ABSTRACT
The second European civil war of the twentieth century and Japan’s meteoric succession of victories of 1942 damaged the prestige of the white man among the colonial peoples far more seriously and lastingly than the First World War Since 1945 Europe has no longer been master of the world. The commonwealth policy of the inter-war period, culminating in the Statute of Westminster and the contemporary British colonial policy of 1945, had thus successfully weathered the storm of the Second World War. From the psychological viewpoint, the British nation could have defended its empire as it had defended India after 1918. The picture becomes clearer only when the perspective is shifted away from the concept of a retreat bordering on a defeat. Admittedly the Netherlands did experience its relinquishing of Indonesia as a defeat and France the end of the first Indochinese war.
