If Stalinism can be considered as an aberration of the democratic socialist revolution of 1918, then the surge of nationalism aimed at a 20th century imperialism in Asia, Africa and the Caribbean is the positive outcome, an inspiration for the people of the colonised world to wake up to their history and their long subjugation under the West.
Fuelled by radical Marxist thought and reinforced by the concept of counter-hegemony developed by Antonio Gramsci in his Prison Notebooks , the clarion call for egalitarianism and justice became the driving force behind resistance movements in the last century. Here in this comprehensive and balanced history of decolonisation, Jansen and Osterhammel shed a penetrating light on the “rapid transformation of the colonial empires into a plural world of sovereign states after the success of the struggle for national independence.”
For national movements to succeed, it is imperative to have a grassroots counter-hegemonic movement that jolts the empire and its ideology from below. Such a development can be both ongoing or sudden and abrupt, triggered by violence and coercion.
Gramsci’s idea of a democratic socialism focusing on the need for a civil society with its relations of autonomy and self-determination, fomented the gradual decline of the coercive, hierarchical and inflexible elements of colonial dominance.
In their emphasis on the progress of national liberation struggles in the decades after World War II, the authors are duly cognizant of the long history from the Bolshevik Revolution to the fall of the Berlin Wall and the birth of democratic socialism in many countries across the globe. This serves as a critical analysis of the far-reaching impact of Marxist thinking on the final demise of imperialism.
This process of decolonisation does not end with the success of evicting the colonisers but also incorporates the struggle to come to terms with the lingering after effects of colonisation. The authors draw attention to “Australians arguing about replacing the British monarch as their sovereign; the North Korean government setting the clock back in 2015 as a means to eradicate a legacy of Japanese imperialism; Zimbabweans arguing about disinterring and repatriating Cecil Rhodes’ remains to England; observers debating if the 2011 Tunisian revolution marked the last stage in the long decolonisation of that country.”
These responses are a step towards questioning the hegemony of colonial rule and fostering the necessary change in attitudes inculcated over a long period of subjugation. The book records the history of decolonisation after the war through a painstaking and wide investigation of the relevant literature pertaining to end of the empire. The genesis of this process lay in the aftermath of WWII that questioned the legitimation of colonial dominance, which could have been the fate of European democracies if Nazism had not been throttled. The fear cast on the European mind by Nazism had spurred the interrogation of the legitimacy of colonisation in the face of struggle for national identity.
Decolonisation, therefore, for the authors, is not merely a historical and political change, but a worldwide phenomenon that altered the very cultural exclusiveness of powerful nations.
Changing world order
Indeed, 20th century history is incomplete without the significant area study pertaining to the rise of anti-imperial opposition which regarded decolonisation as “the disappearance of empire as a political form, and the end of racial hierarchy as a widely accepted political ideology and structuring principle of world order.” The authors have focused on three broad perspectives: the imperial, the local, and the international to build a case for the necessity of delegitimising colonial suppression so as to encourage the creation of nation-states and give stimulus to human rights as fundamental to peaceful coexistence.
Jansen and Osterhammel do not fail to see a connection between the decades after World War II and the process of the dissolution of colonial empires during World War I and the new deal of nationalism arising out of it.
The war “acted as a catalyst for different developments from the interwar period,” especially the rise of anti-colonial crusades. This is ostensibly the “domino effect,” of “what happened in one part of an empire could not remain without consequences in its other parts... each of the individual empires also constituting an interactive field of forces.”
A palpable example of this is the Vietnam War, which inspired nationalist activism in French West Africa or the success of the independence of the British Gold Coast (Ghana) that spurred African students in France to spark the independence struggle of the colonies in French Africa.
This work effectively examines world politics “at the intersection of the East-West conflict and the North-South antagonism” through the intellectual inspiration found in the writings of Mohandas K. Gandhi, Aimé Césaire, Léopold S. Senghor, Frantz Fanon, Albert Memmi, Jawaharlal Nehru, Ho Chi Minh, who essentially castigated the practice of violence and racism that were “an inherent feature of colonialism as a system of rule.”
At this time when postcolonial studies in universities around the world are receiving wide attention, this rigorous yet accessible book becomes relevant to both the specialist and the general reader, especially because of its in-depth coverage of political, economic, and cultural concerns.
Decolonization: A Short History; Jan C. Jansen & Jürgen Osterhammel , Princeton University Press, ₹1,734.
