An essay in universal history

9. WESTERN DECOLONIZATION AND SOVIET IMPERIALISM

World War Two did not end on VE day, nor even on VJ day. Violence continued in a different form - but with undiminished intensity – for years. The roots of the violence lay in the fact that there was not, and could not be, any return to the status quo ante the war, especially for the colonial powers: the nationalist forces determined to throw them out were simply too strong.

“In south-east Asia and Indonesia,” writes J.M. Roberts, “the Second World War was decisive as elsewhere in ending colonial rule, though the pace was faster in Dutch and French colonies than British. The grant of representative institutions by the Dutch in Indonesia before 1939 had not checked the growth of a nationalist party, and a flourishing communist movement had appeared by then, too. Some nationalist leaders, among them on Achmed Sukarno, collaborated with the Japanese when they occupied the islands in 1942. They were in a favourable position to seize power when the Japanese surrendered, and did so by proclaiming an independent Indonesian republic before the Dutch could return. Fighting and negotiation followed for nearly two years until agreement was reached for an Indonesian republic still under the Dutch Crown; this did not work. Fighting went on again, the Dutch pressing forward vainly with their ‘police operations’ in one of the first campaigns by a former colonial power to attract the full blast of communist and anti-colonial stricture at the United Nations. Both India and Australia (which had concluded that she would be wise to conciliate the independent Indonesia which must eventually emerge) took the matter to the Security Council. Finally the Dutch gave in. The story begun by the East India Company of Amsterdam three and a half centuries before thus came to an end in 1949 with the creation of the United States of Indonesia, a mixture of more than a hundred million people scattered over hundreds of islands, of scores of races and religions. A vague union with the Netherlands under the Dutch Crown survived, but was dissolved five years later.
“For a time the French in Indo-China seemed to be holding on better than the Dutch. That area’s wartime history had been somewhat different from that of Malaysia or Indonesia because although the Japanese had exercised complete military control there since 1941 French sovereignty was not formally displaced until early 1945. The Japanese had amalgamaged Annam, Cochin-China and Tongking to form a new state of Vietnam under the Emperor of Annam and as soon as the Japanese surrendered, the chief of the local communist party, the Viet Minh, installed himself in the government place at Hanoi and proclaimed the Vietnam republic. This was Ho Chi Minh, a man with long experience in the communist party and also in Europe [he was one of the founders of the French Communist Party]. The revolutionary movement quickly spread. It was soon evident that if the French wished to re-establish themselves it would not be easy. A large expeditionary force was sent to Indo-China and a concession was made in that the French recognized the republic of Vietnam as an autonomous state within the French Union. But now there arose the question of giving Cochin-China separate status and on this all attempts to agree broke down. Meanwhile, French soldiers were sniped at and their envoys were attacked. At the end of 1946 there was an attack on residents in Hanoi and many deaths. Hanoi was relieved by French troops and Ho Chi Minh fled.
“Thus began a war in which the communists were to struggle essentially for the nationalist aim of a united country, while the French tried to retain a diminished Vietnam which, with the other Indo-Chinese states, would remain under the French Union. By 1949 they had come round to including Cochin-China in Vietnam and recognizing Cambodia and Laos as ‘associate states’. But new outsiders were now becoming interested. The government of Ho Chi Minh was recognized in Moscow and Peking…”¹¹⁰
The process of decolonization, which began with India and Burma in 1947-48, would radically transform what came to be known as the “Third World” – that is, the whole world outside the American-European-Japanese (First World) and Soviet-Chinese (Second World) blocs. If the nineteenth century had seen the conquest of most of the undeveloped world by the European empires, the mid- and late-twentieth century saw it regain its independence – although its internal state boundaries remained largely those drawn for them by the European powers, and the influence of European culture and European economic domination became more, rather than less pervasive. This decolonization process must be seen as in the main a major moral good insofar as the colonies were in effect stolen land now being restored to their rightful native owners. And however painful it was for the former colonial masters, it was good for them too, both economically, in that, having been freed from the “white man’s burden”, they were, paradoxically, able to develop economically at a greatly quickened pace, and also culturally and spiritually, in that the arrogant racist and exploitative attitudes of the past were now recognized for what they were and, however partially and imperfectly, repented of.
However, there was also a very important negative consequence that is less often remarked upon: the missionary aims of the colonialists, which had been prominently touted as a justification of imperialism from the conquest of the Americas by the Spanish conquistadors until at least the Indian Mutiny of 1857, were now dropped. This is not to say that Christian mission ceased altogether. But it was not actively supported either by national governments or by international organizations such as Unesco, which, far from believing that the gods of the heathen were demons, were far more inclined to protect their worship as a precious part of the cultural inheritance of the nations, whose enlightenment was now seen as coming through the provision of democracy and free trade, clean water, vaccines and contraceptives, rather than the Gospel of Jesus Christ…
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Although the prestige of the British Empire had been severely damaged by the surrender of Singapore to the Japanese in 1942, the British probably managed the process of decolonization better than anyone else. There were fewer wars than might have been expected – the main exceptions were those against Communist insurgents in Malaysia, and against the Mau-Mau in Kenya. After they had realized that in their present near-bankrupt state the maintenance of a vast overseas empire was simply beyond their powers¹¹¹, and that the nationalist virus that had destroyed so much of Europe had migrated all round the world and simply could not be eliminated, the British quickly and relatively efficiently set about the task of liberating their colonies.
In India, as in China, Indo-China and Indonesia, anti-colonialism and nationalism was a powerful motive. During the war Indian troops had fought well – and in considerable numbers - under their British colonial masters. But there had also been serious rebellions in India in favour of the Japanese in the hope that they would drive out the British. This fact, combined with financial considerations, convinced the British that it was time to leave – and quickly. And so on August 15, 1947 the largest democracy in history came into being, while two large Muslim chunks of the British dominion became another new independent state - Pakistan. But in spite of partition there was bloodshed between Hindus and Muslims on a large scale.
“Churchill had warned of this in the 1930s and wanted Britain to retain sufficient powers to be able to influence moderation, and protect those who were the victims of the conflict. The Partition Council had worked to devise a geographic line that could be accepted by both Hindus and Muslims. In the weeks before independence, as it became clear that the Sikhs of Amritsar – their Holy City – would be coming under either Hindu or Muslim rule, there were violent clashes…
“The award of the Partition Council was announced two days after independence. With regard to the disputed cities on the margin of the Hindu-Muslim partition lines, India would receive Calcutta and Amritsar, and Pakistan would receive Lahore, as well as most of the area between the River Sutlej and the River Chenab. The two-day-old Government of Pakistan at once protested at what it claimed was the ‘injustice’ of the awards, under which, from the perspective of Pakistan, too large an area of the Punjab had been handed to India. The Sikhs, who remembered that they had been the rulers of the Punjab when the British took over, felt cheated of their own religious and national control.
“The communal violence which had begun in the weeks before independence, escalated. When Calcutta descended into bloodshed, Gandhi – who held no official position in the new Government of India – announced that he would fast ‘to the death’ unless the killings ceased. After three days the violence subsided. But in the Punjab it not only spread, but created a massive exodus of Hindus and Muslims moving in opposite directions, driven by fear. More than seven million people were on the move. Repeated butchery took place as they fled. At least a quarter of a million people were killed…”¹¹²
Nor was this the end of sectarian violence. In 1971, Pakistan’s military government under General Agha Muhammad Yahya Khan banned the Awami League, a Benhali Hindu nationalist party and oversaw a military crackdown, as Harold H. Saunders writes, “that involved the systematic massacre of some 200,000 defenseless citizens and sent more than six million Bengalis fleeing across the Indian border. Later in the year, India reacted by invading East Pakistan, winning a 13-day war that made East Pakistan’s earlier declaration of independence as Bangladesh a reality.”¹¹³
The three main political leaders in the Partition drama – the secular Nehru, the Muslim Jinnah and the Hindu apostle of non-violence Gandhi – had all, as Kissinger points out, “studied in British schools (including at the London School of Economics, where India’s future leaders absorbed many of their quasi-socialist ideas)”,¹¹⁴ and knew well the liberal values of the Empire they jointly overthrew. But their joint failure to obtain a peaceful transfer of power, or to preserve British India as a single state, demonstrated the limitations of those liberal values when religious faith or national sovereignty are felt to be at stake. Hence the determination of the rulers of the age in both East and West to wipe out both religious faith and national sovereignty…
Nevertheless, after Partition India emerged as a predominantly Hindu state with a stable democratic constitution. According to Kissinger, Nehru’s policy of nonalignment as between the Capitalist and Communist blocs “was different from the policy undertaken by a ‘balancer’ in a balance-of-power system. India was not prepared to move toward the weaker side – as a balancer would. It was not interested in operating an international system. Its overriding impulse was not to be found formally in either camp, and it measured its success by not being drawn into conflicts that did not affect its national interests.
“Emerging into a world of established powers and the Cold War, independent India subtly elevated freedom of maneuver from a bargaining tactic into an ethical principle. Blending righteous moralism with a shrewd assessment of the balance of forces and the major powers’ psychologies, Nehru announced India to be a global power that would chart a course maneuvering between the major blocs. In 1947, he stated in a message to the New Republic, ‘We propose to avoid entanglement in any blocs or groups of Powers realizing that only thus can we serve not only [the] cause of India but of world peace. This policy sometimes leads partisans of one group to imagine that we are supporting the other group. Every nation places its own interests first in developing foreign policy. Fortunately, India’s interests coincide with peaceful foreign policy and co-operation with all progressive nations. Inevitably India will be drawn closer to those countries which are friendly and cooperative to her.
“In other words, India was neutral and above power politics, partly as a matter of principle in the interest of world peace, but equally on the grounds of national interest…”¹¹⁵
In time, however, India’s neutrality became a pro-Soviet sham. As Revel writes, “Between the first conference of nonaligneds in Belgrade in 1961, when the genuinely nonaligned position of… Nehru prevailed, and their sixth conference in Havana in 1979, the adjective ‘nonaligned’ had plenty of time to degenerate into a lie. Just as the choice of Havana as the 1979 conference site and the election of Fidel Castro, Moscow’s number-one field executive, as the movement’s chairman showed how distorted the ideal of of nonalignment had become. At that sixth conference, Marshal Tito, a few months before his death, fought his last battle to block the Sovietization of the movement of which he and Nehrus had been the founding fathers. It was a lost fight; with the collapse of the last independent hold-outs, the nonaligned lined up behind the Soviet Union…”¹¹⁶
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This brings us to the important point that at this time there were two quite distinct kinds of imperialism or colonialism – Western and Soviet, and that, as Revel pointed out in 1983, “since 1945 the two imperialisms have moved in exactly the opposite directions. Since the Second World War, the major excolonial powers that make up today’s capitalist world have abandoned, willingly or not, the territory they had annexed over the centuries. Spain long ago lost its vast American possessions. Since then, the former overseas holdings of Britain, Holland, France, Belgium and Portugal have become a crowd of independent nations. In some cases, decolonization went ahead with speed and intelligence, in others slowly and stupidly, with terrible carnage, but in the end it was done everywhere.¹¹⁷ It is interesting to note that the colonial powers that tried to resist the trend were disapproved of by the other capitalist countries; they were isolated even among their allies and forced to give in. Just how much real independence many of these new Third World states have is a matter of considerable debate. The fact remains, however, that aspiration and accession to independence on the part of any group with even the slightest claim to statehood is one of the great postwar historical phenomena.
“At a time, then, when territorial annexation, once considered a legitimate reward for military superiority, has given way to peoples’ right to self-determination and national status, only the Soviet Union continues to grow by means of armed conquest. In the 1940-80 period of decolonization, when the old empires were restoring independence to or conferring it on the territories they had subjugated over the centuries, the Soviet Union was moving the other way, appropriating a number of foreign countries by trick or by force.
“I would hesitate to weary the reader with a list he should be able to find in the encyclopedias and history books if it were not that most of these reference books, reflecting Europe’s cultural Finlandization, shamelessly gloss over the brilliant achievements of Soviet expansionism.
“By what right, for example, did the USSR cling after the war to the countries Germany ceded to it as payment for its neutrality under the Hitler-Stalin treaty sharing out a dismembered Europe? This is how the Soviets acquired the Baltic states, eastern Poland, southern Finland and part of Romania (Bessarabia and southern Bukovina). I grant that it was Germany that later broke the treaty and invaded the Soviet Union, which, it is worth recalling, would have liked nothing better than to go on enjoying its fruitful cooperation with the Nazis. Involuntarily and oh how regrettably, Moscow had no choice but to switch camps. Indeed, it was switched by Hitler.
“Was this any reason for the democracies not to reconsider what Hitler had bestowed on Stalin? Fighting alongside the Allies in the second phase of the war of course gave USSR the right, as it did to all the victors, to recover its own territory intact. But this did not authorize it to expand, as it alone did, at the expense of other martyred countries and certainly not to keep the proceeds of its collusion with the Nazis. Yet not only did the Allies fail to challenge these ill-gotten acquisitions, but they evern threw in a few gifts, such as East Prussia, Ruthenia (a part of Czechoslovakia), the Kurile Islands, and the southern part of Sakhalin Island (in the Sea of Okhotsk, north of Japan). No popular vote, no referendum or plebiscite was organized or even contemplated through which to ask all these Poles, Lithuanians, Estonians, Letts, Romanians, Slovaks, Germans and others if they wanted to become Soviet subjects. The Allies shut their eyes firmly to these annexations, a disconcerting application of the principles guiding their destruction of naziism. Absorption of these countries into Soviet territory, so prodigiously contrary to the principles of that period of decolonization, revived the practices of a monarchist Europe that died two centuries ago. It constituted what may be called the first wave of imperialism and the first zone of national annexation.
“The second wave led to the creation of a second imperial zone, that of the satellite countries.
“Just how Eastern and Central Europe were subjugated is too well known to need repeating here. The technique used in this form of colonialism is to set up the façade of an ostensibly independent state. Administration of this state is entrusted to loyal nationals who function as provincial governors and who are allowed only a few minor departures from the Soviet system, as long as they don’t tamper with its essentials. In practice, the democracies very quickly recognized the Soviet Union’s right to quell by force any disturbances arising out of demands for genuine independence in the European satellites. In other words, they soon agreed to view the European satellites as appendices to Soviet territory, a de facto situation that the Helsinki pact would legitimize in 1975.
“The third wave and third zone of Soviet territorial conquest covered more distant countries that have been annexed or subjected to Soviet control since 1960. Some of these countries, including Cuba and Vietnam, are satellites in the strict sense; another, South Yemen, has been working since 1982 to destabilize the neighboring state of North Yemen. For, driving by unflagging effort, the Soviet advance never stops.
“Then came the African satellites: Angola, Mozambique, Ethiopia, Madagascar, Benin, Guinea, and other, lesser prey, often colonized by mercenaries from other satellites – Cubans or East Germans. These are more fragile protectorates, subject to the sort of accidents that caused the fall in Equatorial Guinea (the former Spanish Guinea) of dictator Francisco Macias Nguema, who, with the help of Soviet advisers, had exterminated or exiled a good third of his country’s population in only a few years.
“Fragile though they are, these distant protectorates must nevertheless be considered satellites insofar as their policies, armies, police, transport, and diplomacy are in the hands of Soviets or Soviet agents…”¹¹⁸