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Notes -
How much did America contribute to decolonization?
Over the years @2rafa and i have had a debate a few times about whether or not America drove decolonization - in theory due to its liberal, anticolonial ideological founding and sympathies. Good points have been made on both sides but I realized we can actually just go and check. This is an attempt to give a quick, surface level look at decolonization globally and see what, if any, role the US might have played. I’ve started and stopped this several times because there’s always more detail but eventually it will just be too long to read. Assuredly I’m going to miss important things because I’m not an expert on most of these places, so let me know if I do and I’ll edit it in.
(P.S. Transnational Thursdays will now be in their own thread instead of the Culture War thread.)
The British Empire
See @Tollund_Man4's comment for more details on America influence on Irish independence.
Asia
America certainly pushed Britain on India and President Roosevelt in particular was very dedicated to the idea of decolonization, going so far as to breach it to Stalin at the Yalta Conference. However, Roosevelt died without putting meaningful pressure on the issue and his successor Truman abandoned the issue. Indian and Pakistani independence ultimately happened without American intervention.
During the Malayan Emergency Britain engaged in 12 years of brutal counterinsurgency against the Malayan Communist Party’s battle for national independence. America did nothing to oppose Britain in this openly colonial endeavor and in fact provided them funding - ostensibly for development in Malaysia but much of the funds went to the conflict, and with open requests for items like “tear gas” it’s hard to believe the American decision makers were unclear on this. Britain abandoned Singapore after a period of defense budget cuts necessitated by the devaluation of the pound. America was not involved.
Sub Saharan Africa
Tanzania, Sudan, Uganda, the Gambia, Sierra Leone, British Somaliland, Zambia, Malawi, Botswana, Nigeria, and Ghana directly negotiated their independence with Britain. As far as I can tell America was not a concern for either party in any of these independence movements.
Zimbabwe became independent from Britain in 1965 and white minority rule was ended from elections in 1980 at the end of a fifteen year guerilla insurgency. There were Americans fighting for the white Rhodesian security forces but without the approval of the US government (though “There is evidence that the Departments of Justice and State tacitly encouraged Americans to volunteer for Rhodesia as part of efforts to prevent the country's collapse prior to a negotiated solution to the war”).
South Africa became independent from Britain peacefully in 1960 but white minority government continued to 1994. America supported South Africa throughout almost all of this period, long after it had become an international pariah state, because South Africa’s participation in the wars in Mozambique and Angola against Soviet proxy forces established them as a bulwark against communism in the region. Bilateral trade was actually at an all time high between our countries in the 80s under Reagan’s “constructive engagement,” and America was quite literally the last relevant country in the world to join sanctions in ’86. These sanctions didn’t do much to the South African economy anyway (most econ indicators actually modestly improved in the late 80s) in large part because the Reagan Admin only weakly enforced them. From our Government Accounting Office review of the sanctions:
According to De Klerk at least, the Safrican leader who ended apartheid, he did it because the Soviet Union had fallen and there was no longer the risk of South Africa becoming a communist Soviet satellite.
The Middle East and North Africa
Britain pulled out of Libya voluntarily following the war, and left Egypt in stages following the 1919 and 1952 coups. Egypt is a little odd, the CIA was likely in communication with the Free Officers movement who led the coup and it’s definitely alleged that they supported the coup but as far as I can tell there’s nothing concrete, no record of weapons or money transfers even by the CIA whistleblower who claims to have led the communications. You won’t find a mention of allegations of American on the actual wiki page for the coup, for whatever that’s worth. Later, during the 1956 Suez Crisis British attempted to reassert itself over the Suez only to be slapped down by America. From Hitchcock’s “The Age of Eisenhower,” President Eisenhower’s motivations in intervention were threefold:
1: He was worried about Egypt and third party countries watching the incredibly unpopular conflict becoming Soviet allies.
2: He was worried about nuclear war. The USSR was desperate to rehabilitate their anti-imperialist credentials after crushing the Hungarian uprising the same week, and Premier Nikolai Bulganin threatened: “we are fully determined to crush the aggressors and restore peace in the east through the use of force”.
3: He was furious with Britain and France for having their diplomats lie to ours and took it personally as a huge breach of trust.
Sympathy for the colonized was nowhere on his list of concerns, nor was Egypt’s sovereignty genuinely at stake in the crisis. I don’t really know how to categorize Egypt but I think we might as well count it as the US spurring decolonization, because we seem to have been meddling around and did oppose the colonial powers, but for self-interested reasons rather than anti-colonial fervor.
Britain pulled out of Yemen following the protracted Aden Emergency, and disengaged from its remaining gulf protectorates after deciding the expense wasn’t worth it - especially after the pound crashed domestically. Britain withdrew postwar troops from the remainder of the Middle East only after nurturing and leaving pliant leaders in Iraq, Jordan, Iran, Bahrain, and Oman. Their remaining influence in the region was ended by coups in Iraq and Iran, the latter of which featured America famously helping Britain reassert itself when Mossadegh’s government threatened Britain quasi-colonial domination of the oil industry.
Caribbean
The British Caribbean possessions, Jamaica, Barbados, etc, achieved independence directly with the British government without American involvement.
The French Empire
Sub Saharan Africa
Senegal, Mali, Burkina Faso, Benin, Guinea, Ivory Coast, Niger, Madagascar, and the Republic of Congo achieved independence directly via negotiations with France. America was not involved nor did we oppose France’s attempts to keep its former territories in a quasi-colonial arrangement, or regularly coup their leaders.
Middle East & North Africa
France was forced out of the rest of the Middle East during the Levant Crisis, where they launched an airstrike on Damascus in an attempt to re-colonize the area. America was indeed happy to see them gone but did not play the role in forcing them out - Britain did, sending in troops as the intervention became a massacre and demanding that France back down, which they did reluctantly. France negotiated independence directly with Tunisia and Morocco and of course left Algeria in the Algerian War of Independence, which America did not participate in on either side.
Asia
America very famously sent aid, materiel, and military advisors to help France hold onto its colonial possessions of Vietnam, and then just took on the project ourselves when they didn’t have the grit to see it through. Cambodia and Laos achieved independence via direct negotiation with France.
Caribbean
America made no effort to help Haiti during its revolution, blockaded it, didn’t recognize it as a country till nearly forty years after even France itself had done so, and in the early twentieth century conquered Haiti ourselves and ruled it as a colony for nineteen years.
(Continued in next comment - plz comment there for simplicity's sake)
(continued from OP)
The Dutch Empire
The Netherlands is the strongest example of America forcing an empire into actually decolonizing. Why? Because
the Netherlands is our greatest foe and must be destroyed at all costswe were fighting a prestige battle in southeast, first against Japan and then later against both the Soviet Union and the PRC, and support for decolonization was the currency that purchased regional alliances. Public opinion on Dutch repression had soured everywhere as well, within the American public and even within the other major colonial empires, and after the Indonesian nationalists crushed a communist rebellion they cemented their reputation as a potential anti-communist bulwark within the region. The Netherlands having outlived its usefulness and dragging down public opinion everywhere, America threatened to cut off Marshall Plan funds unless the Netherlands agreed to decolonization. America allowed the Dutch to keep West New Guinea for another little while and eventually encouraged them to pull out of there as well. Don’t worry though, we coup’d Indonesia’s anti-colonial leader shortly after and helped them genocide all the leftists.Suriname negotiated directly with the Dutch for their independence; America was not involved.
The Belgium Empire
Rwanda, Burundi, and the DRC all achieved independence without American intervention. See below comment for more detail on the DRC.
The Portuguese Empire
In 1944 the US agreed to respect Portugal’s sovereignty over its colonial possessions in Africa and even restore its control over East Timor in exchange for gaining a military base on the Azores. Following the war Harry “I have always been an anti-colonialist” Truman, focused on Soviet containment, greenlit Portugal into the Marshall Plan and NATO and “never regarded the existence of the Portuguese colonial empire as an obstacle to the establishment and maintenance of good relations with Lisbon”. When India tried to kick Portugal out of its remaining enclaves, the Eisenhower Admin formally recognized those territories as Portuguese “provinces”.
As Soviet expansion in Africa spread, and the Portuguese repression of the Angolan rebellion grew to be an international embarrassment, the Kennedy Administration stopped selling them weapons, started voting in favor of unsuccessful UN Resolutions for Portugal to “consider” reforms in Angola, and started offering support to the UPA (later the FLNA) (notably, in their fight not against Portugal, but against the Communist Soviet backed MPLA).
This was short lived, however, during the Cuban Missile Crisis America tracked Soviet submarine movements using the Azores base, which further cemented its importance. Shortly Kennedy reversed course, allowed weapons shipments to be sold to Salazar in 62 and 63, barred American officials from communicating with Angolan rebels, and even sent Portugal aid packages. The US moving forward abstained in UN resolutions or voted in Portugal’s favor. Little changed with LBJ; under Nixon’s “Tar Baby Option” of not opposing the white minority governments in Southern Africa, a treaty was concluded in 1971 reestablishing American support for Portugal and supplying generous grants, loans, free military advisory officials and new weapons sales (against the will of Congress).
The Empire eventually ended in 74 not because of the US but the Carnation Revolution, in no small part driven by a population sick of being taxed and conscripted for colonial wars. The US was not involved in the coup and rather looked upon it warily as the possible beginnings of a Communist state. In the wake of the revolution “the United States, unlike the UN and the majority of Western European governments, did not exert significant pressure for rapid decolonization,” and even encouraged a two year transition period rather than the immediate independence demanded.
The Spanish Empire
The Americas won their independence from Spain with no intervention on the part of the US (who promptly took a bunch of Mexico’s newly independent territory). America fought against Spain in the 1898 war to “liberate” its colonies, and then just colonized them ourselves and ruled over them from afar for decades to come, often brutally suppressing their attempts at independence. We also later separately conquered and occupied for decades the former Spanish colonies of Nicaragua and the Dominican Republic, and otherwise coup’d any anti-colonial leader we didn’t like and frequently supported brutal dictators that would be our own puppets. In my opinion all this is near fatal to the idea that America opposed colonialism because we ideologically identified with the victims; we literally just were a colonial power ourselves.
Conclusion
Tl;dr There are two things America can’t stand in this world: anti-colonial leaders trying to deny our hegemony, and the Dutch.
America played the primary role in decolonizing Indonesia (including West New Guinea), may have played an important but uncertain role in Egyptian independence, and advocated half heartedly and unsuccessfully for the decolonization of the Portuguese Empire and British India, but mostly tolerated or supported both Empires. In situations where America supported decolonization, it looked much less driven by ideological dogmatism or anticolonial sentiment than by a desire to maintain a good reputation among other countries that could drift to the USSR and China. More frequently America continued to sustain diplomatic relations and military support for colonial empires and their successor states long after public opinon in Europe and the rest of the world had turned on them. The overwhelming majority of colonies earned their independence without American intervention but due to factors like sustained counterinsurgency, being too costly to maintain, dwindling public support, and dwindling benefit to the metropole. In other areas America literally just colonized countries ourselves.
Hmm. I've always nursed a small grudge against the US because I was always under the impression it had a greater influence on accelerating decolonization than it seems is the case, at least from reading your effort post.
Why would an Indian be against the end of colonization you might ask? Well, for one, I think that a counterfactual world where India didn't become outright independent in 1947, or had self-rule phased in over decades, with full independence in the 60s or later, would have been a far wealthier and more stable India. Of course, they burnt their credibility by reneging on promises of enabling Home Rule in the 20s as a treat for our WW1 contribution, so who knows how that might have worked. I still think they could have dragged it out a little bit longer if they really wanted to.
Call me a congenital optimist, but that might have mitigated our brush with socialism for an odd 40 or 50 years, which at the very least would have made it likely that we could have liberalized earlier since all the real economic growth happened after that happened in the late 80s or early 90s.
Given the way that Indians run the place, I'd put more faith in distant, slightly bored bureaucrats who at the least aren't corrupt or beholden to identity politics. And I am speaking English here, and moving to the UK, at least for a while, so you can see where my personal loyalties lie.
While I'm bringing up a bunch of stuff from the past, a while back I tried to do a deep dive into colonialism's impact on India. My takeaway was that Britain performed worse than either the independent princely states or post-colonial India on pretty much every factor we care about: economic growth, literacy, life expectancy, etc.
I think the idea that Britain would have kept India from socialism is less likely considering that postwar Britain was also diving headlong into mass nationalizations of the economy, expansive welfare, industrial licensing, high taxes on income and capital, etc.
We did have a productive debate in the comments to that post:
My reply is readily visible, but link for the lazy: https://old.reddit.com/r/TheMotte/comments/sgv76g/culture_war_roundup_for_the_week_of_january_31/hvnwsgw/
For the even lazier, the points I brought up were:
No Britain=No unified India, or an India that wasn't unified under another Great Power.
The Brits were doing better at the whole uplifting a subcontinent thing towards the end of their regime.
When people point out that India did a lot better on measures like agricultural productivity and life expectancy in the decades post Independence, that is hopelessly confounded by the fact that most of this was the Green Revolution and the advent of cheap and effective antibiotics. I personally think they did all the heavy lifting.
Yeah, fully agreed the health stats are pretty confounded by general advances in agriculture and medicine - I gave you credit in the original for that point! :) Other stats like growth, literacy, access to roads, hospitals, and schools I think are harder to fudge.
I can easily imagine another colonial empire being worse than Britain (many were), and I even agree in some ways they were improving, or at least planning to improve (like the Dawes Plan for literacy). But I just don't see a good enough record for them pre-war in India, or post-war in Britain, to assume things would really be better.
Your personal experience gives you some insights into this that I don't necessarily have though.
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