In our case we were kicked out
Displacement colonialism is an older phenomenon that I would expect a Greek to know all about. It's quite a different issue to decolonising somewhere you parachuted a ruling class into an existing society.
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In our case we were kicked out
Displacement colonialism is an older phenomenon that I would expect a Greek to know all about. It's quite a different issue to decolonising somewhere you parachuted a ruling class into an existing society.
Talking about former British colonies, the UK arguably did leave the Indian sub-continent too quickly. Then again, the locals wanted them out ASAP.
It took them about two centuries to leave. How long should they have taken?
The question people who lean "yes" seem to be trying to answer is not whether decolonization was too fast but more something like "Would things have been better if the actual colonial leaders were replaced overnight with idealistic altruists from our imagination, and they stayed for 10 years before leaving?" If you're inventing them, why not just invent virtuous and selfless native rulers of unsurpassed wisdom? We can all agree they would have been much better than what actually happened, right?
Let me put it this way: the UK left the sub-continent by essentially saying "Good bye, and good luck." India and Pakistan then underwent birthing pains on a scale that has went by largely unnoticed.
Also, after WWII, the UK was actually relatively active in offloading their colonies, at least compared to the French and the Dutch. The sub-continent was unprofitable to them, and they offloaded it less than 3 years after the war ended. Singapore was profitable, and they took more than 10 years to leave after the war (14 years just to give it internal self-government), and 6 years after Singapore's independence to evacuate their military base there.
Also, after WWII, the UK was actually relatively active in offloading their colonies, at least compared to the French and the Dutch. The sub-continent was unprofitable to them, and they offloaded it less than 3 years after the war ended. Singapore was profitable, and they took more than 10 years to leave after the war (14 years just to give it internal self-government), and 6 years after Singapore's independence to evacuate their military base there.
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Unnoticed by whom?
But regardless, why do you think if the British held on for another ten years it would be better? They'd be spending all their time opposing the Indians who wanted independence, not doing whatever it is people think they could have done to uplift a grateful populace.
Take Cyprus, for example, where the British did stay for a while longer and almost certainly made things worse, since they responded to the primarily Greek independence movement by recruiting Turks to be anti-independence enforcers.
The whole emerging of India and Pakistan and the consequences are relatively taught less often in history lessons.
The Attlee government wanted to let the sub-continent go, as it was too large to maintain effective control. Imperial romantics like Churchill have their laments and what-not, but ditching the sub-continent helped the UK more than it helped the newly independent nations.
Both Cyprus and Singapore were relatively small, and the UK did have the intention of holding them. Also, it wasn't as if the island's Turkish population had accepted their Greek counterparts' proposal of joining Greece.
The Attlee government wanted to let the sub-continent go, as it was too large to maintain effective control. Imperial romantics like Churchill have their laments and what-not, but ditching the sub-continent helped the UK more than it helped the newly independent nations.
Both Cyprus and Singapore were relatively small, and the UK did have the intention of holding them. Also, it wasn't as if the island's Turkish population had accepted their Greek counterparts' proposal of joining Greece.
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Colonial powers never had any real will of "preparing" their colonies for independence. Take the case of Belgium, for example. After the Belgian state took over after forcing king Leopold II to hand over his "Congo Free State", the successive Belgian governments had almost 60 years to "prepare" the Congo. When they finally conceded independence in 1960, there were less than 30 university graduates among the Congolese population (the highest number I've found, as most other accounts give even lower numbers), and one of them was Patrice Lumumba, who had graduated in ...... Moscow :wacko:. The university of Louvain in Belgium had opened its gates to Congolese students only in 1954, so go imagine.
So? Last time I checked, 82% > 18%. And many Turks didn't mind joining Greece. Check the archives on the 20s and first years of the 30s. By the 50s this number had shrunk but some still didn't care/wanted to join Greece. It was the leftists that had more trouble in Cyprus than the Turks but the British convinced Turkey and the Turks that Cyprus belonged to them so they wouldn't settle with either partition or full control of the island... They got their partition and the UK is the main player to blame. And the UK didn't leave Cyprus either!
If this is the norm, then I'm guessing Scotland has no luck in getting independence even if the Yes vote reaches 90% as there's gonna be a minority that doesn't want it... Pity Mr. Salmond.
Except you seem to forget that Belgian Congo was the absolutely worst case amongst all colonies as it is aknowledged by everyone, and the consequences of Belgian mismanagement are still felt today. You(and others) here are being vastly caricatural, there is not one "black story of colonialism" as you are trying to tell it, but a multiplicity of very different setups. Algeria is one reality, Egypt another, Gabon, Rhodesia and Zanzibar yet completely different, and at the very end of the "infamy" scale you have the damned Belgian Congo, and yet you take it as your example to placate "colonialism" as a whole. No, the claim that colonial powers could/should have done a better job with preparing colonies for independence is not outlandish in any way, because in actuality the few(arguably, insufficient) state-building that was done in Africa was done by the colonial powers, and how independent states are faring today is(with a few exceptions) strongly dependent on the state in which they were left by the colonisers.
Exactly and that's what I was saying/asking when I created this thread. Sure the colonial powers had very different goals and interest when the set the colonies up but once they started decolonising and leaving after WWII. On a case by case basis did they leave to quickly or would it not have made a difference etc because leaving a mess behind bites everyone in the ass later sooner or later.
No, it wasn' Africans were building states long before europeans showed up. Then the europeans smashed them, an the africans had to build new ones at the same time as fighting european colonialists.
Except that pied noirs had civil rights, while native algerians had virtually none. So yes, its petty much one side being worse than the other.m
That's precisely why I specified that my comment applied to the 50-60 year period during which the Belgian state run the Congo as a colony, instead of being Leopold II's private property, one of the darkest episodes of European colonialism. During that time period, the Belgian Congo was a colony equiparable to other European oversea territories, similar to othe French, German or British colonies in Africa.
And even Leopold II's previous activities in the Congo cannot be seen as isolated actions of a particularly greedy and psychopatic individual. He tried to model his "personal" colony after the "kultuurstetsel" system that the Dutch had introduced in the East Indies in the 1830s, and which gave enormous benefits to the both the Dutch state and to Dutch private enterprises (the building of the Dutch rairoads was mainly financed with those benefits). And when Leopold's Congo began to churn out nice profits, the French introduced a forced labour system in their African equatorial colonies to try to copy Leopold's financial success and get some money out of those financial black holes their colonies were at the moment.
I'm perfectly aware that the different European metropolis had different ways of governing their overseas empires, but they all followed the same underlying principle: the colonies existed for the metropolis' benefit, not the other way round. To which point they were willing to go to squeeze a profit out of them varied accordingly to the elites in power in each country, and to the economic realities of the colonies. In general, fertile and populous Asian colonies like India, French Indochina or the Dutch East Indies gave nice profits to their European masters, while few African colonies proved to be profitable, but the Europens sure tried to squeeze them all for all they were worth while they could, and when it became impossible to keep the business going on, they cut their ties with the colonies and retreated from them without the slightest regret.
Bah, it is exactly the same bias again. No, "Africans" weren't building states in all of Africa before colonisation, in some places there were states, in other some state-building and in other places nothing at all. And the shape and organisation of polities in Africa after decolonisation was strongly influenced by the policies of the colonisators and their relationship with various indigenous social groups. This relationship could certainly not be summarized with your caricature of undifferentiated "Africans" gallantly fighting the colonisers while at the same time somehow figuring out how to "build their states"(I'm assuming, you mean they were doing that by themselves, without the colonisers' consent nor knowledge). The level of ignorance/bias on this issue is just striking honestly.
I never claimed that colonisation was done for the benefit of the natives or something like that, but to reduce the colonial question to economical interests is again, vastly oversimplifying. British involvement in India is an extremely complex subject and while it was originally indeed done by a "commercial" company and for economic reasons, it then evolved in ways that went far beyond purely economic rationality. This is even more true about Black Africa which was never really profitable as a whole, exactly as you are stating. It was much more a question of prestige, and whatever economic benefits were at best the cherry on the top of the cake and most often nothing more than propaganda prospects. For all that matters, political decolonisation didn't always mean economic decolonisation. In French Africa, all of the French compagnies that were exploiting natural ressources stayed. They are still there today, 50 years after independence.
What I am trying to underline is that you underestimate the great variation in the policies the colonisers applied in their colonies, and those policies were vastly different from one colonising power to another and even within the same colonial empire to be honest. This is not even a question of intent - you could very well have a lenient policy motivated by the conviction that it is the best way to control and exploit the population, or a disastrous policy fuelled by a genuine desire to civilize the natives. Both certainly existed. I challenge you to charge this man with racism and contempt against the Blacks. Of course, most of the colonisers never actively cared about the natives' quality of life or about preparing them for independence. But as a result of the policies they applied, some countries ended up better prepared for independence than other. This is an obvious fact.
And the other very important aspect that you are ignoring completely is the role of the native elites, who generally overtook the power after independence. The relationship of these elites to the colonising power is very interesting and complex, and a large part of the question of "state-building" can be answered with that. As you have said, there were virtually no educated native elites in Congo for instance, but this was certainly not true in other places. Senegal and the Ivory Coast were overtaken by men who served as Cabinet ministers in the central French government before independence. So it was very interdependent and complex, and the picture is very different from one place to another.
The point of my posts was to state that the question of "did decolonisation happen too fast" is basically pointless, as colonial powers never had a conscious goal of "preparing" their colonies for independence, turning them into modern states with societies engineered along the western model. Colonial empires were mainly and mostly explotaitive enterprises, built for political and economical reasons. The very fact that many colonies never turned out a profit is of course a signal that "rational" economic factors were not the only moving ideas besides the establishing of colonial empires. In many cases, colonies were established because of European political circumstances that were far from economic rationality.
Reading XIX century literature, and not just scientific, politic and philosophic texts (like Marx or lord Salisbury) one gets a clear impression of the mumbled heap of assumptions and hopes that XIX century Europeans harboured in regards to colonies, for example in popular works like Jules Verne's novels, several of which take place in Africa.
Even when Europeans used grandiloquent words like "bringing civilisation" to Africa, what they imagined was something like the population colonies of Algeria and South Africa, never "improving" the natives, who were most of the time just plainly ignored, the same way that contemporary North American Indians were just ignored by western colonists, which saw their lands as "empty" and "unclaimed".
Those attitudes varied in populous colonies with ancient and well structured societies like India, Indochina and the like. In these colonies, ignoring the natives was obviously unpractical, and in there the colonizers had to broke deals with the native elites; the British Raj in India incorporated successfully many Indian princes into a British-ruled system. But again, even in here there was never a clear objective of "preparing" India or Indonesia for their eventual independence.
Whatever infrastructure and educated classes the colonizing powers happened to leave behind them when they left had been intended mainly for serving European interests, generally allowing the quick and efficient transportations of goods from the interior to the coast for European trade, or educating a native middle class to help the Europeans run the administration of the colonies or to act in middle roles in plantations, mines, etc, as in most colonies the Europeans were present only in small numbers. The most evident example were of course colonial soldiers, recruited by each and every one of the colonial powers and in which natives were usually only allowed to raise thorugh the ranks to the subofficer level, or in some cases to the lower officer ranks, and always only to command native soldiers, never European soldiers.
Does that mean that it was totally worthless for the newly independent countries once the Europeans left? No, of course. But it was far from optimal, as it had been put in place for the interests of the metropolis, not of the colonies.
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I guess only positive leftover from colonialism was formation of modern states (which are arbitraty and unstable), congress of Berlin (European nations were able to avoid war with everybody satisfying diplomacy) and networking with rest of the world. Also it is important to point out that there was no alternative for colonization. Had not states took over Africa most likely capitalistic companies would have done this like in Asia.
Africans were building states long before europeans got there. Like europeans they sometimes failed, sometimes succeeded, and sometimes went off and did other things. Claiming that europeans are responsible for there being states in Africa (which is how I read the earlier post) is silly.
Who is saying that? I'm saying that the african states as they exist are not the products of the colonial powers but of the movements against colonialism. The colonial powers by and large didn't *do* state-building: They wanted to *prevent* it. (in practice, if not in theory and rhetoric)
You're probably right about it having no real alternative at the time. Whenever private companies or individuals were left to roam free in Africa, Asia, America or Oceania, the results were disastrous for natives, even worse than "official", state-led colonialism was. The most extreme exemple, as was pointed earlier, was king Leopold II's "Congo Free State", but there's also the Dutch and British East India Companies, Cecil Rodes' African Company in southern Africa, and several other minor examples.