By Eric Vandenbroeck and co-workers

The post-WWII new order part one

The brutality of the Eastern Front was apocalyptic and brought unprecedented destruction. The most devastating campaigns in global military history were fought over the ‘bloodlands’ stretching between Berlin and Stalingrad. Thousands of towns and villages were removed from the face of the earth; tens of millions were made homeless. West Germany, or the Federal Republic of Germany, was officially established in May 1949. East Germany, or the German Democratic Republic, was established in October 1949. Under their occupying governments, the two Germanys followed very different paths. West Germany was allied with the U.S., the U.K., and France and became a western capitalist country with a market economy. In contrast, East Germany was associated with the Soviet Union.

Much of the program to revitalize the empire was wishful thinking. Britain, France, and the Low Countries faced severe problems of economic recovery. The war almost bankrupted Britain. The French economy was undermined by years of occupation. Reliance on the United States for economic assistance was unavoidable. The revival of the empire as a source of economic strength was compromised by American insistence after the Bretton Woods agreement in 1944 that closed imperial trading systems. Currency areas would have to be dismantled in favor of a global system of freer trade. The introduction of the European Recovery Program in 1947, generally known as the Marshall Aid plan, tied the European empires more closely to reliance on America. When Britain denied the United States unconditional access to Jamaican bauxite, the Marshall Aid loan of 1949 was made conditional on British compliance.1 If empire was a source of markets and materials, it was also costly. To appear less colonial, both Britain and France established development programs – the British Colonial Development and Welfare Act in 1945, the French Economic and Social Development Fund a year later – but much of the money was to encourage economic projects in the empire that would benefit the revival of living standards for the home population, rather than contribute to projects for the subject peoples. The money used by the British came from colonial credits blocked in London for the duration of the war, a sleight-of-hand that avoided having to use British taxpayers' money. 

Nor did the imperial powers realize the extent to which the survival of the empire would become a battleground at the United Nations and a significant factor in the transition from wartime alliance to Cold War. From 1946 onwards, the Soviet Union chose to renew the campaign against imperialism that had dropped away at the German-Soviet war. In a widely publicized speech in 1947 to representatives of communist organizations in Europe (Cominform), Andrei Zhdanov announced the Soviet view that there were now 'two camps' in the world, the imperialist and anti-democratic camp and the anti-imperialist and democratic camp. The Soviet aim was to fight against 'new wars and imperialist expansion.' 2 The British Colonial Office began to monitor Soviet activity as a 'champion of colonial peoples,' and Bevin sent instructions to all diplomatic missions in 1948 on 'Countering Soviet Attacks on Colonialism.' 3 A French Interior Ministry official warned the American ambassador in April 1947 that one of the principal aims of Soviet communism was 'the disintegration of existing colonial possessions' to enfeeble the colonial powers and make them easy prey 'for ultimate Communist domination.4 The Soviet delegation to the United Nations was at the forefront of criticism of colonialism and demands for self-determination, including sponsorship of Resolution 1514 in 1960 by the Soviet premier, Nikita Khrushchev, but the prevailing sent. Still, that the Assembly was anyway hostile to the survival of the empire, and even more so with the passing of the Declaration on Human Rights in 1948, which was regularly invoked in the anti-colonial campaign after that. A decade later, a British report on work, at the United Nations concluded, rightly, that it was 'infinitely less favorable to the interests of Western Europe than the composition of the League.. '5

However, the primary impulse for the collapse of the old empires came from the growth of nationalist and anti-colonial sentiment across the colonized world encouraged by the course and consequences of the war. Even without the war, demands for self-government and independence would have challenged the imperial systems, as they had done in 1919, but the speed with which the old empires disappeared after 1945 was the product of a worldwide hostility to empire in its traditional form and the establishment of networks of anti-imperialists in the wake of wartime mobilization. A Pan-African Congress symbolized the change in Manchester in October 1945, where representatives from sixty countries and anti-colonial movements met with stimulating the demand for emancipation from colonial rule and an end to racial discrimination. Wartime recruitment into trade unions or labor corps in the empire gave an additional foundation for organized protest, which linked up with the campaign of Marxists, such as the Trinidadian George Padmore, to see the struggle against the empire in terms of economic entitlement.6 The Jamaican founder of the People's National Party, Norman Manley, worked with the Jamaican Progressive League founded in New York's Harlem and exhorted black American workers to battle not only for their rights but for 'minority and colonial groups all over the world.' 7 Networks could reach even the most remote corners of the empire. In 1945, on Guadalcanal, scene of one of the most dramatic battles of the war, Jonathan Fifi'i, a sergeant in the wartime Solomon Islands Labour Corps, wanted to create a national political movement after working side by side with American black soldiers: 'We felt angry,' he later recalled, 'that we had been treated like rubbish' by the British. Citing the UN Charter in support, he and others helped to found Maasina Ruru (Rule of Brotherhood), which set up an alternative tribal system of authority, refused to pay taxes, and boycotted British 'native councils.' The British officers responded in the Solomons with Operation 'De-Louse' to suppress the movement. Thousands were imprisoned for sedition until the early 1950s.8 

The wave of anti-imperial nationalism proved this time to be irreversible, and the old imperial powers met it with an uneven mix of sensible compromise and extreme violence. The crises of the empire when they came were not unpredictable, like an earthquake, but their effects were seismic. The collapse of the European Asian empires between 1946 and 1954 ended centuries of empire-building in eight years. For Britain, this was a central concern because the great arc of empire from India through Burma to Malaya and Singapore was the most significant and richest part of the whole; essential, so it was argued, to the continuation of a secure British presence in Asia and a global status. The wartime crisis in India prompted by the Quit India campaign in 1942 had been suppressed. Still, the war years created a mass movement dedicated to the idea that after the obligations and sacrifices of war, azadi (freedom) and swaraj (self-rule) must follow. 'We suffered in the war,' one Indian soldier claimed in 1946, '… we bore with this that we might be free.' More than a million were demobilized in 1945 to return to villages and towns dislocated by war.9 The desire for independence from British rule, sustained by political elites in the 1930s, was now a populist demand on a large scale. The All-India Muslim League grew from a party with little more than 1,000 members in the late 1920s to a mass party of 2 million by 1946.

In 1940, the League published the Lahore Resolution, setting the aspiration for a sovereign Muslim Pakistan.10 The Indian National Congress became an alliance of popular nationalist forces by the war's end with a mass rural and urban following. On 14 June 1945, Congress leaders were finally freed from prison to continue the campaign for a future to British rule, they found a changed movement. Jawaharlal Nehru, the released Congress president, warned Stafford Cripps, now President of the Board of Trade in the new Labour government, that independence was now unavoidable: 'People have grown desperate … there must be no prevarication. '11 

The attitude of the Attlee government was uncertain, but the magnitude of the impending crisis was beyond doubt. Food shortages, widespread labor protests, and a full-scale naval mutiny in spring 1946 by Indian sailors stationed at Bombay (Mumbai) were all linked by the popular press and local Indian politicians with the broader issue of freedom for India. The Indian government's ill-judged decision to put on trial members of the Indian National Army because of their association with the Japanese enemy became a national cause célèbre, prompting violent protests. In truth, the British presence was too weak to hold on to a subcontinent seething with hostility to the continuation of the Raj. By 1946 there were only an estimated 97,000 Britons in India, while the great bulk of the army and police force was Indian. Elections held in the spring of 1946 gave an overwhelming mandate for change. Muhammad Jinnah's Muslim League won all the majority Muslim provinces, the Congress Party the rest. Indians now ruled in all the provinces. The viceroy, Field Marshal Wavell, communicated the unfolding political drama to London with a mounting pessimism; India was close to ungovernable by the summer of 1946. The extent to which the government in London understood how parlous the situation had become was limited. Still, the decision was finally taken to send a Cabinet Mission to India, headed by the secretary of state for India, Lord Pethwick-Lawrence, to work out a constitutional future for an independent Indian dominion under the crown. In June 1946, the mission finally proposed a complicated federal structure of a central all-India government responsible for defense and foreign policy, with provincial federations representing majority Muslim or Hindu populations responsible for most domestic issues. A constituent assembly was to be elected, and an interim Indian government was installed. The proposal quickly broke down: Congress feared that the British planned to 'Balkanize' India; the All-Muslim League wanted a firm commitment to Pakistan and began to advocate partition. The British found it impossible to police the growing violence, and the local government passed rapidly into the hands of Indians.

Evidence that the crisis in India was beyond redemption by the British regime came in mid-August 1946 when savage rioting broke out in Calcutta (Kolkata) between rival Muslim and Hindu followers during the Direct Action Day called for by Jinnah in response to the British proposals. The violence replicated clashes that had been seen across northern India for more than a year on the religious fault lines in Punjab and Bengal, but it was on a more vast and more lethal scale. Gangs roamed the city, murdering and mutilating each other with improvised weapons, burning stores and houses with their inhabitants, abducting and raping women and girls. Still, it was not until six days later that the viceroy finally ordered in British, Indian, and Gurkha troops. Estimates on the deaths range widely from the official figure of 4,000 to as many as 15,000, with more than 100,000 injured. The subsequent Calcutta Disturbances Commission of Enquiry decided nothing, and there was nothing the British could do with limited military power to stem the spread of further violence.12 Killings escalated across the winter of 1946–7, fuelled partly by the continuing uncertainty over what the British intended to do after the failed Cabinet Mission and by the fear generated in the minority Hindu and Muslim communities that they might end up on the wrong side of any religious demarcation line. 

In March 1947, Wavell was replaced by Lord Mountbatten as viceroy with a brief from London to find any solution that would allow British withdrawal. He decided that partition into two states, one Muslim and one Hindu, was unavoidable. Once the British Cabinet was persuaded, he announced on the radio on 3 June 1947 that the subcontinent would be divided into two sovereign British dominions, India and Pakistan. The decision was implemented with indecent haste. Independence Day was set for 15 August 1947, and British forces and officials began to pull out at once. The partition boundaries were defined at speed, and millions of Muslims, Hindus, and the minority Sikhs (whose views had largely been ignored) found themselves in a state of virtual civil war. No precise estimate of the subsequent death toll can be made, but it fluctuates between half a million and 2 million; 3 million refugees were crossing the religious divide. It took years before the legacies of Britain's sudden abdication in India were overcome. In 1949 both new states became republics, rejecting continued status as British dominions under the crown.

Nothing confirmed the end of the empire quite so decisively as the independence of India and Pakistan. The following year Ceylon (Sri Lanka) became the first crown colony to be granted independence. While India was in the throes of independence, Burmese nationalists began a campaign to oust the British, spurred on by the brief period of 'independence' experienced under the Japanese. The Burmese National Army, which under Aung San (popularly known as Bogyoke) had switched sides from support for Japan to fight with the Allies, expected Britain to relinquish its discredited rule. Aung San headed the main nationalist political party, the quaintly titled Anti-Fascist People's Freedom Movement. Under its auspices, paramilitary People's Volunteer Organizations were set up to mobilize the countryside for the national cause, hoarding British and Japanese weapons left over from the war. The evidence of what was happening in India spurred Burmese nationalists on. Burma, too, became almost ungovernable during 1946 with large areas of the country virtually out of British control.

A wave of strikes in the autumn threatened to cripple the country, while the evidence was all around that an armed rebellion against British rule was likely. Montgomery told the chiefs of staff that Britain lacked the workforce to hold on to Burma since Indian forces could no longer be used to suppress an anti-British insurgency. On 20 December 1946, Attlee announced in Parliament that Britain would now 'hasten forward when Burma shall realize her independence.' However, he still hoped Burma would remain in the Commonwealth and be tied closely to Britain with trade and defense deals.13 In January 1947, Aung San visited London, where the agreement was reached on Burma becoming independent in January 1948. Aung San was assassinated in July 1947 by a squad of heavily armed militia working for the corrupt right-wing politician U Saw, who hoped to maintain close business ties to Britain. He was tried, found guilty, and hanged. On 4 January 1948, Burma became an independent state, but a republic, outside the Commonwealth. Only then did the unstable mix of nationalist, communist, and separatist forces in the country descend into a long period of violent confrontation. In this case, as in India, Britain left before the violence had to be confronted by British forces.14

The same was not the case in South East Asia, where the colonies captured by the Japanese were reoccupied with waves of violent repression in Malaya, French Indochina, and the Dutch East Indies. In contrast to the loss of south Asia, the British, French, and Dutch sent large armed forces in 1945 to recapture the colonies and prevent nationalist movements from swiftly ending colonial rule. For all three imperial powers, South East Asia retained its importance as an economic resource, particularly for generating much-needed dollar earnings; for all three, fear of the spread of communism, now the new global enemy after the defeat of the Axis, helps to some extent to explain the degree of violence eventually exerted. Above all, the violence displayed by the insurgent groups against the returning colonizers prompted savage wars to re-establish control that in many ways resembled the counterinsurgency campaigns waged by the Axis in Europe and Asia. In Indonesia, the Japanese patronage of the independence movement and eventual granting of 'independence' to the nationalist leaders Sukarno and Muhammad Hatta on the eve of the Japanese surrender led to the declaration of an independent Indonesia on 17 August 1945. As in Burma and India, a broader populist movement blossomed during the war, committed to the ideal of merkeda, freedom from colonial oppression. Among young Javanese, the Pemuda movement created a radical, rebellious generation, dedicated to the violent rejection of a Dutch return: 'we extremists,' broadcast a charismatic Pemuda leader, Bung Tomo,'... would rather see Indonesia drowned in blood and sunk to the bottom of the sea than colonized once more!' 15

The Allies nevertheless assumed that they would restore some form of Dutch rule. British Empire forces were despatched to Java and Sumatra in September 1945, followed by the first Dutch contingents the following spring. British commanders found the returning Dutch officials intransigent on the question of resuming control. Many of them had sat out the war in 'Camp Colombia' in Australia, waiting for the chance to continue old colonial habits and had little sense of the changed popular mood. When the short-sighted lieutenant governor, Hubertus van Mook, arrived in October 1945 to resume his duties, he was greeted by placards that he could not read. 'Death to van Mook,' his aides discreetly informed him.16

British forces remained until November 1946, caught between a Republican government that the Dutch would not accept, Dutch military and police units which behaved with conspicuous violence against the Indonesian population, and a disorganized insurgency that took a continuous toll on Dutch lives. This did not stop the Pemuda from assuming that the British were a barrier to independence too. Before the evacuation of British Empire forces, they fought a pitched battle in November 1945 against nationalist parties in the port city of Surabaya, where Pemuda militia, heavily armed by the outgoing Japanese, seized the town, killed the local British commander, and engaged in grotesque acts of murderous vengeance against the Dutch and Eurasians trapped in the city, severing heads, limbs, and genitalia.17 The response was nevertheless out of all proportion. A naval barrage, followed by an assault by 24,000 troops, 24 tanks, and 24 aircraft reduced much of Surabaya to rubble, killing an estimated 15,000 Indonesians, most of them caught in the crossfire but leaving 600 dead from British forces. There was less fallout than expected from the destruction; a ceasefire with the insurgents was negotiated, and a semi-independent status was offered to the Republic, but talks broke down by the summer of 1947. 

Dutch hardliners insisted on a military response. The Dutch sent 160,000 troops and 30,000 militarized police to Indonesia between 1945 and 1949. A body of 'shock troops' (the Depot Speciale Troepen led by Raymond Westerling) instilled terror into the nationalist resistance.18 Little connection was made between the Dutch wartime resistance and the savage repression of Indonesians, even though politicians who endorsed the repression had themselves been resisters.19 A famous saying – 'If the Indies are lost, ruin will follow' – kept the Dutch public committed to a war whose conduct violated conventional rules of engagement. To avoid accusations of war crimes, the Dutch forces called their campaign' police actions'. Detention without trial, torture during interrogation, and arbitrary killings became structural elements of the counter-insurgency. 'You need to be as hard as a stone here,' wrote one Dutch soldier, 'and you mustn't let the suffering and misery get to you.' The watchword for soldiers who arrived from the Netherlands was 'Shoot before you are shot and don't trust anyone black!' 20 For the four years of conflict, an estimated 100,000–150,000 Indonesians were killed, some caught in the crossfire, others the victims of inter-ethnic violence, in a war that proved in the end too costly in lives and money for the Dutch government to justify to an increasingly critical public. On 27 December 1949, Queen Juliana formally presided over the transfer of power to President Sukarno following an agreement that they would be equal partners in a 'commonwealth. '21 The deal soon foundered on Dutch insistence on retaining the remnant Western New Guinea as a sop to the disappointed colonial lobby. Plans to turn it into a model settler colony failed to materialize, and Indonesian claims almost brought the two sides to war until the Netherlands relinquished the territory to the United Nations Organization, which promptly granted it to Indonesia in 1963.22

Mountbatten's South East Asia Command was in the initial firing line in Vietnam when British Empire troops occupied the country's south up to the 16th Parallel. In contrast, Chinese Nationalist forces occupied the north. Here, as in Indonesia, the Japanese surrender was used as the opportunity for nationalists grouped in the Communist-led Vietminh to declare independence as rapidly as possible. The Communist leader Ho Chi Minh arrived in Hanoi in late August 1945. On 2 September, the date of the formal Japanese surrender, citing the United Nations commitment to self-determination and equality of peoples, he declared the independent Democratic Republic of Vietnam to a vast and emotional crowd.23 A provisional government for the whole of occupied Vietnam was established. A few days later, the British General Douglas Gracey assumed command of the south, followed by the French General Philippe Leclerc with an expeditionary force whose purpose was ostensibly to re-establish, in his words, 'the future of the white race in Asia'.24 One of the first acts of liberated French soldiers was to hang some of the Vietminh 'People's Committee' set up in Saigon to represent the Hanoi government. The British reacted violently to the advance of poorly armed Vietminh towards Saigon, imposing martial law and ordering troops to shoot on sight any 'armed Annamese.' 25 The British repression was soon eclipsed by a ferocious counter-offensive by French colonial forces ordered by the man chosen as French high commissioner, Admiral Georges-Thierry d'Argenlieu, a fervent Catholic and former monk. They wanted the Vietnamese to accept the authority of Christian civilization. In defiance of instructions from Paris, d'Argenlieu established a separate Republic of Cochin-China (the core of later South Vietnam) and stamped a brutal French authority on the south of the country. In the north, a National Assembly called by the Vietminh met in October 1946 in Hanoi and elected Ho Chi Minh as president. When it was clear that the French wanted Vietnam to become an associate member of the French Union and not an independent state, an open war broke out between the Vietminh and the French, which continued, despite sporadic attempts at compromise, for the following eight years.

With growing United States support, the French fought a draining war against the guerrilla forces of the Vietminh. In 1949, in an attempt to compromise, the French authorities chose the former emperor of Annam, Bao Dai. He had briefly been installed by the Japanese in 1945 as leader of a unitary state within the French Union. The provisional central government was formally established on 2 July 1949. France still effectively controlled Vietnam, and the appointment of Bao Dai made little difference to the war since the Vietminh refused to accept the absence of complete independence. By the early 1950s, there were 150,000 French and colonial troops in Vietnam, supported by a probationary national Vietnamese army of around 100,000 strong, trained and officered by the French military to wage what was a civil war for these soldiers.26 Military units were insecurely stationed in central and northern areas where the Vietminh, with its largely Communist core, controlled vast areas of the peasant countryside. By this time, the insurgents had the support of China, after Mao Zedong's victory over Chiang's Nationalists in the civil war, and from Stalin, who until 1950 had refused to recognize the Democratic Republic of Vietnam. As a result, the conflict now assumed a Cold War dimension.27 The region operated under two different regimes, one based on Saigon and the other in the areas dominated by Ho Chi Minh in the center and north of the country. In early 1954 the French military commander, General Henri Navarre, planned a showdown with Vietminh forces; the small village of Dien Bien Phu, near the border between northern Vietnam and Laos, was chosen as the site, designed to tempt the enemy into a major battle. The area was turned into a large fortress, and 13,200 paratroops were flown in to stiffen the local force. Navarre hoped the Vietminh would assault the fortress in futile frontal attacks and be mown down. 

Navarre expected the battle to be decisive for the future of France in Vietnam, and so it proved to be. Reinforced with heavy weapons supplied by the Chinese, the Vietminh commander, Vo Nguyen Giap, brought 100,000 soldiers and auxiliaries across the mountains surrounding Dien Bien Phu and, in March 1954, began a siege of the French base rather than a frontal assault. Heavy artillery ruined the makeshift landing strip, preventing further air supplies. The small artillery redoubts outside the main fortress were picked off one by one; persistent shelling wore down the defenders, who were short of food, ammunition, and medical supplies. On the night of 6/7 May, the French surrendered. The following day was the start of negotiations in Geneva in a summit called by Britain and the Soviet Union to resolve the Vietnam crisis. French defeat made it inevitable that colonial aspirations would finally be dashed. The agreement was reached to divide Vietnam into two states. France abandoned Indochina, and North Vietnam, South Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia became independent sovereign states. The cost of casualties was significant for both sides, though uneven. An estimated 500,000 Vietnamese died in the first war for independence, while 46,000 French and colonial troops were killed – not far short of the losses sustained in the defeat of 1940.28

While the French fought a full-scale war in Vietnam, the British reimposed colonial possession of Malaya and Singapore. Although the success in Malaya in avoiding anything on the scale of insurgency in Indonesia and Vietnam has often been attributed to British efforts to win 'hearts and minds instead of engaging in brutal and failed campaigns of pacification, in this case, too, insurgency encouraged a protracted and brutal war from 1948 until the late 1950s, the last colonial war in Asia. The Japanese presence created the conditions that prompted the rejection of colonial rule. The large Chinese population of the peninsula, around 38 percent of the total, had played a major part in opposing the Japanese occupation through the Malayan People's Anti-Japanese Army and the Malayan Communist Party. At the end of the war, the army was disbanded. Still, the radicalism of the war years remained, encouraged by widespread hunger and unemployment resulting from the dislocation caused by Japanese occupation. Over the two years following the end of the war, there were regular strikes and protests at the poor conditions under a British Military Administration and then under a renewed civilian colonial regime. The war generated a similar crisis of legitimacy for the returning colonial power and resentment at the reimposition of British commercial exploitation of the peninsula. Alongside the Communist Party, the Malayan Nationalist Party and the 'Generation of Aware Youth' (API), modeled on the Indonesian Pemuda movement, called for an end to empire under the slogan Merkuda dengan darah, 'independence through blood,' a text used to convict the API leader Ahmad Boestamam in 1947.29 The British counted on the political and ethnic divisions in Malaya to prevent a united rebellion and in 1947 created a Federation of Malaya that favored the Malay majority. Still, the breakdown of order in parts of the peninsula was already evident. A full clash developed only in 1948 as the colonial regime became more illiberal in its treatment of the press and the political parties. In June 1948, the governor declared a 'State of Emergency, a legal device based on the British 1939 Emergency Powers Act passed at the start of the war, which allowed the colonial regime here (and later in Kenya, Cyprus, and Oman) to arrest without trial, hold suspects in detention camps, employ torture during interrogations, impose curfews, criminalize 'seditious literature' and even to kill wanted suspects on the spot. One of the first murders, in an armed police raid on an isolated hut in July 1948, was of the former commander of the anti-Japanese guerrilla force, who had led the Malayan contingent at the victory parade in London three years before.30

The emergency lasted for a further ten years, during which British and Malay security forces used every measure to extinguish the resistance. The active insurgent groups of the Malayan Races Liberation Army never numbered more than 7–8,000, but they had broad support among the population. Most were Chinese, as they had been in the anti-Japanese war, but not all. Although not all were communists, the British authorities assumed this was the case, so this insurgency too became linked to broader Cold War fears for empire. The reaction here, as in Indonesia, was entirely disproportionate. Despite persistent claims at the time and since the British employed only 'minimum force,' field manuals only referred to the minimum force necessary, which was open to wide interpretation. As the British secretary of state for war, Vital force told Parliament, 'will be quite a lot of force.' 31 It included regular naval gunfire aimed at small guerrilla camps; for eight months in 1955, during Operation' Nassau', naval bombardment was conducted almost every night.32 By the peak in 1952, there were 40,000 British troops, 67,000 police, and 250,000 armed Malayan 'Home Guard,' recruited largely from Malays hostile to the Chinese and communism, to enforce the emergency. This was an exceptional level of security in a population of only 6 million.33

The rebels were treated with scant regard for legality. The Colonial Office revoked the term 'insurgent' and substituted 'bandit', as the Germans had done fighting partisans in Europe during the war to justify the repression. Sir Henry Gurney, the governor-general in 1949, admitted privately that 'the police and the army are breaking the law every day.34 Only in 1952 did the Colonial Office finally ban the practice of bringing back severed heads from anti-guerrilla operations for purposes of identification, the same year that 'bandit' was dropped in favor of the Cold War acronym CT (communist terrorist). Emergency regulations ostensibly legalized 'reasonable force,' which was taken to mean that suspects could be shot in so-called 'free fire zones' without recrimination; detention camps were set up for suspects held without trial; under regulation 17C, deportation was authorized, allowing the authorities to deport 20,000 Chinese to mainland China.35 To prevent the local population from supporting the insurgents, the British finally authorized a compulsory resettlement scheme. Half a million Chinese were moved from the forest fringes to 'New Villages,' surrounded by barbed wire, gun towers, and a guarded entrance. The villagers were supposed to provide information on the whereabouts of guerrilla fighters, and failure to do so was penalized by reduced rations, shop closures, and curfews. By 1954, there were 480 New Villages, while a further 600,000 laborers had been relocated to make it easier to control them. Three years later, more than two-thirds of the insurgents were dead, and the communist threat was deemed to be ended. Malaya was granted independence in 1957 under the rule of Tunku Abdul Rahman, winner of the first national elections in 1955 with an overwhelmingly Malay electorate. 

The end of the empire in South East Asia sustained wartime violence and coercion for a decade after the war. Independence was won as much as granted by imperial powers uncertain how to recolonize lost territories. The collapse of the empire across Asia was finally celebrated as a historic landmark with the Bandung Conference of Afro-Asian states held in the Indonesian city of Bandung from 18–24 April 1955. The 29 states present, including Communist China, representing 1.5 billion people, more than half the world's population. The conference summed up the rejection of 'Westernism' made explicit through the independence movements. The final communiqué called for an end to all surviving colonialism or attempts at neo-colonialism. The organizers saw the conference as a symbolic landmark of the changing post-war order. The conference organizer, Indonesia's President Sukarno, hailed a 'departure in the history of the world' when Asian and African countries could finally meet as 'free, sovereign and independent.'

The freedom of colonies, protectorates, and trust territories in Africa was still to be won. After the first wave of decolonization, this remained the only region where the imperial powers still exercised significant colonial rule. Here they believed they were on the safer ground once the disruption of war was over. Where Asian nationalism was a force challenging to confront, national movements in Africa were less developed. Although France, Britain, and Belgium paid lip service to the idea that they were developing African territories as examples of 'liberal imperialism, it was widely assumed that self-determination was a distant goal for peoples not yet fit to govern themselves. Some territories claimed the British colonial minister Henry Hopkinson in 1954, 'can never expect to be fully independent.36The British historian Hugh Seton-Watson lamented that extending democracy to Africans would indicate the 'tragic decay of civilization' and 'a reversion to barbarism.' Europeans, he continued, will be replaced by 'the goat, the monkey, and the jungle.'37 

Nevertheless, the imperial powers were expected to 'accept the obligation' to assure dependent populations' progress. This was especially true of the United Nations' Trust Territories, most in Africa. The trustee powers were the same powers that had operated the territories as League of Nations Mandates. Still, this time their activity as trustees was to be supervised by a United Nations Committee on Information from Non-Self-Governing Territories and a Trusteeship Council. 

 

1. Jason Parker, ‘Remapping the Cold War in the tropics: race, communism, and national security in the West Indies’, International History Review, 24 (2002), 337–9. 

2. Geoffrey Roberts, Stalin’s Wars: From World War to Cold War, 1939–1953 (New Haven, Conn., 2006), 318–19. 

3. Leslie James, ‘Playing the Russian game: black radicalism, the press, and Colonial Office attempts to control anti-colonialism in the early Cold War, 1946–50’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 43 (2015), 511–17. 

4. Balázs Szalontai, ‘The “sole legal government of Vietnam”: the Bao Dai factor and Soviet attitudes toward Vietnam 1947–1950’, Journal of Cold War Studies, 20 (2018), 16. 

5. Eckel, ‘Human rights and decolonization’, 122, 126. 

6. Penny Von Eschen, Race against Empire: Black Americans and Anticolonialism 1937–1957 (Ithaca, NY, 1997), 45–50; James, ‘Playing the Russian game’, 509, 512. 

7. Parker, ‘Remapping the Cold War in the tropics’, 322–3; Von Eschen, Race against Empire, 47. 

8. McIntyre, Winding up the British Empire, 24–6. 

9. Yasmin Khan, The Great Partition: The Making of India and Pakistan (New Haven, Conn., 2007), 25. 

10. Mary Becker, The All-India Muslim League 1906–1947 (Karachi, 2013), 225–9; Khan, Great Partition, 38. 

11. Christopher Bayly and Tim Harper, Forgotten Wars: The End of Britain’s Asian Empire (London, 2007), 77. 

12. Ranabir Samaddar, ‘Policing a riot-torn city: Kolkata, 16–18 August 1946’, Journal of Genocide Research, 19 (2017), 40–41, 43–5. 

13. Bayly and Harper, Forgotten Wars, 253–7. 

14. Thomas, Fight or Flight, 108–9. 

15. Bayly and Harper, Forgotten Wars, 163–5, 173. 

16. Ibid., 170–71. 

17. William Frederick, ‘The killing of Dutch and Eurasians in Indonesia’s national revolution (1945–49): a “brief genocide” reconsidered’, Journal of Genocide Research, 14 (2012), 362–4. 

18. Petra Groen, ‘Militant response: the Dutch use of military force and the decolonization of the Dutch East Indies’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 21 (1993), 30–32; Luttikhuis and Moses, ‘Mass violence’, 257–8. 

19. Jennifer Foray, Visions of Empire in the Nazi-Occupied Netherlands (Cambridge, 2012), 296–7, 301–3. 

20. Gert Oostindie, Ireen Hoogenboom and Jonathan Verwey, ‘The decolonisation war in Indonesia, 1945–1949: war crimes in Dutch veterans’ egodocuments’, War in History, 25 (2018), 254–5, 265–6; Bart Luttikhuis, ‘Generating distrust through intelligence work: psychological terror and the Dutch security services in Indonesia’, War in History, 25 (2018), 154–7. 

21. Kennedy, Decolonization, 53–4; John Darwin, After Tamerlane: The Global History of Empire since 1405 (London, 2008), 435–6, 450–51. 

22. Vincent Kuitenbrouwer, ‘Beyond the “trauma of decolonization”: Dutch cultural diplomacy during the West New Guinea question (1950–1962)’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 44 (2016), 306–9, 312–15. 

23. Robert Schulzinger, A Time for War: The United States and Vietnam 1941–1975 (New York, 1997), 16–17. 

24. Bayly and Harper, Forgotten Wars, 148–9. 

25. Ibid., 20; Thomas, Fight or Flight, 124–5.

26. François Guillemot, ‘“Be men!”: fighting and dying for the state of Vietnam (1951–54)’, War & Society, 31 (2012), 188–95. 

27. Szalontai, ‘The “sole legal government of Vietnam”’, 3–4, 26–9. 

28. Kennedy, Decolonization, 51, 54. 

29. Bayly and Harper, Forgotten Wars, 355–6. 

30. Ibid., 428–32; David French, ‘Nasty not nice: British counter-insurgency doctrine and practice, 1945–1967’, Small Wars and Insurgencies, 23 (2012), 747–8. 

31. Bruno Reis, ‘The myth of British minimum force in counter-insurgency campaigns during decolonization (1945–1970)’, Journal of Strategic Studies, 34 (2011), 246–52; French, ‘Nasty not nice’, 748–9. 

32. Steven Paget, ‘“A sledgehammer to crack a nut”? Naval gunfire support during the Malayan emergency’, Small Wars and Insurgencies, 28 (2017), 367–70. 

33. Keith Hack, ‘Everyone lived in fear: Malaya and the British way of counter-insurgency’, Small Wars and Insurgencies, 23 (2012), 671–2; Thomas, Fight or Flight, 139–40.

34. French, ‘Nasty not nice’, 748. 

35. Hack, ‘Everyone lived in fear’, 681, 689–92. 

36. Kumarasingham, ‘Liberal ideals’, 816. 

 

37. Ian Hall, ‘The revolt against the West: decolonisation and its repercussions in British international thought, 1945–75’, International History Review, 33 (2011), 47. 

 

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