Chapter 33
Nationalist Movements, Decolonization, &
Newly Independent Nations
Chapter 33
In retrospect the Great War of 1914-1918, shook the foundations of western hegemony. Perhaps
unbeknownst to Europeans at the time, the tragedy of war that befell Europe served to undermine
much of its authority in the world. As a result, this monumental event often serves as a marker event
distinguishing the decades that followed World War I from all previous eras. For intellectuals and
political leaders throughout Africa and Asia, the appalling devastation of World War I cast doubt on
the claims that the Europeans had made for over a century that they were, by virtue of their racial
superiority, the fittest of all peoples to rule the globe. With millions of lives lost, economies disrupted,
and infrastructures destroyed, Europe faced an unprecedented rebuilding effort and made a mockery
of European claims of superior rationality and a racially ingrained capacity to rule. In Europe, the 19th
century’s modern, liberal ideals were challenged, and in the colonies, the first wave of decolonization
resulted.
The social and economic disruptions caused by the war in key colonies, such as India, Egypt, and
Ghana, made it possible for nationalist agitators to build a mass base for their anti-colonial
movements for the first time. But in these and other areas of the colonized world, the war gave added
impetus to movements and processes already underway, rather than initiating new responses to
European global domination. Therefore, it is essential to place wartime developments in the colonies
and the postwar surge in anti-colonial resistance in a longer-term context that takes into account
African and Asian responses that extend in some cases back to the last decades of the 19th century.
Since it is impossible to relate the history of the independence struggles in all of the European
colonies, key movements, such as those that developed in India and Egypt will be considered in some
depth. These specific movements will then be related to broader patterns of African and Asian
nationalist agitation and the accelerating phenomenon of decolonization worldwide.
World War I: The Nationalist Assault on the European Colonial Order

World War I severely disrupted the systems of colonial domination that had been expanded
and refined in the 19th century, and it also gave great impetus to the forces of resistance
that had begun to well up in the decades before the war.
World War I presented the subjugated peoples of Africa and Asia with the spectacle of Europe’s
“civilizers” sending their young men by the millions to be slaughtered in horrific trench warfare.
Moreover, the fact that the three main adversaries in the war—Great Britain, France, and Germany—
were colonial powers meant that when they plunged into war, they pulled their empires into the abyss
with them. A truly global conflict erupted as the British and French were able to draw raw materials,
laborers, and soldiers from their colonial possessions, and these proved critical to their ability to
sustain the long war of attrition against Germany.
European reliance on their colonial possessions was revealed and heightened by the war effort. To
fight the war, European troops in the colonies were withdrawn to meet the need for manpower on the
many war fronts. This need to recall administrative and military personnel from British and French
colonies meant that European officials were compelled to fill their vacated posts with African and
Asian administrators, many of whom enjoyed real responsibility for the first time – a role that would
have been unimaginable without the war. Not only did Africans and Asians fill political needs, but the
colonies were also key economic producers for Britain and France. Native populations supplied food
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for the home fronts, as well as vital raw materials such as oil, jute, and cotton for the battlefields. In
fact, contrary to long-standing colonial policy, the hard-pressed British even encouraged a
considerable expansion of industrial production in India to supplement the output of their
overextended home factories. Thus, the war years contributed to the development in India of the
largest industrial sector in the colonized world. Thus, the war itself was pivotal in the colonies’ native
populations in fostering political leadership, seeds of industrial growth, and deep resentment for the
sacrifices that the war effort required.
Additionally, African and Asian soldiers by the hundreds of thousands served on the Western Front or
in the far-flung theaters of war in Egypt, Palestine, Mesopotamia, and east Africa. So not only were
European killing each other, but for the first time, African and Asian soldiers were ordered by their
European officers to kill other Europeans. In this process of war, the vulnerability of the seemingly
invincible Europeans and the deep divisions between them were starkly revealed. Though the
European colonizers had frequently quarreled over colonial territory in the late 19th century, during
World War I they actually fought each other in the colonies for the first time.
Further undermining colonization, Europeans actively sought to earn the support of Western-educated
elites, win the cooperation of new Arab allies, and maintain the loyalty of their traditional native allies
by making promises regarding future leadership. Whether promised self-determination, greater
access to administrative posts, or economic development, these concessions often seriously
compromised Europe’s prewar dominance and plans for further expansion. As a result, the British
and French repeatedly broke their promises when negotiating the postwar settlement at Versailles.
Wartime promises to the Arabs in return for supporting the Entente were forgotten, as Britain and
France divided the Arab heartlands of the Middle East between themselves. China's pleas for
protection from Japanese aggression were dismissed, and a youthful Ho Chi Minh, the future leader
of Vietnam, was rudely refused an audience with Woodrow Wilson. The betrayal of these pledges
understandably contributed a great deal to postwar agitation against colonial rule and eroded any
remaining confidence in European leadership. When the British and French victors sought to restore
their prewar political prerogatives, the first wave of decolonization was set in motion in Egypt, India,
Vietnam, and other colonial societies.
World War II: Nationalism Accelerates

A second global conflict between the industrial powers proved fatal to the already badly
battered European colonial empires. From the Philippines to West Africa, independence was
won in most of the non-settler colonies with surprisingly little bloodshed and remarkable
speed; the opposite was true in colonies with large settler communities.
The Nazi rout of the French and the stunningly rapid Japanese capture of the French, Dutch, British,
and U.S. colonies in Southeast Asia put an end to whatever illusions the colonized peoples of Africa
and Asia had left about the strength and innate superiority of their colonial overlords. Because the
Japanese were non-Europeans, their early victories over the Europeans and Americans played a
particularly critical role in destroying the myth of the white man's invincibility, even though they went
on to eventually defeat the Japanese. The harsh regimes and heavy demands the Japanese
conquerors imposed on the peoples of southeast Asia during the war further strengthened the
determination to fight for self-rule and to look to their own defenses after the conflict was over.
The devastation of World War II — a total war fought in the cities and countryside over much of
Europe—drained the resources of the European powers. This devastating warfare also sapped the
will of the European populace to hold increasingly resistant African and Asian peoples in bondage.
The effort to confirm old colonial regimes applied also to the Middle East, India, and Africa. Indian and
African troops had fought for Britain during the war, as in World War I, though Britain imprisoned key
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nationalist leaders and put independence plans on hold. African leaders had participated actively in
the French resistance to its authoritarian wartime government. The Middle East and north Africa had
been shaken by German invasions and Allied counterattacks. Irritability increased, and so did
expectations for change. With Europe's imperial powers further weakened by their war effort,
adjustments seemed inevitable. The war also greatly enhanced the power and influence of the two
giants on the European periphery: the United States and the Soviet Union. In Europe the boundaries
of the Soviet Union pushed westward, with virtually all the losses after World War I erased, and many
of the remaining independent nations quickly fell under Soviet domination. The nations of Western
Europe were free to set up or confirm democratic regimes, but most were greatly weakened and
clearly in the shadow of growing U.S. dominance.
The end of World War II set the stage, in other words, for two of the great movements that would
shape the ensuing decades in world history. First, Africans and Asians challenged the tired remnants
of European control—the movement known as "decolonization." Scores of new nations were formed
in the decades that followed World War II. From the Philippines to west Africa, independence was
won in most of the non-settler colonies with surprisingly little bloodshed and remarkable speed; the
opposite was true in colonies with large settler communities, where liberation struggles were usually
violent and prolonged. Second, the confrontation between the two superpowers that emerged from
the war – the United States and the Soviet Union – resulted in a new wave a influence on the newly
independent nations that emerged as each struggled to earn ideological allies in Africa and Asia. The
United States had approached the war as a campaign of liberation and sealed its alliance with Great
Britain by forcing recognition of the "right of all people to choose the form of government under which
they live." The Soviets were equally vocal in their condemnation of colonialism and were even more
forthcoming with material support for nationalist campaigns after the war.
Independence

In the early decades of independence, the very existence of the nation-states that were
carved out of the Western colonial empires was often challenged by internal political and
ethnic rivalries. The leaders of these new nations soon felt the pressure to deliver on the
promises of social reform and economic well-being that had rallied nationalist support.
The nationalist movements that won independence for most of the peoples of Africa, the
Middle East, and Asia usually involved some degree of mass mobilization. Peasants and
working-class townspeople, who hitherto had little voice in politics beyond their village
boundaries or local labor associations, were drawn into political contests that toppled empires
and established new nations. To win the support of these groups, nationalist leaders promised
them jobs, civil rights, and equality once independence was won. The leaders of many
nationalist movements nurtured visions of post-independence utopias in the minds of their
followers. The people were told that once the Europeans, who monopolized the best jobs,
were driven away and their exploitive hold on the economy was brought to an end, there would
be enough to give everyone a good life.
Unfortunately, post-independence realities in almost all of the new nations made it impossible for
nationalist leaders to fulfill the expectations they had aroused among their followers and, in varying
degrees, among the colonized populace at large. Even with the Europeans gone and the terms of
economic exchange with more developed countries somewhat improved, there was simply not
enough to go around. Thus, the socialist-inspired ideologies that nationalist leaders had often
embraced and promoted were misleading. The problem was not just that goods and services were
unequally distributed, leaving some people rich and the great majority poor. The problem was that
there were not enough resources to take care of everybody, even if it was possible to distribute them
equitably.
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When utopia failed to materialize, personal rivalries and long-standing divisions between different
classes and ethnic groups, which had been muted by the common struggle against the alien
colonizers, resurfaced or intensified. The European colonizers had established arbitrary boundaries,
sometimes combining hostile ethnic or religious groups. In almost all the new states, these rivalries
and differences became dominant features of political life. The recurring problems of famine and
starvation in parts of Africa have stemmed from human conflicts more than natural disasters. Rivalries
and civil wars in many of the newly decolonized nations consumed resources that might have been
devoted to economic development. They also blocked—in the name of the defense of subnational
interests—measures designed to build more viable and prosperous states. Absorbed by the task of
just holding their new nations together, politicians neglected problems—such as soaring population
increases, uncontrolled urban growth, rural landlessness, and environmental deterioration—that soon
formed as large a threat as political instability to their young nations.
Depending on the skills of their leaders and the resources at their disposal, newly independent
nations have tackled the daunting task of development with varying degrees of success. Ways have
been found to raise the living standards of a significant percentage of the population of some of the
emerging nations. But these strategies have rarely benefited the majority. It may be too early to judge
the outcomes of many development schemes. But so far, none has proved to be the path to the social
justice and general economic development that nationalist leaders saw as the ultimate outcome of
struggles for decolonization. Although some countries have done much better than others, successful
overall strategies to deal with the challenges facing emerging nations have yet to be devised.
33.1 - India
Because India and much of Southeast Asia had been colonized long before Africa, movements for
independence arose in Asian colonies somewhat earlier than in their African counterparts. By the last
years of the 19th century, the Western-educated minority of the colonized in India had been organized
politically for decades. Their counterparts in the Dutch East Indies were also beginning to form
associations to give voice to their political concerns. Because of India's size and the pivotal role it
played in the British Empire (by far the largest of the European imperialist empires), the Indian
nationalist movement pioneered patterns of nationalist challenge and European retreat that were later
followed in many other colonies.
India prior to WWI: Makings of Nationalist Challenge to British Raj
The National Congress party led the Indians to independence and governed through most of the
early decades of the postcolonial era. It grew out of regional associations of Western-educated
Indians that were originally more like study clubs than political organizations in any meaningful sense
of the term. These associations were centered in the cities of Bombay, Poona, Calcutta, and Madras.
The Congress party that Indian leaders formed in 1885 had the blessing of a number of high-ranking
British officials. These officials viewed it as a forum through which the opinions of educated Indians
could be made known to the government, thereby heading off potential discontent and political
protest.
For most of its first decades, the Congress party served these purposes quite well. The organization
had no mass base and very few ongoing staff members or full-time politicians who could sustain
lobbying efforts on issues raised at its annual meetings. Some members of the Congress party voiced
concern for the growing poverty of the Indian masses and the drain of wealth from the subcontinent to
Great Britain. But the Congress party's debates and petitions to the government were dominated by
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elite-centric issues, such as the removal of barriers to Indian employment in the colonial bureaucracy
and increased Indian representation in all-Indian and local legislative bodies. Most of the members of
the early Congress party were firmly loyal to the British rulers and confident that once their grievances
were made known to the government, they would be remedied.
Many Western-educated Indians were increasingly troubled, however, by the growing virulence of
British racism. This they were convinced had much to do with their poor salaries and limited
opportunities for advancement in the colonial administration. In their annual meetings, members of the
Congress, who were now able to converse and write in a common English language, discovered that
no matter where they came from in India, they were treated in a similar fashion. The Indians' shared
grievances, their similar educational and class backgrounds, and their growing contacts through the
Congress party gave rise to a sense of common Indian identity that had never before existed in a
south Asian environment that was more diverse linguistically, religiously, and ethnically than the continent of Europe.
Social Foundations of a Mass Movement
By the last years of the 19th century, the Western-educated elites had begun to grope for causes that
would draw a larger segment of the Indian population into their growing nationalist community. More
than a century of British rule had generated in many areas of India the social and economic
disruptions and the sort of discontent that produced substantial numbers of recruits for the nationalist
campaigns. Indian businessmen, many of whom would become major financial backers of the
Congress party, were angered by the favoritism the British rulers showed to British investors in
establishing trade policies in India. Indian political leaders increasingly stressed these inequities and
the more general loss to the Indian people resulting from what they termed the "drain" of Indian
resources under colonial rule. Though the British rebuttal was that a price had to be paid for the peace
and good government that had come with colonial rule, nationalist thinkers pointed out that the cost
was too high.
A large portion of the government of India's budget went to cover the expenses of the huge army that
mainly fought wars elsewhere in the British Empire. The Indian people also paid for the generous
salaries and pensions of British administrators, who occupied positions that the Indians were qualified
to assume. Whenever possible, as in the purchase of railway equipment or steel for public works
projects, the government bought goods manufactured in Great Britain. This practice served to buttress
a British economy that was fast losing ground to the United States and Germany. It also ensured that
the classic colonial relationship between a manufacturing European colonizer and its raw-materialproducing overseas dependencies was maintained.
In the villages of India, the shortcomings of British rule were equally apparent by the last decades of
the 19th century. The needs of the British home economy had often dictated policies that pushed the
Indian peasantry toward the production of cash crops such as cotton, jute, and indigo. The decline in
food production that invariably resulted played a major role in the regional famines that struck
repeatedly in the pre-World War I era. Radical Indian nationalists frequently charged that the British
were callously indifferent to the suffering caused by food shortages and outbreaks of epidemic
disease, and that they did far too little to alleviate the suffering that resulted. In many areas,
landlessness and chronic poverty, already a problem before the establishment of British rule,
increased markedly. In most places, British measures to control indebtedness and protect small
landholders and tenants were too little and came too late.
The Rise of Militant Nationalism
Some of the issues that Indian nationalist leaders stressed in their early attempts to build a mass base
had great appeal for devout Hindus. This was particularly true of campaigns for the protection of
cows, which have long had a special status for the Hindu population of south Asia. But these
religious-oriented causes often strongly alienated the adherents of other faiths, especially the Muslims
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who made up nearly one-fourth of the population of the Indian Empire. Some leaders, such as B. G.
Tilak, in western India were little concerned by this split. They believed that since Hindus made up the
overwhelming majority of the Indian population, nationalism should be built on appeals to Hindu religiosity. Tilak worked to promote the restoration and revival of what he believed to be the ancient
traditions of Hinduism. On this basis, he opposed women's education and raising the very low
marriage age for women. Tilak turned festivals for Hindu gods into occasions for mass political
demonstrations. He broke with more moderate leaders of the Congress party by demanding the
boycott of British-manufactured goods. Tilak also sought to persuade Indians to refuse to serve in the
colonial administration and military. Tilak demanded full independence, with no deals or delays, and
threatened violent rebellion if the British failed to comply. His combativeness with the British and
promotion of a very reactionary sort of Hinduism frightened moderate Hindus in addition to Muslims
and religious minorities. At the same time, Tilak's oratorical skills and religious appeal made him the
first Indian nationalist leader with a genuine mass following that spread beyond Western-educated
elite.
The other major threat to the British in India before World War I came from eastern India where an
active group of Hindus advocated the violent overthrow of the colonial regime. Rather than mass
appeal and demonstrations, considerable numbers of young Bengalis, impatient with the gradualist
approach advocated by moderates in the Congress party, were attracted to underground secret
societies. Using guerilla tactics and terrorism, this underground network targeted British officials and
government buildings. The small number of adherents to the guerilla cause and Britain’s repressive
countermeasures ultimately hurt the terrorist movement’s popularity among Indians and limited its
impact.
Uncomfortable with the turning tide and radical demands, the British dampened the mass movement
by imprisoning Tilak and devoted sizable resources to crushing the violent terrorist threats to their
rule. These actions checked the success of these radical movements and strengthened the hand of
the more moderate politicians of the Congress party in the years before World War I. The peaceful
approach of the Indian National Congress was given added appeal by timely political promises from
the British who provided educated Indians with expanded opportunities both to vote for and serve on
legislative councils.
India during WWI: Emergence of Gandhi & Spread of Nationalism
At the outbreak of World War I, Western-educated Indian lawyers became the dominant force in
nationalist politics, and—as the careers of Gandhi, Jinnah, and Nehru demonstrate—they would
provide many of the movement's key leaders throughout the struggle for independence. But, the
British could take great comfort from the way in which the peoples of the empire rallied to their
defense after the start of the war. Among the many tropical colonies, none played as critical a role in
the British war effort as India. Wealthy Indians offered substantial war loans; Indian soldiers bore the
brunt of the war effort in east Africa and the Middle East; and nationalist leaders toured India selling
British war bonds.
But as the war dragged on, Indians died on the battlefields and went hungry at home to sustain a
conflict that had little to do with them. Wartime inflation had adversely affected virtually all segments
of the Indian population. Indian laborers saw their already meager wages drop steadily in the face of
rising costs. At the same time, their bosses grew rich from profits earned in war production. Indian
peasants were angered at the low prices their food stuffs fetched from the British abroad while facing
the rising cost of supplies. Indians were also hurt by their inability to sell products due to wartime
shipping shortages. In fact, many localities suffered from famines, which were exacerbated by these
transport shortages. As a result, unrest spread throughout the subcontinent.
After the end of the war in 1918, moderate Indian politicians were frustrated by the British refusal to
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honor wartime promises. Hard-pressed British leaders had promised the Indians that if they continued
to support the war effort, India would move steadily to self-government within the empire once the
conflict was over. Indian hopes for the fulfillment of these promises were raised by the MontaguChelmsford reforms of 1919. These measures increased the powers of Indian legislators at the allIndia level and placed much of the provincial administration of India under their control. But the
concessions granted were offset by the Rowlatt Act later in 1919, which placed severe restrictions on
key Indian civil rights, such as freedom of the press.
These economic and political conditions fueled by World War I led to local protest immediately after
the war. At the same time, Mohandas Gandhi emerged as a new leader who soon forged this
localized protest into a sustained all-India campaign against the policies of the colonial overlords.
Gandhi's remarkable appeal to both the masses and the Western-educated nationalist politicians was
due to a combination of factors. Perhaps the most important was the strategy for protest that he had
worked out a decade earlier as a lawyer in the Indian migrant community in South Africa. Gandhi's
stress on nonviolent but quite aggressive protest tactics endeared him both to the moderates and to
more radical elements within the nationalist movement. His advocacy of peaceful boycotts, strikes,
noncooperation, and mass demonstrations—which he labeled collectively satyagraha, or truth
force—proved an effective way of weakening British control while limiting opportunities for violent
reprisals that would allow the British to make full use of their superior military strength.
It is difficult to separate Gandhi's approach to mass protest from Gandhi as an individual and thinker.
His background as a Western-educated lawyer gave him considerable exposure to the world beyond
India and an astute understanding of the strengths and weaknesses of the British colonizers. These
qualities and his soon legendary skill in negotiating with the British made it possible for Gandhi to
build up a strong following among middle-class, Western-educated Indians, who had long been the
dominant force behind the nationalist cause. But the success of Gandhi's protest tactics also hinged
on the involvement of ever increasing numbers of the Indian people in anti-colonial resistance. The
image of a traditional mystic that Gandhi projected was critical in gaining mass support from peasants.
Many of these "ordinary" Indians would walk for miles when Gandhi was on tour. Many did so in order
to honor a saint rather than listen to a political speech. Gandhi's widespread popular appeal, in turn,
gave him even greater influence among nationalist politicians. The latter were very much aware of the
leverage his mass following gave to them in their ongoing contests with the British overlords. Under
Gandhi's leadership, nationalist protest surged in India during the 1920s and 1930s.
India during WWII: Winning of Independence
The outbreak of World War II soon put an end to any remaining accommodation between the Indian
National Congress and the British during the interwar years. World War II brought disruptions to India
similar to those caused by the earlier global conflict. Inflation stirred up urban unrest, and widespread
famine engendered much bitterness in rural India. Yet, congress leaders offered to support the Allies'
war effort if the British would give them a significant share of power at the all-India level and commit
themselves to Indian independence once the conflict was over. These conditions were staunchly
rejected both by the viceroy in India and at home by Winston Churchill, who led Britain through the
war. The minority Labour Party in parliament, however, indicated that they were quite willing to
negotiate India's eventual independence. As tensions built between nationalist agitators and the
British rulers, some negotiations were entertained, but political divisions in Indian and British societies
slowed progress and mass civil disobedience campaigns renewed under the guise of the Quit India
movement, which began in the summer of 1942 calling for immediate Indian independence,
protesting of British goods, and protesting of British employers. The British responded to the mass
protests with repression and mass arrests, and for much of the remainder of the war, Gandhi and
other INC politicians were imprisoned. The only nationalist group to support the British cause was the
Muslim League, led by the uncompromising Muhammad Ali Jinnah. This wartime support won the
Muslim League much favor as their demands for a separate Muslim state hardened and became a
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key factor in shaping decolonization in South Asia.
Indian independence was finally brought on by the first postwar British election in 1945. With Winston
Churchill's defeat, the incoming Labour party was ready to negotiate with India's nationalist leaders.
With independence all but assured, the process of decolonization focused on the type of states that
would be carved out of the subcontinent after the British withdrawal. Jinnah and the League played on
widespread anxieties among the Muslim minority that a single Indian nation would be dominated by
the Hindu majority, and that the Muslims would become the targets of increasing discrimination. It was
therefore essential, they insisted, that a separate Muslim state called Pakistan be created from those
areas in northwest and east India where Muslims were the most numerous. It was not until religious
violence spread that the British and key Congress party politicians reluctantly concluded that a
bloodbath could be averted only by partition—the creation of two nations in the subcontinent: one
secular, one Muslim. Thus, in the summer of 1947, the British handed power over to the Congress
party, who headed the new nation of India, and to Jinnah, who became the first president of Pakistan.
In part because of the haste with which the British withdrew their forces from the deeply divided
subcontinent a bloodbath occurred anyway. Vicious Hindu–Muslim and Muslim–Sikh communal
rioting, in which neither women nor children were spared, took the lives of hundreds of thousands.
Whole villages were destroyed; trains were attacked and their passengers hacked to death by armed
bands. These atrocities fed a massive exchange of refugee populations between Hindu, Sikh, and
Muslim areas that may have totaled 10 million people. Those who fled were so terrified that they were
willing to give up their land, their villages, and most of their worldly possessions. The losses of
partition were compounded by the fact that there was soon no longer a Gandhi to preach tolerance
and communal coexistence. On January 30, 1948, on the way to one of his regular prayer meetings,
he was shot by a Hindu fanatic.
In granting independence to India, the British, in effect, removed the keystone from the arch of an
empire that spanned three continents. Burma (known today as Myanmar) and Ceylon (now named Sri
Lanka) won their independence peacefully in the following years. No sooner had the European
colonizers suffered these losses than they were forced to deal with new threats to the last bastions of
the imperial order in Africa. India's independence and Gandhi's civil disobedience campaigns inspired
successful struggles for independence in Ghana, Nigeria, and other African colonies in the 1950s and
1960s.
India after WWII: Independence & Development for Some
Although India’s approach to nation-building and economic development mirrored the state
intervention of many other developing nations, India's experience has differed from other developing
nations in several significant ways. To begin with, the Indians have managed to preserve civilian rule
throughout the nearly five decades since they won their independence from Great Britain. In addition,
although India has been saddled with overpopulation, its development started with a larger industrial
sector, a better communication system, a more established bureaucracy, and a larger (and more
skilled) middle class than most other emerging nations.
These advantages have yielded a remarkably stable government for India. India has had the good
fortune to be governed by INC leaders who were deeply committed to democracy, civil rights,
economic development, and social reform. Following Gandhi’s assassination, the most logical choice
for voters was prominent Congress official and close Gandhi ally, Jawaharlal Nehru, and the
Congress party has continued to rule at the federal level for most of the independence era. But
opposition parties have controlled many state and local governments, and they remain vocal and
active in the national parliament. Despite a very outspoken press, the government has faced
persistent problems with corruption. Still, India remains the world’s largest democracy despite threats
to its stability from secessionist movements, religious tension, linguistic tension, poverty, and natural
disasters. Civil liberties, exemplified by free press and elections, have also been upheld to an extent
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that sets India off from much of the rest of the emerging nations. Perhaps the most important step
taken has been the government’s outlawing of the caste system and discrimination against
untouchables.
Nehru’s approach to government and development attempted a moderate mix of state and private
initiatives. Nehru and his successors pushed state intervention in some sectors but also encouraged
foreign investment from countries in both of the rival blocs in the cold war. As a consequence, India
has been able to build on its initial advantages in industrial infrastructure and its skilled managerial
and labor endowment. Its significant capitalist sector has encouraged ambitious farmers, such as
those in the Punjab in the northwest, to invest heavily in the Green Revolution—the introduction of
improved seed strains, fertilizers, and irrigation as a means of producing higher crop yields. Industrial
and agrarian growth has generated the revenue necessary for the Indian government to promote
literacy and village development schemes, as well as family planning, village electrification, and other
improvement projects in recent decades. Indians have also developed one of the largest and most
sophisticated high-tech sectors in the postcolonial world, including its own "silicon valleys" in cities like
Bangalore in southern India. From the late 1980s India also provided tens of thousands of computer
and Internet experts for advanced industrial societies such as those found in the United States and
Europe.
Despite its successes, India has suffered from the same gap between needs and resources that all
developing nations have had to face. Whatever the government's intentions—and India has been hit
by corruption and self-serving politicians, like most nations—there have simply not been the resources
to raise the living standards of even a majority of its huge population. The middle class has grown,
perhaps as rapidly as that of any postcolonial nation. Its presence is striking in the affluent
neighborhoods of cities such as Mumbai and Delhi and is proclaimed by the Indian film industry, the
world's largest. But as many as 50 percent of India's people have gained little, often living on as little
as $1.25 per day, from the development plans and economic growth that have occurred since
independence. In part, this is because population growth has offset economic gains. But social
reform has been slow in most areas, both rural and urban. Groups such as the wealthy landlords, who
supported the nationalist drive for independence, have continued to dominate the great mass of
tenants and landless laborers, just as they did in the pre-colonial and colonial eras. Some
development measures, most notably those associated with the Green Revolution, have greatly
favored cultivators with the resources to invest in new seeds and fertilizer. They have increased the
gap between rich and poor people over much of rural India. Thus, the poor have paid and will
continue to pay the price for Indian gradualism.
The Pakistan that emerged from partition was for several decades a clumsy two-part country, its
western section in the Indus Valley, its eastern portion on the opposite side of India in the Ganges
Delta. This situation did not bode well for the country. The Bengalis occupying the poorer eastern
section, complained that there were treated as second-class citizens, with political and economic
power entrenched in the west. Boundary issues in general produced political instability and often
threatened the viability of newly independent nations around the world, as with East and West
Pakistan. Ultimately in 1971, extreme contrasts of topography and culture led to violence and the
secession of East Pakistan and the formation of the independent of country of Bangladesh. This
separation did not solve Pakistan’s problems, however, as it remained politically unstable and prone
to military rule. It is also important to note that Pakistan retained the British policy of allowing almost
full autonomy to the Pashtun tribes of the northwest frontier provinces, a relatively lawless area
marked by clan fighting and vengeance feuds. The resulting blind-eye turned to the Taliban and alQaeda groups has made Pakistan a linchpin and frustrating ally in the U.S. war on terrorism.
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33.2 - Middle East
The Middle East faced perhaps the most striking variety of challenges facing a region as nationalist
movements gained strength. The Turkish Ottomans ruled over much of the Middle East since its
capture of Constantinople in 1453. The remarkably durable empire successfully resisted European
efforts at colonization during the 19th century that were not renewed until after World War I. Still, as
the prosperity of the Ottoman Empire declined, many Arabs began to bristle under Turkish rule
despite their common religion. In these respects, the Middle East had very real nationalist aspirations
before the late European entry into the region. This complexity was combined with Egypt’s earlier 19th
century colonization and the growing pressure from European Jews to move their ancient homelands
in Palestine.
In the years after World War I, resistance to European colonial domination, which had been confined
largely to Egypt in the prewar years, spread to much of the rest of the Middle East. Having sided with
the Central Powers in the war, the Turks now shared in their defeat. The Ottoman Empire
disappeared from history, as Britain and France carved up the Arab portions that had revolted against
the Young Turk regime during the war. Italy and Greece attacked the Turkish rump of the empire
around Constantinople and in Anatolia (Asia Minor) in hopes of colonizing it. But a skilled military
commander, Mustafa Kemal, or Ataturk, had emerged from the Turkish officer corps and rallied the
forces that gradually drove back the Greek armies.
By 1923 an independent Turkish republic had been established by Ataturk. As an integral part of the
effort to establish a viable Turkish nation, Ataturk launched a sweeping program of reforms. Many of
the often radical changes his government introduced in the 1920s and 1930s were modeled on
Western precedents, including a new Latin alphabet, women's suffrage, and criticism of the veil. But in
important ways his efforts to secularize and develop Turkey also represented the culmination of
transformations made under the Ottomans over the preceding century (see Chapter 26). Today,
Turkey is, with the exception of Israel, the most democratic nation, the most closely linked to the West
(as evidenced by its NATO membership), and the most diversified economy in the region.
With Turkish rule in the Arab heartlands ended by defeat in the war, Arab nationalists turned to face
the new threat presented by the victorious France and Britain. Prior to the war, Britain promised Arabs
independence to convince them to rise against their Turkish government and support the British war
effort. As a result, British and Arab forces joined to expel the Turks during the war. At roughly the
same time, Britain and France signed a secret agreement to partition the area. When the war ended,
Britain opted to slight its Arab allies and honor its treaty with France, with one exception. The Saud
family convinced the British that a smaller country (Saudi Arabia) should be established, focused on
the desert wastes of the Arabian Peninsula. Saudi Arabia became fully independent in 1932.
Elsewhere, however, Britain and France carried out plans to partition lands into mandates. Britain
divided its new territories into three entities: Palestine (now Israel) along the Mediterranean coast;
Transjordan to the east of the Jordan River (now Jordan); and a third zone that later became Iraq.
Iraq, in particular, was a contrived territory that combined three dissimilar former Ottoman provinces of
Shia Arabs, Sunni Arabs, and Kurds.
Betraying promises of Arab independence, French and British forces occupied much of the Middle
East in the years after the war. Consequently, the allies' postwar violation of these pledges humiliated
and deeply angered Arabs throughout the Middle East. In light of this humiliation, Arab nationalist
movements in the former Ottoman lands gained ground during the 1920s and 1930s, and technically,
several Middle Eastern states, including Egypt, Iraq, and Syria, gained independence between the
world wars. With World War II, independence became more complete, although European
dominance remained strong in the Middle East during much of 20th century. It was not until the 1970s
that governments were strong enough to shake off Western dominance of the oil fields. Yet, there
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has been little economic or political development in the region outside of Turkey. Dictatorships
remain the most common form of government, and petroleum revenues are not well distributed with
states along the Persian Gulf and the upper classes benefitting disproportionately.
Arab anti-western sentiment was cemented when Britain occupied Palestine amidst news that it had
promised the land for a Jewish homeland – all after having promised Palestinian Arabs independence
for supporting British efforts in World War I. The fact that the British had appeared to promise
Palestine to both the Jewish Zionists and the Arabs greatly complicated an already confused
situation. Despite repeated assurances to Arab leaders that they would be left in control of their own
lands after the war, Lord Balfour, the British foreign secretary, promised prominent Zionist leaders in
1917 that his government would promote the establishment of a Jewish homeland in Palestine after
the war, a pledge known as the Balfour Declaration. The declaration fed existing Zionist aspirations
for the Hebrew people to return to their ancient Middle Eastern lands of origin, which had been
nurtured by the Jews of the diaspora for millennia. While some Jews promoted emigration to
Palestine, others were committed to the eventual establishment of a Jewish state there. The
competing Arab and Jewish claims to the land (Palestine/Israel) and the resulting conflict has become
the cornerstone of difficult regional geopolitics.
Egypt prior to WWI: Rise of Nationalism
Egypt is the one country in the Afro-Asian world in which the emergence of nationalism preceded
European conquest and domination. Risings touched off by the mutiny of Ahmad Orabi and other
Egyptian officers (see Chapter 26), which led to the British occupation in 1882, were aimed at the
liberation of the Egyptian people from their alien Turkish overlords as well as the meddling
Europeans. British occupation meant, in effect, double colonization for the Egyptian people by the
Turkish khedives (who were left in power) and their British advisors.
In the decades following the British conquest, government policy pushed to reduce the debts of the
puppet khedival regime, reformed the bureaucracy, and built irrigation systems and other public works
projects. But the prosperity the British congratulated themselves for having brought to Egypt by the
early 20th century was enjoyed largely by tiny middle and elite classes, often at the expense of the
mass of the population. The leading beneficiaries included foreign merchants, the Turco-Egyptian
political elite, a small Egyptian bourgeoisie in Cairo, and the rural landlords (known as ayan). The
latter were clearly among the biggest gainers. The British had been forced to rely heavily on rural
nobles in extending their control outside of Cairo. As a result, the ayan, not the impoverished mass of
farmers, received most of the benefits. New irrigation systems, the building of railways, and the
increasing cultivation of cash crops (like cotton), bolstered Egypt’s export markets and allowed the
ayan to greedily amass ever larger estates by turning small farm owners into landless tenants. As
their wealth grew, the contrast between the landlords' estate houses and the thatch and mud-walled
villages of the great mass of the peasantry became more and more pronounced.
With the khedival regime and the great landlords closely allied to the British overlords, resistance to
the occupation was left mainly to the small middle class. In the wake of the Orabi Revolt and
subsequent British occupation, the cause of Egyptian independence was taken up mainly by the small
but growing number of prosperous business and professional families (the effendi) that made up
much of this new middle class. In contrast to India, where lawyers predominated in the nationalist
leadership, in Egypt, Western-educated journalists led the way. In the 1890s and early 1900s,
numerous newspapers in Arabic, French and English vied to expose the mistakes of the British and
the corruption of the khedival regime. Egyptian writers also attacked the British for their racist
arrogance and their monopolization of well-paying positions in the Egyptian bureaucracy. Like their
Indian counterparts, Egyptian critics argued that these could just as well have been filled by
university-educated Egyptians. In the 1890s the first nationalist party was formed. But again in
contrast to India, where the Congress party dominated the nationalist movement from the outset, a
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variety of rival parties proliferated in Egypt. There were three main alternatives by 1907, but none
could be said to speak for the great majority of the Egyptians, who were illiterate, poorly paid, and
largely ignored.
In the years before the outbreak of World War I in 1914, heavy-handed British repression on several
occasions put down student riots or retaliated for assassination attempts against high British and
Turco-Egyptian officials. Despite the failure of the nationalist parties to unite or build a mass base in
the decades before the war, the extent of the hostility felt by the Egyptian masses was demonstrated
by the Dinshawai incident in 1906. This confrontation between the British and their Egyptian
subjects exemplified the racial arrogance displayed by most of the European colonizers. Though the
incident at Dinshawai was seemingly a small clash resulting in only limited numbers of fatalities, the
excessive British response to it did much to undermine whatever support remained for their continued
presence in Egypt.
Most Egyptian villages raised large numbers of pigeons, which served as an important supplement to
the meager peasant diet. Over the years, some of the British had turned the hunting of the pigeons of
selected villages into a holiday pastime. A party of British officers on leave was hunting the pigeons of
the village of Dinshawai in the Nile delta when they accidentally shot the wife of the prayer leader of
the local mosque. The angry villagers mobbed the greatly outnumbered shooting party, which in panic
fired on the villagers. Both the villagers and the British soldiers suffered casualties in the clashes that
followed. In reprisal for the death of one of the officers, the British summarily hung four of the
villagers. The British also ordered that other villagers connected to the incident be publicly flogged or
sentenced to varying terms of hard labor.
The harsh British reprisals aroused a storm of protest in the Egyptian press and among the nationalist
parties. Some Egyptian leaders later recounted how the incident convinced them that cooperation with
the British was totally unacceptable and fixed their resolve to agitate for an end to Egypt's occupation.
Popular protests in several areas, and the emergence of ayan support for the nationalist cause, also
suggested the possibility of building a mass base for anti-British agitation. More than anything else,
the incident at Dinshawai had galvanized support for popular protest across the communal and social
boundaries that had so long divided the peoples of Egypt.
Egypt during WWI: Hardship & Strengthened Nationalism
By 1913 the rising tide of Egyptian nationalism had sufficiently coaxed the British into granting a
constitution and representation in a parliament elected indirectly by the men of wealth and influence.
Initially, World War I and the resulting British declaration of martial law in combination with the
constitutional concessions put a temporary end to nationalist agitation. But, as in India, the war
unleashed forces in Egypt that could not be stopped and that would soon lead to the revival of the
drive for independence with even greater strength than before.
Because Egypt was already occupied by the British when the war broke out, and it had been formally
declared a protectorate in 1914, it was not included in the promises of self-determination made by the
British to other Arab regions. As a result, the anti-colonial struggle in Egypt was rooted in earlier
agitation and the heavy toll the war had taken on the Egyptian masses rather than in feelings of
betrayed promises. During the war, the defense of the Suez Canal was one of the top priorities for the
British. To guard against possible Muslim uprisings in response to Turkish calls for a holy war, martial
law was declared soon after hostilities began. Throughout the war, large contingents of British as well
as African and Indian British colonial troops were garrisoned in Egypt. These soldiers created a heavy
drain on the increasingly scarce food supplies of the area. Additionally, Egyptians peasants were
often forced into labor or to forfeit their draft animals in order to support the war effort. The resulting
discontent was further inflamed by spiraling inflation and famine as the war dragged on.
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By the end of the war, Egypt was ripe for revolt. Mass discontent strengthened the resolve of the
educated nationalist elite to demand a hearing at Versailles, where the victorious Allies were
struggling to reach a postwar settlement. When a delegation of Egyptian leaders was denied
permission to make the case for Egyptian self-determination before the peacemakers at Versailles,
most Egyptian leaders resigned from the government and called for mass demonstrations. What
followed shocked even the most confident British officials. Student-led riots touched off outright
insurrection over much of Egypt. At one point, Cairo was cut off from the outside world, and much of
the countryside was hostile territory for the occupying power. Though the British army was able, at the
cost of scores of deaths, to restore control, it was clear that some hearing had to be given to Egyptian
demands. The emergence of the newly formed Wafd party provided the nationalists with a focus for
unified action and a mass base that far exceeded any they had attracted in the prewar decades.
Egypt during the Interwar Years & WWII: Nominal Independence
When a British commission investigating the causes of postwar upheaval in Egypt was greeted by
Wafd party civil disobedience and continuing violent opposition, it recommended that the British begin
negotiations for an eventual withdrawal from Egypt. Years of bargaining followed, which led to a very
limited independence for the Egyptians. Officially independent in 1922, British withdrawal occurred in
stages culminating in the British withdrawal to the Suez Canal zone in 1936. As the British handed
Egypt independence, they did so by restoring the Turkish Khedives to power and reserved the right to
reoccupy Egypt should it be threatened by a foreign aggressor.
Still, Egypt won a significant degree of political independence, but parliamentary leaders from the
Wafd party and others did little to relieve the misery of the Egyptian masses. Most Egyptian politicians
regarded the winning of office as an opportunity to increase their own fortunes. With corruption
rampant, many politicians from professional, merchant, and ayan households used their influence and
growing wealth to amass huge estates, which were worked by landless tenants and laborers. Locked
in interparty quarrels, as well as the ongoing contest with the khedival regime for control of the
government, few political leaders had the time or inclination to push for the land reforms and public
works projects that the peasantry so desperately needed.
To remedy these injustices and rid Egypt of its foreign oppressors, two Arab alternatives to the
Khedival regime emerged. One revolutionary group, the Free Officers movement, evolved from a
secret organization established in the Egyptian army in the 1930s. Founded by idealistic young
officers of Arab-Egyptian rather than Turco-Egyptian descent, the Free Officers studied conditions in
the country and prepared to seize power in the name of a genuine revolution. A second revolutionary
movement, the Muslim Brotherhood, was founded in 1928 in an effort to bring social reform to
Egypt. The brotherhood was founded by Hasan al-Banna, a schoolteacher who had studied at AlAzhar University in Cairo in the years after World War I. Al-Banna’s interests combined a deep
curiosity in scientific subjects with active involvement in Wafd-organized demonstrations for Egyptian
independence. Like many other Egyptians who supported the Wafd’s nationalist ambitions, al-Banna
developed contempt for the wealthy Egyptian minority who prospered during Egypt’s conditional
independence amidst so much poverty. Although members of the Muslim Brotherhood were
committed to a reactionary revival of Islam, the organization's main focus, particularly in the early
years, was on a program of social uplift and sweeping reforms. The organization became involved in a
wide range of activities, from promoting trade unions and building medical clinics to educating women
and pushing for land reform.
The outbreak of World War II only brought more discontent to Egypt. Hoping to exploit the farmland
in Egypt, strategic location of the Suez Canal, and feelings of betrayal elsewhere in the Middle East,
Axis powers invaded Egypt in 1940. Instigating British defense of the Suez Canal, the Allied battle
against Germany’s Rommel again made North Africa and Egypt a centerpiece in global conflict. This
time the resulting Egyptian hardship led criticism to be leveled at Khedive, King Farouk I. King
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Farouk’s lavish lifestyle, for example keeping all the lights burning at his palace in Alexandria during
Italian bombing and blackouts elsewhere in the city, particularly angered some. Despite the
brotherhood's social service becoming highly politicized, the group continued to expand its influence
among the impoverished massed and even middle-class youths during World War II.
Egypt after WWII: Arab Independence
As we have seen, the Egyptians won their independence in the mid-1930s except for the lingering
British presence in the Suez Canal zone. But self-centered civilian politicians and the corrupt khedival
regime had done little to improve the standard of living of the mass of the Egyptian people. The social
bankruptcy of Khedive and Wafd party leadership is suggested by some revealing statistics compiled
by the United Nations in the early 1950s. By that time, nearly 70 percent of Egypt's cultivable land was
owned by six percent of the population. As for the mass of the people, 98 percent of the peasants
were illiterate, and malnutrition was chronic among urban and rural lower classes. Such was the
legacy of the very un-revolutionary process of decolonization in Egypt. As conditions worsened and
Egypt's governing parties did little but rake in wealth for their elitist memberships, revolutionary forces
emerged in Egyptian society.
Following a government assassination of the Muslim Brotherhood’s Hasan al-Banna, the group best
positioned to reform Egypt was the Free Officer’s movement. Representative of a broader global
trend, militaries often became forces of political change in the 20th century. The regimentation,
discipline, and solidarity emphasized in military training often rendered soldiers more resistant than
other groups to ethnic or religious divisions. Additionally, in conditions of political breakdown and
social conflict, the military possesses the monopoly—or near monopoly—of force that is often
essential for restoring order. Military personnel also tend to have some degree of technical training,
which was usually lacking in the humanities-oriented education of civilian nationalist leaders. Lastly,
because most military leaders have been staunchly anticommunist, they have often received technical
and financial assistance from Western governments.
It is in this context that Egypt’s Free Officers led the military coup and social revolution in 1952 that
ended 40 years of nationalist political dominance. After Egypt's humiliating defeats in the first ArabIsraeli War of 1948 and in a clash with the British over its continued occupation of the Suez Canal in
1952, mass anger gave the officers their chance. In July 1952, an almost bloodless military coup
toppled the corrupt Khedive Farouk from his jewel-encrusted throne. The revolution had begun. The
monarchy was ended, and with the installation of the Free Officers, Egyptians ruled themselves for
the first time since the 6th century B.C.E.
Rising to power with several officers at the head of the Free Officers movement and months of
internal power struggles, Gamal Abdul Nasser emerged as the head of a military government that
was deeply committed to revolution. Nasser and his fellow officers used the dictatorial powers they
had won in the coup to force through radical economic and social programs that they believed would
uplift the long-oppressed Egyptian masses. They were convinced that only the state had the power to
carry out essential reforms, and thus they began to intervene in all aspects of Egyptian life. By 1954
all political parties had been disbanded, including the Muslim Brotherhood. Land reform measures
were enacted: limits were placed on how much land an individual could own, and excess lands were
seized and redistributed to landless peasants. State-financed education through the college level was
made available to Egyptians. The government became Egypt's main employer; by 1980, more than
30 percent of Egypt's workforce was on the state payroll. State subsidies were used to lower the price
of basic food staples, such as wheat and cooking oil. State-controlled development schemes were
introduced that emphasized industrial growth, modeled after the five-year plans of the Soviet Union.
To establish Egypt's economic independence, stiff restrictions were placed on foreign investment. In
some cases foreign properties were seized and redistributed to Egyptian investors. Nasser also
embarked on an interventionist foreign policy that stressed the struggle to destroy the newly
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established Israeli state, forge Arab unity, and foment socialist revolutions in neighboring lands. His
greatest foreign policy coup came in 1956, when he rallied international opinion to finally oust the
British and their French allies from the Suez Canal zone.
However well-intentioned, many of Nasser's initiatives misfired. Land reform efforts were frustrated by
bureaucratic corruption and the clever strategies devised by the landlord class to hold on to their
estates. State development schemes often lacked proper funding and failed because of
mismanagement and miscalculations. Even the Aswan Dam project, the cornerstone of Nasser's
development drive, was a fiasco. Egypt's continuing population boom quickly canceled out the
additional cultivable lands the dam produced. The dam's interference with the flow of the Nile resulted
in increasing numbers of parasites that cause blindness. It also led to a decline in the fertility of
farmlands in the lower Nile delta, which were deprived of the rich silt that normally was washed down
by the river. Foreign investment funds from the West, which Egypt desperately needed, soon dried up.
Aid from the much poorer Soviet bloc could not begin to match what was lost, and much of this
assistance was military. In the absence of sufficient foreign investment and with Egypt's uncontrolled
population rising at an alarming rate, the state simply could not afford all the ambitious schemes to
which Nasser and the revolutionary officers had committed it. The gap between aspirations and
means was increased in the later years of Nasser's reign (in the 1960s) by the heavy costs of his
mostly failed foreign policy adventures, including heavy intervention in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.
Nasser's successor, Anwar Sadat, had little choice but to dismantle the massive state apparatus that
had been created. He favored private rather than state initiatives. As a result during Sadat's tenure in
office, the middle class emerged again as a powerful force. Additionally, he also moved to end Egypt’s
costly intervention in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. Sadat then expelled Soviet advisors and opened
Egypt to investment from the United States and Western Europe. Sadat's shift in direction was
continued by his successor, Hosni Mubarak. But neither the attempt at genuine revolution led by
Nasser nor the later move to capitalism and more pro-Western positions has done much to check
Egypt's alarming population increases or the glaring gap between the living conditions of Egypt's rich
minority and its impoverished masses. Perhaps most importantly, corruption in the bloated
bureaucracy, in addition to these inequalities, has allowed the Muslim Brotherhood to remain
influential in secret. At times stressing Islamic fundamentalism and at others stressing more
moderate economic agendas, the Muslim Brotherhood was a critical force behind peaceful 2011
revolution that ousted Mubarak in favor of democracy, but the success of the revolution and its ideals
have yet to be determined.
Palestine-Israel: Conflicting Nationalisms
Conflict over the land known as Palestine or Israel has existed since Biblical times. In 70 CE, the
Romans expelled the Jewish people from the land of Palestine resulting in Jewish refugees forming
minority communities across Europe. Since then Jews had always dreamed of returning to this
homeland. But the Roman conquerors of this land and their Byzantine descendants were ousted from
the eastern Mediterranean early in the postclassical period by Arabs united under a banner of Islam.
Yet more conflict surrounded the region when Arab control of the eastern Mediterranean, and in
particular Palestine, became the rallying cry for European Christian crusaders in the 11th century.
Although Arab citizens withstood these onslaughts, it was not until the new Turkish, albeit Muslim,
political authority of the Ottomans laid claim to much of the Middle East in 1453 that a considerable
era of peace stabilized the narrow slice of land.
The modern conflict in area known today as Israel most clearly has its roots in the migrations of the
late 1800s. A wave of anti-Semitism in the second half of the 19th century witnessed particularly
vicious pogroms, or violent assaults on the Jewish communities of Russia and Romania. The desire
for a Jewish homeland grew as discrimination intensified convincing Jewish intellectuals such as Leon
Pinsker that assimilation of the Jews into, or even acceptance by, Christian European nations was
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impossible. In response, Jewish nationalism, known as Zionism, spiked in Europe, and Zionist
organizations formed to promote Jewish migration to Palestine. These early moves were made in
direct response to the persecution of the Jews of Eastern Europe in the last decades of the 19th
century. But until World War I, the numbers of Jews returning to Palestine were small, and Arabs –
both Christian and Muslim – greatly outnumbered Jewish settlers.
Britain’s efforts to the defeat the Ottoman Empire in World War I also spurred a conflicting Arab
nationalism in the region. Promised independence in exchange for rebelling against their Turkish
overlords, Arab peasants clamored for freedom. The Zionist movement then turned to the British
government for support. In 1917, the British governor issued the, now famous, Balfour Declaration
which states “His Majesty’s Government views with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national
home for the Jewish people.” Lord Balfour's promises to the Zionists and the British takeover of
Palestine in 1920 struck the Arabs as a double betrayal. Having promised the land to two groups,
Britain created a land struggle betraying two deeply nationalistic groups following World War I.
Further adding to the tension was increasing Jewish immigration. Zionist groups helped Jews to buy
land from Arab landlords. Often these Arab landowners lived in cities and used tenant farmers to
work the farm plots in their absence. Arab landlords quickly sold much of their rural holdings for profit,
but forcing tenant farmers to suddenly leave in turn and face the hardships of urban life. A major
Muslim revolt swept Palestine between 1936 and 1939. The British managed to put down this rising
but only with great difficulty. It both decimated the leadership of the Palestinian Arab community and
further strengthened the British resolve to stem the flow of Jewish immigrants to Palestine.
Government measures to keep out Jewish refugees from Nazi oppression led in turn to violent Zionist
resistance to the British presence in Palestine. This violent competition for land only increased during
World War II and after.
By the end of World War II, the major parties claiming Palestine were locked into a deadly stalemate.
The fate of Palestine continued to present special problems. The Palestinian Arabs and their allies in
neighboring Arab lands were equally determined to transform Palestine into a multireligious nation in
which the position of the Arab majority would be ensured. The Zionists were determined to carve out a
Jewish state in the region. Hitler's campaign of genocide against the European Jews had provided
powerful support for the Zionists' insistence that the Jews must have their own homeland, which more
and more was conceived in terms of a modern national state. The brutal persecution of the Jews also
won international sympathy for the Zionist cause. Having badly bungled their responsibilities, and
under attack from both sides, the British proposed perhaps the only viable option: partition. The newly
created United Nations provided an international body that could give a semblance of legality to the
proceedings. In 1948, with sympathy for the Jews running high because of the postwar revelations of
the horrors of Hitler's Final Solution, the member states of the United Nations—with the United States
and the Soviet Union in rare agreement approved the partition of Palestine into Arab and Jewish
countries.
The Arab states that bordered the newly created nation of Israel had vehemently opposed the UN
action. Soon the two sides were engaged in all-out warfare. Though heavily outnumbered, the Zionists
proved better armed and much better prepared to defend themselves than almost anyone could have
expected. Not only did they hold onto the tiny, patchwork state they had been given by the United
Nations, but they expanded it at the Arabs' expense. The brief but bloody war that ensued created
hundreds of thousands of Palestinian Arab refugees. It also sealed the persisting hostility between
Arabs and Israelis that has been the all-consuming issue in the region and a major international
problem to the present day. In Palestine, conflicting strains of nationalism had collided. As a result,
the legacy of colonialism proved even more of a liability to social and economic development than in
much of the rest of newly independent Africa and Asia.
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Iran: Religious Revivalism and the Rejection of the West
Thirty years ago Iran was one of America’s staunchest Middle East allies, until a revolution in January
1979 toppled Iran’s pro-Western monarchy and brought to power an anti-American Shia cleric,
Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. Less than a year later, sixty-six Americans were taken hostage at the
U.S. embassy in Tehran.
Iran Prior to 1979
The prior history behind Iran revolution was pivotal in this turn of events. Like China, Iran had not
been formally colonized by the European powers but rather had been reduced to a sphere of informal
influence, divided between Great Britain and Russia. As a result, neither the bureaucratic nor the
communication infrastructures that accompanied colonial takeovers were highly developed there. Nor
did a substantial Western-educated middle class emerge. Thus, the impetus for "modernization" came
suddenly and was imposed from above by the Pahlavi shahs. The initiatives taken by the second
shah in particular, which were supported by Iran's considerable oil wealth, wrenched Iran out of the
isolation and backwardness in which most of the nation lived until the mid-20th century. Beginning in
the 1960s, the Shah, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, pushed through major reforms that gave more rights
to women, improved education and health care, and gave peasants land-ownership rights. The U.S.
viewed the Shah as a leader who could show the authoritarian Arab governments of the Middle East
the way to modernization, if not democracy.
But beneath the surface Iran was smoldering. His flaunting of Islamic conventions and his neglect of
Islamic worship and religious institutions enraged the ayatollahs, or religious experts. They also
alienated the mullahs, or local prayer leaders and mosque attendants, who guided the religious and
personal lives of the great majority of the Iranian population. Landowners decried the Shah’s efforts
to redistribute land to sharecropping farming, upending centuries of feudalism. Rampant corruption
and secret police, which imprisoned, tortured, or even killed political opponents, often eroded any
political support that the Shah initially possessed. The shah's dictatorial and repressive regime deeply
offended the emerging middle classes, whom he considered his strongest potential supporters. The
urban middle class that Shah had helped to create with his economic reforms began to demand a
greater share of power and more political freedoms.
America’s role in Westernization had also spurred anger. In the early 1950s, the CIA engineered a
coup that restored the Shah to power after democratic elections, and the favoritism the shahs showed
foreign investors further angered the country’s conservative citizens. By the 1970s, Americans were
everywhere in Iran. They were advising its government officials, training its military, building its oil
rigs, teaching in its schools, and peddling American cars, language, fashions, industrial products, and
culture. Although some Iranians viewed this as progress, many others saw the American influence as
a threat to their ancient Persian culture.
Islamic Revolution: God’s Government
No path of development adopted by a postcolonial society has provided more fundamental challenges
to the existing world order than revolutionary Iran under the direction of the Ayatollah Ruhollah
Khomeini. In many respects, the Khomeini revolution of 1979 was a throwback to the religious fervor
of such anti-colonial resistance movements as that led by the Mahdi of the Sudan in the 1880s. In fact
the comparison may be particularly apt, since both movements were motivated by religious
purification, the caliph-like rejoining of religion and politics, toppling Western-backed governments,
and recreation of the region’s past "golden age."
Though proclaimed as an alternative path for development that could be followed by the rest of the
emerging nations, Khomeini's revolution owed its initial success in seizing power to a combination of
circumstances that was unique to Iran. In the years before the 1979 revolution, a fall in oil prices
resulted in an economic slump and widespread unemployment in urban areas such as the capital,
Tehran. Although he had treated his officers well, the shah had badly neglected the military rank-and17
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file, especially in the army. So when the crisis came in 1978, the shah witnessed mass
demonstrations, and was disheartened by what he saw as betrayal by his people. Ultimately, the
shah fled without much of a fight. Khomeini's revolution triumphed over a regime that looked powerful
but proved exceptionally vulnerable.
After coming to power, Khomeini followed through on his promises of radical change. Constitutional
and leftist parties allied to the revolutionary movement were brutally repressed. Moderate leaders
were replaced quickly by radical religious figures who were eager to obey Khomeini's every
command. The "satanic" influences of the United States and Western Europe were purged. Secular
influences in law and government were supplanted by strict Islamic legal codes, which included such
punishments as the amputation of limbs for theft and stoning for women caught in adultery. Veiling
became obligatory for all women, and the career prospects for women of the educated middle
classes, who had been among the most favored by the shah's reforms, suddenly were limited
drastically. Khomeini's planners also drew up grand schemes for land reform, religious education,
and economic development that accorded with the dictates of Islam. Most of these economic
measures resulted in little because soon after the revolution, a protracted and bloody war with Iraq
broke out between 1980 and 1988. Following a war featuring the use of chemical weapons,
revolutionary Iran was left in shambles. Few of its development initiatives had been pursued, and
shortages in food, fuel, and the other necessities of life were widespread.
The post-war devastation combined with the international isolation that resulted from the 444 day long
American hostage crisis makes it impossible to assess the development potential of the religious
revivalist, anti-Western option for other postcolonial nations. While the West remains at odds with Iran
over issues of nuclear development, the 1979 Islamic Revolution in Iran inspired the anti-Western,
revivalist movement, called Islamic Fundamentalism, that world still grapples with today.
33.3 - Africa: Tropical Dependencies
With Egypt’s history of foreign rule and India’s early colonization, their nationalist movements
organized much earlier than could be expected in Africa. But in all the cases, World War I was a
pivotal point in the drive toward independence. Local conditions in Africa made for important
variations on the sequence of decolonization worked out in India and Egypt. But key themes—such as
the lead taken by Western-educated elites, the importance of charismatic leaders in the spread of the
anti-colonial struggle to the peasant and urban masses, and a reliance on nonviolent forms of
protest—were repeated again and again in other colonial settings.
Tropical Africa during WWI: Beginnings of Liberation Struggle
Most of Africa had come under European colonial rule only in the decades before the outbreak of
World War I. Nonetheless, precolonial missionary efforts had produced small groups of Westerneducated Africans in parts of west and south central Africa by the end of the 19th century. Like their
counterparts in India, most Western-educated Africans were staunchly loyal to their British and French
overlords during the First World War. With the backing of both Western-educated Africans and the
traditional rulers, the British and especially the French were able to draw on their African possessions
for manpower and raw materials throughout the war. But this reliance took its toll on Africa and
European dominance in the long run. In addition to local rebellions in response to the forcible recruitment of African soldiers and laborers, the war effort seriously disrupted newly colonized African
societies. African merchants and farmers suffered from shipping shortages and the sudden decline in
demand for crops, such as cocoa. African villagers were not happy to go hungry so that their crops
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could feed the armies of the allies. As Lord Lugard, an influential colonial administrator, pointed out,
the desperate plight of the British and French also forced them to teach tens of thousands of Africans:
…how to kill white men, around whom [they had] been taught to weave a web of sanctity of life.
[They] also know how to handle bombs and Lewis guns and Maxims ... and [they have] seen the
white men budge when [they have] stood fast. Altogether [they have] acquired much knowledge
that might be put to uncomfortable use someday.
The fact that the Europeans kept few of the promises of better jobs and public honors, which they had
made during the war to induce young Africans to enlist in the armed forces or serve as colonial
administrators, contributed a good deal to the unrest of the postwar years. This was particularly true of
the French colonies, where opportunities for political organization, much less protest, were severely
constricted before, during, and after the war. Major strikes and riots broke out repeatedly after the
war. In the British colonies, where there was considerably more tolerance for political organization,
there were also strikes and a number of outright rebellions.
Though Western-educated politicians did not link up with urban workers or peasants in most African
colonies until the 1940s, disenchanted members of the emerging African elite began to organize in the
years following World War I. In the early stages of this process, charismatic African American political
figures, such as Marcus Garvey and W.E.B. Du Bois, had a major impact on emerging African
nationalist leaders. In the 1920s much effort was placed into attempts to arouse all-Africa loyalties and
build pan-African organizations. Although pan-Africanism ultimately proved unworkable in Africa, the
early pan-African conferences held in Paris did much to arouse anti-colonial sentiments among
Western-educated Africans. In the early stages of this process, African leaders in British colonies
sought to nurture regional organizations that linked the emerging nationalists of different colonies,
such as the National Congress of British West Africa. In the long-term however, the leadership of the
pan-African organizations was mainly African American, and the delegates from colonized areas in
Africa faced very different challenges under different colonial overlords. By the mid-1920s, nationalists
from French and British colonies were pretty much going separate ways.
Tropical Africa during the Interwar Years & WWII: Maturing Nationalism
As postwar tempers abated and political concessions were made, nationalist groups matured as they
sought to strengthen their following and intellectual basis. Yet, nationalists in French and British
colonies developed distinct strategies.
In French colonial Africa, political organization was harshly restricted, but in exchange, France
allowed a small but well-educated group of Africans representation in the French parliament. These
conditions meant that French-speaking West Africans concentrated their organizational and ideological efforts in Paris in this period. West Africa expatriates, for example, began the negritude literary movement in Paris, which did much to combat the racial stereotyping that had so long held the
Africans in psychological bondage to the Europeans. Writers such as the Senegalese poet Leopold
Sector Senghor celebrated the beauty of black skin and the African physique. They argued that in
the precolonial era, African peoples had built societies where women were freer, old people were
better cared for, and attitudes toward sex were far healthier than they had ever been in the so-called
civilized West.
In British colonial Africa, western-educated Africans were given greater opportunities to build political
associations, except in settler colonies, such as Kenya and Rhodesia. By the late 1920s, flirtation with
regional nationalist associations gave way to political groupings concerned primarily with issues within
individual colonies, such as Sierra Leone, the Gold Coast, or Nigeria. After the British granted some
representation in colonial advisory councils to Western-educated Africans in this period, emphasis on
colony-specific political mobilization became even more pronounced. Though most of these early
political organizations were too loosely structured to be considered true political parties, there was a
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growing recognition by some leaders of the need to build a mass base. In the 1930s a new generation
of leaders made much more vigorous attacks on the policies of the British, and protest intensified in
response to the economic slump brought on by the Great Depression. Through their newspapers and
political associations, nationalist leaders also reached out to ordinary African villagers and the young,
who had previously played little role in nationalist agitation. But, their efforts to win a mass following
would only come to full fruition after European divisions plunged humanity into a second global war.
World War II proved even more disruptive to the colonial order imposed on Africa than the first global
conflict of the European powers. Forced labor and confiscations of crops and minerals returned, and
inflation and controlled markets again cut down on African earnings. African recruits in the hundreds
of thousands were drawn once more into the conflict and had even greater opportunities to use the
latest European weapons to destroy Europeans. African servicemen had witnessed British and
French defeats in the Middle East and Southeast Asia, and they fought bravely only to experience
renewed racial discrimination once they returned home. Many were soon among the staunchest
supporters of postwar nationalist campaigns in the African colonies of the British and French. The
swift and humiliating rout of the French and Belgians by Nazi armies in the spring of 1940 shattered
whatever was left of the colonizers' reputation for military prowess.
The wartime needs of both the British and the exiled French government led to major departures from
longstanding colonial policies that had restricted industrial development throughout Africa. Factories
were established to process urgently needed vegetable oils, foods, and minerals. These in turn
contributed to a growing migration on the part of African peasants to the towns and a sharp spurt in
African urban growth. The inability of many of those who moved to the towns to find employment
made for a reservoir of disgruntled, idle workers that would be skillfully tapped by nationalist
politicians in the postwar decades.
Tropical Africa after WWII: Independence
In the postwar era, there were essentially two main paths to decolonization in tropical Africa. The first
occurred in largely in French territories, where colonial governments initiated reforms with moderate
leaders leading to a slow withdrawal. The second occurred in British colonies, where more radical
African nationalists used civil disobedience to aggressively push for independence.
Hard-pressed by costly military struggles to hold on to their colonies in Indochina and Algeria, the
French took a conciliatory line in dealing with the many peoples they ruled in West Africa. Ongoing
negotiations with such highly westernized leaders as Senegal's Leopold Sklar Senghor and the Ivory
Coast's Felix Houphouat-Boigny led to reforms and political concessions. The slow French retreat
ensured that moderate African leaders, who were eager to retain French economic and cultural ties,
would dominate the nationalist movements and the postindependence period in French West Africa.
Between 1956 and 1960, the French colonies moved by stages toward nationhood. By 1960 all of
France's West African colonies were free.
Independence in the comparable areas of the British empires in Africa came in a somewhat different
way. This process was epitomized by Kwame Nkrumah and his followers in the British Gold Coast
colony, which, as the independent nation of Ghana, launched the process of decolonization in Africa.
Nkrumah and other radical African leaders emerged throughout Africa after the war. Educated in
African missionary schools and the United States, he had established wide contacts with civil rights
leaders in both West Africa and in America. Returning to the Gold Coast in the late 1940s following
his schooling, Nkrumah witnessed a land in ferment. The restrictions of government-controlled
marketing boards and their favoritism for British merchants had led to widespread, but nonviolent,
protest in the coastal cities. But after the police fired on a peaceful demonstration of ex-servicemen in
1948, rioting broke out in many towns. Though both urban workers and cash crop farmers had
supported the unrest, Western-educated African leaders were slow to organize these dissident groups
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into a sustained mass movement. Their reluctance arose in part from their fear of losing major political
concessions, such as seats on colonial legislative councils, which the British had just made. Rejecting
the caution urged by more established political leaders, Nkrumah resigned his position as chair of the
dominant political party in the Gold Coast and established his own Convention Peoples Party (CPP).
Even before the formal break, he had signaled the arrival of a new style of politics by organizing mass
rallies, boycotts, and strikes. In the mid-1950s, Nkrumah's mass following, and his growing stature as
a leader who would not be deterred by imprisonment or British threats, won repeated concessions
from the British. Educated Africans were given more and more representation in legislative bodies,
and gradually they took over administration of the colony. The British recognition of Nkrumah as the
prime minister of an independent Ghana in 1957 simply concluded a transfer of power from the
European colonizers to the Western-educated African elite that had been under way for nearly a
decade. The peaceful devolution of power to African nationalists led to the independence of the
British non-settler colonies in black Africa by the mid-1960s.
A third, rare path to independence was demonstrated by the Belgians’ hasty retreat from their huge
colonial possession in the Congo. Their virtual flight was epitomized by the fact that there was little in
the way of an organized nationalist movement to pressure them into concessions of any kind. In fact,
by design there were scarcely any well-educated Congolese to lead resistance to Belgian rule. At
independence in 1960, there were only 16 African college graduates in a Congolese population that
exceeded 13 million.
Though the Portuguese still clung to their impoverished and scattered colonial territories, by the mid1960s the European colonial era had come to an end in all but the settler societies of Africa.
Ghana: Charismatic Populism & One-Party Rule
One of the least successful development strategies adopted by newly independent nations has been
a retreat into authoritarian rule. This approach has often been disguised by calculated, charismatic
appeals for support from the disenfranchised masses. Perhaps the career of Kwame Nkrumah, the
leader of Ghana's independence movement, illustrates this pattern best. There is little question that
Nkrumah was genuinely committed to social reform and economic uplift for the Ghanaian people
during the years of his rise to become the first prime minister of the newly independent west African
nation of Ghana in 1957. After assuming power, he moved vigorously to initiate programs that would
translate his high aspirations for his people into reality. But his ambitious schemes for everything from
universal education to industrial development soon ran into trouble.
Rival political parties, some representing regional interests and ethnic groups long hostile to Nkrumah,
repeatedly challenged his initiatives and tried to block the efforts to carry out his plans. His leftist
leanings won support from the Soviet bloc but frightened away Western investors, who had a good
deal more capital to plow into Ghana's economy. They also led to growing hostility on the part of the
United States, Great Britain, and other influential noncommunist countries. Most devastatingly, soon
after independence, the price of cocoa—by far Ghana's largest export crop—began to fall sharply.
Tens of thousands of Ghanaian cocoa farmers were hard hit and the resources for Nkrumah's
development plans suddenly dried up.
Nkrumah's response to these growing problems was increasingly dictatorial. He refused to give up or
cut back on his development plans. As a result, most failed miserably because of the lack of key
supplies and official mismanagement. In the early 1960s, he forcibly crushed all political opposition by
banning rival parties and jailing other political leaders. He assumed dictatorial powers and ruled
through functionaries in his own Convention People's party.
Nkrumah also sought to hold on to the loyalty of the masses and mobilize their energies by highly
staged "events" and the manipulation of largely invented symbols and traditions that were said to be
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derived from Ghana's past. Thus, he tried to justify his policies and leadership style with references to
a uniquely African brand of socialism and the need to revive African traditions and African civilization.
Even before independence, he had taken to wearing the traditional garb of the Ghanaian elite. The
very name Ghana, which Nkrumah himself proposed for the new nation that emerged from the former
Gold Coast colony, had been taken from an ancient African kingdom. The original Ghanaian kingdom
actually was centered much farther to the north and had little to do with the peoples of the Gold Coast.
Nkrumah went about the country giving fiery speeches, dedicating monuments to the "revolution,"
which often consisted of giant statues of himself. He also assumed a prominent role in the nonaligned
movement that was then sweeping the newly independent nations. His followers' adulation knew no
bounds. Members of his captive parliament compared him to Confucius, Muhammad, Shakespeare,
and Napoleon and predicted that his birthplace would serve as a "Mecca" for all of Africa's leaders.
But his suppression of all opposition and his growing ties to the Communist party, coupled with the
rapid deterioration of the Ghanaian economy, increased the ranks of his enemies, who waited for a
chance to strike. That chance came early in 1966, when Nkrumah went off on one of his many trips,
this time a peace mission to Vietnam. In his absence, he was deposed by a military coup. Nkrumah
died in exile in 1972, and Ghana moved in a very different direction under its new military rulers.
Military Dictatorships
Given the difficulties that leaders such as Nkrumah faced after independence and the advantages the
military have in crisis situations, it is not surprising that coups quickly proliferated. Once in control,
military leaders have banned civilian political parties and imposed military regimes of varying degrees
of repression and authoritarian control. Yet the ends to which these regimes have put their dictatorial
powers have differed greatly. At their worst, military regimes—such as those in Uganda (especially
under Idi Amin) and Congo—have quashed civil liberties while making little attempt to reduce social
inequities or improve living standards. These regimes have existed mainly to enrich the military
leaders and their allies. Military governments of this sort have been notorious for official corruption
and for imprisoning, torturing, or eliminating political dissidents. Understandably uneasy about being
overthrown, these regimes have diverted a high proportion of their nations' meager resources, which
might have gone for economic development, into expenditures on expensive military hardware.
33.4 - Africa: Settler
The pattern of relatively peaceful withdrawal by stages that characterized the process of
decolonization in most of Asia and Africa proved unworkable in most of the settler colonies. These
included areas like Algeria, Kenya, and Southern Rhodesia, where substantial numbers of Europeans
had gone intending to settle permanently in the 19th and early 20th centuries. South Africa, which had
begun to be settled by Europeans centuries earlier, provided few openings for nationalist agitation
except that mounted by the politically and economically dominant colonists of European descent. In
each case, the presence of European settler communities, varying in size from millions in South Africa
and Algeria to tens of thousands in Kenya and Southern Rhodesia, blocked both the rise of
indigenous nationalist movements and concessions on the part of the colonial overlords.
Because the settlers regarded the colonies to which they had emigrated as their permanent homes,
they fought all attempts to turn political control over to the African majority or even to grant them civil
rights. They also doggedly refused all reforms by colonial administrators that required them to give up
any of the lands they had occupied, often at the expense of indigenous African peoples. Unable to
make headway through nonviolent protest tactics—which were forbidden—or negotiations with British
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or French officials, who were fearful of angering the highly vocal settler minority, many African leaders
turned to violent, revolutionary struggles to win their independence.
The first of these erupted in Kenya in the early 1950s. Impatient with the failure of the nonviolent
approach adopted by leader Jomo Kenyatta, an underground guerilla organization coalesced around
a group of more radical leaders. In the early 1950s, the radicals mounted a campaign of terror against
the British, the settlers, and Africans who were considered collaborators. At the height of the struggle
in 1954, some 200,000 rebels violently fought for independence in Kenya. The British responded with
an all-out military effort to crush the guerrilla movement, which was dismissed as savagery. In the
process, the British, at the settlers' insistence, imprisoned Kenyatta, thus eliminating the nonviolent
alternative to the guerrillas. The rebel movement had been militarily defeated by 1956 at the cost of
thousands of lives. But the British were now in a mood to negotiate with the nationalists, despite
strong objections from the European settlers. Kenyatta was released from prison, and he emerged as
the spokesperson for the Africans of Kenya. By 1963 a multiracial Kenya had won its independence.
Under what was, in effect, Kenyatta's one-party rule, it remained until the mid-1980s one of the most
stable and more prosperous of the new African states.
Algeria
Perhaps the bloodiest decolonization was in the settler colony of Algeria. The struggle of the Arab
and Berber peoples of Algeria for independence was longer and even more vicious than that in
Kenya. In 1946, when the French government was restored following the fall of the Nazis, a new
constitution was written establishing the Fourth Republic of France. In this document, Algeria was
considered to be a department of France, with the same legal status as a province inside of France,
and not just a colony. Long seen as an integral part of France, the presence of more than a million
European settlers in the colony only served to bolster the resolve of French politicians to retain it at all
costs. As Premier Pierre Mendes-France declared, “One does not compromise when it comes to
defending the internal peace of the nation, the unity and integrity of the Republic. The Algerian
departments are part of the French Republic. They have been French for a long time, and they are
irrevocably French… Between them and metropolitan France there can be no separation.”
In the decade after World War II, Algerian nationalists started to openly push for an end to colonialism
and the special privileges held by white settlers. But by 1954, sporadic rioting grew into sustained
guerrilla resistance. Led by the National Liberation Front (FLN), military outposts and government
targets were attacked. Within a few years, large segments of the Algerian Arab population were
mobilized into full-scale revolt against European dominance, and their attacks broadened to include
the French settler population. The French government responded to the revolt with force, committing
over 400,000 troops to Algeria. High-ranking French army officers came to see the defeat of this
movement as a way to restore a reputation that had been badly tarnished by recent defeats in
Vietnam (see Chapter 34). By 1958 most of the urban cells of the FLN were destroyed. However, in
the fight in the rural and mountainous regions of Algeria intensified. The FLN conducted a brutal
campaign that the French countered with a massive show of military force that included aerial
bombardments. Resettlement camps were established to isolate people thought to be supporting the
rebels. Over two million Algerians were forced from their homes. In 1958, public opinion in France
became so divided over Algeria that, with strong support from elements in the French military, the
settlers had managed to topple the government in Paris in 1958, thereby putting an end to the Fourth
Republic. As a result, Charles De Gaulle agreed to take charge and called for a new constitution,
establishing the Fifth Republic. As the rebels were gradually defeated in the field, the French people
had wearied of the seemingly endless war. De Gaulle began a negotiated independence for Algeria
as he became convinced that he could not restore France to its once powerful status as long as its
resources continued to be drained by the Algerian conflict.
By the end of 1959, the French army was the closest it would get to a complete military victory, De
Gaulle’s call for self-determination led to an agreement between the Algerian nationalists and the
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French government that temporarily protected the rights of the colonists for a three-year period. After
which, the colonists could either return to France or seek Algerian citizenship. Yet, the Algerian
struggle was prolonged and brutalized by a violent settler backlash. Attacks focused on Arabs,
Berbers from the interior, and French who favored Algerian independence. One violent settler
organization even attempted to assassinate de Gaulle. In the end, however, some six million
Algerians voted for independence in 1962. On July 5, Algeria officially declared its independence
from France. After the bitter civil war, the multiracial accommodation worked out in Kenya appeared
out of the question as far as the settlers of Algeria were concerned. Over 900,000 left the new nation
within months after its birth. In addition, tens of thousands of French-sympathizing Arabs fled to
France, who along with later migrants formed the core of the substantial Algerian population now
present in France.
South Africa: Persistence of White Supremacy
In southern Africa, white settler dominance, particularly South Africa, lasted longer than in any other
colonial region. In the Portuguese colonies of Angola and Mozambique, violent revolutions did not put
an end to settler rule until 1975. And in the British colony of Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe),
settlers unsuccessfully declared independence in 1965 when the international community failed to
recognize the new state for failing to include African nationalists in the process. Following a decade
long guerilla war and international brokering, an election in 1980 finalized the creation of Zimbabwe
wrestled from settler control. Yet, it was South Africa that maintained white minority dominance until
1994.
South Africa’s ability to preserve white supremacy until 1994 rested on several factors that
distinguished it from other settler societies. To begin with, the white population of South Africa, equally
divided between the Dutch-descended Afrikaners and the more recently arrived British, was a good
deal larger than that of any of the other settler societies (roughly 4.5 million). And unlike the settlers in
Kenya and Algeria who had the option of retreating to Europe, the Afrikaners had no European
homeland to fall back upon. They had lived in South Africa as long as other Europeans had in North
America, and they considered themselves quite distinct from the Dutch. Next, the Afrikaners had also
built up over the centuries an explicit and elaborate ideology of white racist supremacy that quoted
biblical verses and spoke of struggle against both the African "savages" and the British "imperialists."
Last, and ironically, Afrikaner defeat by the British in the Boer War from 1899 to 1902 also contributed
much to the capacity of the white settler minority to maintain its place of dominance in South Africa. A
sense of guilt, arising especially from their treatment of Boer women and children during the war—
tens of thousands of whom died of disease in what the British called concentration camps—led the
victors to make major concessions to the Afrikaners in the postwar decades. The most important of
these was internal political control, which included turning over the fate of the black African majority to
the openly racist supremacist Afrikaners.
With Afrikaners the driving political force in South Africa, the continued subjugation of the black
Africans became a central aim of organizations that emerged in the 1930s and 1940s, culminating in
the Afrikaner National Party. From 1948, when it emerged as the majority party in the all-white
South African legislature, the Nationalist party devoted itself to winning complete independence from
Britain and to establishing lasting white domination over the political, social, and economic life of the
new nation. South Africa was by far the most strategy, populous, and wealthy area where the majority
population had yet to be liberated from colonial domination. Thus, the Afrikaners instituted a rigid
system of racial segregation, called apartheid, following 1948 through the passage of thousands of
laws. Simultaneously, through a series of peaceful stages, the Nationalist party won complete
independence from Great Britain in 1960.
The Dutch Afrikaner-led Nationalist party solidified its control through a series of elections in which the
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majority black population was not allowed to vote. Among other things, laws were passed that
reserved skilled and high-paying jobs for whites. The right to vote and political representation were
denied to the black Africans, and ultimately to Indians and those of mixed descent. It was illegal for
members of any of these groups to hold mass meetings or to organize political parties or labor unions.
Thousands of laws, when taken together, made up a system that dominated all aspects of South
African life until the 1990s, but apartheid was not designed to just ensure a monopoly of political
power and economic dominance. The white minority, both British- and Dutch-descended, also
imposed a system of extreme social segregation on all races of South Africa. Separate and patently
unequal facilities were established for different racial groups for recreation, education, housing, work,
and medical care. Dating and sexual intercourse across racial lines were strictly prohibited, and
nonwhites were required to carry passes that listed the parts of South Africa where they were allowed
to work and live. If caught by the police without their passes or in areas where they were not permitted
to travel, nonwhite South Africans were routinely given stiff jail sentences.
The Afrikaners’ opportunistic cultivation of divisions between the diverse peoples in the black African
population, also contributed to their ability to preserve a bastion of white supremacy in an otherwise
liberated continent. Spatial separation was organized on a far grander scale than separate
bathrooms. Numerous homelands within South Africa were created, each designated for the main
"tribal" groups within the black African population. Though touted by the Afrikaners as the ultimate
solution to the racial "problem," the homelands scheme (and associated forced relocation) left the
black African majority with a small portion of some of the poorest land in South Africa. Because the
homelands were overpopulated and poverty-stricken, the white minority was guaranteed a ready
supply of cheap black labor to work in their factories and mines and on their farms. Denied citizenship
in South Africa proper, these laborers were then forced eventually to return to the homelands, where
they had left their wives and children while emigrating in search of work.
To maintain the blatantly racist and inequitable system of apartheid, the white minority had to build a
police state and expend a large portion of the federal budget on a sophisticated and well-trained
military establishment. Because of the land's great mineral wealth, the Afrikaner nationalists were able
to find the resources to fund their garrison state for decades. The combined effects of apartheid
restrictions, police repression, and blacks’ limited opportunities for higher education hampered the
growth of black African political parties and their efforts to mobilize popular support for the struggle for
decolonization. The black organizations that did form, such as the African National Congress, were
declared illegal. African leaders such as Nelson Mandela were shipped off to maximum-security
prisons, and other leaders, such as Steve Biko, were murdered while in police custody. Theh
Afrikaner government prohibited all forms of black protest and brutally repressed even nonviolent
resistance. With all avenues of constitutional negotiation and peaceful protest closed, many
advocates of black majority rule in a multiracial society turned to guerrilla resistance from the 1960s
onward. The South African government responded in the 1980s by declaring a state of emergency,
which simply intensified the restrictions already in place in the garrison state. The government
repeatedly justified its repression by labeling virtually all black protest as communist-inspired and
playing on the racial fears of the white minority.
Through most of the 1970s and early 1980s, it appeared that the hardening hostility between the
unyielding white minority and the frustrated black majority was building to a very violent upheaval. But
from the late 1980s, countervailing forces were taking hold in South African society. An international
boycott greatly weakened the South African economy. In addition, the South African army's costly
involvement in neighboring wars seemed to foreshadow never-ending struggles against black
liberation movements within the country. Led by the courageous F.W. de Klerk, moderate Afrikaner
leaders pushed for reforms that began to dismantle the system of apartheid. The release of key black
political prisoners, such as the dramatic freeing of Nelson Mandela in 1990, signaled that at long last
the leaders of the white majority were ready to negotiate the future of South African politics and
society. Permission for peaceful mass demonstrations and ultimately the enfranchisement of all adult
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South Africans for the 1994 elections provided a way out of the dead end in which the nation was
trapped under apartheid.
The well-run and remarkably participatory 1994 elections brought to power the African National
Congress party, led by Nelson Mandela, who became the first black president of South Africa.
Mandela proved to be one of the most skillful and respected political leaders on the world scene as
well as a moderating force in the potentially volatile South African arena. The peaceful surrender of
power by F.W. de Klerk's Nationalist party, which was supported by most of the white minority,
suggested that a pluralist democracy might well succeed in South Africa. But major obstacles remain.
Bitter interethnic rivalries, hard-line white supremacist organizations, and the misdistribution of wealth
make a just and equitable social order formidable. Yet, South Africa’s inclusion in the BRICS nations
(Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa) means that it is among the most powerful emerging states
today.
33.5 - Comparisons & Social Themes
Neocolonialism

Economic growth was hampered by unprecedented rates of population increase, the
structure of the international market, and the underdeveloped state of most colonial
economies at the time of independence.
Once nationalist leaders achieved their goal of independence, it was soon time for them to make good
on the promises of prosperity they used to gain mass support. The realities of the postcolonial world
soon presented major obstacles to the industrial development schemes that would support the rapidly
increasing populations of nationalists’ new nations. Not only did most of the nations that emerged
from colonialism have little in the way of an industrial base, but their means of obtaining one were
meager. To buy the machines and hire or train the technical experts that were essential to get
industrialization going, the new nations needed to earn capital they could invest for these ends. Some
funds could be accumulated by saving a portion of the state revenues collected from the peasantry. In
most cases, however, there was little left once the bureaucrats had been paid, essential public works
and education had been funded, and other state expenses had been met. Thus, most emerging
nations have relied on the sale of cash crops and minerals to earn the money they need to finance
industrialization.
As newly independent nations soon discovered, the structure of the world market worked against
them. The pattern of exchange promoted during colonization left most emerging countries dependent
on the export production of two or three food crops or industrial raw materials. Although in high
demand in industrialized economies, cash crops (like cocoa, palm oil, coffee, jute, and hemp) and
minerals (like copper, bauxite, and oil) typically experience wide fluctuations in price. Price
fluctuations have created nightmares for planners in developing nations. Revenue estimates from the
sale of coffee or copper in years when the price is high are used to plan government projects for building roads, factories, and dams. Market slumps can wipe out these critical funds, thereby slowing
economic growth and throwing countries deeply into debt. African, Middle Eastern, and Asian leaders
have been quick to blame the legacy of colonialism. Critics argue that the struggles that newly
independent nations face and their resulting economic dependence on the West represent a
Neocolonialism, where Europe and the United States exert so much economic and cultural control
that it is reminiscent of colonization.
Although there is much truth to these accusations, they do not tell the whole story. Leaders in
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emerging nations must also share the responsibility for the slow pace of economic growth in much of
the developing world. The members of the educated classes that came to dominate the political and
business life of newly independent nations often used their positions to enrich themselves and their
relatives at the expense of their societies as a whole. Corruption has been notoriously widespread in
most of the new nations. Government controls on the import of goods such as automobiles, television
sets, and stereos, which are luxury items beyond the reach of most of the people, have often been
lax. As a result, tax revenues and export earnings that could have fueled development have often
gone to provide the good life for small minorities within emerging nations. The inability or refusal of
many regimes to carry out key social reforms, such as land redistribution, has contributed vitally to the
persistence of these patterns.
Badly strapped for capital, investments, and technology, developing nations have often turned to
international organizations, such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, for
assistance. Although resources for development have been gained in this way, the price for
international assistance has often been high. The industrialized nations funding the loans have
demanded major concessions in return for their aid. Loans from the World Bank and IMF almost
invariably have been granted only after the needy nation agreed to structural adjustments. These are
regulations that are meant to ensure repayment often determine how the money is to be invested. In
recent years, these controversial economic measures have often reduced government spending and
encourage private sector initiatives. Yet they typically trigger drastic cutbacks in government
supported services and food subsidies, which disproportionately affect the poor.
Population Growth
The nationalist leaders who led the colonized peoples of Africa and Asia to independence had firmly
committed themselves to promoting rapid economic development once colonial restraints were
removed. In keeping with their Western-educated backgrounds, most of these leaders saw their
nations following the same path of industrialization that had brought national prosperity and
international power to much of Western Europe and the United States. Of the many internal barriers to
development, the most formidable and persistent were the spiraling population increases that often
overwhelmed whatever economic advances the peoples of the new nations managed to make.
Several factors for sustained population increase were established during the earlier history of Asia
and Africa. Food crops, mostly from the New World, contributed to dramatic population growth in
China, India, and Java as early as the 17th century. They also helped sustain high levels of population
in areas such as West Africa, despite heavy losses as a result of the slave trade. The coming of
colonial rule reinforced these upward trends in a number of ways. Colonization often established a
peaceful order and rail lines reducing local warfare and famine that had been a major check against
population increase. With war and famine much reduced, growth began to speed up as death rates
declined, but birth rates remained much the same. On the surface, reducing instances of war,
disease, and famine was one of the great achievements of European colonial regimes. But the
European policy of limiting industrialization in their colonial possessions meant that one of the ways
by which Europe had met its own population boom in the 19th and early 20th centuries was not
available to the new nations. Since independence, improved hygiene and medical treatment, such as
vaccinations and sewage systems, have led to even further population increases. Before the 20th
century, the high rates of stillbirths and infant mortality meant that mothers could expect to lose many
of the children they conceived. Losing ten of fifteen children conceived was not unheard of. Beyond
the obvious psychological scars left by these high death rates, they also fostered the conviction that it
was necessary to have many children to ensure that some would outlive the parents. In societies
where welfare systems were meager, surviving children took on special urgency because they were
the only ones who would care for parents who could no longer work for themselves. The persistence
of these attitudes in recent decades, when medical advances have greatly reduced infant mortality,
has been a major factor contributing to soaring population growth.
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Nearly all leaders of the emerging nations headed societies in which population was increasing at
unprecedented levels. This increase continued in the early years of independence. Although rapid
growth rates in Asia have already slowed since the mid-20th century, even moderate growth rates
have produced huge total populations, most notably in South Asia, because they were adding to an
already large base. Currently, India’s population is more than 1 billion people with another 350 million
people in Pakistan and Bangladesh. In Africa, by contrast, population growth continues at very high
rates. Starting with relatively low population levels relative to its large land area, Africa’s very high
birth rates have resulted in very steep population increases that may be outstripping its resources.
Some population experts predict that if present growth rates continue, Nigeria will have a population
equal to that of China in 2050. In view of the AIDS epidemic that has spread through much of central
and eastern Africa since the 1980s, some of the estimates for population increases in Africa as a
whole may have to be revised downward. But recent measures of African per capita incomes suggest
that even moderate increases in population may be difficult to support at reasonable living standards.
This prospect is underscored by estimates that 50% of the 1 billion peoples of Africa live on less than
$1.25 per day and the continent’s economy is roughly equal to that of the state of New York.
In most Asian and African countries, there has been resistance to birth control efforts aimed at
controlling population growth. Some of this resistance is linked to deeply entrenched social patterns
and religious beliefs. In many of these societies, procreation is seen as a sign of male virility. In
addition, the capacity to bear children, preferably male children, continues to be critical to the social
standing of women. In Asia and Africa, sons are considered essential for continuing the patrilineal
family line and performing burial rites. In contrast to Asia, where high dowries reduce the status of
female children, African women are highly valued due to their agricultural production. Additionally, in
the early decades after independence, many African and Asian leaders were deeply opposed to state
measures to promote family planning and birth control. Some saw these as Western attempts to
meddle in their internal affairs. As it has become increasingly clear that excessive population increase
makes significant economic advances impossible, many of these leaders have begun to reassess
their attitudes toward birth control. But even for those who now want to promote family planning, the
obstacles are staggering. In addition to the cultural and social factors just discussed, leaders often
find they lack sufficient resources and the educated personnel needed to make these programs
effective. High rates of illiteracy, particularly among women, must be overcome, but education is
expensive. Perhaps no form of financial and technical assistance from the industrialized to the
developing world will be as critical in the coming decades as that devoted to family planning.
Urbanization
As population increase in the rural areas of emerging nations outstripped the land and employment
opportunities available to the peasantry, mass migrations to urban areas ensued. The massive
movement of population from overcrowded villages to the cities was one of the most dramatic
developments in the postcolonial history of most new nations. Ambitious youths and the rural poor
crowded into port centers and capital cities in search of jobs and a chance to find the "good life" that
the big hotels and restaurants and the neon lights of the city center appeared to offer to all comers.
But because most of these cities lacked the rapidly expanding industrial sectors that had made
possible the absorption of a similar migrant influx earlier in the West, they were often dead ends for
migrants from the rural areas. There were few jobs, and heavy competition for them ensured that
wages would remain low for most workers. The growing numbers of underemployed or unemployed
migrants turned to street vending, scavenging, begging, or petty crime to survive.
The sudden population influx from the rural areas to cities without sufficient jobs or the infrastructure
to support them has greatly skewed urban growth in the emerging nations. Within decades, Asian
cities have become some of the largest in the world, and Middle Eastern and African urban areas
have sprawled far beyond their modest limits in colonial times. The wealth of the upper- and middle28
Chapter 33
class areas, dominated by glitzy hotels and high-rises, contrasts disturbingly with the poverty of the
vast slums that stretch in all directions from the city centers. Little or no planning was possible for the
slum quarters that expanded as squatters erected makeshift shelters wherever open land or derelict
buildings could be found. Originally, most of the slum areas lacked electricity, running water, or even
the most basic sewage facilities. As shanties were gradually converted into ramshackle dwellings,
many governments scrapped plans to level slum settlements and instead tried to provide them with
electrical and sanitary systems. The urban poor have become a volatile factor in the political struggles
of the elite. They form the crowds willing for a price to cheer on one contender or jeer down another,
and ready to riot and loot in times of government crisis. In deeply divided societies, the poor, workingclass, or idle youths of the urban areas often form the shock troops in communal clashes between
rival ethnic and religious groups. Fear of outbursts by urban "mobs" has forced Asian, Middle Eastern,
and African regimes to spend scarce resources to subsidize and thus keep low the price of bread,
kerosene, and other necessities.
These conditions have burdened many postcolonial societies with parasitic rather than productive
cities. This means that they are heavily dependent for survival on food and resources drawn from their
own countryside or from abroad. In contrast to the cities of Western Europe and North America, even
during the decades of rapid urban expansion in the 19th century, few cities of the emerging nations
have had the manufacturing base needed to generate growth in their surrounding regions or the
nation as a whole. They take from the already impoverished countryside, but they are able to give little
in return. Urban dependence on the countryside further stretches the already overextended resources
of the rural areas and advanced environmental degradation in cities and villages alike.
Gender Struggles
The example of both the Western democracies and the communist republics of eastern Europe,
where women had won the right to vote in the early and mid-20th century, encouraged the founders of
many emerging nations to write female suffrage into their constitutions. The very active part women
played in many nationalist struggles was perhaps even more critical to their earning the right to vote
and run for political office. Women's activism also produced some semblance of equality in legal
rights, education, and occupational opportunities under the laws of many new nations.
However, the equality that was proclaimed on paper often bore little resemblance to the actual rights
that most women could exercise. It also had little bearing on the conditions under which they lived
their daily lives. Even the rise to power of individual women such as Indira Gandhi, is deceptive. In
most instances, female heads of state in the emerging nations entered politics and initially won
political support because they were connected to powerful men. Lacking these sorts of connections,
most African, Middle Eastern, and Asian women have been at best relegated to peripheral political
positions and at worst allowed no participation in the political process. The limited gains made by
women in the political sphere are paralleled by the second-class position to which most are relegated
in many societies. In some respects, their handicaps are comparable to those that constrict women in
the industrialized democracies and communist nations. But the obstacles to female self-fulfillment,
and in many cases mere survival, in emerging nations are usually much more blatant and
fundamental than the restrictions women have to contend with in developed societies. To begin with,
early marriage ages for women and large families are still the norm in most African, Middle Eastern,
and Asian societies. This means that women spend their youthful and middle-age years having
children. There is little time to think of higher education or a career. Because of the low level of
sanitation in many post-colonial societies and the scarcity of food, all but elite and upper-middle-class
women experience chronic anxiety about such basic issues as adequate nutrition for their children
and their susceptibility to disease. The persistence of male-centric customs directly affects the health
and life expectancy of women. For example, the Indian tradition that dictates that women first serve
their husbands and sons and then eat what is left has obvious disadvantages. The quantity and
nutritional content of the leftovers is likely to be lower than that of the original meals, and in tropical
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environments flies and other disease-bearing insects are more likely to have fouled the food. Although
the highly secular property and divorce laws many new states passed after independence have given
women much greater legal protection, many of these measures are ignored in practice.
Contrasting Emerging Nations
This chapter has focused on many of the common problems faced by newly independent nations in
Asia, the Middle East, and Africa in the final decades of the 20th century.
Despite common issues, it is also important to distinguish particular patterns in the late 20th century,
some of which reflected older traditions in key civilizations. India's success in maintaining democracy,
for example, contrasts with the experience of most of the Middle East and, until recently, much of
Africa. India was less completely a new nation than its counterparts elsewhere. It reflected
enlightened leadership and its complex relationship with Great Britain. Earlier Indian traditions of
considerable decentralization showed in the federal system of the huge democracy. The abolition of
the caste system, a massive change, did not remove considerable social inequality based in part on
the caste heritage. While it too changed in some ways, the persistence of Hinduism as the majority
religion marked India as well.
Developments in the Middle East reflected massive changes, ranging from the tensions over Israel to
the region's growing control over its oil revenues. Despite distinguished traditions, most nations in this
region were new, and political patterns also reflected the absence of a dominant regional state since
the fall of the Ottoman Empire. Important tensions continued between secular and religious leaders.
The significance of Islam, as in the Iranian revolution, also linked this region to earlier traditions,
raising issues about the relationship between religion and politics and the role of women that had
distinctive regional elements as well.
Africa had particular features of its own. The new nations of sub-Saharan Africa came late to
independence, and they had been subjected to increasing Western economic dominance well into the
postcolonial decades. This was one reason that Africa was poorer than most of Asia by the century's
end. Massive cultural changes included growing conversions to Islam or Christianity: by 2000, about
40 percent of all sub-Saharan Africans were Muslim, about 40 percent Christian, while the number of
traditional polytheists had shrunk to 20 percent (from 80 percent) during the course of the century.
Nationalism, consumer culture, and some Marxism constituted other new cultural components. Yet
here too, some observers found important elements of tradition. Many Africans combined older beliefs
and artistic styles with their new religions. In some nations, emphasis on powerful authoritarian rulers
reflected not only the tensions of new nationhood, but an earlier tradition of "Big Man" rule.
GLOBAL CONNECTIONS: PERSISTING TRENDS
Given the fragile foundations on which it rested, the rather rapid demise of the European colonial
order is not really surprising. World War II completed the process that World War I and anti-colonial
nationalism had begun; the end of Western imperialism came quickly. In this sense, the global
framework was transformed. However, the winning of political freedom in Asia and Africa also
represented less of a break with the colonial past than the appearance of many new nations on the
map of the world might lead one to assume.
The decidedly non revolutionary, elite-to-elite transfer of power that was central to the liberation
process in most colonies, even those where there were violent guerrilla movements, limited the extent
of the social and economic transformation that occurred. The Western-educated African and Asian
classes moved into the offices and took the jobs—and often the former homes—of the European
colonizers. But social gains for the rest of the population in most new nations were minimal or
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nonexistent. In Algeria, Kenya, and Zimbabwe (formerly Southern Rhodesia), abandoned European
lands were distributed to Arab and African peasants and laborers. But in most former colonies,
especially in Asia, the big landholders that remained were indigenous, and they have held on
tenaciously to their holdings. Educational reforms were carried out to include more sciences in school
curricula and the history of Asia or Africa rather than Europe. But Western cultural influences have
remained strong in almost all of the former colonies. Indians and many West Africans with higher
educations continue to communicate in English and French.
The liberation of the colonies also did little to disrupt Western dominance of the terms of international
trade or the global economic order more generally. In fact, in the negotiations that led to
decolonization, Asian and African leaders often explicitly promised to protect the interests of Western
merchants and businesspeople in the post-independence era. These and other limits that sustained
Western influence and often dominance, even after freedom was won, greatly reduced the options
open to nationalist leaders struggling to build viable and prosperous nations. Though new forces have
also played important roles, the post-independence history of colonized peoples cannot be
understood without a consideration of the lingering effects of the colonial interlude in their history.
Postcolonial Nations in the Cold War World Order
The years of independence for the nations that emerged from the colonial empires in Asia, the Middle
East, and Africa have been filled with political and economic crises and social turmoil, and tensions
between tradition and change. At the same time, it is important to put the recent history of these areas
in a larger perspective. Most of the new nations that emerged from colonialism have been in existence
for only a few decades. They came to independence with severe handicaps, many of which were a
direct legacy of their colonial experiences. It is also important to remember that developed countries,
such as the United States, took decades filled with numerous boundary disputes and outright wars to
reach their current size and structure. Nearly a century after the original 13 colonies broke from Great
Britain and formed the United States, a civil war, the most costly war in the nation's history, was
needed to preserve the union. If one takes into account the artificial nature of the emerging nations,
most have held together rather well.
What is true in politics is true of all other aspects of the postcolonial experience of the African, Middle
Eastern, and Asian peoples. With much lower populations and far fewer industrial competitors, as well
as the capacity to draw on the resources of much of the rest of the world, European and North
American nations had to struggle to industrialize and thereby achieve a reasonable standard of living
for most of their people. Even with these advantages, the human cost in terms of horrific working
conditions and urban squalor was enormous, and we are still paying the high ecological price. African,
Middle Eastern, and Asian countries (and, as we saw in Chapter 27, this includes japan) have had few
or none of the West's advantages. Most of the emerging nations have begun the "great ascent" to
development burdened by excessive and rapidly increasing populations that overwhelm the limited
resources that developing nations often must export to earn the capital to buy food and machines.
The emerging nations struggle to establish a place in the world market system that is structured in
favor of the established industrial powers.
Despite the cultural dominance of the West, which was one of the great legacies or burdens of the
colonial era, Asian, Middle Eastern, and African thinkers and artists have achieved a great deal. If
much of this achievement has depended on Western models, one should not be surprised, given the
educational backgrounds and personal experiences of the emerging nations' first generations of
leaders. The challenge for the coming generations will be to find genuinely African, Middle Eastern,
and Asian solutions to the problems that have stunted political and economic development in the
postcolonial nations. The solutions arrived at are likely to vary a great deal, given the diversity of the
nations and societies involved. They are also likely to be forged from a combination of Western
influences and the ancient and distinguished traditions of civilized life that have been nurtured by
African, Middle Eastern, and Asian peoples for millennia.
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