ABSTRACT
During World War ii the United States started to force the European colonial powers to live up to an ideology of national self-determination and thus acted as champions of decolonisation. The Americans themselves were also faced with the problem of how to reconcile their relatively young empire with these political ideals. After all, since the beginning of the twentieth century the United States controlled a strategically situated empire itself, albeit of a more modest nature than those of its European counterparts. It soon turned out that Washington often pushed aside its ideologies on independence in favour of a more self-serving approach. The irony is that in several of the newly acquired American territories, reform and full decolonisation were late in coming or failed to materialise at all. ‘Decolonisation’ may have been an American concept right from the start, but its own colonial heritage was addressed with remarkably ambivalent solutions.
