History :The west and the World

HI 103 West & the World

The “Third World” – Decolonization - Documents

In 1945 a significant portion of the world was ruled by the colonial powers of Europe. By the 1970s, most of these colonies had achieved their independence. This process of decolonization was one of the most important developments in post-1945 history. These documents help us to understand the causes that led to this wave of decolonization, and the primary sources in particular help us to understand the grievances against colonial rule that motivated the independence movements of this period.

Primary Sources

#1 Ho Chi Minh - "Declaration of Independence of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam” (1945)

According to the document, what were the key principles behind the Vietnamese nationalist movement? What specific grievances against French colonial rule are discussed here?

“All men are created equal. They are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights; among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness." This immortal statement was made in the Declaration of Independence of the United States of America in 1776. In a broader sense, this means: All the peoples on the earth are equal from birth, all the peoples have a right to live, to be happy and free. The Declaration of the French Revolution made in 1791 on the Rights of Man and the Citizen also states: "All men are born free and with equal rights, and must always remain free and have equal rights." Those are undeniable truths. Nevertheless, for more than eighty years, the French imperialists, abusing the standard of Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity, have violated our Fatherland and oppressed our fellow citizens. They have acted contrary to the ideals of humanity and justice. In the field of politics, they have deprived our people of every democratic liberty. They have enforced inhuman laws; they have set up three distinct political regimes in the North, the Center, and the South of Vietnam in order to wreck our national unity and prevent our people from being united. They have built more prisons than schools. They have mercilessly slain our patriots; they have drowned our uprisings in rivers of blood. They have fettered public opinion; they have practised obscurantism against our people. To weaken our race they have forced us to use opium and alcohol. In the field of economics, they have fleeced us to the backbone, impoverished our people, and devastated our land. They have robbed us of our rice fields, our mines, our forests, and our raw materials. They have monopolized the issuing of banknotes and the export trade. They have invented numerous unjustifiable taxes and reduced our people, especially our peasantry, to a state of extreme poverty. They have hampered the prospering of our national bourgeoisie; they have mercilessly exploited our workers. In the autumn of 1940, when the Japanese Fascists violated Indochina's territory to establish new bases in their fight against the Allies, the French imperialists went down on their bended knees and handed over our country to them. Thus, from that date, our people were subjected to the double yoke of the French and the Japanese. Their sufferings and miseries increased. The result was that from the end of last year to the beginning of this year, from Quang Tri province to the North of Vietnam, more than two million of our fellow citizens died from starvation. On March 9, the French troops were disarmed by the Japanese. The French colonialists either fled or surrendered showing that not only were they incapable of "protecting" us, but that, in the span of five years, they had twice sold our country to the Japanese. On several occasions before March 9, the Vietminh League urged the French to ally themselves with it against the Japanese. Instead of agreeing to this proposal, the French colonialists so intensified their terrorist activities against the Vietminh members that before fleeing they massacred a great number of our political prisoners detained at Yen Bay and Caobang. Notwithstanding all this, our fellow citizens have always manifested toward the French a tolerant and humane attitude. Even after the Japanese putsch of March 1945, the Vietminh League helped many Frenchmen to cross the frontier, rescued some of them from Japanese jails, and protected French lives and property. From the autumn of 1940, our country had in fact ceased to be a French colony and had become a Japanese possession. After the Japanese had surrendered to the Allies, our whole people rose to regain our national sovereignty and to found the Democratic Republic of Vietnam. The truth is that we have wrested our independence from the Japanese and not from the French. The French have fled, the Japanese have capitulated, Emperor Bao Dai has abdicated. Our people have broken the chains which for nearly a century have fettered them and have won independence for the Fatherland. Our people at the same time have overthrown the monarchic regime that has reigned supreme for dozens of centuries. In its place has been established the present Democratic Republic. For these reasons, we, members of the Provisional Government, representing the whole Vietnamese people, declare that from now on we break off all relations of a colonial character with France; we repeal all the international obligation that France has so far subscribed to on behalf of Vietnam and we abolish all the special rights the French have unlawfully acquired in our Fatherland. The whole Vietnamese people, animated by a common purpose, are determined to fight to the bitter end against any attempt by the French colonialists to reconquer their country. We are convinced that the Allied nations, which at Tehran and San Francisco have acknowledged the principles of self-determination and equality of nations, will not refuse to acknowledge the independence of Vietnam. A people who have courageously opposed French domination for more than eighty years, a people who have fought side by side with the Allies against the Fascists during these last years, such a people must be free and independent. For these reasons, we, members of the Provisional Government of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam, solemnly declare to the world that Vietnam has the right to be a free and independent country-and in fact is so already. The entire Vietnamese people are determined to mobilize all their physical and mental strength, to sacrifice their lives and property in order to safeguard their independence and liberty.

Citation: (“Vietnamese”)

Works cited:

“Vietnamese Declaration of Independence, 1945.” Internet Modern History Sourcebook, 1997. Web. 6 August 2016.

#2. Report of the Commission of Enquiry into Disturbances on the Gold Coast (1948)

In 1948 there was a series of strikes in the Gold Coast (today’s Ghana), which were viewed by the British government as a serious challenge to their authority.  A Commission was established to investigate the causes of the strikes, and this document is a summary of their main findings.  What does this document tell us about the main grievances of colonized Africans after World War II?  What specific social groups are identified in the document as having grievances against colonial rule?

[p.99] In the main, the underlying causes may be divided into three broad categories: political, economic and social.  There is often no clear dividing line between them and they are frequently interrelated ... The remedy for the distrust and suspicion with which the African views the European, and which is to-day poisoning life in the Gold Coast, demands an attack on all three causes....

A. Political

(1) The large number of African soldiers returning from service with the Forces, where they had lived under different and better conditions, made for a general communicable state of unrest.  Such Africans by reasons of their contracts with other peoples, including Europeans, had developed a political and national consciousness.  The fact that they were disappointed with conditions on their return, either from specious promises made before demobilisation or a general expectancy of a golden age for heroes, made them the natural focal point for any general movement against authority.

(2) A feeling of political frustration among the educated Africans who saw no prospect of ever experiencing political power under existing conditions...

(3) A failure of the Government to realise that, with the spread of liberal ideas, increasing literacy and a closer contact with political developments in other parts of the world, the star of rule through the Chiefs was on the wane.  The achievement of self-government in India, Burma and Ceylon had not passed unnoticed on the Gold Coast.

[p.100] (4) A universal feeling that Africanisation was merely a promise and not a driving force in Government policy....

(5) A general suspicion of Government measures and intentions reinforced by a hostile press....

(6) Increasing resentment at the growing concentration of certain trades in the hands of foreigners....

B. Economic

(1) The announcement of the Government that it would remain neutral in the dispute which had arisen between the traders and the people of the Gold Coast over high prices of imported goods and which led to the organised boycott of January-February, 1948.

(2) The continuance of war-time control of imports, and the shortage and high prices of consumer goods....

(5) The degree of control in the Cocoa Marketing Board, which limited the powers of the farmers' representatives to control the vast reserves which are accumulating under the Board's policy.

[p.101] (6) The feeling that the Government had not formulated any plans for the future of industry and agriculture, and that, indeed, it was lukewarm about any development apart from production for export.

C. Social

(1) The alleged slow development of educational facilities in spite of a growing demand, and the almost complete failure to provide any technical or vocational training.

(2) The shortage of housing, particularly in the towns, and the low standards of houses for Africans as compared with those provided for Europeans.

(3) The fear of wholesale alienation of tribal lands leaving a landless peasantry.”

“Colonial Officials Take Note of African Discontent (1948).” In Africa and the West: A Documentary History, Vol. II, ed. William H. Worger et. al. 2nd ed. Oxford University Press, 2010.

Secondary Sources

#1 Michael Hunt – The World Transformed - Required

In the first section of this reading Hunt discusses the general causes of the wave of decolonization that occurred after the Second World War. He then examines specific anti-colonial movements in India, Ghana, and Algeria.

[p.15] Before 1945 much of the world—roughly half the surface of the globe and some 70 percent of its population—had fallen under colonial administration or informal great-power control. The process of subjugation occurred in two successive waves as Europeans laid claim to mastery over other lands and peoples. The first expansionist thrust came between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries with the main targets the Americas, the Indian subcontinent, and parts of the Pacific. The second imperial impulse came in the late nineteenth century (coincident with state nationalism and economic globalization). At that time the major European powers, joined by Japan and the United States, established new colonies in Africa, Southeast Asia, the Pacific, and the Caribbean….

[p.17] The impressive structure of imperial control was not to last. By 1945, within roughly half a century of its apogee, it teetered on the brink of collapse. Almost at once after World War II the march from formal subordination to formal independence began, and the pace accelerated in the 1960s. By the early 1970s, colonies were increasingly rare. New states swelled the ranks of the United Nations. By 1970 it had grown to 127 members, up from the 51 charter members in 1945, and more were waiting in the wings. What accounts for this rapid collapse of empire?

One reason is to be found in the conflicts of the first half of the twentieth century that demoralized and weakened Europe. Driven by nationalist passions, the imperial countries went to war against each other using ever more destructive technology. Each round of conflict dealt body blows to all the combatants and made more difficult the maintaining of control over distant colonies….

[p.18] The other explanation for this rapid imperial collapse is to be found in the capacity of subjugated peoples to turn the ideological weapons of the West to their own ends. In country after country an educated, politically engaged minority, usually from relatively privileged backgrounds, mixed indigenous values with imported ideas. The resulting amalgam provided the vision that gave order and direction to the independence struggles and programs of domestic renovation that dominated the first decades after independence.

Nationalism was the most significant of the imports that would help subvert the colonial order. As in Europe, the United States, and Japan, so too in the countries they dominated, nationalists worked to create a body of unifying myths and values that would overcome internal divisions and lay the groundwork for ending foreign control. New nation builders in places as far-flung as Guatemala, Algeria, and Ghana turned to the methods that European nationalists had developed to build mass support—print and other communications technologies, education, and promotion of an official language.

The other Western ideology with a strong appeal to anti-colonial leaders was Marxism-Leninism. For leaders and intellectuals from Cuba to Cambodia, it proved appealing as a tool for scientifically analyzing societies troubled by internal weakness and poverty. It seemed also to offer an explanation for foreign domination at the same time that it promised liberation from a morally corrupt and economically declining capitalism. Finally, it made an attractive case for the effectiveness of a loyal, determined, and ideologically united party in fighting for liberation from foreign control and creating a new, better society The achievements of the Communist Party in the Soviet Union seemed to strengthen the case for Marxism as a guide to revolution and development….

[p.131] In 1885, less than three decades after [Great Britain] had brought the [Indian] subcontinent together under the direct rule of the British crown, indigenous resistance took organized form with the creation of the Indian National Congress. The leaders of this loose political assemblage were English speakers, mostly university-trained professionals and mostly from the higher castes. They took up the ideas of their British educators on nationalism and self-determination--and turned those ideas against their teachers. They charged that a "civilized" country professing to have the best interests of its subjects at heart was in fact draining away India's wealth in the service of its own enterprise and empire and refusing to allow its subjects a significant voice in their own affairs.

Mohandas Gandhi emerged as the commanding figure at the forefront of the independence drive….

Gandhi's special contribution to the independence struggle was his philosophy and strategy of nonviolent protest. He had worked out his ideas while leading the civil rights struggle in South Africa and began applying them to India in 1919 when he launched a campaign for self-rule. Drawing from his South African experience, he relied on such novel tactics as work stoppages, boycotts of British goods, massive demonstrations peacefully defying British authority, and prayers and fasts to advance the nationalist cause. Gandhi himself assumed an increasingly simple, even severe, lifestyle that commanded respect across a diverse population. He gave up Western clothes in favor of a loincloth and shawl, spun his own fabric, wrote and meditated in a spare cubicle, and refrained from sexual intercourse. By generally cultivating a spiritual outlook, he sought to signal his belief in an Indian way distinct from a degraded, materialistic Western way imposed by the British and to challenge the moral authority of the colonial regime. That regime had, he charged, exploited his country and lured Indians toward a "modern" civilization inferior to their own. He dreamed of an India emerging from the independence struggle that would be the antithesis of the West—just, harmonious, egalitarian, and tolerant. He hoped that these values

[p.132] would transcend the many differences of language, class, caste, region, and religion that divided the subcontinent and would lay the foundations for an enlightened and united country.

This public persona—politically assertive, populist, frail, and profoundly moral—drew a mass following to the Indian National Congress cause for the first time. Repeated rounds of arrests and imprisonment for Gandhi and other Congress leaders failed to still the protest. In 1930 an emboldened Gandhi began pressing for full independence….

World War II fatally weakened an already infirm British grip on the subcontinent. During the interwar period, rising nationalist feeling had forced the colonial regime to admit Indians into administration and to give them a growing role at the provincial and local level. They gained a say in economic affairs, a power quickly used to raise protective tariff and promote an indigenous steel and textile industry. With the outbreak of war, colonial officials cracked down in the face of Congress party demands for a set date for independence. They jailed Gandhi and his associates. The war also brought fresh suffering and sacrifice to ordinary Indians as Britain's global war effort drained food and other goods from India, sparked inflation, and in places caused starvation. By the end of the war, colonial authority faced not just widespread unrest, including the first serious outbreaks

[p.133] of violence, but also the loss of the last shreds of legitimacy. At least in the eyes of Hindus, the Indian National Congress with Gandhi as its symbolic head had become the unquestioned leader of the nation. As sentiment shifted and independence became more likely, collaborators on whom British rule depended became more reluctant. These trends steadily raised the potential cost of maintaining control by force for a Britain exhausted financially and spiritually by war. The British Labour Party was already on record favoring independence, and the Americans, now Britain's senior partner on the world stage, worried that a prolonged, violent independence struggle would radicalize the colony to the embarrassment of the flee world and to the benefit of international communism. In August 1947 Britain transferred power to British-educated moderates at the head of the Congress party….

But independence also brought Gandhi immediate disappointment. Even as the British laid down an independence timetable, splits appeared between the leaders of the Indian National Congress and the Muslim League, organized in 1906 by Muslims no longer willing to work within the Hindu-dominated Congress party. The League's declared purpose was to guarantee protection of India's diverse and scattered Muslim communities from majority Hindu prejudice, which was particularly virulent among an extremist minority committed to a religious definition of Indian national identity. As independence drew nearer and the actual distribution of communal power became a pressing, practical issue, communal violence erupted. Gandhi's dream of a united, secular, harmonious, tolerant India drowned in the blood of as many as a million dead and the sorrow of some fourteen million refugees…. In early 1948 Gandhi suffered assassination at the hands of a Hindu militant intent on punishing the frail old man for trying to stop the violence and hold the subcontinent together.

Partition seemed the only solution, and India's first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, reluctantly agreed to the creation of a separate sovereign Muslim state—Pakistan—led by Mohammad All Jinnah of the Muslim League. This internal trauma would leave the subcontinent deeply and bitterly divided….

[p.266] Like much of the rest of the third world, the sub-Saharan region [of Africa] experienced foreign conquest and exploitation. In the late nineteenth century the European powers completed Africa's subjugation, carving it into colonies (formalized at the conference of Berlin in 1884-1885)….

Also like other third-world peoples, Africans began in the wake of World War II a sustained drive against European colonial control. By the late 1950s and early 1960s they had made enormous strides toward throwing off that control. In most cases colonial powers had worked out collaborative arrangements with indigenous elites. This was the favored British path. As in the case of India, London had consistently preferred a low-cost, light-rein approach to colo-

[p.267] nial administration that left substantial authority in the hands of local leaders and even anticipated conceding greater autonomy to the "natives.” When the cry for independence went up after World War II, London usually accommodated rather than engage in a costly defense of colonial authority that would radicalize post-colonial leaders. Former British colonies such as Ghana, Nigeria, and Kenya began their national life with parliamentary governments and a place in the association of former colonies known as the British Commonwealth. The French had, by contrast, pursued policies of assimilation intended to create a close, permanent bond with their colonies. But France had to retreat in the face of indigenous pressures and after 1958 offered its remaining sub-Saharan colonies a choice between full independence or an association with France that would preserve

[p.268] some mutually beneficial ties. A third pattern involving prolonged conflict over independence and majority rule was evident in Zimbabwe, South Africa, and the Portuguese colonies of Mozambique and Angola. In these cases substantial numbers of European settlers supported the colonial status quo. Their tenacity set the stage for long, bitter struggles with African liberation movements….

The ghost of Karl Marx hovered over Africa during the early phase of decolonization. Many independence leaders were to tilt left for familiar reasons. Capitalism was a system that had brought them few benefits in the colonial era and that the former colonial powers still championed. Socialism, by contrast, seemed most relevant to their aspirations for rapid economic and social development. The Soviet Union proved more supportive of true independence and autonomous development than the West, and Mao Zedong's peasant revolution offered a model suited to third-world social conditions. Leaders in diverse settings—from Patrice Lumumba in the Belgian Congo to Nelson Mandela in South Africa—drew ideological inspiration and political support from the Left. The most influential figure in the heyday of African decolonization was Kwame Nkrumah, Ghana's founding father….

Nkrumah found the road to full independence blocked by a cozy alliance between the British and local elites consisting of tribal chiefs, merchants, crop brokers, and urban professionals (teachers, doctors, lawyers, and civil servants). This minority of political notables—roughly a thousand in total—had worked closely with the British, traded with the British, and received education under British rule. They strongly favored a gradual transition to independence that would enable them to take control without inviting dangerous social upheaval. As the first formal step in that direction, this elite organized the United Gold Coast Convention (UGCC) in 1947. By embracing this "responsible" established class of influentials, London hoped to guide the Gold Coast toward independence in a way that would maintain Britain's political and economic influence. Already in 1946 Britain had given the colony a constitution as a first step toward what was supposed to be a long, peaceful evolution toward independence.

[p.269] Nkrumah disrupted this comfortable arrangement. Working within the "establishment" UGCC, he set up a newspaper, schools, and a youth organization to create a base of popular support. Nkrumah's energy and success unnerved the UGCC leaders and the colonial administration. Sensing in increasing popular agitation a "communist" plot, worried colonial authorities had Nkrumah and the other prominent UGCC figures arrested in 1948. When they were released from jail, the UGCC leaders attacked Nkrumah as a "rabble-rouser.” Now resolved to chart his own path, Nkrumah created his own Convention People's Party (CPP) to advocate immediate independence and a popular role in national politics. Though Nkrumah and others at the CPP forefront lacked wealth and close working ties with the British, they still had important assets—a familiarity with the West, political experience, and popular support.

Nktumah pressed ahead with a nonviolent program to force concessions from the British much as Gandhi had done in India earlier. The response was at first repression, including his second arrest early in 1950. Now more popular than ever, Nkrumah ran for the legislature from prison and won a resounding victory in 1951 along with others of his party. London realized that like it or not, it had

[p.270] to deal with Nkrumah and accelerate decolonization if it wanted to keep peace and protect commerce. Further facilitating the decision was the absence of a substantial European community tenaciously clinging to the colonial order. The British government released Nkrumah, asked him to form a government, and promised to move the colony rapidly to self-rule. In 1957 the colony with its almost seven million people became a fully independent state within the British Commonwealth. It took the name of Ghana after an interior West African trading empire that had flourished a thousand years earlier.

[p.290] Algeria had the misfortune of becoming a battleground in the most violent process of decolonization that the North Africa—Middle East region would witness. Demands for independence ran up against a wall of French resistance. Geographical proximity does much to explain the French tenacity. Located just across

[p.291] the Mediterranean from France, Algeria was by 1945 home to one million settlers, and Paris claimed the colony as an integral part of France itself. Talk of integration, however, ran up against a settler community resistant to any concessions to Algerians that might threaten its political dominance and economic privilege.

Amidst this paralysis of colonial policy, an Algerian nationalist movement took shape between World War I and World War II. Growing numbers of the poor and landless moved to the cities, where exposure to colonial practices and proximity to the settler community sharpened their anti-French sentiments. At the same time, French education made the Algerian elite sensitive to the gap between Europe's professed liberal and nationalist ideas and the colonial reality. World War II added impetus to burgeoning independence sentiment, encouraged by the Atlantic Charter's commitment to self-determination. Wartime economic deprivation and clashes with police heightened the sense of grievance. The more vociferous the calls for independence, the more stubborn settlers became in defense of the status quo and the more repressive the measures the French military took. In putting down one round of demonstrations at the end of the war, colonial authorities killed some 20,000 to 40,000 Algerians.

Tensions building for several decades came to a boiling point in mid-1954 with the formation of the National Liberation Front (Front de Liberation National, or FLN)…. Some among the leadership wanted nothing less than unconditional independence, whereas others were ready to settle for a compromise. Some viewed the world through the prism of European leftist and liberal ideas; others championed indigenous Arab and Islamic values.

Popular support came from an equally diverse range of groups—from migrant workers in France and French intellectuals to Algerian peasants, some newly arrived in the city. Women participated no less than men. The strategies of resistance employed in this at first seemingly impossible challenge to a formidable colonial presence were no less diverse. An underground organization challenged French administration. Guerrilla operations and cross-border raids by FLN forces threatened French control in the countryside. Urban terrorists struck at the settler population, against Algerians collaborating with the French, and within France itself. Street demonstrations and general strikes underlined the breadth of revolutionary support.

Paris responded to this bold defiance by deploying 400,000 troops. Increasingly frustrated and demoralized senior French military officers conducted the war with grim determination….

[p.292] The army's strategy of mass arrests, sweeps in the countryside, resettlement and destruction of villages, sealing off the border, and meeting FLN terror with counter-terror and torture successfully contained the FLN threat. These actions would in the end result in deaths on the Algerian side estimated as high as 300,000 out of a population of about eight million. Some 10,000 of the French forces would die.

However, the French could not turn the stalemate into victory. Repression deepened Algerian alienation from French rule, brought new recruits to the FLN, and provoked international condemnation of French policy. Within France itself, by the late 1950s the brutality of the highly publicized urban struggle and the costs of the war in terms of life and property had polarized the public and paralyzed the political system. Some regarded Algeria as a lost cause; others felt an obligation to defend the imperiled settlers and the last shreds of imperial glory.

[French President Charles] de Gaulle moved to negotiate an end to the war over the violent objections of rebellious officers serving in Algeria and their allies within the settler community. Their acts of terrorism and threats of a military takeover in Paris gave special urgency and peril to de Gaulle's peacemaking. Finally in March 1962 de Gaulle and the FLN reached an agreement to bring this long, bloody war to an end. France yielded on independence but got in return continued access to military bases and preservation of economic ties. The agreement included safeguards for European settlers, but by the end of the year virtually all but the poor and elderly had fled.

Citation: (Hunt pg#)

Works cited:

Hunt, Michael H. The World Transformed: 1945 to the Present. Oxford University Press, 2014.

HI 103 West & the World Decolonization 9