Englisch Landeskunde
British Empire and Commonwealth
Factors in Decolonisation
Ideologically, of course, if the British could ever be described as having an ideology, there was nothing strange about decolonisation for this country. That the Empire would eventually disintegrate into its various national units was anticipated as far as 1838, when a report submitted to the British Government by the Governor – General of Canada envisaged independence for the colony. There was a little support either in Britain or elsewhere in the Empire for the idea of relating the separate parts of the Empire, as they became independent, into some kind of organically interrelated whole, as in a federation or confederation. But above and beyond this there was in Britain in the twentieth century a certain split-mindedness in relation to empire which in fact caused decolonisation to be as smooth and bloodless as it eventually proved to be. The fact was that although the Empire was a subject of abiding interest and emotional attachment for a relative minority of ex-colonial civil servants, soldiers who had served in the colonies or in India, Conservative politicians and th like, the people at large in Britain had never seemed to conceive of this vast conglomeration, the Empire, as anything of vital importance to their own lives. Many of them had never set eyes on its territories or had any contact with them perhaps at exhibitions such as the Empire Exhibition at Wembley in 1924. The economic experience of millions of them in the period between the two wars was so dismal and harsh that they had little time or energy to consider the plight of ordinary people in the distant Empire, whose situation might well have been worse. Hence there grew up in Britain, especially after 1918, a distinct sense of psychological detachment from the Empire and, after 1945, a perceptible feeling of grievance at the anxieties and burdens of empire, a desire to be rid of the imperial mantle and to begin a quieter life at home.
For these and similar reasons there was little in Britain of a desire to struggle to retain the Empire, and not much wish for ‘revanche’ after it had all fallen away. In fact when Britain joined the European Communities in January 1973 some of the territories still dependent on Britain, notably Gibraltar and the Falkland Islands, clung to their dependent status, not because Britain gave them no alternative, but because they gave themselves no alternative to remaining British.
That, for the rest, almost a quarter of the world’s population could pass in a few years from colonial into independent status with hardly a drop of blood shed, except perhaps in fighting between themselves, is possibly the most remarkable example of peaceful change in the history of th international system.
The other factors internal to the Commonwealth itself which helped to precipitate decolonisation in the post-war years was the force of nationalism in the dependent territories themselves. The Second World War like the First, gave an immense impetus to national independence in the non-European world and, unlike the First, gave an even stronger impetus to nationalism because Europe, the birthplace of nationalism, was devastated and thrown into vast economic and political confusion. In the Far East especially Western imperialism was cast from its pedestal by Japanese army and this exploit, like the Japanese victory over Russia in 1905, further helped to convince colonial subjects throughout East Asia and the Pacific Western imperialism was a giant with feet of clay. Moreover, colonial nationalist leaders could rightly feel that they were pushing at an open door. After all, what was the Second World War supposed to have been about if not to allow subject peoples, like everyone else, to ‘choose the form of government under which they will live,’ in famous words of the Atlantic Charter? Whether the major western belligerents in the war really meant what they said when they called for a world of social and racial justice after the war or not, the fact was that they had gone on record repeatedly as favouring those ideals and the colonial peoples could hardly be blamed for taking them seriously.
683 words by F. S. Northedge
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