After Tamerlane (66 page)

‘We are living in a revolutionary age of transition,' Jawaharlal Nehru told a group of Asian leaders in January 1949.
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It was a shrewd piece of analysis. The effects of the war and the turmoil that followed it broke the habit of obedience in many parts of the world. The first three or four years after the Second World War are usually portrayed by historians as the prelude to cold war, first in Europe then in Asia. And so they turned out to be. But the drift to cold war is only part of the story, and in many parts of the world not the most important part. Nor was it obvious what its impact would be on all the other upheavals produced by the war. For the conflicts ignited
at each end of Eurasia had detonated a chain of further explosions right around the world. Under their battering, the established order – often recent and fragile – buckled, bent and in some places broke. Those excluded from power before the outbreak of war – whether Communists, socialists, nationalists, Zionists, Islamists or separatists – relished the chance to break the political mould. Local parties and interests scrambled to influence the dominant regional power and mobilized furiously to raise their strength on the ground. But every move they made reflected a state of extreme uncertainty. Would the victor powers impose a set of collective decisions – as Mao still expected in 1946?
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Would they quarrel irreconcilably? Would America drift into isolation once more, as in 1919? Would the global economy slip back into slump? Would the devastation of war exclude much of the world from engaging in trade? Would state-controlled autarky be the only practicable means of economic recovery? Had the assault on property under wartime conditions (by taxation, confiscation or destruction) and the general retreat of individual rights erased old social differences and levelled society for good? Was a new mass culture nowcertain to triumph over pre-industrial ‘high' cultures and folk ways alike? Was the coming era to see a world of great states and great continental conglomerates, or a loose confederacy of free nation states?

In the first half-decade of peace, the signs were conflicting. Many smaller states invested high hopes in the United Nations Organization, set up in 1945 as a more potent successor to the League of Nations. But would it be a counterweight to the dominant powers, or merely the arena for their competition and conflict? The Bretton Woods agreements in 1944–5 set up newmachinery to prevent the return of catastrophic slump. The International Monetary Fund allowed states to meet a temporary crisis in their balance of payments without a resort to the controls on trade and exchange that had shrivelled the world economy in the 1930s. With the zeal of newconverts, the Americans demanded the scrapping of tariffs and other restraints on trade. But, in face of the huge imbalance in productive capacity between the United States and the rest of the world and the shortage of dollars with which to buy American goods, the new era of free trade soon became a dead letter. The Sterling Area (comprising Britain,
its colonial territories, independent Commonwealth countries, including India, and certain Middle East countries like Egypt and Iraq) formed a separate trade and currency zone, whose dollar purchases were strictly controlled. It was far from clear – even with Marshall Aid dollars from the United States – howfast Western Europe would recover as producer or market. The Soviet bloc moved back towards autarky. In such austere conditions, it was hard to imagine an age of growth and prosperity and wider private choice. The priority was to expand production at almost any cost. Whether this was compatible with a rapid advance in political freedom was an interesting question. Whether small states were viable outside a larger bloc (or empire) or without adequate access to scarce supplies of capital seemed at best uncertain.

It was hardly surprising, then, that there was no consensus on the likely shape of a new world order. In the old colonial powers, most informed opinion believed that keeping empire going wherever conditions allowed was the safest option – even if it were best to liberalize colonial rule. Empire could be plausibly justified as being in the material interest of colonial peoples in a disordered world. Anticolonial nationalists could take heart from the sudden retreat of British imperial power from its
raj
in South Asia. But there was no reason to think that the fall of colonial empires would be universal, or would take place quickly. It seemed almost as likely that in much of the world colonial rulers would recover their nerve and rebuild their colonial states (in a modified form) with American backing. Nehru's revolutionary age was still in the making.

We know, of course, that the colonial revival was limited in scope and very short-lived. Instead, decolonization became the overwhelming political fact across most of Asia, Africa and the Middle East, and its effects reverberated ideologically in Latin America as well. Decolonization is often equated with the end of colonial
rule
, but this is much too narrow. It is far more useful to think of it as the demolition of a Europe-centred imperial order in which territorial empire was
interlocked with extraterritorial ‘rights'. The bases, enclaves, garrisons, gunboats, treaty ports and unequal treaties (as in Egypt or China) that littered the Afro-Asian world were as much the expression of this European imperialism as were the colonies and protectorates coloured red, blue, yellowor green on the old imperial maps. So was the assumption that intervention was justified by the general failure of non-European states to reach the civilizational standard that European visitors were entitled to expect. This imperial ‘order' imagined a cultural hierarchy in which the progressive capabilities of North West European (and Euro-American) societies were contrasted with the (sometimes picturesque) ‘stationary state' in which non-Western cultures were presumed to be stuck. It also expected, and where possible enforced, an economic division of labour in which the capital, manufactures and technical skills of the imperial-industrial world were exchanged for the raw materials and foodstuffs of the non-Western countries.

Most, if not all, of this global ‘regime' was quickly demolished in the two decades that followed the Second World War. A Europe-centred world order was no longer sustainable. Indeed, the effort to maintain it by Britain and France in regions that they ruled or where their influence had been dominant evoked the very resistance that forced their departure. They might have stayed longer as subcontractors of American influence. But their transatlantic patron had lost faith in their methods by the mid-1950s. The climate had changed. The language of empire and colonial rule had lost almost all its legitimacy in international affairs. The world's two largest powers had long since denounced it. There was already a large group of ex-colonial states (India was the most prominent) for whom demolishing colonialism was the most urgent priority, and for whose goodwill and favour both superpowers were competing. Both the institutions and the charter of the United Nations – the main arena where the superpowers contended for influence – envisaged a world in which the free nation state had become the ideal and the norm. The prop was pulled from under colonial power.

Decolonization had very striking results. It brought an explosion in the number of sovereign states, almost quadrupling the total of the inter-war years. It demolished the apparatus of European privilege in
some non-European states that had been only technically sovereign. It shattered the legitimacy of imperial rule and ridiculed the ethos of imperial ‘service'. It opened the way for post-imperial governments to expropriate foreign-owned property, control external trade, and reach a (sometimes profitable) accommodation with multinational firms. It was the vital stimulus for a great reappraisal of cultural values, and for the rejection – or questioning – of those that were seen as European in origin. What was much less clear (as we will see in what follows) was whether the collapse of a Europe-dominated imperial order would mean a real transition to a ‘world of nations'. Or whether the partition of Eurasia (as the vital context in which decolonization occurred) would encourage the rise of new kinds of empires, reliant much less on colonial rule than on forms of influence that might be just as effective.

The end of British rule in India in 1947 and the withdrawal two years later of Europe's navies from China marked the end of the ‘Vasco da Gama epoch' in Asian history. The age of European dominance was over. This was the verdict of an Indian historian a few years later.
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Of course the weight of the European presence should not be exaggerated. The Europeans had assembled grand colonial empires, in Southern Asia especially: in the Malay archipelago, in Indochina, above all in India. They commanded the seaways to East Asia after
c
.1840, and were firmly lodged in maritime China by the 1860s. But Japan had resisted subordination to Europe and more than preserved its autonomy. The European effort after 1890 to drive deeper into China's society and economy was scarcely under way before it was choked off by the geopolitical changes of the First World War. Europe's colonization of Asia had been a patchy affair, only shallowly rooted in much of South East Asia (where colonial rule had gained limited purchase before the 1890s). It was much more impressive on the continent's maritime fringes than it was inland. (In this respect, as in others, India was different.) It was partly this that explained why it fell apart so quickly in 1941–2, and staged only a brief recovery after 1945.

Yet change after 1945 was real enough. Less than ten years later, colonial rule had all but vanished from South, East and South East Asia. Where it still persisted, the timetable for independence was
already drawn up, or the territory concerned was of trivial importance. The exception was Hong Kong. But Hong Kong remained a colony by grace and favour of the Chinese government, and for its convenience.
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Contemplating a divided and war-shattered Europe, it was hardly surprising that a newgeneration of Asian political leaders were struck by the difference that a fewyears had made. The simultaneous crash of a Europe-centred world order and the sudden revival of independent statehood across most of Asia promised a newbeginning. Asian conceptions of race and culture, Asian indifference to Europe's fratricidal quarrels, the interests of Asia's impoverished millions could nowfind a voice.

This was the spirit of the ‘Asian–African' conference held at Bandung in Indonesia in May 1955. The host was Sukarno, the Indonesian president and hero of its anti-colonial revolution. Delegates came from more than twenty-five countries, including the Gold Coast and Cyprus, then both still colonies.
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Egypt was represented by Gamal Abdel Nasser. The presence of Nehru and of Chou En-lai, the prime ministers of India and China, lent an added authority to the conference proceedings. The meeting had no formal agenda, but its implicit purpose was to assert the claims of the non-Western world in international politics. Conference resolutions called for more Afro-Asian members in the United Nations Security Council, denounced all forms of race discrimination, and declared colonialism an evil ‘which should speedily be brought to an end'. In a notably conciliatory speech, Chou En-lai insisted that China had no expansionist aims and was ready to negotiate with the United States. Nehru denounced entry into an alliance with the West as ‘an intolerable humiliation for an Afro-Asian country', and NATO as ‘one of the most powerful protectors of colonialism'. Africa and Asia should remain neutral in the conflict of East and West: ‘why should we be dragged into their quarrels and wars?'
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Behind the speeches of Nehru and Chou En-lai was a vision of an Asia and Africa in which outside influence would exist only on sufferance. It was a heroic conception of decolonization that rejected any vestige of post-imperial attachment. The Asian states would take up the struggle to free the remaining colonized peoples. Cultural cooperation between Asians and Africans would replace the old deference
to Europe's civilizational claims. These ideas remained powerful. The possibilities of a non-aligned ‘Third World', independent alike of the East and the West, exerted enormous appeal. Third World solidarity against colonialism, forcefully displayed at the United Nations, helped to accelerate the end of European rule, especially in Africa after 1960. But, for all its attractions, the post-colonial future imagined at Bandung was doomed from the outset. Decolonization was not just a matter of demolishing colonial rule or excluding European influence. Even at Bandung, a rift appeared between those Afro-Asian states that favoured Nehru's ‘neutralist' line and the sizeable group that was openly pro-Western. Part of the reason lay in the nervous apprehension (despite Chou En-lai's reassurance) of Sino-Soviet intentions. But a deeper cause lay in the complex tensions evoked by Asia's escape from empire. For it was not the case that a family of new nations emerged fully formed from Asia's
ancien régime
. Where empires had caved in or had been overthrown, what followed instead were struggles for succession between rival claimants to their title deeds. Since imperial rule had often strung together different ethnic groups and ridden roughshod over old ethno-cultural boundaries, neither newnational identities nor their territorial rights could be taken for granted. It might have been simpler if this had been true only of the colonial empires the Europeans had made. But by the 1950s Asia was littered with the wreckage of other empires as well. The imperial ambitions of Britain, France, Russia, the Netherlands and Portugal had their Asian counterparts in the vast Inner Asian dominion built up by the Ch'ing, Japan's abandoned colonies in Korea and Taiwan, and the South East Asian empires whose Thai, Burmese and Vietnamese masters had been caged and cramped in the colonial era. Kashmir, Tibet, Korea, the Taiwan straits, Vietnam, Sumatra and the Hill States of Burma were the open sores of this painful transition from empire to nation, the glaring evidence that post-imperial state-making was only rarely consensual. Asia's immersion in the expanding Cold War masked the bitter reality of these local and regional conflicts.