Decolonization

By the end of this lesson, students will be able to:

• Account for the various ways colonial peoples around the world sought independence from European colonizers in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries (Skill 6.D; LO I).
• Account for KC-4.1.VI: how decolonization occurred over the course of the century with varying degrees of cooperation, interference, or resistance from European imperialist states.
• Account for KC-4.1.VI.A: how Wilson's principle of national self-determination at the end of the First World War raised expectations in the non-European world for new policies and freedoms.
• Account for KC-4.1.VI.C: how independence for many African and Asian territories was delayed by imperial reluctance, threats from other nations, unstable economic and political systems, and Cold War strategic alignments.
• Build a Skill 6.D complex argument that draws on varied and alternative evidence to qualify and reinforce a thesis about decolonization as a multi-decade and multi-pattern process.

Topic 9.9 covers the twentieth-century decolonization of the European overseas empires. KC-4.1.VI captures the framework: decolonization occurred across the century with varying degrees of cooperation, interference, or resistance from European imperialist states. The lesson is structured in four parts: the early-twentieth-century anti-colonial foundations and Wilson's self-determination principle (KC-4.1.VI.A); the postwar British and Dutch decolonizations of Asia (1945-1960); the French decolonization and the Algerian War (1946-1962); and the African decolonization of 1960 and the long-running residual decolonizations through 1999.

Early-twentieth-century anti-colonial foundations and Wilson's principle (KC-4.1.VI.A). The principal early-twentieth-century European overseas empires by 1914 included the British (the largest, with approximately one-fifth of the world's land area and approximately one-quarter of the world's population); the French (the second largest); the German (substantially dismantled after 1918 through the Versailles mandate system); the Dutch (principally the East Indies); the Belgian (the Congo); the Portuguese (Angola, Mozambique, Guinea-Bissau, Cape Verde, Sao Tome and Principe, Timor-Leste, Macao); the Italian (Libya, Eritrea, Italian Somaliland; Ethiopia from 1935-1941); the Spanish (Spanish Morocco, Spanish Sahara, Equatorial Guinea); and the Russian (the Central Asian and Caucasus territories that became Soviet republics). Topic 7.6 covered the late-nineteenth-century New Imperialism that produced the principal expansion; the early-twentieth-century imperial systems combined economic exploitation, settler-colonial enterprises, indirect-rule administrative arrangements, missionary and educational institutions, and substantial military presence.

The principal early-twentieth-century anti-colonial movements developed before the First World War. The Indian National Congress (founded December 1885 in Bombay; principal early leaders Allan Octavian Hume, Womesh Chunder Bonnerjee, and Dadabhai Naoroji) initially advocated for limited Indian participation in the British colonial administration; the post-1918 leadership of Mahatma Gandhi (returned from South Africa in 1915; led the noncooperation movement of 1920-1922; the salt march of March 1930; the Quit India movement of August 1942) substantially radicalized the movement toward outright independence. The All-India Muslim League (founded December 1906 in Dhaka under Aga Khan III) developed the parallel Muslim political position that would produce the eventual Pakistani independence. The Egyptian Wafd Party (founded November 1918 under Saad Zaghloul) pressed for Egyptian independence and produced the partial independence of 1922 (formal Egyptian independence with substantial continuing British military presence). The Vietnamese Indochinese Communist Party (founded February 1930 by Ho Chi Minh through the unification of three earlier Vietnamese Communist organizations); the Indonesian National Party (founded July 1927 by Sukarno); the Algerian Etoile Nord-Africaine (founded 1926 by Messali Hadj); and dozens of comparable organizations developed substantial pre-Second-World-War political movements.

Wilson's principle of national self-determination (articulated in his Fourteen Points address to the United States Congress on 8 January 1918; reaffirmed in his subsequent speeches and the broader Versailles diplomatic context) raised substantial expectations in the non-European world. Anti-colonial nationalist leaders cited Wilsonian principles extensively: Ho Chi Minh attended the 1919 Paris Peace Conference and submitted (unsuccessfully) a "Demands of the Annamite People" petition; the Indian National Congress's December 1929 Lahore Resolution explicitly invoked self-determination; the May Fourth Movement in China of 1919 protested the Versailles transfer of German Shandong concessions to Japan rather than to Chinese sovereignty; the Egyptian Wafd Party invoked self-determination in its 1919 demand for Egyptian independence. The Versailles application of self-determination was substantially limited to European frontiers; the colonial application was substantially constrained by the League of Nations mandate system (Articles 22 of the League Covenant) that maintained European imperial control under nominal League supervision. The French, British, and Belgian mandates over former German African and Ottoman Middle Eastern territories (the principal mandates: Iraq under Britain; Palestine under Britain; Syria and Lebanon under France; Tanganyika under Britain; Togoland and Cameroon partitioned between Britain and France; Rwanda-Urundi under Belgium) provided new institutional forms for continued imperial control.

The interwar anti-colonial movements substantially expanded. The 1922 Indian Non-Cooperation Movement; the 1925-1927 Syrian Revolt against the French Mandate; the 1925-1926 Druze Revolt; the 1929-1931 Palestinian Buraq Uprising; the 1936-1939 Palestinian Arab Revolt; the 1929 Burmese Saya San Rebellion; the 1930-1931 Vietnamese Yen Bay Mutiny and the Nghe-Tinh Soviet Movement; the 1935-1936 Italian-Ethiopian War; and the 1937 Indian Government of India Act elections all contributed to the cumulative pressure on the imperial systems. The Atlantic Charter of 14 August 1941 (Topic 8.8) committed the Anglo-American Allies to "the right of all peoples to choose the form of government under which they will live"; Churchill subsequently disputed that the principle applied to the British Empire, but the Atlantic Charter substantially shaped the postwar anti-colonial expectations.

Postwar British and Dutch decolonization in Asia (1945-1960). The Second World War substantially undermined the imperial systems. The wartime fall of Singapore to Japan on 15 February 1942 (the largest British military surrender in history; approximately 80,000 British, Indian, and Australian troops surrendered to a substantially smaller Japanese force under Yamashita Tomoyuki) substantially eroded the principal symbol of British imperial military authority in Asia; the wartime Japanese occupations of British Malaya, the Dutch East Indies, French Indochina, the Philippines, Hong Kong, and Burma demonstrated the imperial vulnerability and substantially shaped the post-1945 anti-colonial expectations. The cumulative wartime cost of imperial maintenance, the postwar economic difficulties of the imperial powers, and the substantial pressure from the Atlantic Charter framework produced the postwar British and Dutch decolonizations.

The Indian and Pakistani independence of 15 August 1947 was the principal early postwar decolonization. The British Labour government under Clement Attlee (in office from July 1945) had committed during the 1945 election campaign to Indian self-government; the postwar British economic position substantially constrained the British capacity to maintain the Indian commitment; the cumulative pressure from the Indian National Congress, the All-India Muslim League, and the Indian National Army and Royal Indian Navy mutinies of 1945-1946 produced the rapid postwar timetable. The Cabinet Mission of March-June 1946 attempted but failed to produce a unified Indian state; the Mountbatten Plan of 3 June 1947 (presented by Viceroy Louis Mountbatten) accepted the partition of British India into the Dominion of India (predominantly Hindu) and the Dominion of Pakistan (predominantly Muslim, in two non-contiguous wings of West Pakistan and East Pakistan, the latter eventually becoming Bangladesh in 1971). The Indian Independence Act of 18 July 1947 implemented the partition; independence took effect on 15 August 1947 (India) and 14 August 1947 (Pakistan). The partition produced one of the principal twentieth-century mass-displacement events: approximately 14-18 million people moved across the new frontiers; approximately 1-2 million people died in the resulting communal violence. Mahatma Gandhi was assassinated by Hindu nationalist Nathuram Godse on 30 January 1948 over Gandhi's perceived accommodations to the Pakistani position. Burma achieved independence on 4 January 1948; Sri Lanka (then Ceylon) on 4 February 1948; Israel was established on 14 May 1948 from the partition of British Palestine.

The Indonesian War of Independence (17 August 1945 to 27 December 1949) was substantially more violent. Indonesian nationalist leader Sukarno and Mohammad Hatta declared independence on 17 August 1945, two days after the Japanese surrender; the returning Dutch colonial authority (with British military assistance) attempted to reassert control through two "police actions" (Operations Product 1947 and Kraai 1948-1949) that killed approximately 100,000 Indonesians; substantial international pressure (the United States threatened to suspend Marshall Plan aid to the Netherlands) produced the eventual Dutch recognition of Indonesian sovereignty in The Hague Round Table Conference of 27 December 1949. The Malayan Emergency of 1948-1960 produced a different pattern: British counterinsurgency against the Malayan Communist Party-led insurgency produced eventual British military success; the Federation of Malaya achieved peaceful independence on 31 August 1957 under Tunku Abdul Rahman.

French decolonization and the Algerian War (1946-1962). The French postwar decolonization followed a substantially more contested trajectory than the British. The First Indochina War (19 December 1946 to 1 August 1954) was the principal early French case. Ho Chi Minh's Vietnamese Declaration of Independence of 2 September 1945 (using framing from the American Declaration of Independence) had asserted Vietnamese sovereignty after the Japanese surrender; the returning French colonial authority refused to recognize the Democratic Republic of Vietnam under Ho Chi Minh; substantial military operations from December 1946 onward produced approximately 400,000 Vietnamese and approximately 75,000 French military deaths. The decisive battle was Dien Bien Phu (13 March to 7 May 1954), in which Vo Nguyen Giap's Viet Minh forces defeated the French garrison; the Geneva Accords of 21 July 1954 partitioned Vietnam at the seventeenth parallel and produced the eventual American intervention covered in Topic 9.3.

The Algerian War of Independence (1 November 1954 to 5 July 1962) was the principal violent French decolonization and substantially shaped postwar French political life. Algeria had been French since the 1830 invasion and had been administered as part of metropolitan France (the three departments of Alger, Oran, and Constantine) rather than as a colony; approximately one million European settlers (the pieds-noirs) lived in Algeria alongside approximately nine million Arab and Berber Algerians. The Front de Liberation Nationale (FLN, founded 1 November 1954 through the merger of earlier Algerian nationalist organizations) launched a coordinated armed campaign on 1 November 1954 (the "Toussaint Rouge"); the French response combined substantial military operations (approximately 400,000 French troops at peak), the controversial use of torture (the Battle of Algiers of January-September 1957 under General Massu produced sustained international criticism of French interrogation practices), the systematic relocation of approximately two million rural Algerians into camps de regroupement, and the substantial counterinsurgency violence on both sides.

The May 1958 Algiers crisis (a coup d'etat by French military officers and pied-noir civilians who feared a French Fourth Republic government willing to negotiate with the FLN) produced the collapse of the Fourth Republic and the return to power of Charles de Gaulle on 1 June 1958. The new Fifth Republic Constitution (adopted 4 October 1958) substantially strengthened the French executive; de Gaulle's progressive reorientation toward Algerian independence (the September 1959 self-determination speech; the January 1960 Barricades Crisis; the April 1961 Generals' Putsch in Algiers; the OAS terrorist campaign against the Algerian independence settlement) produced eventual French recognition of Algerian independence through the Evian Accords of 18 March 1962 and the Algerian referendum of 1 July 1962. The war killed approximately 250,000-1.5 million Algerians (estimates vary substantially); approximately 800,000 pieds-noirs and approximately 90,000 harkis (Algerian Muslims who had served alongside the French military) emigrated to France in 1962. Substantial subsequent French historical-memory contestation over the war (the 1999 French parliamentary recognition of the conflict as a "war" rather than the previous official designation of "operations of order"; the 2018 Macron acknowledgment of state torture in the case of Maurice Audin) continued through the 2020s.

The Year of Africa (1960) and the African decolonization. The "Year of Africa" of 1960 produced seventeen new independent African states. The principal cluster was the French sub-Saharan African decolonization: Cameroon (1 January 1960); Senegal (4 April 1960); Togo (27 April 1960); Madagascar (26 June 1960); the Central African Republic, Chad, Congo-Brazzaville, and Gabon (all August 1960); Cote d'Ivoire (7 August 1960); Burkina Faso (then Upper Volta), Niger, Mauritania, and Mali (all September-November 1960). The decolonizations followed the May 1958 Constitution of the Fifth French Republic that had created the French Community framework and the September 1958 referendum that authorized member states to choose immediate independence (only Guinea under Sekou Toure had voted "no" in 1958, producing the immediate but acrimonious Guinean independence on 2 October 1958). The British African decolonization included Ghana (independent on 6 March 1957 under Kwame Nkrumah, the first sub-Saharan British African colony to achieve independence); Nigeria (1 October 1960); Sierra Leone (27 April 1961); Tanganyika (9 December 1961); Uganda (9 October 1962); Kenya (12 December 1963, after the Mau Mau Emergency of 1952-1960); Malawi and Zambia (1964); Botswana, Lesotho, and Mauritius (1966); Swaziland (1968).

The Belgian Congo's independence on 30 June 1960 produced the principal early African post-independence crisis. Belgian colonial rule had been substantially extractive and had produced minimal indigenous administrative or technical capacity; the immediate post-independence Congo Crisis (the Katanga secession under Moise Tshombe; the assassination of Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba on 17 January 1961 in a CIA-supported and Belgian-supported plot; the United Nations Operation in the Congo of 1960-1964; the eventual establishment of the Mobutu Sese Seko dictatorship from 1965) demonstrated the substantial difficulties of postcolonial state-building. The Portuguese African decolonization came substantially later: the Carnation Revolution of 25 April 1974 (the military coup that ended the Estado Novo dictatorship) produced the rapid Portuguese exit from Guinea-Bissau (10 September 1974), Mozambique (25 June 1975), Cape Verde (5 July 1975), Sao Tome and Principe (12 July 1975), and Angola (11 November 1975); the Angolan and Mozambican post-independence civil wars (Topic 9.3 covered) ran for decades. The Italian decolonization (Libya 1951; Somaliland 1960; Eritrea 1952 federated with Ethiopia, independence 1993) and the Spanish decolonization (Spanish Morocco 1956; Equatorial Guinea 1968; Western Sahara contested from 1975) followed substantially different patterns.

Long-running residual decolonizations. The long-running residual decolonizations extended through the late twentieth century. The British Caribbean decolonization produced Jamaica and Trinidad and Tobago (1962); Barbados (1966); Bahamas (1973); Grenada (1974); and the smaller Caribbean states through the 1970s and 1980s. The Pacific decolonization produced Western Samoa (1962); Nauru (1968); Tonga and Fiji (1970); Papua New Guinea (1975); Solomon Islands (1978); Tuvalu and Kiribati (1978-1979); and others. The Hong Kong handover of 1 July 1997 transferred the British Crown Colony to the People's Republic of China under the "one country, two systems" framework articulated in the December 1984 Sino-British Joint Declaration; the parallel Macao handover of 20 December 1999 transferred the Portuguese-administered territory to the PRC. Subsequent post-2019 PRC restrictions on Hong Kong's autonomy (the June 2020 National Security Law; the 2021 electoral-system reforms) substantially modified the original "one country, two systems" framework.

The Skill 6.D argument. Topic 9.9's suggested skill is 6.D (Argumentation: corroborate, qualify, or modify an argument using diverse and alternative evidence in order to develop a complex argument). The skill applies in three principal ways. First, students should corroborate the central argument that European decolonization was a multi-decade and multi-pattern process by drawing evidence from the British, French, Dutch, Belgian, Portuguese, Italian, and Spanish cases. Second, students should qualify the argument by recognizing the substantial variation across cases: the British Indian and Ghanaian cases produced substantially negotiated transitions; the French Algerian and Vietnamese cases produced sustained colonial wars; the Belgian Congo and the Portuguese African cases produced substantial post-independence civil conflict; the Hong Kong and Macao cases produced late-century negotiated transfers. Third, students should modify the argument where varied evidence requires it: the Wilson-derived self-determination framework was substantially constrained by the Versailles mandate system; the Atlantic Charter framework was disputed by Churchill; the postwar Cold War alignments substantially complicated the decolonization (American support for European colonial powers in the Indochinese case; Soviet support for selected anti-colonial movements; the broader pattern of Cold War proxy involvement in the African and Latin American post-colonial states).

Three sources framing twentieth-century decolonization: the anti-colonial declaration, the international institutional framework, and the revolutionary-anticolonial theoretical articulation.

1. (Causation, Skill 6.D) Build a Skill 6.D complex argument that draws on the British, French, Dutch, Belgian, and Portuguese decolonization cases as varied evidence for or against the central thesis that twentieth-century decolonization was a multi-decade and multi-pattern process. Where does the evidence corroborate the thesis? Where does it qualify or modify it?
2. (Causation) Account for KC-4.1.VI.A: how did Wilson's principle of national self-determination raise expectations in the non-European world for new policies and freedoms? Cite specific anti-colonial responses and the limitations of the Versailles application.
3. (Causation, Skill 6.D) Compare the British Indian decolonization (1947) and the French Algerian decolonization (1962) as varied evidence for KC-4.1.VI's "varying degrees of cooperation, interference, or resistance from European imperialist states." What does the comparison reveal about the conditions for negotiated versus violent decolonization?
4. (Causation) Account for KC-4.1.VI.C: how did imperial powers' reluctance, threats from other nations, unstable economic and political systems, and Cold War strategic alignments delay independence for many African and Asian territories? Cite specific cases.
5. (Causation, Skill 6.D) Examine the Frantz Fanon argument that decolonization is "always a violent phenomenon" against the cumulative case evidence. Does the argument corroborate, qualify, or modify the long-running pattern that the British and French postwar decolonizations produced?

Draft alignment — pending educator review. AP European History codes correspond to the official College Board Course and Exam Description (Effective Fall 2023, V.1). Statements below are paraphrased in the CountryReports voice; refer to the College Board's published CED for verbatim wording.