10

decolonisation and empire

john kent

The transitions that the world has undergone, and is still undergoing
since 1945, have seen a new interest in ‘empire’. Since the end of the cold
war the unilateral exercise of American power under the second Bush
administration in particular has been included in the ‘empire’ debate.1
The fact that some conservative American commentators are beginning
to regard the idea of an American empire and the exercise of American
power with a degree of satisfaction and pride has distracted attention
from the ways in which the old European empires were dismantled after
1945 and the changes that were thus produced. Although authors like
Michael Doyle continue to analyse the roles of maritime empires,2 land-
based empires of former days now play a more prominent role in imperial
literature. The rise and decline of great powers and their empires is more
connected to hard power factors – military and economic power – and
the nature of European decolonisation and soft power elements have
been marginalised.
Paradoxically this has been done more with regard to the cold war, and
in misleading orthodox ways, than with an emphasis on the accompanying
decline of twentieth-century European empires. Despite the fact that the
transfer of power, in the sense of political and administrative control,
was generally accompanied by a French and British desire to retain
influence – a lesser manifestation of power – ideology and ideas have
been underplayed. In other words decolonisation was initially connected
to a wish to continue exercising power on the international stage as geo-
strategic concepts intermingled with the ideology of the cold war and
concerned policy-makers grappling with the ending of European empires.
As the early cold war began transforming the international system, and
before the more aggressive US policy began in 1948, decolonisation was
only partially in evidence. It was only later in the decolonisation process

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S. R. Dockrill et al. (eds.), Palgrave Advances in Cold War History
© Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited 2006
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in the 1950s and 1960s that the exercise of power, regarded more and
more as influence through the usage of a softer form, came to dominate
and the cold war became more intimately connected to decolonisation.
This process was primarily a phenomenon associated with the British and
French (although each were influenced by very different colonial and
imperial traditions as well as by different administrative practices) and
the British aim was also to gain a special place in the American empire,
unlike the French.3
Both the United States and the Soviet Union during the wartime alliance
had been opponents for different reasons of European empires and the
possession of colonies. Autarchic trading blocs were not welcomed by
American capitalism whatever their ideological hue but such sentiments
applied specifically to colonies were disappearing even before Franklin D.
Roosevelt’s death in April 1945.4 In recent history, the informal empire of
the United States, along with that of the Soviet Union, have been linked
to the elements of hard power that preceded the cold war years in which
the European empires collapsed. The standard hard power framework
analysed in the cold war has been one of a bipolar competitive world
of the superpowers with their nuclear weapons and arms acquisition.
As such with less emphasis on soft power, the superpowers can be more
aptly compared with the old pre-war empires in terms of their acquisition
of territories and political domination. When it comes to the processes
that produced the abandonment of European empires after the Second
World War the hard power explanation of decolonisation and cold war
is certainly less persuasive and re-enforced by the collapse of the Soviet
Union. During the latter stages of decolonisation the role of empires, the
British in particular, was much less defined by the means of control and
the exploitation of resources as features of power. Imperial powers are
now having to adjust to a relative lack of such hard power capabilities.
Even as early as the end of the Second World War, empires, in their most
obvious forms of economic exploitation and political domination, that
were projecting ‘power in the world’ were no longer regarded as acceptable
parts of the international system. They therefore had to contribute
to increasing the state’s power and status within the international
community in some other way – influence in less tangible and concrete
forms. Yet they were to some extent reprieved by the onset of the cold
war, even if the latter is interpreted primarily as an ideological conflict, as
opposed to a geo-strategic battle featuring nuclear weapons and economic
resources. The debates over the nature and meanings of empires and
European decolonisation are clearly associated with and inseparable from
the cold war world which had to deal with the new states produced by