ABSTRACT
Many of the issues brought up in this part cannot be meaningfully separated from those in Part III, but the essays in this section foreground the comparative or theoretical dimension, whereas those in the next part examine these problems in a regional context. The essays here explore the twin political forces that conditioned and shaped the decolonization movement more than any other: imperialism and nationalism. The opening piece by Michael Adas records a critical turning point in the discourse of imperialism. In the aftermath of World War I, the emergent decolonizing movement turned on its head the ‘civilizing mission’ that had been the pivotal ideology of imperialism. Adas shows how the horrors of war catalysed the critique of the civilizing mission among numerous thinkers in Asia and Africa, thus undermining its moral authority and launching a fully fledged attack upon the ideas of racial and technological superiority. This richly documented article can be compared with John Voll’s essay in Part III (Chapter 15) which also traces the decolonization of the mind that takes place in the Islamic world. Adas brings together the two terms of this section – imperialism and nationalism. The subsequent essay by Patrick Wolfe surveys the changing conceptions of imperialism – within both the Marxist and non-Marxist traditions – from the late nineteenth century until the present time. We should note that these conceptions directly influenced most of the leaders and thinkers of the decolonization movement, including each of the figures in Part I. Thus while Leninist ideas had an impact on such thinkers as Ho Chi Minh, Nehru, and even Sun Yat-sen, we can see some versions of dependency theory – which are closely related to ideas of neo-imperialism – in figures like Nkrumah, Fanon and Al-i Ahmad. Interestingly, the famous Robinson (and Gallagher) thesis on imperialism that Wolfe discusses was propounded by the same Ronald Robinson who writes in this volume about neo-imperialism. The second half of Wolfe’s essay introduces the contemporary post-colonial critiques of imperialism. The intellectuals associated with these critiques – such as Edward Said or Ashish Nandy – may be seen as the intellectual successors to the anti-imperialist thinkers of the colonial world. These thinkers seek to critique our present-day assumptions about race, gender and modernity
as being continuous with the colonial period. They argue that a discourse which presents the decolonizing nation as the mirror opposite of the colonial risks reproducing the basic form of the colonial representation. They try to show how both colonizer and colonized were shaped by contemporary political and economic forces, and how each contributed to the production of the other. These theorists also explore colonial gender conceptions that earlier troubled Fanon (in this volume) and others. Wolfe’s own concern is to bridge the gap between the cultural or representational (e.g. colonial-contemporary representations of masculinity or a ‘backward race’) emphasis of post-colonial theories with the older political-economic analyses of imperialism. He concludes with his own studies of race relations in the world, relations which were shaped simultaneously by the imperialist division of labour and by the cultural representations arising from the specific circumstances of this division. Turning to nationalism, Geoffrey Barraclough’s chapter from his 1964 book An Introduction to Contemporary History (Chapter 10 of the present volume) represents perhaps one of the more inclusive and sympathetic studies of the decolonization movement during its time. Barraclough attends to the novel and historical dimensions of the movement as it awakens and mobilizes the peasant masses to political consciousness. He also presents us with a comparative study of the movement in its different phases, enumerating the strengths and weaknesses of the movement in places like India, China, North Africa and elsewhere. As such, it provides the background for several of the more specialized essays which appear later in the volume. Barraclough’s vision of the decolonization movement may be interpreted as a culmination of the self-liberation of the colonized peoples, who are now able to build a bright future for themselves. Writing almost twenty years later, Benedict Anderson’s highly influential and superb study of nationalism, Imagined Communities, reiterates a similar (though by no means identical) view of Third World nationalism. In their contribution to this volume, John Kelly and Martha Kaplan seek to go beyond the Barraclough-Anderson type of vision to suggest that nationalism in the Third World did not necessarily result in self-liberation, but often turned out to be an entry into a new form of domination through the nation-state model. The authors argue that the trappings of the nation-state represented a kind of outfit to equip these societies to enter a new world order dominated by the United States and the United Nations. Kelly and Kaplan conclude their provocative analysis with an extended discussion of Frantz Fanon and Mahatma Gandhi, who, they demonstrate, reveal two different, although equally prescient, understandings of the contradictions of this new world order. The essay by William Roger Louis and Ronald Robinson that follows, furnishes the historical details by which ‘the British imperial system was neo-colonized more intensively under new management’ of a British-American alliance after World War II. The authors cover Africa and the Middle East in particular (whereas Stein Tønnesson’s essay in Part III [Chapter 18] addresses America’s role in Southeast Asia during the long Vietnam war). Their description of the
neo-imperialist interventions in the Middle East during the Cold War is particularly relevant for our understanding of the more recent interventions by ‘the alliance’ in the region. The last chapter of Part II, by Radha Kumar (Chapter 13), deals with the ‘partitions’ that accompanied the disintegration of empires, from the post-World War I era to the post-World War II decolonizations, and beyond to the contemporary ‘decolonization’ of the Soviet empire. The essay focuses on the contemporary division of Yugoslavia after 1989, and particularly on the partition of Bosnia in 1996; but in doing so it draws attention to the entire history of partition in the twentieth century. The newly emergent nationalist doctrine of ethnic purity or dominance among decolonizing movements within colonial empires, and the imperative among colonial powers to abandon sticky conflicts through a quick solution that Kumar calls ‘divide and quit’, has left a legacy that continues to haunt both the ex-colonizers and ex-colonized well into the twenty-first century. It may well be the most lasting political legacy of modern colonialism and decolonization, a legacy that the United Nations has been hitherto at best only able to contain.
