Decolonization in Africa & Asia

By 1945, the European powers that had carved up Africa and Asia were broke. Britain owed billions. France had been occupied for four years. The Netherlands had been flattened. Portugal and Belgium clung to their colonies with a stubbornness inversely proportional to their actual capacity to hold them.

The war had cracked something deeper than budgets. Hundreds of thousands of colonial subjects had fought in European armies, in North Africa, in Burma, in Italy, on the beaches of Normandy. African and Asian soldiers had seen Europeans kill each other with industrial efficiency. They had seen Paris in ruins. They returned home with military training, organizational experience, and a question that no amount of colonial propaganda could answer: if Europeans could not even govern themselves without catastrophic violence, what right did they have to govern anyone else?

The United States and the Soviet Union, the two powers that emerged strongest from the war, both opposed European colonialism, for different reasons and with varying degrees of sincerity. The Americans had their own anti-colonial founding myth and wanted access to markets that colonial trade systems locked them out of. The Soviets saw anti-colonial movements as natural allies in the struggle against capitalism. Both superpowers pressured European allies to loosen their grip, even as they built their own spheres of influence.