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Did Decolonisation Happen to Fast ?

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The Super Pope said:
Nowhere did I really mention the 'wrong boundaries' issue, I personally think that that case is overstated.
India was partitioned into two states (Pakistan and India, no Bangladesh at that time) but the Republic of India has faced no serious problems of ethnic unrest despite its multi-ethnic nature, and many languages. Pakistan's problems by contrast stem in large part from the fact that people there felt the whole show was being run by the Punjabis for the benefit of the Punjabis, which is how they lost East Pakistan
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India and Pakistan (including East Pakistan) shared so little in common with India that they created one of the worst humanitarian catastrophes in the modern era as India broke up. East and West Pakistan again had little in common that this collapsed. Punjabi vs Bengali issues implied that there was a) no common Indian identity b) even after partition, the common Pakistani identity was very weak.

I'm not sure how Kashmir isn't a "serious problem of unrest". It's been an issue for decades and India and Pakistan have fought wars over it.

Indians are Indians in the sense that Britons are British. They have sub-nations below this identity that are every bit as important and could replace the Indian identity in the right conditions.

India is not a (qualified) success because it had a strong united identity. It is a (qualified) success despite having very diverse identities.

Somalia isn't a failure because of a lack of a cohesive national identity. It is a failure despite having a cohesive national identity.
 
Gordy said:
India and Pakistan (including East Pakistan) shared so little in common with India that they created one of the worst humanitarian catastrophes in the modern era as India broke up. East and West Pakistan again had little in common that this collapsed. Punjabi vs Bengali issues implied that there was a) no common Indian identity b) even after partition, the common Pakistani identity was very weak.
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Yes, the Muslim League were quite determines they wanted a Muslim state, which led to partition. This is not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about the India that was created in 1947's success at managing its multi-ethnic population. Indian elites consciously aimed at building a multi-ethnic multi-religious state, while Pakistan defined itself in narrow religious terms. Pakistan's identity was and is, as you say, very weak, because it generally ended up as the Punjabi military running the show, while the Bengalis were looked down on. Pakistan did not build a strong 'Pakistani' identity, and thus we have the divided mess that exists today

I'm not sure how Kashmir isn't a "serious problem of unrest". It's been an issue for decades and India and Pakistan have fought wars over it.
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Kashmir, on which I am no great expert, is a bit of a special case, being as it is not only markedly different from the rest of India, but also disputed between two states, and the target of heavy-handed Indian rule, and the tender efforts of the ISI. The insolubility of Kashmir is in large part because of its border position, the various territorial claims, and the state of Indo-Pakistani relations.

Indians are Indians in the sense that Britons are British. They have sub-nations below this identity that are every bit as important and could replace the Indian identity in the right conditions.

India is not a (qualified) success because it had a strong united identity. It is a (qualified) success despite having very diverse identities.

Somalia isn't a failure because of a lack of a cohesive national identity. It is a failure despite having a cohesive national identity.
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More or less what I'm saying, that India has been able to get people to buy into and identify with the state, above ethnic identities. Somalia has not been able to convince the homogenous Somali people to buy into their state, due to the weak institutions, corruption, and narrow interest of the urban elite,which led to its fracturing. These factors are far more important than ethnic identity as to whether the new states of Africa could thrive or not
 
No country has any ethnic backed armed insurrections if they can all be dismissed as "a special case".
 
Gordy said:
No country has any ethnic backed armed insurrections if they can all be dismissed as "a special case".
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1) Kashmir poses no existential threat to the survival of Indian unity.
2) Kashmir isn't a straight up ethnic revolt against a different ethnicity government, its also a battleground between India and Pakistan, where skirmishing between their armies and the efforts of different intelligence agencies keep the situation febrile. Pakistan deliberately stokes unrest there as part of its wider foreign policy of oppose India everywhere.

The point is that the only ethnic unrest India has is on a disputed border region, and does not pose anything like a serious threat to India's survival as a state or an identity for the vast bulk of its population. By contrast, the lack of acceptance of the regime in Pakistan by the non-Punjabis threatens the existence of Pakistan as functioning state, which is the sort of situation the OP is talking about.
 
The Super Pope said:
1) Kashmir poses no existential threat to the survival of Indian unity.
2) Kashmir isn't a straight up ethnic revolt against a different ethnicity government, its also a battleground between India and Pakistan, where skirmishing between their armies and the efforts of different intelligence agencies keep the situation febrile. Pakistan deliberately stokes unrest there as part of its wider foreign policy of oppose India everywhere.

The point is that the only ethnic unrest India has is on a disputed border region, and does not pose anything like a serious threat to India's survival as a state or an identity for the vast bulk of its population. By contrast, the lack of acceptance of the regime in Pakistan by the non-Punjabis threatens the existence of Pakistan as functioning state, which is the sort of situation the OP is talking about.
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You might as well argue that Scotland leaving the UK is no threat to the UK because the UK would still exist. It would, it just wouldn't include Scotland. India would exist with Kashmir but it would be India without Kashmir.

And it's not the only ethnic unrest, there is a significant amount in North East India, it just doesn't get the same press coverage.
 
Furion Matsuya said:
I'm well a wear of what the colonies were established for. But surely it's common sense, not the mention the colonizers responsibility to clean up the mess they made before pulling out at the very least, even more so since by pulling out they may be abandoning the people who have settled there like what happened when France pulled out of Algeria "supposedly I'm no expert so I'm probably wrong about what happened there"
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Despite all the propaganda they flaunted around, colonial powers rarely felt anything similar to a moral responsibility towards the improvement of their colonies. For example, take the British in what was the jewel of their colonial empire. All the "improvements" the British colonial authorities made there (irrigation canals, railroads, etc), including defense spending, was financed exclusively by the Indian taxpayers, independently if that spending would benefit the Indians or not. For example, during the 1876-78 famine in the Deccan, the colonial government refused not only to help its starving subjects, but they refused to lower taxes and even increased them in order to guarantee that the oncoming Afghan campaign would be entirely paid for by the Indian budget, without touching the British taxpayers' pockets. And that's not an isolated happening, but the regular order of things in European colonies. The French rule in Algeria prompted a 50% decrease in native population levels between 1830 and the 1880s, the Dutch instituted a near-slavery plantation system in Java, etc.
 
Semper Victor said:
Despite what some ill-informed romantics still seem to think, colonies were not set up for the enlightenment and benefit of the colonized peoples, but for the interests of their metropolis, and the political and economic interests of the metropolitan ruling elites. When after the IIWW it became increasingly clear that the costs of running a colonial empire had become far too high for the benefits they provided, the smarter colonial powers cut their losses and run (like Britain or the Netherlands)
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I'd say the Dutch were pretty stubborn in trying to keep their colonies, there was the four year armed struggle in Indonesia and they still kept New Guinea for a while afterwards. Surinam only got its independence in '75.
 
I'm not sure how Kashmir isn't a "serious problem of unrest".
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And it's not just Kashmir. At any given point India is fighting a couple of guerilla wars.
 
Semper Victor said:
Despite what some ill-informed romantics still seem to think, colonies were not set up for the enlightenment and benefit of the colonized peoples, but for the interests of their metropolis, and the political and economic interests of the metropolitan ruling elites. When after the IIWW it became increasingly clear that the costs of running a colonial empire had become far too high for the benefits they provided, the smarter colonial powers cut their losses and run (like Britain or the Netherlands) while the others who tried to cling to their old empires for internal political reasons (like France and Portugal) were forced to undertake hasty and humiliating retreats in the end.

It was a thing to run an empire in the good old days when some soldiers and mercenaries armed with Maxim guns and repetition rifles could easily control sparsely populated lands against disorganized natives armed with spears and arrows. But when said natives increased in number, organized themselves into ideologically motivated mass "liberation fronts" and began smuggling arms (either supplied by the Soviet bloc like in the First Indochina war, or purchased in the black market like in the Algerian war), the "burden of the white man" began to feel to heavy for said white men's comfort.

Thinking that in those circumstances the colonial powers would try to stay and improve things in their colonies when they had shown no interest in doing so in earlier times when things were much calmer and easier for them is being quite naïve.
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This is important: Colonies were (with a few exceptions) a net loss for the colonial powers, but a huge profit-making scheme for the ruling class.
 
Blaaat said:
I'd say the Dutch were pretty stubborn in trying to keep their colonies, there was the four year armed struggle in Indonesia and they still kept New Guinea for a while afterwards. Surinam only got its independence in '75.
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They were able to avoid getting involved in doomed colonial wars. The British also fought colonial wars in Kenya in the 1950s (including "relocation" of entire native communities in concentration camps "à la Kitchener" with similar results) and Malaysia in the 1960s. But both the British and the Dutch deftly avoided getting involved in such hopeless conflicts as the First Indochina War or the Algerian War, which brought down the IV French Republic and put the country on the verge of a military coup. And the colonial conflicts were also capital in bringing the Portuguese dictatorship to its end in 1974. Compared to them, the British, Dutch and Belgians were able to cut their losses and run when it was hopeless to fight, and to pick only those fights that they had a reasonable chance to win with minimal expenses.

The case of Algeria is particularly enlightening. Despite it being divided into three départements that were nominally part of metropolitan France and thus not legally a colony, out of ten million inhabitants only one million of them were enfranchised (descendants of European colonists and Algerian Jews, who had been given French citizenship in the 1880s). The rest were legally strangers in their own land, despite constituting 9/10ths of the population. By the 1950s, French politicians saw clearly that such a situation was impossible to maintain, but just giving French citizenship to 9 million Algerian muslims and allowing them to vote in French elections was just unthinkable, so the tacit consensus among the ruling class was that Algeria would have to go eventually. The problem was that anybody who admitted it publicly would commit political seppuku, as they would be immediately labelled as "anti-patriotic" by the right, and there was also the small detail that the Algerian pied noirs were overwhelmingly over-represented in the French officer corps, which posed a further political risk (similar to the weight of Irish-born officers in the pre-1914 British army). The result was that they allowed the country to be dragged into a pointless war: around one million deaths, and a costly French military victory that meant nothing as eventually the French state gave independence to Algeria despite it. And to top it all, they were able to avoid the deared military coup only by a very small margin. They were lucky to have De Gaulle at hand to sort the mess out.
 
Furion Matsuya said:
True enough I suppose although sometimes it seems like it was shorted sighted in the extreme
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The issue is that colonies were not setup to be governed by the natives and as a result didn't integrate natives beyond the basic administrative levels of government. Trying to integrate them would have taken decades and IIRC the initial transition plans were decades long, e.g. Papua New Guinea and Australia, but decades is well beyond what most locals would be willing to put up with and once assault weapons are widely available post-WW2 you're not going to be able to enforce it by force.

I'd say that all decolonisation was "hasty", if only because it wasn't possible to have a smooth handover to native administrators. IMHO the difference between successful and failed decolonisation was whether the native societies had a history of being centralised states.
 
The issue is that colonies were not setup to be governed by the natives and as a result didn't integrate natives beyond the basic administrative levels of government.
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To be fair, this varied significantly between colonies. (mostly between settler-colonies and those with fewer settlers, far more natives in the administration (for obvious reasons) in the latter case, but also between colonial powers)

France even had a couple of african governors, for instance.
 
Arilou said:
To be fair, this varied significantly between colonies. (mostly between settler-colonies and those with fewer settlers, far more natives in the administration (for obvious reasons) in the latter case, but also between colonial powers)
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True, there was always going to be a range of native involvement.

Arilou said:
France even had a couple of african governors, for instance.
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Any idea where those were? Algeria?
 
Any idea where those were? Algeria?
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No, never Algeria (as mentioned, that'd never happen in a settler-colony). West Africa, IIRC. (one of them was governor during WWII and was one of the first to support De Gaulle)
 
pithorr said:
Oh, guys... Have you forgotten Abdul is still an Angolan in his heart?
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Que? i had thought of him as a World citizen, comfortable anywhere but calling no place "home" - though I admit you really never forget the home of your youth.
 
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