Decolonisation & the rise of the Third World
Decolonisation after 1945: the dismantling of empires in Asia and Africa, the Bandung-NAM moment, and the rise of the Third World—mapped for UPSC GS-1.
What decolonisation was
Decolonisation denotes the dissolution of the European colonial empires and the emergence of sovereign states across Asia, Africa, the Caribbean and the Pacific between 1945 and roughly 1975. By 1939 European powers controlled nearly a third of the globe; within three decades that order collapsed. The United Nations had 51 founding members in 1945; by 1970 membership had crossed 120, the increase composed almost entirely of newly independent ex-colonies.
Why the empires fell after 1945
Four converging forces explain the timing. First, the Second World War shattered the financial and moral capacity of Britain, France, the Netherlands and Belgium to hold distant possessions; Britain emerged in 1945 a debtor to its own colonies. Second, the Atlantic Charter (August 1941), in which Churchill and Roosevelt affirmed 'the right of all peoples to choose the form of government under which they will live', supplied a self-determination vocabulary the colonised promptly turned against the metropoles. Third, the two new superpowers—the United States and the USSR—were both, for different reasons, anti-imperial; the Suez crisis of 1956, when Washington forced an Anglo-French-Israeli withdrawal from Egypt, exposed that European empire now ran against American and Soviet preference alike. Fourth, mass nationalist movements—the Indian National Congress, the Vietminh, Ghana's Convention People's Party, Algeria's FLN—had built mobilising machinery that war had radicalised.
The phases and patterns
The first wave was Asian. India and Pakistan became independent on 15 August 1947 under the Indian Independence Act 1947, partitioned amid roughly a million deaths and 10–15 million displaced. Burma and Ceylon followed in 1948; Indonesia secured Dutch recognition in 1949 after armed struggle; France's defeat at Dien Bien Phu (1954) and the Geneva Accords ended French Indochina.
The African wave crested after 1957, when Ghana under Kwame Nkrumah became the first sub-Saharan colony to gain independence. 1960—the 'Year of Africa'—saw seventeen states become sovereign, mostly from French West and Equatorial Africa and the Belgian Congo. Settler colonies resisted longest and most violently: Algeria's war of independence (1954–62) cost perhaps 300,000–1,000,000 lives; Kenya's Mau Mau emergency (1952–60) and the Portuguese wars in Angola and Mozambique (ending 1974–75 after the Carnation Revolution in Lisbon) showed that where European settlers had entrenched, decolonisation came through war, not negotiation.
The UN furnished the legal scaffolding. General Assembly Resolution 1514 (XV) of 14 December 1960, the Declaration on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples, declared that 'the subjection of peoples to alien subjugation... is a denial of fundamental human rights' and demanded an end to colonialism. Resolution 1541 (XV) set the criteria for non-self-governing territories, and the Special Committee on Decolonisation (the Committee of 24) was created in 1961 to police the process.
