V o L u m e I : a d

to replace autarkic colonial relationships with the so-called open door, the

notion of equal economic opportunity for all nations. While Americans con-

gratulated themselves on the liberality of this agenda, in practice it often

drove Washington to forge partnerships with authoritarian regimes willing to

serve American interests rather than those of their own people.

Historian Michael H. Hunt stresses not economic but rather ideological

limits on American anticolonialism. Surveying two centuries of American his-

tory, Hunt contends that U.S. support for decolonization abroad had always

been tightly circumscribed by a racist skepticism about the abilities of non-

European peoples to govern themselves and by a deep-seated fear of radi-

calism, which Americans often judged to be a likely consequence of giving

free rein to the nationalist passions of foreign peoples.

Whatever the cause of American behavior, Washington showed little

consistency in coping with colonial problems during the Cold War. In the

late 1940s, Washington risked its relationship with the Dutch government

by exerting pressure on The Hague to concede independence to Indonesia.

More famously, in 1956 President Dwight D. Eisenhower used economic coer-

cion to force the traditional colonial powers in the Middle East, Britain, and

France to back down when they attempted to reassert control over the Suez

Anticolonialism

143

An Egyptian boy near a British tank amid the rubble of destroyed buildings at Port Said, Egypt, in November 1956

during the Suez Crisis. (Hulton-Deutsch Collection/Corbis)

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Canal. At other times, however, the United States set its alliance obligations

well ahead of its anticolonial ideals and distanced itself from colonial repres-

sion. In the 1970s, for example, Washington supplied military aid to Portugal

despite knowledge that the Lisbon government would use that aid to sup-

press anticolonial agitation in Angola, Mozambique, and other Portuguese

territories in Africa.

Communist propaganda routinely pointed out American hypocrisy and

denounced the United States as the heir to the repressive practices of its

European partners. But the Soviet Union had itself been slow to champion

anticolonialism after World War II. Under Josef Stalin, Moscow backed away

from Vladimir Lenin’s earlier anticolonial enthusiasm and concentrated on

European problems. In the 1950s and especially the 1960s, however, new

Soviet leaders revalidated Lenin’s interest in anticolonial revolution and

sought closer relationships with developing-world nationalists. The Soviets

and their allies gave political and economic support to Egypt, Indonesia, India,

North Vietnam, and other young states. In the 1960s and 1970s, Moscow

increasingly supported anticolonial movements in Africa.

Soviet enthusiasm for anticolonialism during the 1960s partly reflected

pressure from the People’s Republic of China (PRC), which repeatedly

accused Moscow of halfhearted efforts to spread communist revolution. The

PRC also launched rival efforts of its own to support anticolonial struggles in

Asia and Africa. Ever since their 1949 triumph in the Chinese Civil War,

PRC leaders had viewed their country’s revolution as a model for other op-

pressed peoples around the world. For a decade thereafter, however, Beijing

avoided a bold independent role in developing world affairs, insisting that

Moscow was the leader of world communism. Only with the Sino-Soviet

split in the early 1960s did China loudly proclaim its dedication to promoting

anticolonial revolution. China sent matériel and other supplies to help sus-

tain Left-leaning regimes and liberation movements in Africa, but its most

spectacular efforts came in Southeast Asia, where North Vietnam and later

Cambodia benefited from massive amounts of Chinese aid.

Soviet and Chinese efforts to position themselves as champions of anti-

colonialism achieved success in parts of Asia and Africa, where statist eco-

nomic models and revolutionary politics held strong appeal. Over the long

term, however, the communist powers were no more successful than the

United States in seizing the high ground of anticolonialism. Just as in the

American case, the Soviet and Chinese governments often proclaimed their

hostility to European imperialism even as they established domineering

relationships with postcolonial states, carried out under the banner of anti-

colonialism. Late in the Cold War, the Soviet Union and China propped up

repressive political regimes in desperately poor states such as Cambodia,

Cuba, Vietnam, Ethiopia, and Angola. On the communist side as on the cap-

italist side, developing-world nations may have been the biggest losers in the

Cold War.

Mark Atwood  Lawrence

144

Anticolonialism

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See also

Africa; China, People’s Republic of; Churchill, Winston; Decolonization; Middle

East; Roosevelt, Franklin Delano; Sino-Soviet Split; Southeast Asia; Soviet

Union; Stalin, Josef; Suez Crisis; United States

References

Borstelmann, Thomas. The Cold War and the Color Line: American Race Relations in the

Global Arena. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001.

Chen, Jian. Mao’s China and the Cold War. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina

Press, 2001.

Crockatt, Richard. The Fifty Years’ War: The United States and the Soviet Union in World

Politics, 1941–1991. New York: Routledge, 1995.

Hunt, Michael H. Ideology and U.S. Foreign Policy. New Haven, CT: Yale University

Press, 1987.

Williams, William Appleman. The Tragedy of American Diplomacy. New York: Norton,

1988.

Anti-Semitism, or hostility and animosity toward Jewish people, played a sig-

nificant role in the diplomacy and geopolitics of the Cold War. European

anti-Semitism has its roots in medieval religion and culture; Jews suffered

persecution and prejudice in Eastern and Western Europe right through the

twentieth century. The Nazi extermination of 6 million Jews during World

War II represents the most heinous expression of European antipathy toward

Judaism. Revulsion at the atrocities of the Nazis resulted in a subsequent

decline in anti-Semitism in Europe. However, the end of the Holocaust did

not mean an end to anti-Jewish feeling in the world. The status of the Jew-

ish population in the Soviet Union remained an important issue throughout

the late twentieth century, and the establishment of Israel in May 1948

resulted in the growth of anti-Jewish sentiment throughout the Arab world

and the global Muslim community, sentiments that remain strong today.

Cold War anti-Zionism, the rejection of the Jewish claim to Israel/Palestine,

often included elements of anti-Semitism and attacks on the Jewish people

themselves.

The rise of modern European secular culture in the eighteenth and

nineteenth centuries did not result in the disappearance of anti-Semitism.

Indeed, it remained an ugly part of the European cultural landscape. In fact,

Theodore Herzl’s Zionist movement grew as a response to the continued

exclusion of Jews from late nineteenth-century European culture. In the

1890s, Herzl’s arguments for a separate Jewish state proceeded from his real-

ization that Jews would always be regarded as alien in Europe. Fifty years

later, the horrors of the Nazi Holocaust focused world attention on the plight

of the European Jewish community, and the state of Israel was established in

November 1948 as a Jewish homeland.

Anti-Semitism

145

Anti-Semitism

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