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)
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
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