How did decolonization happen?
Decolonization happened through multiple paths: negotiated transfers of power (India, Ghana, most of British Africa), armed liberation wars (Algeria, Vietnam, Angola, Mozambique), Cold War pressure as superpowers competed for newly independent nations' allegiance, and the moral and economic unsustainability of colonial rule after World War II. Between 1945 and 1975, European empires that had ruled much of the globe for centuries were dismantled.
Decolonization was not a single process but a collection of distinct struggles, each shaped by local conditions, the particular colonial power involved, Cold War dynamics, and the balance between negotiation and violence.
The groundwork was laid before World War II. Nationalist movements in India, Vietnam, Indonesia, and across Africa had been developing for decades — building political organizations, articulating demands for self-governance, and cultivating educated leadership cadres. The war itself was the decisive accelerator: it exhausted European colonial powers economically, demonstrated that Asian armies could defeat European ones (Japan's conquests), and embedded the language of self-determination and human rights in international discourse through the Atlantic Charter and the United Nations.
British decolonization was often negotiated, though rarely without pressure. India's independence in 1947 followed decades of organized resistance under Gandhi and the Indian National Congress, combined with Britain's post-war economic exhaustion. Ghana's independence in 1957 under Kwame Nkrumah set the pattern for most of British Africa — political parties organized, demanded self-rule, and negotiated transfer of power. But even 'peaceful' decolonization involved violence — the Mau Mau uprising in Kenya, the Malayan Emergency — that increased the costs of maintaining colonial control.
French decolonization was more violent. France fought devastating wars to maintain Vietnam (1946–1954) and Algeria (1954–1962). The Algerian War was particularly brutal — over a million Algerians died, and the conflict nearly toppled the French Republic itself, bringing Charles de Gaulle to power. French West and Equatorial Africa were decolonized more peacefully, though French economic and political influence persisted through neo-colonial arrangements.
Portuguese decolonization was the latest and most disruptive. Portugal, Europe's poorest colonial power, fought liberation wars in Angola, Mozambique, and Guinea-Bissau throughout the 1960s and early 1970s. The strain of these wars contributed to a revolution in Portugal itself in 1974, after which the new government rapidly withdrew from Africa, leaving power vacuums that devolved into civil wars.
The Cold War shaped decolonization everywhere. Both superpowers courted newly independent nations, providing aid, arms, and ideological frameworks. Some independence movements aligned with the Soviet Union (Vietnam, Cuba, Angola), others with the West, and many tried to remain non-aligned. The result was that local independence struggles were frequently entangled in global superpower competition, with consequences that lasted long after formal independence was achieved.