ABSTRACT
The countries of western, southern, and south-eastern Asia, central and south America, and Africa, will increasingly assert their independence, no longer content to be grouped formally or tacitly behind the older large powers. The balance of power will be more geographically dispersed, the political manoeuvring within the United Nations more complicated, with groupings and re-groupings that will cross the conventional lines of the past and shift with new changes in the distribution of power. Doctrinal warfare was interwoven with struggles over the balance of power in Europe and sometimes among smaller kingdoms in the Asian territories invaded by European peoples. The colonial powers themselves inadvertently gave an impetus to the move for decolonisation by stripping the defeated powers of their colonies, alleging that the latter had acquired them arbitrarily and ruled them oppressively.
