Decolonization & the Third World
Decolonization and the rise of the Third World from 1945 to the 1970s: independence movements, partition, Bandung, Non-Alignment, and neo-colonial critique.
The Postwar Setting
The Second World War shattered the material and moral foundations of European empire. Britain emerged in 1945 bankrupt and indebted to the United States; France was occupied and humiliated; the Netherlands and Belgium were exhausted. The Atlantic Charter (August 1941), Articles 3 of which affirmed 'the right of all peoples to choose the form of government under which they will live,' supplied colonized nationalists with a rhetorical weapon Churchill never intended for the empire. The United Nations Charter (1945) entrenched the principle of self-determination (Article 1(2)) and created a Trusteeship system (Chapter XII), while the two emergent superpowers — the United States and the USSR — were, for distinct ideological reasons, hostile to formal colonialism.
The First Wave: Asia, 1945-1957
Asia decolonized first. Indonesia declared independence under Sukarno on 17 August 1945, securing Dutch recognition in December 1949 after armed struggle. The Indian Independence Act 1947 (UK Parliament) partitioned British India into India and Pakistan on 15 August 1947, triggering communal violence that killed an estimated one million people and displaced 15 million. Ceylon and Burma followed in 1948. The Philippines gained independence from the United States on 4 July 1946. In Indochina, Ho Chi Minh's Viet Minh defeated France at Dien Bien Phu (7 May 1954); the Geneva Accords (July 1954) partitioned Vietnam at the 17th parallel, planting the seed of a Cold War war.
The African Wave, 1957-1975
Ghana, under Kwame Nkrumah, became the first sub-Saharan colony to gain independence (6 March 1957). Harold Macmillan's 'Wind of Change' speech to the South African Parliament (3 February 1960) acknowledged the inevitable. 1960 — the 'Year of Africa' — saw 17 states become independent. Decolonization was rarely peaceful: the Algerian War (1954-1962) cost perhaps 300,000-400,000 lives before the Evian Accords (March 1962); the Mau Mau Emergency in Kenya (1952-1960) and the chaotic Congo Crisis (1960-1965, encompassing the assassination of Patrice Lumumba in January 1961) demonstrated how superpower rivalry and mineral wealth complicated transitions. Portugal, clinging to Angola and Mozambique, relinquished them only after the Carnation Revolution of April 1974 toppled the Estado Novo, with independence following in 1975.