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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)
Do we need to accept that decolonization was good? Or that decolonization is a lot of places had negative effects? South Africa current situation just makes me conclude that colonization in many places was better than self rule. Didn’t Scott have a post we he looked at wealth and per capita income today and in Africa the more colonization equates to more income and better governance today.
I believe I’ve just concluded that Western European civilization was good and spreading and enforcing it elsewhere led to better rule.
The only place I’ve really come across that crushed decolonization in Mena would be the Saudis.
Self-determination counts for a lot. People getting to rule themselves makes people happier. No taxation without representation, after all.
I think the idea of "White man's burden" could've been true, the Brits could've altruistically given good government and institutions to weaker peoples and raised their quality of life. In practice, there was a lot of resource extraction with minimal effort to raise the quality of life for the masses.
I think decolonization was also handled horribly though. I think ideally it would've been a longer process with a slow but consistent withdrawal as institutions are built up and colonial leadership trains their successors as they hand off the reigns. But I'm sure it was a tricky situation when the locals look around, see that their poor and the whites are rich even though they live on the same sort of land, and they know for a fact that there's been a decent amount of exploitation going on, so they not unreasonably conclude that exploitation was 100% of the reason their lives sucked and want the whites out of their ASAP.
I think what I’m really getting at is an HBD argument. Africa never developed for Garret Jones style low average IQ making it difficult to build state capacity. And some sort of colonial aristocracy was better and providing functional government - even if it wasn’t Democracy.
It’s seems like the old trope
White people move in - gentrification
White people leave - white flight and we don’t have resources. White people stay resource extraction. White people leave no development. It seems like the only constant is a poorer dysfunctional underclass regardless of which policy choices are made. Now if colonials want resource extraction they are still building railroads, infrastructure, and enough state capacity to make sure militias aren’t raiding their mines.
People on the left would cite like “Why Nations Failed” and if we just did these policy rules everything would work out. But it’s feeling a lot more like Garret Jones world where some areas just always fail.
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