Monday, January 25, 2010

Decolonisation and decline (1945–1997)

Though Britain and the Empire emerged victorious from the Second World War, the effects of the conflict were profound, both at home and abroad. Much of Europe, a continent that had dominated the world for several centuries, was now literally in ruins, and host to the armies of the United States and the Soviet Union, to whom the balance of global power had now shifted.[127] Britain itself was left virtually bankrupt, with insolvency only averted in 1946 after the negotiation of a $3.5 billion loan from the United States,[128] the last instalment of which was repaid in 2006.[129]

At the same time, anti-colonial movements were on the rise in the colonies of European nations. The situation was complicated further by the increasing Cold War rivalry of the United States and the Soviet Union, both nations opposed to the European colonialism of old, though American anti-Communism prevailed over anti-imperialism, which led the US to support the continued existence of the British Empire.[130]

The "wind of change" ultimately meant that the British Empire's days were numbered, and on the whole, Britain adopted a policy of peaceful disengagement from its colonies once stable, non-Communist governments were available to transfer power to, in contrast to other European powers like France or Portugal,[131] which waged costly and ultimately unsuccessful wars to keep their empires intact. Between 1945 and 1965, the number of people under British rule outside the UK itself fell from 700 million to five million, three million of whom were in Hong Kong.[130]

Initial disengagement


Mahatma Gandhi and Mohammad Ali Jinnah, key leaders of the Indian independence movement

The pro-decolonisation Labour government elected at the 1945 general election and led by Clement Attlee, moved quickly to tackle the most pressing issue facing the Empire, that of Indian independence.[132] India's two independence movements—the Indian National Congress and the Muslim League—had been campaigning for independence for decades, but disagreed as to how it should be implemented. Congress favoured a unified Indian state, whereas the League, fearing domination by the Hindu majority, desired a separate state for Muslim-majority regions. Increasing civil unrest and the mutiny of the Royal Indian Navy during 1946 led Attlee to promise independence no later than 1948, but when the urgency of the situation and risk of civil war became apparent to Britain's newly appointed (and last) Viceroy, Lord Mountbatten, partitioned independence was hastily brought forward to 15 August 1947.[133] The borders drawn by the British to broadly partition India into Hindu and Muslim areas left tens of millions as minorities in the newly independent states of India and Pakistan.[134] Millions of Muslims subsequently crossed from India to Pakistan and Hindus in the reverse direction, and violence between the two communities cost hundreds of thousands of lives. Burma, which had been administered as part of the British Raj, and Ceylon gained their independence the following year in 1948. India, Pakistan and Ceylon became members of the Commonwealth, though Burma chose not to join.[135]

The British Mandate of Palestine, where an Arab majority lived alongside a Jewish minority, presented the British with a similar problem to that of India.[136] The matter was complicated by large numbers of Jewish refugees seeking to be admitted to Palestine following Nazi oppression and genocide in the Second World War. Rather than deal with the issue, Britain announced in 1947 that it would withdraw in 1948 and leave the matter to the United Nations to solve,[137] which it did by voting for the partition of Palestine into a Jewish and Arab state.

Following the defeat of Japan in the Second World War, anti-Japanese resistance movements in Malaya turned their attention towards the British, who had moved to quickly retake control of the colony, valuing it as a source of rubber and tin. The fact that the guerrillas were primarily Malayan-Chinese Communists meant that the British attempt to quell the uprising was supported by the Muslim Malay majority, on the understanding that once the insurgency had been quelled, independence would be granted.[138] The Malayan Emergency, as it was known, began in 1948 and lasted until 1960, but by 1957, Britain felt confident enough to grant independence to the Federation of Malaya within the Commonwealth. In 1963, the 11 states of the federation together with Singapore, Sarawak and British North Borneo joined to form Malaysia, but in 1965 Chinese-dominated Singapore left the union following tensions between the Malay and Chinese populations.[139] Brunei, which had been a British protectorate since 1888, declined to join the union[140] and maintained its status until independence in 1984.

[edit] Suez and its aftermath


British Prime Minister Anthony Eden's decision to invade Egypt during the Suez Crisis ended his political career and revealed Britain's weakness as an imperial power.

In 1951, the Conservative Party was returned to power in Britain, under the leadership of Winston Churchill. Churchill and the Conservatives believed that Britain's position as a world power relied on the continued existence of the Empire, with the base at the Suez Canal allowing Britain to maintain its pre-eminent position in the Middle East in spite of the loss of India. However, Churchill could not ignore Gamal Abdul Nasser's new revolutionary government of Egypt that had taken power in 1952, and the following year it was agreed that British troops would withdraw from the Suez Canal zone and that Sudan would become independent by 1955.[141]

In 1956, Nasser unilaterally nationalised the Suez Canal. The response of the new British Prime Minister, Anthony Eden, was to collude with France to engineer an Israeli attack on Egypt that would give Britain and France an excuse to intervene militarily and retake the canal.[142] Eden infuriated his US counterpart, President Dwight D. Eisenhower, by his lack of consultation, and Eisenhower refused to back the invasion.[143] Another of Eisenhower's concerns was the possibility of a wider war with the Soviet Union after Nikita Khrushchev threatened to intervene on the Egyptian side. Eisenhower applied financial leverage by threatening to sell US reserves of the British pound and thereby precipitate a collapse of the British currency.[144] Though the invasion force was militarily successful in its objective of recapturing the Suez Canal,[145] UN intervention and US pressure forced Britain into a very humiliating withdrawal of its forces, and Eden resigned.[146]

The Suez Crisis very publicly exposed Britain's limitations to the world and confirmed Britain's decline on the world stage, demonstrating that henceforth it could no longer act without at least the acquiescence, if not the full support, of the United States.[147][148][149] The events at Suez wounded British national pride, leading one MP to describe it as "Britain's Waterloo"[150] and another to suggest that the country had become an "American satellite".[151] Margaret Thatcher later described the mindset she believed had befallen the British political establishment as "Suez syndrome",[152] from which Britain did not recover until the successful recapture of the Falkland Islands from Argentina in 1982.

While the Suez Crisis caused British power in the Middle East to weaken, it did not collapse.[153] Britain again soon deployed its armed forces to the region, intervening in Oman (1957), Jordan (1958) and Kuwait (1961), though on these occasions with American approval,[154] as the new Prime Minister Harold Macmillan's foreign policy was to remain firmly aligned with the United States.[150] Britain maintained a presence in the Middle East for another decade, withdrawing from Aden in 1967, and Bahrain in 1971.

Wind of change

Macmillan gave a speech in Cape Town, South Africa in February 1960 where he spoke of "the wind of change blowing through this continent."[155] Macmillan wished to avoid the same kind of colonial war that France was fighting in Algeria, and under his premiership decolonisation proceeded rapidly.[156] To the three colonies that had been granted independence in the 1950s—Sudan, the Gold Coast and Malaya—were added nearly ten times that number in the 1960s.[155]


British decolonisation in Africa. By the end of the 1960s, all but Rhodesia (the future Zimbabwe) and the South African mandate of South West Africa (Namibia) had achieved independence.

Britain's remaining colonies in Africa, except for Southern Rhodesia, were all granted independence by 1968 (see map). British withdrawal from the southern and eastern parts of Africa was complicated by the region's white settler populations, particularly in Rhodesia where racial tensions had led Ian Smith, the Prime Minister, to a Unilateral Declaration of Independence from the British Empire in 1965.[157] Rhodesia remained in a state of civil war between its black and white population until the Lancaster House Agreement of 1979, under which Rhodesia was temporarily returned to British colonial rule until elections could be held, under British supervision. The elections were held the following year and won by Robert Mugabe, who became the Prime Minister of the newly independent state of Zimbabwe.[158]

In the Mediterranean, a guerrilla war waged by Greek Cypriots ended (1960) in an independent Cyprus, with the UK retaining the military bases of Akrotiri and Dhekelia. The Mediterranean islands of Malta and Gozo were amicably granted independence from the UK in 1964, though the idea had been raised in 1955 of integration with Britain.[157]

Most of the UK's West Indies territories achieved independence after the departure in 1961 and 1962 of Jamaica and Trinidad from the West Indies Federation, established in 1958 in an attempt to unite the British Caribbean colonies under one government, but which collapsed following the loss of its two by far largest members.[159] Barbados achieved independence in 1966 and the remainder of the eastern Caribbean islands in the 1970s and 1980s, but Anguilla and the Turks and Caicos Islands opted to revert to British rule after they had already started on the path to independence.[160] The British Virgin Islands,[161] Cayman Islands[162] and Montserrat[163] opted to retain ties with Britain. Guyana achieved independence from the UK in 1966. Britain's last colony on the American mainland, British Honduras, became a self-governing colony in 1964 and was renamed Belize in 1973, achieving full independence in 1981. A dispute with Guatemala over claims to Belize was left unresolved.

British territories in the Pacific acquired independence between 1970 (Fiji) and 1980 (Vanuatu), the latter's independence having been delayed due to political conflict between English and French-speaking communities, as the islands had been jointly administered as a condominium with France.[53] Fiji, Tuvalu, the Solomon Islands and Papua New Guinea chose to become Commonwealth realms.

End of empire

The granting of independence to Rhodesia (as Zimbabwe) and the New Hebrides (as Vanuatu) in 1980 and Belize in 1981 meant that, aside from a scattering of islands and outposts (and the acquisition in 1955 of an uninhabited rock in the Atlantic Ocean, Rockall),[164] the process of decolonisation that had begun after the Second World War was largely complete.

In 1982, Britain's resolve to defend its remaining overseas territories was tested when Argentina invaded the Falkland Islands, acting on a long-standing claim that dated back to the Spanish Empire.[165] Britain's ultimately successful military response to retake the islands during the ensuing Falklands War was viewed by many to have contributed to reversing the downward trend in the UK's status as a world power.[166]

The same year, the Canadian government severed its last legal link with Britain by patriating the Canadian constitution from Britain. The 1982 Canada Act passed by the British parliament ended the need for British involvement in changes to the Canadian constitution.[167] Equivalent acts were passed for Australia and New Zealand in 1986.[168]

In September 1982, the Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher travelled to Beijing to negotiate with the Chinese government on the future of Britain's last major and most populous overseas territory, Hong Kong.[169] Under the terms of the 1842 Treaty of Nanking, Hong Kong Island itself had been ceded to Britain "in perpetuity", but the vast majority of the colony was constituted by the New Territories, which had been acquired under a 99 year lease in 1898, due to expire in 1997.[170] Thatcher, seeing parallels with the Falkland Islands, initially wished to hold Hong Kong and proposed British administration with Chinese sovereignty, though this was rejected by China.[171] A deal was reached in 1984—under the terms of the Sino-British Joint Declaration, Hong Kong would become a Special Administrative Region of the People's Republic of China, maintaining its way of life for at least 50 years.[172] The handover ceremony in 1997 marked for many,[173] including Charles, Prince of Wales[174] who was in attendance, "the end of Empire".

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