Great Britain and decolonization

The Suez crisis of 1956, followed by Soviet space successes and rocket-rattling after 1957, dealt serious blows to the morale of western Europe. Given the potential of the war scares over Berlin to fracture NATO, the United States had to reassure its allies and try to satisfy their demands for greater influence in alliance policy. American efforts largely succeeded in the case of Britain, an ally much depleted in power and will. American policy largely failed in the case of France, an ally stronger and more stable than at any time since 1940.

Since World War II, Britain had tried to maintain the appearance of a global power, developing its own nuclear weapons, deploying conventional forces around the world, and keeping hold of its African colonies. Churchill, returned to office in the early 1950s, had vowed never to “preside over the liquidation of the British Empire.” Likewise, the British held aloof from the continental experiments with integration and saw their role rather as the vertex of three great world systems: the English-speaking peoples, the British Commonwealth, and the old European Great Powers. All this came to a sudden end when a combination of factors—sluggish economic performance by the world’s oldest industrial power, growing pressure to decolonize, demands for greater social expenditures at home, and the superpowers’ leap into the missile age—convinced London that it could no longer afford to keep up appearances in foreign policy. A defense White Paper of 1957 signalled a shift away from conventional armed forces toward reliance on a cheap, national nuclear deterrent. Sputnik then convinced the British government to cancel its own ballistic-missile program and rely on its special relationship with the United States to procure modern weapons. Eisenhower agreed to sell the Skybolt air-launched missile to Britain by way of healing the wounds inflicted by Suez and shoring up NATO after Sputnik. When McNamara subsequently cut the Skybolt program in his campaign to streamline the Pentagon, the British government was acutely embarrassed. Kennedy met with Prime Minister Harold Macmillan at Nassau in December 1962 and offered Polaris submarines instead. It was hoped at the time that the British deterrent would be subsumed in a multilateral NATO force. The Conservative government also made the hard decision in 1963 to seek admission to the Common Market, only to be vetoed by the French. Not until 1973 was Britain’s application, together with those of Ireland and Denmark, approved and the European Communities broadened.

The period 1957–62 was also the climax of decolonization. As early as 1946–47, when Britain was granting independence to India and states of the Middle East, the Attlee government sponsored the Cohen–Caine plan for a new approach to West Africa as well. It aimed at preparing tropical Africa for self-rule by gradually transferring local authority from tribal chiefs to members of the Western-educated elite. Accordingly, the Colonial Office drafted elaborate constitutions, most of which had little relevance to real conditions in primitive countries that had no natural boundaries, no ethnic unity or sense of nationalism, and no civic tradition. When the Gold Coast (Ghana) elected the radical leader Kwame Nkrumah, who then demanded immediate independence and got it in 1957, the British felt unable to deny similar grants to neighbouring colonies. Britain had, in fact, when the matter was faced squarely, little desire to hang on, given the exorbitant financial and political costs of late imperialism. In 1959 the Cabinet quietly decided to withdraw from Africa as soon as it won reelection. Macmillan then announced the new policy in Cape Town on February 3, 1960, when he spoke of “the winds of change” sweeping across the continent. Nigeria, Togo, and Dahomey (Benin) became sovereign states in 1960, Tanganyika (Tanzania), Uganda, and Kenya in East Africa between 1961 and 1963, and Malaŵi and Northern Rhodesia (Zambia) in the south in 1964. White residents of Southern Rhodesia, however, declared their own independence in defiance of London and the UN. The Republic of South Africa and the surviving Portuguese colonies of Angola and Mozambique made those portions of southern Africa the last refuges of white rule on the continent.

Most new African states had little more to support their pretensions to nationhood than a paper constitution, a flag, and a London-backed currency. The leaderships blamed African underdevelopment on past exploitation rather than on objective conditions, thus rejecting the American and European development theories that saw political stability as possible only within the context of economic growth. Nkrumah lectured to his Pan-African Congress in 1963 that “the social and economic development of Africa will come only within the political kingdom, not the other way around.” Indeed, Africa’s politicians invariably styled themselves as charismatic leaders whose political and even spiritual guidance was the prerequisite for progress. Nkrumah himself seized all power in Ghana and made himself a quasi-divine figure until the army overthrew him in 1966. Togo’s government fell to a military coup in 1963, and mutinies broke out in Kenya, Uganda, and Tanganyika. In the latter country, Julius Nyerere, much admired in Europe and the United States, declared a one-party dictatorship based on his ideology of ujamaa (familyhood) and courted aid from Communist China. Other leaders contrived similar ideologies to justify personal rule. By 1967 Black Africa had suffered 64 attempted coups d’état, many born of tribal hatreds, and most Africans had fewer political rights than under colonial rule.

With the exception of Congo (Brazzaville), Cold War rivalries were absent from Africa in the 1960s, while the African regimes themselves wisely declared the inviolability of their boundaries lest the artificial lines drawn by the colonial powers provoke endless warfare. When Igbo tribes-people seceded from Nigeria in 1967 and formed the rebel state of Biafra, only four African nations supported their cause. Nigeria suppressed the secession in a bloody civil war. Decolonization nonetheless had a profound effect on international relations through the medium of the UN. The three dozen or so new African states combined with those of Asia and the Soviet bloc to form a permanent majority made up mostly of one-party dictatorships nevertheless claiming moral superiority over the Western “imperialists.” Thus, the founders’ dreams that the UN might become a “parliament of the world” and bulwark of democracy and human rights were undermined by the very process of what, with one or another degree of irony, was called “liberation.” Instead, the UN degenerated into a forum for polemics and a playground for intrigue.