Decolonization: A History of Failure?

from the Library of Congress in Washington DC you good afternoon I'm Carolyn Brown I direct the office of scholarly programs and the John W Kluge Center at the Library of Congress and it's my great pleasure to welcome you here this afternoon for a lecture by a distinguished historian professor John Darwin who'll be talking about decolonization a history of failure very provocative title the lecture is offered in conjunction with the current four weeks seminar on decolonization which is a joint project with the National History Center and the John W Cooney Center library of congress with funding by the Andrew W mellon foundation before we begin if you would if you have a cell phone would you please turn it off or other electrical equipment that might interfere with the recording so much of the world that we are living in today bears the footprints of the process of decolonization in the years after World War two and exploring that process and its implications has been the subject of an ongoing seminar this is the sixth year of that that the library has hosted and at the National History Center has organized and I want to say a word about each organization and the wonderful collaboration the National History Center promotes research teaching and learning in all fields of history it was created by the American Historical Association in 2002 as a public trust dedicated to the study and teaching of history as well as to the advancement of historical knowledge in government business and the public at large needless to say they have a wonderful webpage you can go to that to learn more WWN a tional History Center org the John W Kluge Center at the library is really happy with this collaboration with National History Center and earlier before it was formed with the American Historical Association as a way of bringing research is because we're interested in bringing researches to the library to mind the depth of the collections and of course historians actually are the largest number and deepest users of the library's collections the Kluge Center was established in 2000 by a generous donation from John WG to provide opportunities for the world's finest scholars to have informal conversations with members of Congress it doesn't happen frequently but when it does it can be quite wonderful so we try to bring together the world of affairs in the world of ideas the community of senior scholars is joined by a rich collection of the world's most promising junior scholars and together form a really wonderful intellectual community as part of that we offer lectures such as this seminars such as that National History Center's and other such programs you can find out more about the center and also sign up for email notification by going to our web page on the Library of Congress homepage right hand side you'll find a Kluge Center page and there at the bottom you can sign up for email notification today's lecture lecture will be introduced by Professor Roger Lewis the Kerch air and english history and culture and distinguished teaching professor at the University of Texas in Austin well known and admired for his work on the British Empire especially post-world war ii a period of decolonization he has written edited more than 30 books on the subject and is the guiding spirit both behind the National History Center's formation and also behind the seminar which he conceived funded and now Lee each year in the process he really has been able to establish decolonization as a new field within the history profession we at the library also very proud to claim professor Lewis as a he was a a kruky senior chair Kluge chair for country and cultures of the north in 2010 and he is a member of the library scholars council a group of distinguished scholars who advise the librarian on various issues so please welcome dr. Lewis who will introduce our speaker Thank You Carolina I want to acknowledge the help the assistance that we have received for many years from Carolyn Brown from the Kluge Center and the Library of Congress indispensible assistance in helping to run the seminar on decolonization we are now in our sixth year of the seminar and I want to acknowledge also the presence of the 15 seminarians we are now in the third day of getting the seminar up and going and we are especially pleased that John Darwin is giving the inaugural a lecture to the seminar because he is going to challenge the very premise on which the seminar usually operates John Darwin is going to ask whether this was such a good idea after all or at least the assumption that the old the dissolution of the old European empires resulting in the world of nations as we know it today symbolized by some 50 nations that represented the United Nations that is founding in 1945 to some 200 nations today this is usually regarded as a success story in other words the replacement of the old system of colonies with a family of Nations John Darwin according to the blurb that has been posted in the Washington Post wants to challenge this question by asking whether this detritus of the broken-down empires as a success story after all for that matter is the world of Nations even a desirable solution this would lead on to me to suggest that anarchy might be a favorable solution to what we don't have but I leave this up to John Darwin actually to argue the case what I would like to say about John is that he brings considerable authority to the subject having published several works that have been truly significant in the historiography including one on Egypt and the Empire including another book on decolonization itself but people kept wondering when is John Darwin going to publish his great work and this took quite a long time and one reason for this is that he's from Oxford so there's no reason to be any any particular hurry about this but when he did he managed to confuse everyone because he published first a book on the international economy entitled after tamerlane the global history of empire in 2007 before he published his life work on the history of the British Empire which is called the Empire project the rise and fall of the British world system which this published two years later in 2009 and people are still trying to make up their minds about which book is which and how they stand in relation to one another there is one remarkable part of John Darwin's career that I thought I might mention and that is that almost the entirety of it is has been spent in Oxford and aetna field college and one might ask the reason for this I mean one could say give us a break why don't you spend a year at Harvard perhaps even Cambridge the reason for this is a very Nuffield reason that if you happen to be at nothing you're at the very top of the world there is no reason to go anywhere else or to do anything else except to remain at neffe ode I have to say though that this is not a universal view the former Regius professor at Oxford referred to the field college as the Tibet of Oxford so what I suggest that we are going to hear this afternoon is a view from the point of view of Tibet of the Oxford of the British Empire this will be most interesting a to Batian view of the British decolonization John Darwin thank you very much I think somebody's walked off with one of my pages was it I think about known the terms of Rogers introduction to me I are awed me I would have worn a rather different set of clothes as it is of course I must begin by expressing very warm thanks to first of all the National History Center for limeys take part in this enormously successful seminar on decolonization which as Roger said has been running now for six years and also to the Kluge Center and especially Karen in brown for giving me such a warm welcome and providing me with the ideal circumstances in which to do some work was I have now to do some work in order to justify these excellent conditions mm-hmm let me begin also with to apologize one is for my bedraggled appearance this afternoon like other people here I decided to take a long hard cold shower on my way to the Library of Congress this afternoon the other apology is when I glanced around the room and see people looking rather glazed I shall attributed of course to my strange foreign accent I don't say that lightly some years ago I found myself on the Golan Heights with a party of other academics which included Russians Italians Germans Spaniards Hungarians French and when we went to see the colonel he said ask your questions so everybody did in Russian English Italian English French English Hungarian English etc there was my turn and I asked my question and the colonel said speak more clearly I don't understand your English so I had to explain that I came I was afraid for rather remote corner of the english-speaking world between Scotland and France that I would do my best now let me turn then to the subject and I'm not showing quite going to meet all Rogers expectations in terms of the challenges I'm going to throw out but it is true of course as he said that decolonization is regarded and perhaps rightly regarded as one of the foundational processes in the making of the modern world the shift from a world order dominated by great empires to what is usually described or has been described as a world of Nations and it is hard to imagine our modern world without that great transition having taken place from some 50 states in 1945 50 sovereign states 1945 to around 200 today and of course the this foundational characteristic of this process has encouraged a kind of what's my call Whig history in which the process has been seen not only as a great success but as providential inevitable and progressive indeed almost a kind of end of history in itself and not surprisingly given that there's wide agreement on its virtues a long queue of people has formed to take credit for it as usually happens as they say victory has many fathers defeat is an orphan and it seemed to be a great victory the dis orange job is not act as a kind of praise singer or court here two great processes admired by powerful people but to ask as far as he or she can fairly pressing questions and in this case perhaps there are four we might want to think about one is what vision was it which inspired what turned out to be a very particular conception of the ideal world order world of Nations what inspired that secondly how was that vision actually implemented in practice by those in whose power it was to transform the world in this fashion and that's of course not just one or two sets of people thirdly what were the consequences of creating so many new states so rapidly in a course of some 20 or 25 years after 1945 and lastly what happens when decolonization collided with that other foundational process of our modern world globalization now it's important before I go any further to say what I am NOT arguing and I do that the particular anxiety because what you didn't mention this but tomorrow the seminar will be discussing and I dare say dissecting with very sharp scalpels what I said this evening and I will need to be in a good position to defend what you may think are some of the war outrageous statements that I might make what I'm not saying is that Empire was a good thing of course to debate about how bad Empire was but that's a debate perhaps for another day it's pop perhaps not entirely of profitable debate and depends upon an extremely complex calculus but I'm not arguing that secondly I'm not arguing that de causation could or should have been delayed or prevented to try and make such an argument would be a form of second-guessing of the actors of the time which historians are quite fond of but historians aren't necessarily the best people to second-guess what are done by political actors this is one thing that might be worse than being governed by politicians it would probably be to be governed by historians thirdly I'm not arguing that decolonization has not been profoundly liberating intellectually and so morally one of the major changes which the political act of decline ization produced and certainly reinforced was of course the end of respectability of racism as an understanding the cultures of the world that change of attitude followed rather than preceded the political changes of decolonization and of course anybody who's in the store in is extremely aware of the transformative impact on the study of history itself which dekat which decolonization has brought a remarkable democratization in many ways of its concerns opening up to many different constituencies groups of people of the opportunity to assert their place in the world to discover or rediscover their identity but what I am arguing is the decolonization was not of course I either a smooth or inevitable process especially in the way it actually happened and here the question of failure perhaps is rather more pertinent there is a case to answer I think and let me suggest two five points around which one might structure such an argument consider firstly how often it was there was no smooth transfer of power from colonial rule but often a bitter war of succession think of the case cases of Korea or window China or indeed on a grand grander scale within the Middle East or in South Central Africa where the end of colonial rule was an exceptionally ragged disorganized and violent affair whether in Angola in Mozambique in what is now Zimbabwe and of course in the Congo think secondly of the extreme violence which accompanied the later stages of the transition from colonialism to decolonization especially in India of course in Algeria in Kenya in Cyprus again of course in Portuguese Angola and Mozambique although of course this was only part yes Vogl witching the colonial power and those who organize themselves against it think thirdly of the failures of institutional transfer which were understood to be a key element in decolonization the passing over from the colonial power to the decolonized state of its institutions especially its institutions of representative government the rule of law etc here India stands out as a great exception perhaps the great exception that proves the rule elsewhere where varieties of one-party rule military dictatorship often seem to be the enormous inevitable outcome after a short period of transition fourthly think of the failures of nation-building that's to say the failure to cultivate or build an adequate sense of a shared national identity in so many that the new sovereign states that covered the globe covered the map after 1947 but particularly perhaps after about 1960 and think third the fifth day I think upon think swiftly of the failures of both of economic and cultural integration which inevitably seemed to have accompanied dispatch clocking together of territories once ruled by the colonial powers in two sovereign states the question we might well ask is why was decolonization such a messy process now part of the answer I would suggest is that there was a profound failure on the part of especially those who lose power it lay to accelerate this process to really imagine the consequences of winding up Empire now perhaps this profound failure is or is not surprising nor reprehensible human affairs seem to be constantly afflicted by failures of foresight it's part perhaps of a human condition but is interesting I think to ask why this and I think the answer lies in two enormously powerful pervasive and influential assumptions which had really fused by the early post-world war two years the first is that empires were a great aberration in world history they were peculiarities they were abnormal because of they were abnormal they could be brought to an end in a way which actually advanced the health as it were of society the society national society at large and secondly an assumption that the natural state of the world was one in which units with fixed boundaries could cooperate harmoniously this was they might say the fundamental idea behind the world of nations the widest view became so influential in some ways rather puzzling it represents perhaps a kind of fusion of Marxism and nationalism as intellectual influences two gods of the 20th century which might say conspicuously failed now in fact of course if one does cast one's eye over a world history without the spectacles of nationalism and Marxism clenched on one's face what's striking is that over the long view of world history Empire has been the default mode of political organization for almost all the time and it's not in fact a very surprising statement to make and by contrast nation-states ie states that were able to fit their territory closely to a sense of ethnic identity and cultural unity were extremely rare partly because of course or the sheer difficulty of constructing such states the 20th century has been the great exception to that long history of the world and of course that changed that exceptionality of the 20th century has a great deal to do with a very peculiar set of geopolitical circumstances which favoured in a way that previously have been disfavored the creation of nation-states or States anyway with some plausible claim to be nation states of course it's true but if one casts ones eye back to the experiment in nation state building in the interwar years when after all you might say this whole process and the ideology behind it really gathered pace one month will have drawn the conclusion that here geopolitics had been profoundly influential geopolitics dictated that the great experiment in nation state building in europe would be a disastrous catastrophic and devastating failure when the rival imperialism's of the nazis and the soviet union had their way secondly if one thinks about the notion that the world was in some way naturally divided up into harmonious bounded units one might again feel that any proper scrutiny of world history would suggest something extremely different but firstly the movements of people around the world were showed that populations were not naturally fixed but actually dynamically even dangerously mobile what things only of the original movement of human beings out of africa the colonization of china the movements of Huns and long rules the great modern migrations and of course the great diasporas and migrations of our own day secondly that the world was also deeply influenced and often as who had dynamically so by the growth of empires of religion and the creation of senses of transnational allegiance which overlapped and challenged any sense of a fixed bounded ordered identity and loyalty thirdly there was the impact of pandemics and disease empires transforming the possibilities of national or ethnic survival most dramatically of course in the Americas and also in Australia mister Australasia as well as other forms of environmental which of course we are now once again becoming surgically aware of fourthly the influence of great technological innovations constantly appending cultural hierarchies and creating sometimes alarming proximity x' between peoples not used in fact to encountering each other at close quarters and consequently rate alarm as a result and since we think of the end of series as it seems of ideological tsunamis whether it's in our own more modern era of liberalism of capitalism of Marxism or thism ism in other words you might conclude we live in a and have done always in a dangerous turbulent mobile world in which boundaries and Allegiance have been very hard to face now it seems in retrospect rather extraordinary that the vision of a world of nations should be so much associated with Wilson with Woodrow T Wilson and here I lower my voice because the Woodrow Wilson collection is next door I don't want to be too disrespectful but you might have thought that of all countries in the world the country from which Wilson sprang had experienced in its making the impact of seismic population movements and of course had grown by a process of violent dispossession in short decolonization as leading to a world of nations could only be seen as a natural evolution of world history by ignoring almost everything world history had to teach so why then was it that the powerful actors of the world after 9:45 true advance down this primrose path and of course the real reason may not so much in a fundamental sense of historical change as in a series of powerful pure political imperatives let's look a bit more closely at that claim if we start first of all with those whom we might describe as the old colonial powers as to say primarily Britain and France with Belgium the Netherlands have Spain as well Portugal after 1945 it was clear that both individually and collectively they were too weak to go on sustaining an international order based upon the primacy of him Empire for the British the motive to engage in a process of political transition which culminates you might think in this form or in in decolonization was both negative and positive on the one hand the British understood by 1945 or perhaps even a year or two earlier that they were too weak to go on in particular to sustain their position as the rulers of India that's an acceptance they come to really I think in 1942 a year of catastrophic disaster for the British in the second world war with the fall of Singapore and a similar sense of weakness and impotence is what drives them out of Palestine in 1948 I had already driven them out of Burma in 1947-48 and of course drove them out of Egypt in 1954 despite the fact that in Egypt in particular the British believed that they needed to remain a powerful political and also military presence because the Middle East was still for even for an empire I might say it was beginning to find it harder and harder to sustain itself the Middle East and Britain's position in it was their great geostrategic asset but they were too weak to sustain it but there was also a positive reason for engaging in this political transition and that was to rally the moderates to the cause of a moderate constructive transition which would the British hoped and I think the French in a similar way hoped would culminate in regimes that continued to look towards Britain as their great power sponsor as their guide as their source of advice as also a source of expertise and probably to some even some limited extent of money and behind this idea of creating moderate successor States friendly to Britain sympathetic to British aims in the world they of course a deeper commitment to sustain Britain's place as a great power as far as possible enjoying some at least notional parity with the emergence superpowers man who's often regarded as the Great Architect of British decolonization especially from the late 1950s the British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan was absolutely committed to the idea that Britain as a worldwide I'd say a confederation of states only together by the idea of ideal of a Commonwealth would continually enjoy something like parity with the United States now of course in the official version of British decolonization there was a grand well-thought-out scheme or progressive transfers of power on a kind of clockwork schedule which granted greater and greater power to those colonies as they became in heavy quotation marks more politically mature in reality something different actually took place a wag once described the Habsburg monarchy as absolutism mitigated by sloth earliness in this case British policy you might say was pragmatism moderated by penet far from discovering as it were a clockwork schedule which enabled them to engage in the progressive careful carefully tabulated transfers of power the British actually found themselves engaged in a series of u-turns and Zed Benz attempting to construct Federation's then deciding they could not be sustained as in the West Indies as in Central Africa where the Central African Federation under white management was designed to be the acceptable face of a continued white presence in a decolonizing world they attempt a federation in Uganda change their mind again and abandon that and adopt instead a unitary model in Kenya as a particularly interesting case McMillan's great henchmen Ian McLeod often seen as the real technician who carried through the process of decolonization in East Africa especially was absolutely determined under no circumstances whatever that the successor to British power in Kenya was going to be Jomo Kenyatta he devised every possible stratagem to ensure this should not happen but of course as we know it was a total failure in many ways one might say the behind the grand rhetoric of progressive transfers of power according to the ability of colonial peoples to meet various meet various challenges and demonstrating their political maturity instead actually the only criterion that was really applied with any general consistency was to find a viable successor to whom to toss the keys as the British left the building now what about the superpowers well here it might say there is a story which is actually not much better if they at all the United States of course plays a very key role in decolonization in 1950 it acted to compel Netherlands or such as the current scholarly account Capel the Netherlands to give up its attempt to reimpose its power on its East Indian empire Indonesia largely because it was calculated in Washington that the regime which would replace them was likely to be anti-communist and therefore highly acceptable to Washington and therefore it should be put into power before any rivals especially a common his rival should come along to challenge it but in the case of Indochina a reverse course seemed horrible there it seemed necessary to sponsor the continuation of French power until that too collapsed under the weight of its own contradictions and then of course to engage in the division of Indochina into two regimes one of these two which would be anti-communist well certainly to sponsor those on the ground in South Vietnam who looked as if they were willing to pay this role in the Congo of course Niger States was more than winning once the dust had settled on the end of Belgian rule to sponsor of course that great hero of freedom fighting they say were Bhutto who must have compiled one of the largest fortunes of anybody in Africa Cecil Rhodes notwithstanding as far as the United Union was concerned of course you might say that once the caution or limited caution of Stalin was thrown off by Khrushchev but they didn't but mid-1950s the Soviet Union was willing to support any movement which looked as if it might help to undermine the power of the West and to crush any movement which looked as if it might undermine the power of the Soviet Union think of course of Hungary or Czechoslovakia 1956 in 1968 behind all these calculations of Britain of the United States and the Soviet Union of course they above all a sense of the overwhelming importance of confronting each other in a great Cold War it's a necessity to find successive regimes which would frustrate the designs and intrigues of the other side especially after liberation an American point of view of the Soviet side which really dictates the pace and timing and choices made in terms of successive regimes and indeed that competition between especially now by the 1970s of superpowers was intensifying right up to the moment of which Soviet power actually collapsed will certainly least into the early 1980s now it's conceivable that a smooth transition into a world of nations could have taken place in an atmosphere of consensus in which all powerful actors in the world agreed the what was necessary was a fair wind and general support for the creation of new nation-states but that of course was not the picture at all the fact that decolonization took place in a setting largely determined by a cold war was a fundamental aspect of his trajectory now you might say perhaps that all this would have mattered a little bit less had a world of nations really been waiting to be born in 1945 but of course that wasn't the case think of the two most powerful nationalist movements of the interwar years in Asia in India and in China in interwar years neither was able to fully assert its claim to govern its territory and to eject the outsider in the case of the Chinese of course because of the invasion of Japanese imperialism which set in most part after 1937 that was already there from 1931 and of course after they both acquired full sovereignty both had to accept in different measure partition of their territory elsewhere of course colonial states which were the seedbed or perhaps the perhaps that's not quite the best term but anyway the seedbeds from which these new sovereign nations were going to be sprung had of course operated in ways which in many ways quite unintentionally made it extremely hard for highly organized new states to actually emerge colonial rule in most parts of the world was an exceptionally shallow phenomenon which made little attempt to mobilize populations beyond the most limited degree required for the raising of a revenue often a rather limited revenue and for the maintenance of peace and order that was emphatically true of course in Africa where colonial states were deeply unambitious as far as aided opted any particular political strategy it had been to decentralize through the devices of indirect rule ie as far as possible decentralizing power devolving power down to differentiated ethnic groups indeed the principle of differentiation between different parts of their territory had been applied with great thoroughness mainly for pragmatic administrative reasons though not entirely consequently when colonial rule began to evaporate it was hardly surprising that a variety of rival successors appeared and he returned to our third factor when liberation came over the horizon for former colonial territories it was not just the case they were going to be those who were claimants on behalf of the whole nation a great variety of sub K months made their appearance and these were groups and people's ethnic groups sometimes for whom colonial bargain the colonial bargain which had maintained imperial rule overlaid or sustained a whole set of historic injustice --is between ethnic groups towards castes towards religions and sometimes toward classes when liberation came along therefore in the form of the end of colonial rule there were not just one but many groups of people who now sought as it were the rectification of these historic in Justices and take a very small example in what is now a Zimbabwe there were n de ballet in western Zimbabwe for whom the end of white rule offered the opportunity as it were to reclaim lost lands to reassert lost dignity to recover lost power but there are also people not far away in the Zambezi Valley for whom the immediate oppressor had not been the whites but then in the Bailee themselves they now wanted liberation from what they saw as being ended Baili domination in which the whites had been for their own reasons complicit fourthly of course it was often the case that although it had been possible to construct temporary coalition's against imperial rule colonial rule largely because cologne rule had in the in the post immediate post warriors come to seem more and more oppressive a variety of reasons we can discuss later if you would like those temporary coalition's rapidly disintegrated once it became a question not so much of evicting foreign rule but as deciding how the fruits of independence should be shared out between different groups and may even perhaps between different individuals and then 50 there is the real problem perhaps which too little attention has been given all these ex colonial states were encouraged to try and advance themselves towards what was regarded in the West as a real ideal form of nation-state the kind of nation state which had appeared especially in northwest Europe bounded territories organized governments strong senses of cultural and ethnic identity close allegiance etc yet that view ignored the fact that those nation-states in Western Europe had come about through very very unusual means and if you will know that Marlys a ver ism by Charles Tilly the state's makes war and war makes the state in other words that it had been the ways in which these states had organised themselves for their ferocious rivalries and conflicts within the copies of Europe which had so often given em both the motivation and the means to create true or something closer to a sense of true national identity to mobilize their population to ensure and to concentrate their control over their bounded territories is obidon leave the curious circumstances of frequent if not constant warfare in Europe which actually permitted this process to be carried through through a level it had reached by the 20th century but that was the one thing which acts colonial states were not able to do when deep were likely to be prevented from doing even had they wished to do it states making by wall the thing which had made Western European nation states was not an option and finally you might say it's of course worth noticing that although these kinds of difficulties and perhaps failures although failures you might think that were in many ways either inevitable certainly extremely pardonable many of these failures of nation building and state building were largely hidden in the Cold War period because during that period both sides both sides east and west were so willing to sponsor and to subsidize the power of those actually who controlled the reins of the state by whatever means usually a course through the subsidization of increasing militarism throughout the x colonial world i come now and you may say a knock for time to my last scene I'm very conscious that a needs to be plenty of time not only for questions which may need be very short but a course for the consumption of food and drink what was the impact of globalization on this decolonized world globalization of course can be thought of as a form of double revolution on the one hand a massive hike in a scale of global economic integration of flows especially of money as well as of goods around the world the double revolution because this was in many ways made possible by the defeat of the Soviet Union by the mid and late 1980s and therefore the opening up of the hitherto closed eastern bloc to international trade and to the kinds of flows I've just mentioned this had two consequences which were likely to affect the ex colonial world very deeply firstly it relieved the west of the need to go on cropping up regimes which it no longer particularly like to look off even if they were the regimes which had maintained even if only fitfully the administrative and political unity of ex colonial states but secondly it permitted the West to enforce a neoliberal economic regime often described a structural readjustment now the results of this you might say resemble perhaps a survival of the fittest that associated with an obscure biologist whose name I forget sometimes it was a case that knew a Leitz were able to consolidate power as example in Malaysia because the rewards of grading in international trade created the means for building more powerful and centralized states economic success that sense played the part perhaps of war in today's formulation but others fell apart a structural readjustment destroyed the capacities of the center to disperse patronage and maintain the power the capital over its remoter provinces thirdly in many cases neoliberal economics made the control of resources even more critical and tended perhaps on occasions if not on many occasions to accelerate as it were the tendency towards cronyism and corruption fourthly and very critically what you might call the NGO revolution also had a dramatic impact on the power of those states who are perhaps least able to resist as it were the impact of the NGO presence they were most likely to be indeed in states where state power was underdeveloped or in certain respects defective the presence of NGOs inserting international influence bypassing the structures of the existing government connecting directly with communities offering the most talented people within a society the opportunity to work at a much higher rate of pay usually for them rather than for their own government this this engineer evolution was undoubtedly propelled by powerfully idealistic motives but its impact upon the capacity of external states to build their own structures and assert effective rule is something perhaps which requires much more scrutiny than it's been so far Givens altogether you might say are harsh experience of nation-building over the last 25 or 30 years has suggested how deeply flawed have been most academic theories of that nation-building process she mostly turned out to be quite pitifully myopic and there's expertise on her own perhaps which they been deciding in discussion in a minute but one might well think that Afghanistan perhaps represents one of the most striking cases of the difficulty of nation building or whatever model the academics might an event so finally what verdict can we reach we might be inclined to say as a wag said about the French Revolution was it a success well after two hundred years it's rather too soon to tell even more so perhaps of decolonization after a mere fifty years perhaps one lesson we should draw is that our notion of decolonization does need a considerable expansion from its political limits decolonization was not just the granting of sovereignty to large numbers of new states well that of course was a key component of it it was the unraveling of a Europe centered global Imperial order in a whole number of other ways it was a transformation in particular or the international norms about the rights particularly of interference in other sovereign states which in the nineteenth century or in the Imperial era had been you might say largely ignored by those powerful enough to ignore them and extent to which that new norm has been entrenched is effected of course in the intense and ferocious debate not least in this country about the legitimacy of intervention for example particularly in Iraq but thirdly decolonization has also meant as it were the opportunity or the encouragement to achieve economic autonomy in the words a transformation from the old status of being dependence upon the imperial and also industrial and capital giving power escape from that into a wider economic freedom and the Sun extent one might say that globalization for many ex colonial territories has indeed at last performed that function it's a longer possible to see the world and remotely like it was in the old Imperial era as divided into two great classes of economically powerful and economically impotent fourthly of course declaration also appended a cultural hierarchy which had validated in particular both West European ways of doing things and had treated most other cultures and civilizations as being perhaps pretty and exotic but in the words of a very influential writer of the late nineteenth century socially inefficient it created also the opportunity to discover new notions of identity on a vast scale anybody visiting any library these days will be struck by the profusion of volumes in which the assertion or reassertion identity is a major theme and nasty of course tacoma's ation turned out to be the prelude to an enormous demographic upheaval the consequences which we have yet still to live through feud likeness it seems to me decolonization actually eludes any pedantic category of success or failure instead we should better see it as a vast spawning fact of life a huge work-in-progress with which our world must come to terms thank you very much and as you can see on poverty colonization Jess I've worked before i'm muhammad qasim and I'm retired world Bangkok but don't hold that against me I have worked in about 40 countries usually in the rural areas and I was will go there not as an economist but as a student of society why are these countries not moving what is it why this era wars and some time ago dawned on me that the legacy the Empire was not Nations was a whole bunch of conceits that there are very very few nations the empires are drawn like this I mean three prisoner Russians really what is called Afghanistan into Pakistan I mean that does not make a nation and so what you have then as you mentioned there are these tensions as a colonial power went that the ethnic groups which were hostile settle scores and you see that in Kenya you see that in now I rico's any number especially Africa and if it takes Sudan I flow of a Sardar in 55 and rubles in flames three months after independence an old and you know this is a country as big as the EU or two-and-a-half will square kilometres wealthy civilize Europeans who sadly without slaughter each other why do you expect the 200s the groups in Sudan to behave themselves so I'd like to have you exceed extend on that which is the issue of creating nations out of the colonization process and why maybe we call fragile states galore and they'll be collapsing I didn't catch why all these fragile states that have come out will probably be collapsing that's my theory right right well I mean if I had the answer to that I'm sure I'd be a great deal wealthier and yeah but I think the the the only one has to say is this that I think B it's perfectly true as you say that not everywhere but in in in many cases in many cases and I suppose in those numerous cases ours we found in Africa constructing a nation-state yes is a extraordinarily difficult task now is there any alternative that I think is the dilemma there isn't actually an alternative to which the international community really would like to give any credence to well I think what's true to say is that one of the difficulties that is faced by any successor state whether it's Sudan anywhere else is that now those sorts of processes of let's followed by the anodyne term integration which in the past took place might say to some extent in private by the powerful elements within a particular territory asserting their control dominating those groups the reconstitute or apparently unwilling to accept command from the center this could be done these forms of harassment and domination could be done without very much scrutiny from anybody and certainly nobody in a position to interfere with what you were doing the problem for many states in the world now we might say of course there must be scrutiny human rights matter you can't allow a state ID to sit on to oppress people within its territory but if it doesn't oppress someone if it permits international supervision to intervene in the way in which its affairs are conducted then it remains in a kind of political stasis which is unable to actually reach any resolution between those different groups within its territory so I think in some ways of course some states have managed to do this after the I of the world and some have managed to do it by more subtle means party because perhaps they'd been blessed with the resources to do it money is a great lubricator in these things party perhaps because the ethnic divisions and differences have been more amenable to some form of a Grange menteur settlement but where they really aren't amenable in that way and where you are compelled to conduct your state building activities in the full glare of publicity and with the constant threat as it seems to these such governments or the external intervention it's very hard to see how you can actually move forward if that's the right term to you so I don't think there's any very good on that front thing um okay it is alright howdy I'm cursory I am an intern with congressman Duncan Hunter Sophos I'm a student at George Washington University my question for you is Professor Darwin is would you consider Rhodesia to be the ultimate failure in decolonization because when it was finally decolonized in 1980 it was the wealthiest economy in Africa it had the as Ian Smith wrote in his memoirs the happiest black faces in the continent and that's his own words and he described all this infrastructure and how basically it was of a strong equivalent almost to a first world economy and how it's completely collapsed into being the trash pit of the world essentially would you consider that to be the greatest failure and how that could be in how could the lesson of the collapse of now Zimbabwe to be lessons for future developments in the form of decolonized world thank you well I think there two interesting things about about the Zimbabwe case and I think unfortunately the competition to be the worst example of what happens is rot is rather a hot one so I don't know whether you really necessarily can award the prize to Zimbabwe but what does in Barberie case does show is that one of the theories about who was likely to perform best coming out of colonial rule as in this case been disproved because there was an assumption that those territories which had had an elaborate infrastructure built up by a substantial in this case white population of population you know several hundred thousand yeah but this would enable an incoming state to have a very substantial you might say inheritance or endowment to build upon and that where they might say passionately came to terms with the those who remain behind on this population of settlers who used the commandeer a significant economic resources though this would actually be to the general benefit of the population now why does in barbra case turn so sour because that was the assumption made on independence in 1980 that will gobby would act as a workhorse rationally he would deploy this infrastructure to make zimbabwe a very successful commercial economy and he would acknowledge the value even he didn't like them of the sentence as contributors commercial why didn't he do that well to some extent you might say the other side of the coin in the cases in Barbie was that the process of building a guerrilla force a Liberation Army as absolute would be termed by those that part in it to overthrow a white rule was the process which first of all created a great deal of a capacity of force and secondly of course it created a very widespread sense of entitlement and that is something which those who inherited a colonial state peaceably did not face in the same way you didn't have a great guerrilla army to whom you owed your power then you didn't have to give away so many rewards whereas Mugabe found himself in a position I think in which the demands of those who had a powerful sense of entitlement ultimately could not be ignored not least in the situation in which he also of course confronted ethnic division between them Shawna Shawna with who from whom he derived most of this particular base on one hand and the Ender Bailey in the west of the country on the other so you actually have a cross-cutting of two very destabilizing phenomena on the one hand entitlement on the other the need to consolidate his ethnic base against the challenge posed especially by in debating and in debating politicians the famous dance indeed indeed exactly thank you yeah indeed yeah I mean Maga be exactly Mugabe know whether he exaggerated or North he certainly believed that his regime was by no means safe sound and secure so I think that's I know if you were asking how has one explaining this tragedy of Zimbabwe I think those two elements seemed to me to be amongst the most powerful and determinative at the office smaller very sad outcome it seems to me that the whole notion of human rights developed and you can tell me if I'm wrong or came became very strong at the same time that decolonization was happening that it's identified with the formation of the UN and I'm guessing that the NGO movement maybe is a element of that a implementation of a sort of philosophical notion can you say something about the relationship to those two and why the the notion that you have to do your evil in secret because for generations you just cut people's heads off the middle of the street and people thought it was normal so how did this notion of human rights how does that intersect with decolonization well that's a very good question I mean it's what is interesting is that if you look at the United Nations charters as the point made of course by Mark Bazar and that I think expended recent book appears no enchanted palace if you look at the United Nations Charter prepared with the Covenant of the League of Nations 1919 whereas the League covenant in 1919 has a great deal about minorities and much of the as it were the efforts of international organization in the interwar years has put into this question of how you safeguard minorities it's becomes a becomes a very very powerful rhetorical question it influences the way the British talk about for example their rule in India they're talking about a great deal of stuff about minorities in that compare that with United Nations Charter and it really is quite uninterested in minorities and indeed the whole question of casing or protecting minorities was not something which appealed very much to those who contemplated the building of new sovereign states out of the detritus of Empire because of course they saw that especially if it's going to be policed by the international community as Empire by the back door in other words of the old imperial powers or the new imperial powers would intervene under the guise of protecting minorities in order to restore the political authority which they'd given away with one hand they were now going to take back with the other now what I think you're absolutely right about is that some point rather after as it were the onset of decolonization and this notion of the universality of human rights does begin to take off of course you have the Universal Declaration of Rights going back to 1940 is do you have the European notions of you know civil rights as well which develop and get institutionalized in 40s and 50s but you can see that this is only really rather a kind of shadow on the horizon right through the 1950s into the early 60s if you look at the way in which lawyers especially those lawyers especially concerned with the building of new states the lawyer is attached to Cologne office in London or other people who operate in this not necessary under government employer but if within this or the world their notion of what constitutes human rights is really pretty underdeveloped and there's very little sense of how you actually going to apply it properly so it's something which really begins some time in perhaps even in the later 1960s is and begins to take off and maybe not unconnected with movements of course in this country which in many ways set a kind of standard for an offer a method for how human rights can be promoted to the idea of civil rights of course I think the to sort of merge into each other so it's actually a development which occurs rather after decolonization really gets going and in some ways as I've tested in my talk there is a sort of implicit conflict between the pursuit of human rights by outside as it were bodies and agencies on the one hand and you might say the project of decolonization on the other and it's not one which is possible to see any easy way of resolving hi I'm Kimberly Moxley from the University of Georgia and I was just wondering about the how resources affect development of sovereignty and decolonization specifically resources can be sort of a blessing because they can bring economic economic stimulus to a country but when countries are trying to develop their own sense of sovereignty their own sense of self and power they not only have to deal with Western countries trying to come in to help develop resources to fill their own needs but they also have to deal with corporations coming in and putting out their own branches of control I guess we've most famously seeing this with blood diamonds and corporations like that so how do you think decolonized states can balance this sort of need for economic inclusion in the global market and a need to develop their own sovereignty the as you say very often it depends upon the particular strategic situation of a given country some countries have been able to assert very effectively state sovereignty over their resources and to compel outsiders to pay fairly heavily for the privet of exploiting those resources sometimes of course that payment does not flow necessarily into the state coffers if they flow into other people's purses but certainly it's I think one of the characteristics of even the early decolonization period was the way in which international business found it necessary to make to cut a deal with the successor regimes in order to as it were insert themselves into these states and many ways find it not that difficult so often because for all the rather than to farias reasons that we know about it was often quite easy to persuade somebody somewhere in that successive regime to make life easy for you the real challenge of course is for a former colonial territory a decolonized country to maximize the domestic benefit of engaging in this globalizing economy of our own time without losing control over its resources or seeing them effectively annexed by some multinational corporation who if left unconstrained have very little incentive to as it were returned very much to that country well it's the form of training or whether it's in a form of building infrastructure etc etc now whether as a state you're able to make a good deal with a such a corporation and preserve your control does seem to me so often to depend upon all sorts of variables one of which is your own size your own wealth the extent to which you yourself deploy significant economic expertise significant managerial expertise to actually hold such corporations to account rather than be run rings down by them and the other course is that cyclical factor which is so variable whether the commodity which you are happen to be strong in commands a very high price in the world of today it might be oil but as we know the price of them as everything else the price of copper all these commodities go up and down many them are very up at the moment for all sorts of reasons but I think so there's no one who'll it seems and all sorts of complexities and difficulties about carrying us off that is I suppose the story or the hope the general problem of economic development in such basis James saying you spoke about how the history had defeated the expectations of the D colonizers in the decolonized are there any examples where in fact the expectations were met reasonably well of course in the case of the South Asian subcontinent I mean decolonization engulfed it in a vast human tragedy but I would think that although there are there as qualifications to be made that most observers would agree that if there's one X colonial territory which has been able to build institutions which actually empower its populations to a considerable extent preserve the rule of law and create as it were something like as it were a an environment in which individual merit and talent can find it's novel then probably India would be seen as meeting many of those criteria and how we all know how there are enormous number of qualifications remain about that but so there are bigger body and after all we mustn't I think behave as all talk as though it's the case that countries of the former imperial world somehow have an unblemished record in all these respects I I come from the country which is rather good at scandals particularly one at the moment this has been a presentation of the Library of Congress visit us at loc.gov

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Published: Fri Sep 02 2011