ABSTRACT
In 1945 Belgium, France, Great Britain, Holland and Portugal were still major colonial powers, exercising direct rule over the territory of 55 of the 188 countries which now enjoy membership of the United Nations Organisation as fully sovereign nation states. At least in appearance, the situation which already existed in 1914 had not changed. Seventy per cent of the world’s surface was under the control either of the countries of Western Europe itself or of those which, like the United States of America or the countries of Central and South America, were of European origin. What had enabled the inhabitants of this small peninsula on the western extremity of Asia, whose population comprised a mere eighteen per cent of the total number of human beings on the planet, to reach a position where they exercised a political and economic power so disproportionate to the physical size of their homeland?
