powers which fascism denounced, not their

repression of colonial liberties. With no grand anti-imperial coalition in
prospect, everything turned on how successfully Britain and France could
manoeuvre between their divided enemies and uphold the substance of their
imperial prerogatives. Here there was comfort to be drawn from recent
history. So long as the United States and Soviet Union remained neutral (at
worst), short of a sudden knock-out blow, Hitler's chances of inflicting a
decisive defeat on Britain and France seemed small. A war of attrition was
far more likely. In that case there was much less danger of either Italy or
Japan joining in.23 Of course, a second European war was likely to
strengthen both American and Soviet influence. But it was unlikely to
demolish at a stroke the surviving structures of colonial and semi-colonial
power.

Ill

In June 1940 the fall of France destroyed these central assumptions of

international politics. Henceforth Britain was the sole champion of the old
colonial order. Italian intervention rapidly extended the war to Britain's
spheres in the Middle East and North Africa where a military defeat
threatened to break its empire in half. At this hour of maximum imperial
danger, the unleashing of a Japanese blitzkrieg began the systematic
demolition of Europe's colonial structures in East and Southeast Asia. By
the end of 1942, with the obliteration of European rule almost everywhere
between the borders of India and the maritime frontiers of Australia, the
prestige and authority of the Old Colonial Powers had been dealt a
devastating blow. It was hardly surprising that, having entered the war,
President Franklin D. Roosevelt should quickly revive the Wilsonian
programme for colonial self-determination blocked by imperialist
obstruction after 1919. Nor that Vichy collaboration and the helplessness of
France should make French colonialism the prime target of his radical
displeasure. France's record of failing to govern in the interests of its subject
peoples, he declared, abrogated its claim to territorial sovereignty24 -
perhaps forgetting that by this criterion white American rule would lapse in
large parts of the Deep South.
The events of 1940-42 promised a revolution in world politics. The
crushing defeat of France, the occupation of The Netherlands, the great and
growing dependence of Britain on American aid, the vast scale of Russian
military power in evidence by 1943, and the certainty that Washington
would play a dominant role in the peace settlement made any return to inter-
war 'normalcy' inconceivable. These were inauspicious circumstances for
14 INTERNATIONAL DIPLOMACY AND COLONIAL RETREAT

the restoration of colonialism in Asia, and its continued practice elsewhere.

Indeed, the overshadowing of British power, so visible at the Yalta
conference in February 1945, hinted at a world that would be remade to the
prescription of the emerging superpowers. Already a blueprint had appeared
for a post-colonial world governed through a United Nations Organization
by four great powers: the United States, the Soviet Union, the 'British
Commonwealth' and China - whose regional predominance in East Asia
was to be underwritten by American support. Here was a golden
opportunity for rapid decolonization, since only Britain, in a ruined Europe,
could hope to maintain, and then only briefly and conditionally, some
vestige of the old order. With India already promised independence (in the
darkest imperial hour in 1942), the Pacific dominions reoriented
strategically towards the United States, nationalist mobilization in the
Middle East and Southeast Asia, the colonial claims of the French and the
Dutch erased by defeat and occupation, colonialism would be quickly
driven back to its last temporary refuge in tropical Africa.
But this prospect remained a fantasy: the reality of decolonization turned
out to be slow, complex, untidy and incomplete. The Old Colonial Powers
displayed a tenacious attachment to their imperial claims and a readiness to
assert them by force if necessary. Far from repudiating the heritage of
empire as incompatible with social democracy and domestic reconstruction,
they set about rebuilding as much as possible of the pre-war imperial order,
to recreate the zones of monopoly influence they had enjoyed before the
war. It is not difficult to see why they should have wanted to do so. In their
impoverished post-war circumstances, with desperate shortages of
foodstuffs, raw materials and hard currency, the colonial territories assumed
a premium value undreamt of in the depression era between the wars. Now
they promised commodities for metropolitan consumption at knock-down
colonial prices, or even on tick, and raw material exports that could be
exchanged for precious dollars. As symbols of national power or (in
France's case) of great power status, they could not easily be discarded:
especially where new post-war regimes were anxious to consolidate their
authority. Paradoxically, therefore, the political and economic effects of war
had raised not lowered the store that Europeans set by empire. But this
would have mattered little had not two vital circumstances given wide, if
temporary, scope for the reassertion of imperial power.
The first was Washington's gradual retreat from the anti-colonial
programme so vigorously propagated in the earlier stage of the war.25 As
resentment against the colonial powers was replaced by fear of the Soviet
Union, evicting them prematurely became an increasingly risky option.
Fragile post-war governments in Western Europe, crippled by economic
DIPLOMACY AND DECOLONIZATION 15

failure and humiliated by colonial dispossession would be soft targets for

communist influence, especially in France, the key to regional stability.
Their abandoned colonies in Asia, where American influence was skeletal
at best, might fall prey to local versions of anti-Western nationalism.
Secondly, almost as soon as the war was over, the diplomatic pre-conditions
required to construct a new post-imperial world order vanished like a
dream. The grand four power coalition to police the world fell apart in
acrimony over the future of Germany and Eastern Europe. China
succumbed to civil war and revolution. As a result no orderly colonial
settlement could be appended to the European peace (as had happened in
1919-23) because there was no European peace. Instead in the extra-
European world and in the old regions of imperial sway, there was an
unseemly free-for-all.
The Old Colonial Powers seemed collectively well-placed to take
advantage of this unexpected twist in their fortunes. In Southeast Asia,
where the course of the war had done them most damage, it was British
military power pivoted on India and Ceylon (Sri Lanka) which carried out
the 'liberation' of not only British Malaya but French Indochina and the
Dutch East Indies as well. Behind a screen of British and sepoy bayonets,
the old colonial masters scrambled back into the saddle - or at least got a
foot in the stirrup. In Indochina, the French embarked on a colonial
reconquest and, after inconclusive diplomatic sparring with the Viet Minh,
installed a new mandarin regime enjoying limited autonomy under Bao Dai
in 1948. In Indonesia, Dutch re-occupation was designed to submerge Java-
based nationalism in a new decentralized structure: the Linggadjati
agreement of 1946 promised local autonomy within a Netherlands-
Indonesia union. Here too the commanding heights of foreign policy,
defence and finance would remain in European hands. The British
recovered Hong Kong and set about rebuilding their colonial authority in a
new Malayan Union, a more centralized model of the ramshackle regime
that had fallen apart in 1942. By 1947 fear of Soviet communist influence
was transforming American acquiescence in this colonial revival into active
support, especially in Indochina.
The confidence with which Britain, France and the Netherlands set out
to rebuild the colonial order in Southeast Asia was reinforced by their
apparent freedom from military interference by any great power rival
(except in the northern part of Indochina, where Chinese nationalist forces
had replaced the Japanese occupation). In this richest of colonial regions
they had every motive to restore their control over economies wrecked by
four years of war. Here, as elsewhere in their empires, the Old Colonial
Powers acknowledged that some concession would have to be made to the
16 INTERNATIONAL DIPLOMACY AND COLONIAL RETREAT

wartime growth of political consciousness, their need to win more local co-
operation than before 1939, and the ideological shift, which their alliance
with the United States had required. Here, as elsewhere, they hoped that the
immediate post-war turbulence would give way to quieter times in which
the new global balance would permit imperial repair and renovation.
Indeed, the defeat of Germany and Japan, and American willingness to
assume the burden of containing the Soviet Union, seemed to offer a
precious respite in which to complete economic recovery at home and
political reconstruction in the colonies. Far from being daunted by the scale
of American power, bolder spirits in Britain and France, especially the
Labour Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin, were confident that they could
exploit Soviet-American rivalry to build a new Europe that would keep
much of old Europe's influence in the outer world.26
Between 1945 and 1954 these hopes foundered on two great obstacles.
Firstly, they assumed that the colonial powers would be able to manipulate
the American colossus with exemplary finesse. Without American aid they
could not hope to revive their domestic economies or meet the costs of far-
flung colonial re-occupations. American policy and opinion had to be
persuaded that colonialism was the corollary of containment. At the same
time, American interference in or influence over their colonial or semi-
colonial spheres had to be resisted. Sometimes Washington might have to be
persuaded that defeating communism was less urgent than defending
colonialism. And once the Soviet threat had receded, America would be
expected to assume a more modest role among the Western Powers. But
assumptions like these took too little account of how American foreign
policy was made, and of the enormous growth of America's political,
commercial and cultural influence once Europe's dark age set in after June
1940. If America's military power had narrower limits in the decade after
1945 than is sometimes imagined, the expansion of American private
interests knew no such boundary. Only economic recovery and
modernization on a gargantuan scale would have enabled the Old Colonial
Powers to compete. Nor were they able to assert more independence in
world politics to even up their status with their transatlantic ally. The Soviet
threat, and their need for America's strategic guarantee, remained as great
as ever.
These factors would have been much less important had they enjoyed
greater success in reimposing their control in their old spheres or in carrying
through the necessary adjustments in their systems of colonial
collaboration. But the side-effects of war in Europe and Asia had drastically
destabilized many of their local alliances or, as in Southeast Asia, liquidated
the colonial infrastructure altogether. For the British, the consequence was
DIPLOMACY AND DECOLONIZATION 17

the abandonment of Burma to republican independence outside the

Commonwealth and gloomy acceptance that only by a hasty withdrawal and
partition of India - forsaking the diplomatic and strategic benefits of a
federal 'Dominion of India' - could they escape entrapment in a potentially
catastrophic civil war. In the Middle East, the British had intended to
reshape their presence, lowering their wartime profile to conciliate Egyptian
and Arab nationalism. But this plan was wrecked by the savage twist given
to communal conflict in Palestine by the European holocaust and then by
the decisive intervention of the United States as the sponsor of Jewish
aspirations. The effects on Britain's treaty empire were disastrous. Amid the
surge of nationalist feeling across the Arab world, the British lost their pre-
war vantage point as the arbiters in the struggles of courts and parties;27 now
their influence in Egypt required a garrison of 80,000 men - 13 times its
pre-war level. For the French and Dutch the travails and delays of their
'police action' in Southeast Asia threatened even worse exposure to external
intervention. In the French case, as it turned out, American sympathy for the
defeat of the Viet Minh as communist 'proxies' ensured a huge volume of
military aid, meeting nearly 80 per cent of their costs by the 1950s.28 But in
the Dutch East Indies, Washington's fear of communist influence drove it in
the opposite direction. Impatient with Dutch attempts to force Sukarno back
into their 'commonwealth', and seeing his nationalism as a firmer barrier to
Soviet influence than their imperialism, the American government evicted
them from their colonial archipelago on pain of bankruptcy.29
For the colonial powers, therefore, their grand ally had proved
worryingly unpredictable, although, with characteristic insouciance, the
British had regarded the end of the Dutch empire as a necessary (foreign)
sacrifice for the greater imperial good. But the combination of European
weakness and American strength had punched two large holes in the pre-
war colonial order by 1950, with the prospect of further damage as the
impact of China's communist revolution was felt across Asia. The premium
on anti-communist varieties of nationalism was bound to rise. The scope for
colonial-style bargains was certain to narrow. Meanwhile, the surviving
colonial powers found themselves bogged down in guerrilla wars and
emergencies that threatened to sap their military power and the resolve of
domestic opinion.
Perhaps the best that the colonial powers could hope for was a partial
retention of their old prerogatives, a piecemeal and fragmented
reconstruction of the international colonial order. But this could be only a
temporary refuge. There was no stable foundation for any halfway house
between the ancien regime of colonies and spheres and the new diplomacy
of successor states and superpowers. All the preconditions of Europe's
18 INTERNATIONAL DIPLOMACY AND COLONIAL RETREAT

imperial primacy were going or gone. In an age of bipolar rivalry, there

could be no doctrine of colonial non-interference: colonies were hostages to
fortune in the competition for Afro-Asian friendship, and those who wished
to keep them would have to pay for the privilege. The open exercise of
imperial power was no longer legitimate, except as a transition to
independence. While the charter of the United Nations did not proscribe
colonial rule, it treated progress towards self-government as universally
desirable and unabashed imperialism as obsolete and discredited. Moreover,
as the colonial world shrank, the infrastructure of military power, which had
underpinned it, became much costlier to maintain. This was especially true
for the British. The loss of India as a great reservoir of sepoys, a vast
cantonment moored in Asia and, during most of British rule, a cashbox
which met nearly half the ordinary costs of the empire's standing armies30
meant that their extra-European commitments had now to be met by
peacetime conscription at home - a political and economic albatross.
Elsewhere, new bases had to be constructed, imposing added costs and
unwelcome commitments, as in Cyprus."
Most baffling of all was the dilemma of colonial reform. By the early
1950s the British and French understood that whenever possible direct
colonial administration should make way for self-government and that local
self-rule, even the concession of formal sovereignty, was their best hope of
winning local co-operation and safeguarding their interests. This meant a
switch from formal control to informal influence: a cheap, flexible and
convenient alternative. There was one drawback. The success of informal
empire depended upon the ability of the great power patron to 'buy' the
allegiance of the client state: by strategic protection, military and technical
aid, and economic favours. It was not a cheap option. It worked best where
the great power concerned already enjoyed a practical monopoly of
influence. It was not a technique that worked very well where the
competition for influence was intense and where richer and stronger patrons
were waiting in the wings. By the mid-1950s this was precisely the
difficulty facing Britain and France as the superpowers sharpened their
global rivalry. Though the true extent of their dilemma took some time to
become obvious, it proved inescapable. To maintain their credit as global
powers, even, in the British case, to keep the friendship of the most
important ex-colonial states like India, they had to move steadily towards
informality. Yet the more they did so, the more vulnerable their old spheres
became to the entry of the new world powers.
In retrospect we can see that the years between 1954 and 1956 served
notice that France and Britain were under-engined for this task of maintaining
empire by influence. After the defeat at Dien Bien Phu and the Geneva
DIPLOMACY AND DECOLONIZATION 19

agreements in 1954, France's post-colonial presence in Vietnam was swiftly

terminated by the alliance struck between the United States and the nationalist
following of Ngo Dinh Diem.32 More tellingly still, the Suez crisis showed
that even when Britain and France acted together they lacked the diplomatic
and financial muscle to enforce their claims and resist an expropriation of
international property inconceivable by a small power before 1939. In both
cases, the defeat of the European powers was followed by the assertion of
American primacy proclaiming 'nationalist' values and promising (credible)
aid against external attack. In two out of the three regions where European
colonialism had tried to maintain a post-war footing (Africa being the third),
it had suffered a decisive defeat. The diplomacy of imperial survival was over;
the diplomacy of colonial retreat had begun in earnest.
Between the later 1950s and the mid-1960s the surviving colonial
powers tried to adapt themselves to the new era of superpower
predominance. The Belgians jumped overboard leaving their vast ill-
organized colony adrift with a mutinous crew. In France, where the failure
to suppress the Algerian revolt had brought down the Fourth Republic,
General Charles de Gaulle zigzagged towards colonial disengagement.
France's claim to global status was upheld by the force de frappe, the
zealous promotion offrancophonie that reached its notorious climax in the
General's visit to Quebec and the exercise of a post-independence (and
uncontested) monopoly of influence in what had been French Colonial
Africa. This was a toy empire to soothe a wounded amour propre. The
Evian Accords of 1962 conceded Algerian independence. Like Napoleon in
1798, de Gaulle retired from North Africa to conquer Europe, or, less
heroically, to guard French primacy in the Economic Community against
the Anglo-Saxon interloper. For the British the balance of choice was finer:
their commitments were more extensive and the link between financial and
commercial power (through the sterling area) and a diluted version of their
imperial role more convincing.33 They enjoyed, or so it seemed, greater
success than the French in installing congenial successor regimes with
whom strategic and financial co-operation was possible.34 After Suez, they
successfully renegotiated the terms of the Anglo-American partnership to
prolong much of the appearance and some of the substance of world power
status. But even for the British 1960 was a watershed. They could not
escape the 'informal imperative' but by the early 1960s its rising costs and
growing risks - in South Arabia, Southeast Asia and Central Africa -
coupled with the endemic crisis in their balance of payments, was driving
them towards the logic of abdication.35
One Old Colonial Power seemed immune to the wasting disease that
afflicted the British and French. The smallest and most backward of
20 INTERNATIONAL DIPLOMACY AND COLONIAL RETREAT

European imperialisms was the last to lose its confidence in the imperial
mission. On the great Padrao erected in Lisbon in 1960, Henry the
Navigator points south - towards Africa - the direction of Portugal's
destiny. More surprisingly, perhaps, the Portuguese were unaffected by the
defeats and reappraisals that dented imperial confidence elsewhere after
1945. For them the international consequences of the Second World War
were much less negative than for the grander empires. Despite the
ideological leanings of the Salazar regime and a colonial record for which
not even colonialists had a good word, the Portuguese escaped the righteous
anathema of President Roosevelt. Washington approved the restoration of
Portuguese rule in Timor, which had been occupied by the Japanese, despite
Lisbon's wartime neutrality. And after 1945 the Portuguese set about a
vigorous programme of colonial development swelling the number of white
settlers in its African territories of Angola and Mozambique from some
67,000 in 1940 to nearly 300,000 by I960.36
This success story was built on three favourable conditions.
Economically the war had been a bonanza for Portugal's colonial trade.
Angola's exports rose threefold between 1939 and 1946, and Mozambique's
by a similar factor.37 Portugal became not an impoverished dollar debtor like
Britain but an imperial nouveau riche with a large sterling balance. Except
for Timor, there was no burden of reconstruction, and no lost colonies where
authority had to be painfully reasserted. Geopolitically, far from a new
dependence upon the United States, Portugal's strategic assets now
commanded a handsome price. America's entry into the war and the
urgency of a short all-season air route to Europe and the Middle East had
made the Azores a vital staging post. When Portugal reluctantly provided a
separate American air base in October 1944 (previously they had used the
British base conceded earlier by Lisbon), Timor was part of the bargain.38
After the war, Mozambique's uranium39 and Portugal's potential value as a
maritime launching pad if a second Anglo-American liberation of Europe
became necessary reinforced Lisbon's claim on American goodwill. Finally,
unlike Britain and France, Portuguese opinion, in a closed society, was
much less susceptible to the ideology of self-determination; and in a poor
society with a peasant surplus, the economic utility of empire was less likely
to be questioned.
The Portuguese case shows that the shift towards a bipolar world was
not necessarily fatal even to an unrepentant imperialism that repudiated the
ultimate goal of colonial self-government. Under post-war conditions,
Portugal was in a uniquely favourable geopolitical niche. Shielded by
Spain at home, the Portuguese in Africa found their two largest territories
conveniently close to the last bastions of white power in South and central
DIPLOMACY AND DECOLONIZATION 21

Africa. But the lateness of Portugal's colonial retreat - delayed until 1975
- and the prolongation of white minority rule in Rhodesia (until 1980) and
South Africa (until 1994) is a sharp reminder that dismantling the colonial
order was far from easy where the power concerned was not susceptible to
financial or diplomatic pressure, was indifferent to any alternative path and
could rely on well-entrenched allies on the spot. Indeed, Portugal offers an
intriguing insight into how well international colonialism might have fared
even after the rise of American and Soviet power had the impact of the
Second World War on the Old Colonial Powers been less destructive than
it was.

IV

As the case of Africa's Southern Third suggests, even if a Europe-centred

colonial order had disintegrated by the early 1960s, decolonization was far
from complete. In another vast geopolitical niche in Northern Eurasia, the
Soviet empire, with its closed society, ideological ramparts and superpower
capabilities, seemed invulnerable to the solvents of imperial power
elsewhere.40 Nor had the break-up of the European empires been the prelude
- as had been fondly hoped in the West - to a new world of nation states
combining representative government with economic democracy.
Decolonization between 1960 and 1990 was not only territorially
incomplete. Its whole shape was bent and twisted by the progressive
intrusion of fierce bipolar competition into the old spheres of colonialism.
The new states enjoyed neither economic independence nor ideological
autonomy. Soviet-style planning enjoyed wide prestige as the fastest route
to economic growth and many ex-colonial states adopted versions of the
command economy with its paraphernalia of permits, parastatals and import
substitution. But the shadow of industrial progress usually concealed the
reality of agrarian disaster. An American-style executive presidency proved
more attractive than parliamentary models of government derived from
Europe. But it was often the prelude to the politics of despotism and the
personality cult. Above all, the superpowers bought influence with arms,
fostering the large scale militarization of the ex-colonial world, and the
proliferation of militias and warlords that were eventually to make large
areas of Africa ungovernable. By the 1980s, as bipolar rivalry reached its
climax, the emergence of a real post-colonial world of nations seemed to be
indefinitely postponed as the superpowers gradually fashioned a new and
more violent imperial order that partitioned the world uneasily between
them. The diplomacy of colonial retreat had long outlasted the end of
colonial rule.
22 INTERNATIONAL DIPLOMACY AND COLONIAL RETREAT

Contrary to much prediction, superpower rivalry ended with a whimper.

By the later 1980s the Soviet empire had entered a syndrome of decline
curiously similar to that which had rotted the Old Colonial Empires 40 years
before. External influences and hostile ideologies penetrated its colonies
and protectorates in Eurasia. Its grip on their economies was loosened by
competition from outside. The 'metropolitan' economy buckled under the
strain of soaring military expenditure. Its international prestige was badly
damaged by overt military intervention (in Afghanistan) and then by its
failure. Perestroika was a last-ditch effort at imperial reform. It aimed to
revive the 'domestic' economy by easing its military burden, and to
modernize the 'imperial' economy in Eastern Europe and elsewhere with
the help of new and more efficient collaborators. Within a sphere to be
demarcated by detente diplomacy, rather than asserted by force, the
instruments of control were to be replaced by an informal empire of
fraternal influence. But the Kremlin found to its chagrin - as had London
and Paris somewhat earlier - that the very conditions that had dictated a
policy of informal imperialism made its realization impossible. The fall of
the Berlin Wall signalled even more brutally than Suez that in such an
unfavourable international, economic and ideological climate the price of
informal empire was as high if not higher than its formal counterpart.
It would not be true to say that by the 1990s the protracted phase of
imperial breakdown was entirely over. The messy aftermath of Soviet
imperialism remained. The diplomacy of colonial retreat may still be
studied in the darker Caucasian recesses of the Russian empire. The
wreckage of superpower competition in the second phase of decolonization
after 1960 still lies strewn across the world, especially in Africa. But it
would not be unrealistic to say that the dismantling of global colonialism,
whose consequences dominated world politics for much of the fifty years
after 1945, no longer shapes the agenda of international affairs. With the
rapid transformation of the world economy and the new preoccupation with
human rights and governance, even the rhetoric of anti-colonialism has
gone stale. Wherever it may lead, the great re-ordering between the West
and what were once (and for the most part briefly) its fiefdoms in the 'outer
world' is now an accomplished fact.

NOTES

1. J. A. Gallagher, The Decline, Revival and Fall of the British Empire (Cambridge, 1982).
2. Gerrit W. Gong, The 'Standard of Civilisation' in International Society (Oxford, 1984).
3. This concept was given classic expression in A. G. Hopkins, An Economic History of West
Africa (London, 1973).
DIPLOMACY AND DECOLONIZATION 23

4. M. Lipton, 'Neither Partnership nor Dependence: Pre-decolonisation, Inertia, Diversification

and Paraprotectionism in Indo-British Relations since 1947', in W. H. Morris-Jones and G.
Fischer (eds.). Decolonisation and After (London, 1980), 158-92.
5. Charles Lipson, Standing Guard: Protecting Foreign Capital in the Nineteenth and Twentieth
Centuries (London, 1985).
6. For a pioneering study of this transition in a major ex-colonial economy, M. Lipton and J.
Firn, The Erosion of a Relationship: Britain and India since 1960 (London, 1973).
7. Baron Meyendorff (ed.), Correspondance Diplomatique de M. De Staal, vol.2 (Paris, 1929),
441, 450; N. Rich, Friedrich von Holstein, vol.2 (Cambridge, 1965), 617.
8. For an expression of this view by the doyen of proconsuls, Earl of Cromer, 'The government
of subject races', Political and Literary Essays 1908-1913, first series (London, 1913).
9. Sir Walter Townley, British Minister, Tehran, to Sir Edward Grey, British Foreign Secretary,
21 Dec. 1913, in D. Gillard, K. Bourne and D. C. Watt (eds.), British Documents on Foreign
Affairs: Reports and Papers from Foreign Office Confidential Print, part 1, series B, vol.14
(London, 1984), 358 ff.
10. J. Darwin, Britain, Egypt and the Middle East (London, 1981), 123.
11. Memo, by Sir Beilby Alston, British ambassador to Peking, 1 Aug. 1920, in R. Butler and J.
P. T. Bury (eds.), Documents on British Foreign Policy, first series, vol.14 (London, 1966),
83-5.
12. A. Carthill, The Lost Dominion (London, 1924).
13. A recent study is B. Gökay, A Clash of Empires: Turkey between Russian Bolshevism and
British Imperialism 1918-1923 (London, 1997).
14. H. R. G. Greaves, The League Committees and World Order (London, 1931), 176-7.
15. F. C. Jones, Japan's New Order in Asia 1937-45 (London, 1954).
16. For the preoccupation of an Indian governor with the consequences of depression, Sir
Malcolm Hailey, Governor of the United Provinces, to Lionel Curtis, 28 June 1934, Lionel
Curtis Papers MSS 91, Bodleian Library, Oxford.
17. Though Hitler was notably cautious about attacking the British empire. See Milan Hauner,
India in Axis Strategy (Stuttgart, 1981).
18. J. Darwin, 'An Undeclared Empire: the British in the Middle East 1918-1939', Journal of
Imperial and Commonwealth History, 27 (1999), 169-73.
19. P. A. Shambrook, French Imperialism in Syria 1927-1936 (Reading, 1998), 203-4.
20. The retrocession of the sanjak of Alexandretta, remarked the French Foreign Minister, 'c'est
uniquement en raison de la situation général de l'Europe'. Georges Bonnet to René Massigli,
French ambassador to Ankara, 5 May 1939, Documents Diplomatiques Français 1932-39,
second series (Paris, 1983), tome XVI, no. 63.
21. M. J. Cohen, Palestine: Retreat from the Mandate 1936-1939 (London, 1978).
22. B. J. C. McKercher, Transition of Power: Britain's Loss of Global Pre-eminence to the
United States 1930-1945 (Cambridge, 1999), 259.
23. For the strength of this belief in the fiercest of anti-appeasers, Churchill's memo, on sea
power, 27 March 1939, in M. Gilbert (ed.), Churchill Companion, vol.5, part 3 (London,
1982), 1414 ff.
24. Gary R. Hess, The United States' Emergence as a Southeast Asian Power 1940—1950 (New
York, 1987), 78.
25. The authoritative account is W. R. Louis, Imperialism at Bay (Oxford, 1977).
26. For Bevin's views, W. R. Louis and R. E. Robinson, 'The Imperialism of Decolonization',
Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 22 (1994), 439.
27. For an outline of this pre-war regime in Egypt, J. Darwin, 'Imperialism in Decline?:
Tendencies in British Imperial policy between the wars', Historical Journal, 23 (1980),
657-79.
28. For an excellent recent study, Dieter Brötel, 'Indochina (Vietnam) between National
Independence and Colonial Continuity, 1940-54', in G. Krebs and C. Oberlander (eds.),
1945 in Europe and Asia (Munich, 1997).
29. See R. H. Fifield, The Diplomacy of South East Asia 1945-1958 (New York, 1958).
24 INTERNATIONAL DIPLOMACY AND COLONIAL RETREAT

30. Under British rule some 60-70,000 British troops (i.e. one third of the British army) were
stationed in India at Indian expense. There was also an Indian regular army of some 140,000
men.
31. The indispensable account of British interests and policy in Cyprus is now R. F. Holland,
Britain and the Revolt in Cyprus (Oxford, 1999).
32. Brötel, 'Indochina', 359.
33. Britain's fundamental economic interest, proclaimed the Radcliffe Committee on monetary
policy in 1959, still lay in complementary exchanges with the primary producing countries
of the Commonwealth. See J. Darwin, Britain and Decolonisation (London, 1988), 239.
34. Both Ghana and Malaya agreed to remain in the Sterling Area on independence and bank
their dollar earnings in London.
35. For an early account, P. Darby, British Defence Policy East of Suez (London, 1973); but see
below the chapter by John Subritzky.
36. Antonio José Telo, Economía e Império no Portugal Contemporânea (Lisbon, 1994), 267.
37. F. Rosas, Portugal entre a Paz e a Guerra 1939-1945 (Lisbon, 1995), 239-59, especially
242,246-7,251.
38. António Josée Telo, Os Açôres e o Controlo do Atlântico (Lisbon, 1993), 453.
39. Telo, Economía e Império, 261.
40. For a suggestive analysis of the Soviet Union's imperial politics, P. Roeder, 'Soviet
federalism and ethnic mobilisation', World Politics, 43 (1991), 196-232.