9.9 Decolonization

Woodrow Wilson's Fourteen Points (1918) called for self-determination, the right of peoples to choose their own government. Colonized peoples, many of whom had fought or worked for the empires during the war, took that idea seriously. But the peace settlement applied it mainly to Europe. German colonies and Ottoman Arab lands became League of Nations mandates under Britain and France (8.4), which looked like empire under a new name.

Nationalist movements grew between the wars. In India, the Indian National Congress, founded in 1885, became a mass movement under Mohandas Gandhi, who led nonviolent campaigns of civil disobedience such as the Salt March (1930). In Vietnam, Ho Chi Minh, who had asked in vain for Vietnamese rights at the 1919 peace conference, turned to communism. Closer to home, most of Ireland won independence from Britain in 1922.

• European weakness: Britain, France and the Netherlands were exhausted and in debt after World War II.
• Japan's wartime conquests had shattered the idea that Europeans could not be beaten in Asia.
• Nationalist movements had grown stronger, better organized and more determined.
• The superpowers opposed old-style empires: the United States supported self-determination in principle, and the Soviet Union backed anticolonial movements, often communist ones.
• The United Nations Charter (1945) affirmed self-determination, and newly independent states used the UN to push for more decolonization.

Britain's Labour government accepted Indian independence. In August 1947 British India was divided into two states, mostly Hindu India and mostly Muslim Pakistan. Partition set off massive violence between Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs: an estimated 10 to 20 million people fled across the new borders, and estimates of the dead range from about 200,000 to as many as 2 million. In 1957 Ghana, under Kwame Nkrumah, became one of the first African colonies south of the Sahara to win independence, inspiring movements across the continent. In 1960 alone, 17 African countries became independent, most of them former French colonies. Many former colonies kept ties to Britain through the Commonwealth or to France through economic and military agreements.

• Indonesia: Sukarno declared independence from the Netherlands in 1945. After four years of fighting and international pressure, including from the United States, the Dutch recognized Indonesia's independence in 1949.
• Vietnam: Ho Chi Minh's Viet Minh fought France from 1946 and won the decisive Battle of Dien Bien Phu in 1954. The Geneva Accords divided Vietnam into a communist north and a non-communist south, setting up the later war with the United States (9.3).
• Algeria (1954–1962): France considered Algeria part of France itself, and about a million European settlers lived there. The war between French forces and the National Liberation Front (FLN) involved terrorism, torture and the deaths of hundreds of thousands. The crisis brought down France's Fourth Republic and returned Charles de Gaulle to power in 1958; he negotiated independence, which came in 1962, and most settlers then left for France.
• Kenya: Britain brutally suppressed the Mau Mau rebellion in the 1950s before granting independence in 1963.
• Portugal's dictatorship clung to Angola and Mozambique through long colonial wars until its 1974 revolution; both became independent in 1975.

In 1956 Egypt's leader Gamal Abdel Nasser nationalized the Suez Canal. Britain and France, with Israel, invaded to take it back, but the United States and the Soviet Union both pressured them to withdraw, and they did. The crisis showed that Britain and France could no longer act as independent world powers without American support.

The Cold War shaped many outcomes. In the Congo, Belgium's rushed departure in 1960 led to civil war, superpower interference and the murder of the first prime minister, Patrice Lumumba, in 1961. Newly independent states were courted by both sides, and some formed a Non-Aligned Movement (1961) to avoid choosing.