10

Breaking Empires

The Cold War was born as an ideological contest in Europe and the European offshoots, Russia and the United States. In the second half of the twentieth century that contest came to interact with the processes surrounding the collapse of the European overseas empires. Europe had been predominant in international affairs for at least two centuries. But as the post–World War II re-creation of Asia had shown, this position of primacy could no longer be taken for granted. And in the 1950s and ’60s decolonization sped up, so that by 1970 the number of independent states had increased almost four times since 1945. They all wanted to have their say in how the world was run. And they were not willing to conform to the bipolar Cold War system without a struggle for their own interests.

Out of this encounter between Cold War and decolonization came the Third World movement. It was so named by its protagonists in homage to the Third Estate, the rebellious underdog majority of the French Revolution of 1789. But its aims were very contemporary. Leaders of newly independent states, such as Indonesia’s Sukarno or India’s Nehru, believed that the time had come for their countries to take center stage in international affairs. Europeans, a small minority in the world, had dominated for far too long, and had not done a good job of it. Not only had they produced colonialism and two world wars, but within colonialism they had created a political and economic system that only served the interests of Europeans. The talents, opinions, cultures, and religions of the vast majority of the world’s people had been neglected. Now the time had come for the disenfranchised to take responsibility not just for their own liberated countries, but for the world as a whole.

To Third World leaders the Cold War was an outgrowth of the colonial system. It was an attempt by Europeans to regulate and dominate the affairs of others, to tell them how to behave and what to do. Even though many in the newly independent states distrusted capitalism because it was the system their colonial masters had tried to impose on them, in most cases they were not ready to embrace Soviet-style Communism as an alternative. It seemed far too regimented, too absolutist, or simply too European for postcolonial states. Even when attempting to learn from the Soviet experience, as many did, for instance in India or Indonesia, the Third World agenda implied independence from the power blocs. As developed at the 1955 Afro-Asian Bandung Conference, this agenda stressed full economic and political sovereignty, solidarity among former colonial countries and liberation movements, and peaceful resolution of conflict, followed by nuclear disarmament.

For the Superpowers this was a perturbing spectacle. The United States increasingly put its own national experience at the core of its perception of global development. As the Cold War hardened, countries that did not conform to US visions of liberty and economic growth were believed to be sliding toward a Soviet orientation. The Soviet Union, on its side, believed that any “third” position was simply a stage on the way to socialism and eventually the Soviet form of Communism. No wonder non-Europeans saw significant similarities between the two Superpowers, in spite of their ideological rivalry. Indeed, leaders such as Ahmed Ben Bella in Algeria or Kwame Nkrumah in Ghana compared the demands the Superpowers made on them to colonialism in its latter phase. The Americans and the Soviets wanted political and diplomatic control, but also sought development within the framework that the Superpowers could offer. They were thieves on the same market, even though the US bid for control was much more powerful, and therefore more pervasive, than anything the Soviets could muster.

THERE WERE TWO main reasons why decolonization happened on such a wide scale in the 1950s and ’60s. The first was the social and economic exhaustion of the colonizing powers. In 1910 a European man, especially if he was French or British, could still safely assume that he was on top of the global pile. He may have been poor in his own country, or felt threatened by suffragettes or revolutionaries. But it was his country that had set the global agendas for as long as he could remember. The world economic system was created to make him produce and consume. His culture and his religion were assumed to be the envy of the world. And others, who were not Christian Europeans, who did not possess the Europeans’ science or technology, or military skills, or well-honed and ruthless administrations, were seen as distinctly inferior.

Compare this with a generation later, in 1945. The European countries were exhausted by warfare and their inhabitants had themselves begun to doubt their centrality in the world. With what right did they rule others, when they could not avoid repeatedly tearing their own continent to pieces? Principles of racial superiority—at least those openly stated—now had a bad name. Hitler had seen to that. And was not the primary duty of a young Englishman or Frenchman to his own battered country, rather than to faraway places? Resources were scarce, and almost all Europeans wanted them spent at home.

The second reason for decolonization was the rebellion against foreign rule in the colonies. Although it is unlikely that any anticolonial movement would have been able to throw the Europeans out by force alone, these movements increased the cost of colonialism and made the enterprise less popular at home. Organizations such as the Indian National Congress or the South African National Congress aimed for national independence and a basic restructuring of the economy to serve the native inhabitants of their countries. They wanted their peoples to be recognized as a new driving force in world history, not as second-class citizens in their own countries.

The disasters of the two world wars and the global depression focused these movements politically and magnified their support. Until the 1920s almost all of them were minority phenomena, with leaders who had a hard time convincing their countrymen to take the risk of challenging colonial rule. But thereafter they increased in size and significance, not least because the colonial powers tried to stamp them out by force. India’s Jawaharlal Nehru had been imprisoned by the British, as had Gandhi, his political mentor. Sukarno, Ho Chi Minh, and Ben Bella all spent time in prison and exile. They became heroes to their peoples, and their anticolonial rhetoric began to be picked up by many young men and women, often from prominent families, often trained at the best European or American colleges.

These processes of retrenchment and resistance had been underway since the start of the century, although they came to the fore after 1945. The Cold War influenced both, though it did not determine them. The global economic restructuring, which gradually privileged the United States, was an important factor in the collapse of formal empires. So was the Soviet support for liberation movements and the radicalization of some of them due to the Soviet example. But most important was the Cold War at home in Europe, the need for Britain and France to strengthen their own defense, to align with the United States, and the fear, especially in France, that long-term disorder in the colonies would contribute to radicalization at home. By the early 1960s, when the focus for the Cold War was shifting to the Third World, the conflict had already for a long time played itself out both among colonizers and colonized.

The history of how the Cold War influenced decolonization in economic terms is strange and somewhat incongruous. British and French high imperialist ideology of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century had been built on the prospect of improvement for all inhabitants of their empires, and implied a move away from the naked exploitation of earlier years. But wars and depression had made the metropoles more dependent on their colonies in economic terms, not less. They therefore attempted to reconstitute some of the mechanisms that would favor the Europeans, but found it difficult to do. Imperial preference systems counted not only as key examples of what the Americans thought was wrong with colonialism—restrictions against free trade and US access to foreign markets—but they also alienated indigenous elites who had taken the imperial reformers at their word. But on the whole these measures did not correspond to changing global realities. The United States and other countries, rather than Britain and France, were gradually becoming more important for economic development in the colonies. Meanwhile, economic cooperation and trade in western Europe was becoming more important for the British and French. It was a discordance that could not last.

The role of the United States was crucial in the process of decolonization during the Cold War. Most Americans believed that colonialism was a bad thing. The country had won its own independence in a rebellion against Britain. Colonial control meant less freedom and free trade, both concepts that Americans cherished. But most white Americans also suspected that nonwhites were not capable of governing themselves unless assisted by people of European origin. This fear increased during the first phase of the Cold War. With another Superpower vying for their attention, Washington was terrified that postcolonial leaders, easily tempted, would fall into the Soviet bloc. Anticolonial instincts would therefore have to be tempered by Cold War concerns in US foreign policy.

US support was the main reason why the European colonial empires did not all collapse in the 1940s, but went on for another two (or, in the Portuguese case, three) decades. After 1945, no European country was financially capable of keeping its colonial possessions given the poor state of their own economies and their defense needs in Europe. The chimera of colonialism could only be continued as long as the United States was willing to underwrite these countries’ other expenses at home. All of the colonial countries were of course aware of this, and did their best to present their reluctance to decolonize as part of a common struggle against Communism. US policy-makers, getting used to working with their western European allies in NATO committees and other international organizations, far too rarely questioned the motives of their partners. Washington’s own anti-Communist focus mostly overrode its anticolonialism, except in cases where it was blatantly obvious that failing to decolonize would stimulate Communist groups, such as in Indonesia and India. When the British falsely claimed that the Kenyan nationalist Jomo Kenyatta was controlled by Communists, or when the French claimed the same for Guinean leader Sékou Touré, the Americans did not protest, even though their own intelligence agencies told them that it was untrue.

Both during the Truman and the Eisenhower Administrations, the Americans were also wary of contributing to the loss of prestige that letting go of their colonies would lead to for the European powers. Such a development could threaten stability in Europe and make the western Europeans less effective in helping to fight Communism both on their own continent and on a global scale. The fact that these governments were completely dependent on US loans did not make things better. It rather made them worse. The British and French resented the supplication and subservience to the United States that their economic weakness had led to, and suspected the Americans of having their own designs on their overseas territories. Impoverished at home, empire still made them great powers. Britain without empire was only “a sort of poor man’s Sweden,” as one British colonial administrator put it.¹

Still, the writing was on the wall for the European empires after 1945. Even with significant US support, the combination of economic weakness at home and rising resistance in the colonies determined the outcome. The governments in Britain and France that completed decolonization were not of the socialist Left. They were the British Conservatives, led by Winston Churchill, Anthony Eden, and Harold Macmillan, and the French nationalist Right-wing government of Charles de Gaulle. They regretted the loss of the colonies but realized they had no choice. As the last British governor-general of Nigeria, Sir James Robertson, viewed it in 1959: “The trouble is that we have not been allowed enough time; partly this is because we are not strong enough now as a result of two world wars to insist on having longer to build up democratic forms of government, partly because of American opposition to our idea of colonialism by the gradual training of people in the course of generations to run their own show: partly because of dangers from our enemies, the Communists, we have had to move faster than we should have wished.”²

On the US side, an increasingly global military strategy and the need to facilitate access to key resources and raw materials were big concerns in the decolonization process. US leaders increasingly saw their country as engaged in a worldwide campaign against Communism and responsible for building global capitalist structures that worked well. A US network of military bases was necessary in this struggle, as was securing the availability of resources for the economic rebuilding of western Europe and Japan. By 1960, the United States had global access to bases that furthered its military superiority, and many of these came courtesy of the colonial powers. In addition to the British and French stations around the world that the United States could use in case of war, it leased its own bases in colonial territories from Ascension Island to the Azores and Bermuda. French-controlled Morocco had a US base. And Diego Garcia, a British-held island in the Indian Ocean, remained British after decolonization, mainly so that a massive US military base could be constructed. The 1,200 people who already lived on Diego Garcia were evicted.

Throughout the Cold War US leaders were concerned that the Soviets would be able to control, directly or indirectly, the raw materials on which America’s allies depended for their economic well-being. Such fears were a main reason why radical Third World nationalism, which included proposals for economic nationalization, production planning, and export restrictions, was conflated with Communism or Soviet influence. The Cold War in resource terms was about absolute control. Anything that assisted the enemy in getting an influence over vital resources in strategic or economic terms was a challenge to the United States. This was of course particularly true for access to metals vital for the military industry. In the 1940s the most significant of these was uranium, used to produce nuclear weapons. The United States tried to get exclusive access to uranium ore from Belgian-ruled Congo and from South Africa, although it soon became clear that the metal was so scattered in occurrence that monopolizing access was very hard.

The most important strategic resource during the Cold War was oil. The first half of the twentieth century had seen its rise from a minor source of energy to becoming the substance that made modern states work. Armies depended on it for transport, and civilian economies depended on it for production. The Soviet Union became self-sufficient in 1954, so it was not competing with the West for access to foreign oil for its own sake. But the post-Stalin Moscow leaders knew how dependent US allies were on oil imports for their economic development. In western Europe dependence on oil for energy consumption increased from less than 10 percent in 1945 to over a third in 1960. In Japan the figures were even more striking: from 6 percent to 40. Eight-five percent of western Europe’s imports came from the Middle East already by 1950. For the United States, which up to 1970 relied primarily on its own production for domestic use, controlling access to Middle Eastern oil was therefore still of major strategic importance.

The main oil producers in the Middle East were Iran, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, and the Gulf states. These were all countries in which Britain had been the predominant foreign power in the first part of the twentieth century. With British power waning, British-led oil companies were struggling to hold on to their positions. In Iran, for example, nationalists were pushing for more of an Iranian stake in the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (AIOC), the biggest producer in the country, which operated the world’s largest oil refinery at Abadan. Even though both profit-sharing arrangements and working conditions for Iranians were blatantly unfair, AIOC and the British government refused to change them. The result was the election of a nationalist government in Iran, led by Mohammed Mossadegh, committed to the nationalization of the oil industry.

At first, US advice to the British was to compromise. In Saudi Arabia, where the Arabian-American Oil Company (ARAMCO) was the main producer, the US government had successfully pushed for a 50/50 percent sharing of profits between the Saudi monarchy and the American owners. But neither the Iranians nor the British accepted the US proposals. Instead, the conflict intensified. On 1 May 1951 the Iranian Majlis, the national assembly, voted to nationalize the oil industry, with compensation for current owners. The British initiated an embargo on Iranian oil and appealed to the United States for support. London argued that nationalization of Iranian oil entailed a strategic danger to the West. In the wings of Tehran politics, they claimed, waited the powerful Iranian Communist party, the Tudeh, which would benefit politically from the nationalization campaign.

The Truman Administration hesitated, though it was increasingly won over by some of the British arguments. Even so, Iranian prime minister Mossadegh was no Communist. He had been a staunch critic of the Soviet occupation of northern Iran, and attacked the Tudeh on that issue in 1944, saying that “if you claim to be Socialist, then why are you ready to sacrifice the interest of your own country for the sake of Soviet Russia?”³ But Washington worried about long-term effects and about instability in the region. As the embargo started having severe economic effects inside Iran, opposition to Mossadegh grew. His response was to suspend the Majlis, and to rely increasingly on the Iranian Left, including the Tudeh, for the support of his policies.

The Eisenhower Administration decided to join with Britain in a covert operation to remove Mossadegh’s government. Using contacts in Iran as well as paid agents, the CIA organized a stream of misinformation and staged rallies. In some cases the CIA paid Iranians to pose as Tudeh members attacking Islamic preachers or the advisers of the monarch, the Shah. The purpose was both to create unrest on the streets and to unify the conservative opposition against Mossadegh: the Shah, the Islamic clergy, and the military. The stage-managed coup, which came in August 1953, almost failed when the young Shah, Reza Pahlavi, lost his nerve and fled the country. But the military stepped in, arrested Mossadegh, and crushed the Tudeh party. Pahlavi flew back to Tehran accompanied by the US director of central intelligence, Allen Dulles. For the next twenty-six years the Shah ruled Iran as an autocrat, closely allied with the United States.

In spite of US skepticism about British motives, the Iran coup had seen the two countries closely aligned. They had also been working together over the British-declared “emergency” in Malaya, where British forces from the late 1940s battled and defeated a Communist-led workers’ rebellion. While the United States supported Britain’s warfare in Malaya, Washington stepped up its own campaign against a Left-wing rebellion in the Philippines. In spite of US protestations against colonialism, the Philippines had in reality been held as a colony by the United States since 1898. During the Japanese occupation, the Philippine Left had carried out the bulk of the resistance struggle and, when the war was over, campaigned for a fairer deal for peasants and workers. Granted their independence from the United States in 1946, Philippine leaders refused the Left’s demands. Later US forces and the Philippine army fought a rebellion by the People’s Liberation Army, the Huks. But by 1954 both the Malayan National Liberation Army and the Huks had been defeated.

It was Western intervention in the processes of setting up new independent states that gave rise to the Third World movement. Anticolonial activists only gradually began using the term, until the Martinican activist Franz Fanon popularized it in his book The Wretched of the Earth in 1961. But its contents were visible much before: the belief that non-Europeans now had the primary responsibility not just for their own countries, but for the future of the world. The idea that solidarity among newly decolonized states would create a power bloc out of the world’s majority peoples. And the concept that the Cold War showed how arrogant, irresponsible, and out-of-touch with global developments the United States and its European allies were. The Soviet bloc came in for criticism as well. But it was the Eisenhower Administration that bore the brunt of Third World ire.

The Afro-Asian conference in Bandung, Indonesia, in 1955 became a focus point for Third World ideas. The Bandung Conference had a long pedigree. Since the early twentieth century anticolonial activists had been gathering across borders to create transnational networks of resistance. By the 1950s a number of key leaders had a transnational background: the Martinican Fanon fought French colonialism in Algeria, and the Trinidadian George Padmore played an important role in the creation of Ghana as an independent country. But at Bandung the new states were in focus. In his opening speech, Sukarno stressed the responsibilities the postcolonial states had to work together, defeat colonialism, and prevent nuclear war. “We are often told ‘Colonialism is dead,’” the Indonesian president told his audience from twenty-nine different countries and even more nationalist parties and liberation movements.

Let us not be deceived or even soothed by that. I say to you, colonialism is not yet dead. How can we say it is dead, so long as vast areas of Asia and Africa are unfree.… Colonialism has also its modern dress, in the form of economic control, [and] intellectual control.… War would not only mean a threat to our independence, it may mean the end of civilization and even of human life. There is a force loose in the world whose potentiality for evil no man truly knows.… No task is more urgent than that of preserving peace. Without peace our independence means little. The rehabilitation and upbuilding of our countries will have little meaning. Our revolutions will not be allowed to run their course.⁴

Those who met at Bandung came from very different backgrounds. China was represented by the smooth premier Zhou Enlai, though others kept the Chinese at arms’ length because of their close alliance with the Soviets. Iran, Iraq, Turkey, and Japan attacked what they saw as anti-American views at the conference. But the main countries in terms of the dynamism of their leaders and their role within their regions were Indonesia, India, and Egypt. Their views had a decisive impact on the final communiqué, which stressed human rights, sovereignty, nonintervention, and resistance against Great Power domination. And their leaders—Sukarno, Nehru, Nasser—hoped that Bandung was just the first step in setting up cooperation among postcolonial states as an alternative to the Cold War.

The spirit of Bandung got its first test in the Middle East in the summer of 1956. At the head of a new radical military government, Egyptian leader Gamal Abdel Nasser was frustrated by fruitless negotiations with the Americans over loans. He resented that Egypt, long under British domination, still was forced to accept substantial foreign influence. Nasser wanted the Suez Canal, bisecting his country, to revert from British and French to Egyptian control, not least so that Egypt could benefit more from the substantial income from the canal. The United States urged negotiations. When London and Paris both declined, Nasser seized control of the canal zone in a sudden military operation on 26 July 1956. The Egyptian code word for the immediate start of the operation, cleverly woven into a lengthy Nasser speech in Alexandria, was Lesseps—the name of the French engineer who had designed the canal in the 1860s.

In his Suez speech, Nasser summed up the injustices imperialism had committed not only against Egypt, but against all Arabs. Arabs had been second-class citizens in their own countries; they had been divided, or evicted, like the Palestinians. But no longer. In a speech laden with references to Bandung and anticolonial solidarity, Nasser declared a new Arab unity, of which Egypt and Syria would form the initial parts, but which all Arab states could join. “Since Egypt has declared its free and independent policy, the entire world has its eyes fixed on Egypt,” Nasser said. “Everyone takes account of Egypt and the Arabs. In the past we were wasting our time in the offices of [foreign] ambassadors…, but today, after we are united to form a single national front against imperialism and foreign intervention, those who disdained us began to fear us.”⁵

The British and the French reacted with fury. To British prime minister Anthony Eden, Nasser was another Hitler, or at least a Mussolini. Together with the Israelis, London and Paris came up with a harebrained conspiracy, by which Israel would first invade Egypt. Then the British and French would intervene, claiming to separate the warring sides. Finally, as a simple addition, they would retake the Suez Canal. The Israelis went into action 29 October 1956, just as—in another theater—the Hungarian crisis reached its peak. French and British forces invaded Egypt on 5 November. With fighting in the canal zone, the crisis escalated. President Eisenhower was enraged. He had been kept completely in the dark about the plans of his allies, and now felt that he had “just never seen great powers make such a complete mess and botch of things.”⁶ Particularly after the removal of Mossadegh, Washington was eager to avoid being seen as an opponent of nationalism in the region. This was especially true for the Arab countries, where the CIA feared that any display of British and French colonialism would give the local Communists a leg up against more “healthy” nationalist forces.⁷

The United States demanded an immediate cease-fire and the withdrawal of all foreign troops. The president let the British know that if they did not comply, the Americans would refuse to sell or transport oil to them, much more important now that the Suez Canal was closed, and cancel further loans to prop up the flagging British economy. When Eden hesitated, the US Treasury hinted that they might start selling British pounds, thereby further weakening a currency already in near free fall. Eden and his French colleague Guy Mollet, threatened by similar measures, capitulated and withdrew. The Israelis, chastised by the US president in ways that shocked Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion, followed a few months later. They only complied after Eisenhower had gone public with his complaint. In a television address to the American people, the president asked whether “a nation which attacks and occupies foreign territory in the face of United Nations disapproval [should] be allowed to impose conditions on its own withdrawal? If we agree that armed attack can properly achieve the purposes of the assailant, then I fear we will have turned back the clock of international order.”⁸

There were many reasons for Eisenhower’s fury. His sense of betrayal after not having been informed by his allies was strong. The United States, after all, saw itself as the leader of the “free world.” Eisenhower suspected that the invaders had timed their operation to coincide with the US presidential vote, in which he was seeking reelection, thereby hoping for a weaker US response. The co-incidence with the Soviet invasion of Hungary also jarred, since it invited people across the world to compare the two actions. Eisenhower’s assistants feared that the attack on Egypt would make it easier in the future for the Soviets to gain a foothold in the Middle East. But the most important concern was the European powers’ willingness to sacrifice larger Cold War interests to achieve short-term, narrow, national gain. For Eisenhower this was a deadly sin, since it, in his mind, deflected from the purpose for which the United States was fighting the Cold War.

The outcome of the Suez crisis was also manifold. It made it abundantly clear, if further confirmation was needed, that Britain and France could no longer take independent action in foreign affairs against the will of the United States. For both countries this was a visible setback for national prestige, even though the realities of the matter had been clear for more than a decade. But Suez also showed that public opinion in the postcolonial world counted, and, as with Hungary, there was a price to pay for displaying naked power too openly. Speaking to the Indian parliament, Nehru summed it up: “The use of armed forces by the big countries, while apparently [achieving] something, it has really showed its inability to deal with the situation. It is the weakness which has come out.”⁹ With characteristic panache, Nehru told them, “The greatest danger which the world is suffering from is this Cold War business. It is because the Cold War creates a bigger mental barrier than the Iron Curtain or brick wall or any prison. It creates barriers of the mind which refuses to understand the other person’s position, which divides the world into devils and angels.”¹⁰

After Suez, decolonization sped up, both because of further British and French weakness and because it had become increasingly clear that the future for the two countries lay in Europe and in the transatlantic alliance, not in Africa or Asia. France had been forced out of Indochina in 1954 and was fighting a colonial war in Algeria that was going badly and attracted unwelcome American criticism. Elsewhere the French withdrew reluctantly. The governments of the Fourth Republic were caught among competing priorities: Being anti-Communist (while also wanting to appear radical); resenting US domination (while also fearing US abandonment); and embracing European integration (while also fearing a drop in French independent power and prestige). The French governments wanted US support, and therefore reported on the threat of Communism in independence movements from Senegal to Madagascar to Tahiti. But they also feared that the United States was out to replace France in its former colonies. French intellectuals denounced US imperialism, while some of them found it hard to abandon France’s own colonialism, which—by strange twists of terminology—was supposed to be more moral, involved, committed, and “authentic” than any other. France knew Africa; the Americans did not, was an often underlined perception in French newspapers. But the subtext—that “knowledge” entitled continued exploitation—was as little said out loud in Paris as in London.

Some Frenchmen and other Europeans, and a smaller number of Africans, believed that the colonial empires could still somehow be transformed from within. They believed in an integrationist form of a British Commonwealth or Union française, where democratic values and the culture of the metropolitan state could be embraced by the former colonials, creating what some Parisian intellectuals called Eurafrique. Everyone, regardless of race, would be a citizen with equal rights, the argument went. The closeness of the colonizers and the colonized was substantially greater than among different countries in Europe. Why should progressives support European integration, while encouraging disintegration overseas? Not understanding that it was much too late for such an argument, the French Communists, for instance, went through considerable political contortions on the issue. The French Communist Party (PCF) wanted to see the “liberation” of the colonies, but not their separation from France. “The right to divorce is not followed by the obligation to divorce,” declared PCF leader Maurice Thorez.¹¹

For the main leaders in the colonized world in the 1950s and ’60s, the issue was not promises of future integration but decolonization and anticolonial solidarity. The issue of race was essential. Colonialism was in its essence a racist project, and the lack of US support for full decolonization reminded many Third World leaders of racial oppression against African-Americans in the United States. But the European Left was also to blame. In his 1956 resignation from the PCF, whom he had been elected to represent in the National Assembly ten years earlier, the black Martinican writer Aimé Césaire castigated the Eurafrique idea: “Look at the great breath of unity passing over all the black countries! Look how, here and there, the torn fabric is being re-stitched! Experience, harshly acquired experience, has taught us that we have at our disposal but one weapon, one sole efficient and undamaged weapon: the weapon of unity, the weapon of the anticolonial rallying of all who are willing, and the time during which we are dispersed according to the fissures of the metropolitan parties is also the time of our weakness and defeat.”¹²

Nowhere was the weapon of unity more tested than in the Algerian struggle for liberation. Different from the British case, where all colonies (except, some people would say, Ireland, Scotland, and Wales) were far away overseas, Algeria was linked with France by the Mediterranean. The country had been invaded by the French in the 1830s, and by the late 1950s had around 1.2 million European settlers in a total population of eight million. Anticolonial rebellions had been frequent, and the National Liberation Front (FLN) began a campaign of armed struggle against the French in 1954. The French government responded with a massive anti-guerrilla operation, during which atrocities were committed on both sides. At its peak, France kept half a million soldiers in Algeria, most of whom could be paid only because of US support for the government in Paris. Even so, the operation did not succeed in rooting out the FLN, which by 1957 controlled significant parts of the country.

In May 1958 a military coup by French officers in Algiers threatened to split not just Algeria, but France as well. The officers, and the settlers who supported them, insisted that there could be no negotiations with the FLN. They demanded that General Charles de Gaulle, unconstitutionally, return as French president. To underline their military power, the rebels took control of Corsica and threatened to march on Paris. De Gaulle, who had been out of power since 1946, returned as the savior of the (French) nation, declaring his anti-Communism and his commitment to keeping Algeria a part of France. But even if given near dictatorial powers, he could do little to change the tide of the Algerian war.

De Gaulle spent four years trying to keep Algeria French. In the end he failed because the Cold War priorities of the United States had little time for France’s last colonial war. On the contrary, the Americans found de Gaulle difficult and suspected his war to be lost already. The FLN conducted very skillful diplomatic offensives, in which they challenged the anticolonial credentials of the United States. Why would a nation itself born in a struggle against empire not condemn the French occupation of Algeria? De Gaulle struck back at Washington’s hesitation, declaring that France would have to acquire its own nuclear weapons, since the United States and the Soviet Union were obviously out to divide the world between them, and diminish France. The Eisenhower Administration did not think de Gaulle could afford to break with the West, but worried about the impact its alliance with France had elsewhere. “As long as the Algerian conflict continues,” a National Security Council study concluded in 1959, “France will be a liability in U.S. relations with the Afro-Asian bloc, as well as in the Middle East.”¹³

The British Conservative government, which had sworn never to abandon the British Empire, ended up giving eight countries independence between 1958 and 1962. In most cases the process was peaceful, even though the new postcolonial governments often found it difficult to sustain their authority. Ghana had been the first African colony to gain independence, in 1957. There, the charismatic nationalist leader Kwame Nkrumah became the first prime minister, though Nkrumah was keen on getting a more prominent place in the liberation of Africa than just being the head of one small country. In spite of his declared commitments, de Gaulle played the same role for the French colonies as the Conservatives had done on the British side. In French West Africa, Guinea became independent in 1958 and declined all association with the former metropole. Fourteen more French territories became independent between 1958 and 1962. In Algeria, de Gaulle also capitulated in the end. Unable to win the war, and under strong international pressure, Paris agreed to withdraw its forces and grant independence to its former colony. The FLN took power in Algiers in the summer of 1962, a radical anticolonialist government that was intent on symbolizing the power of the Third World.

For the Soviet Union, the view of the world also started to change in the late 1950s. The Soviet state was founded on the principle of world revolution and the overthrow of imperialism and other forms of feudal and capitalist oppression. In the first decades of Soviet rule, the prospect of “revolution in the east” had taken on an increasing significance, especially since “revolution in the west” failed to materialize. The Comintern set up schools and training institutes in the USSR for Communists from outside of Europe, and they helped organize parties and Communist groups in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. The Communist University of the Toilers of the East, a sort of finishing school for Asian revolutionaries, had been set up in Moscow in 1921, with branch campuses in Baku, Irkutsk, and Tashkent. It trained an astonishing array of leaders, including the head of the Indonesian Communist Party, Tan Malaka; China’s Deng Xiaoping; and Vietnam’s Ho Chi Minh (who would later serve as a Comintern agent all over southeast Asia and southern China). During the interwar period, Soviet universities attracted anti-imperialist students from most Asian and some African countries, with especially large groups from China, Vietnam, India, the Middle East, and Turkey. Not all of these were Communists, but all of them were attracted to the Soviet Union because of its proclaimed opposition to colonialism and European domination.

Lenin’s stated policy of creating “united fronts” with non-Communist Left-wingers and anti-imperialists, especially in the colonized world, paid great dividends for Soviet foreign policy and for the radicalization of the anticolonial movement. Even the turns and twists of the Comintern in the late 1920s, as Stalin secured his hold on the Soviet Communist Party, did little lasting damage to the attraction of working with the Soviets for a common cause. For anticolonialists, the Soviet Union was both an inspiration as a social and economic model, and a source of practical support. For many Soviets, especially of the younger generation, helping the anti-imperialist struggle added luster to lives that were becoming harder at home. And for the Communist leadership, supporting anticolonial revolution made strategic sense, even if it was not led by their ideological brethren. It was a way of hitting the imperial centers in Europe—London, Paris, Brussels—which could not be achieved through a weak Communist movement in Europe.

The perceived closeness of the Communist cause and the anti-imperial one was witnessed at a number of conferences from the 1920s to the 1940s. One starting point was the first International Congress against Imperialism and Colonialism held in Brussels in 1927. The conference had been planned by German Comintern agents, primarily the colorful Willi Münzenberg, a master of setting up united-front organizations. Münzenberg used the anti-imperialist campaigns in China, led by the Guomindang, as the summons to the meeting. The conference had attracted international participants ranging from anti-imperialist Europeans, such as Albert Einstein and Henri Barbusse, to Jawaharlal Nehru; Song Qingling, the widow of the first Chinese president, Sun Yat-sen; and other Asian, African, and Caribbean activists. A number of US civil rights organizations were represented, including African-American and Puerto Rican groups. Very soon the Comintern handlers lost control of the proceedings, which turned into a denunciation of European control rather than the celebration of the links between anticolonialism and socialism that they had hoped for. The Senegalese Communist Lamine Senghor stressed that his primary commitment was to the replacement of empires by democracies that embraced racial equality: “Slavery is not abolished. On the contrary it has been modernized.… We know and ascertain that we are French when they need us to let us be killed or make us labor. But when it comes to giving us rights we are no longer Frenchmen but Negroes.”¹⁴

The difficulties the Soviets had with controlling global anti-imperialism was also seen in their problems with handling the multinational empire they had inherited from the tsars. At first, the Communists encouraged the non-Russians (and especially the non-Europeans) to take up leading positions in their own areas, which were made into Soviet republics or autonomous regions. Groups such as the Tajiks or the Uzbeks, who had been conquered by the Russian empire in the nineteenth century, were now told that they should aspire to run their own republics within the Soviet federal state. Even smaller groups, which had never known any form of independence, such as the Kalmyks or the Udmurts, also got their own territories. Russian ethnographers were hard at work identifying nationalities in order to give them their rights, promote their language, and provide education, all under the aegis of Communist advisers. A main enemy of the USSR, Lenin had stated, was Great-Russian chauvinism. He feared that after his death, “the infinitesimal percentage of Soviet and Sovietized workers will drown in that tide of chauvinistic Great-Russian riffraff like a fly in milk.”¹⁵ But in most cases the policy of korenizatsiia (nativization) continued into the early 1930s, in spite of Stalin’s fears of independent authority in the republics.

But when Stalin in the 1930s turned to massive terror to uphold his dictatorship, the knell sounded for Asian national aspirations within the Soviet Union. Those who had argued for principles of national, religious, or cultural autonomy disappeared into the labor camps, as did many of their Russian advisers, as well as a sizeable number of foreign anticolonialists who had taken refuge in the USSR. Some prominent Soviet Muslim anti-imperialists, such as the Bashkir leader Mirsaid Sultan-Galiev, were executed in prison. Stalin wanted a unified Soviet state under his personal leadership, a state that could eventually challenge for hegemony in Europe. To the Georgian Communist Stalin, Europe was where the future of the world would be decided. The colonial world was at best a sideshow, and at worst a distraction. Inside the Soviet Union the former Russian colonials should be integrated into the Soviet state. Outside, anticolonialists were mainly of interest if they could further the security interests of the USSR. Even the massive postwar turn toward overthrowing European control in India, Indonesia, and China seemed of less consequence to Stalin. Although after 1945 he spoke about how anti-imperialism would weaken the United States and its allies, his gaze was firmly fixed on Europe.

Little wonder, then, that Stalin’s successors felt that the vozhd had missed a trick with regard to the Third World. In what amounted to a direct, though implicit, criticism of the late dictator, Khrushchev and his colleagues set out to visit countries in Asia and the Middle East in the first few years after Stalin’s death. Khrushchev himself went to India, Burma, and Afghanistan in 1955. While visiting newly independent states, Khrushchev’s message was always the same: all those who broke away from colonialism could count on the support of the Soviet Union. Gone were the days when the Soviet Union mainly lectured its own truths to new countries. Now the emphasis was on practical cooperation, which would serve both sides alike, and which would, eventually, improve the conditions for a transition to socialism worldwide. “The peoples which achieved national independence have become a new and powerful force in the struggle for peace and social progress,” Khrushchev told the Higher Party School in Moscow in January 1961. “The national liberation movement deals more and more blows against imperialism, helps consolidation of peace, contributes to speeding mankind’s development along the path of social progress. Asia, Africa, and Latin America are now the most important centers of revolutionary struggle against imperialism.”¹⁶

By 1960 the Soviet Union had expanded its reach into the Third World considerably. Even countries that opposed Cold War divisions and those that had pledged allegiance to the Bandung agenda were happy to turn to the Soviets for practical support. After the Suez crisis, Egypt had begun a long-term development program supported by the USSR. Indonesia, Cuba, and several west African states, including Ghana, Guinea, and Mali, began cooperating closely with the Soviets. In spite of its worsening relations with China, the USSR seemed to have no trouble finding friends in the Third World. India was one of the big prizes, and in spite of its nonaligned policy, Nehru’s government had started drawing on the Soviet experience in building its own form of socialism. They expected the influence to go in both directions, however. The Indian ambassador to Moscow, K. P. S. Menon, reported that India’s “friendship with the Soviet Union is paying dividends not only in the shape of… technical assistance but in a certain softening of the contours of Communism and the boring of a passage, through which goodwill—and good sense—can flow between the two Blocs.”¹⁷

The crisis that would demonstrate both the reach and the limitations of Soviet power in the Third World happened in Congo. The poor and exploited Belgian colony got its independence suddenly in 1960, when there were no roads connecting the different parts of the vast country and little economic development, except in European-owned mines. Congo had a total of sixteen university graduates, no doctors, no high school teachers, no military officers, and no nationwide political parties. Everything had been run by the Belgians. When the colonial administrators left, the new leadership, under Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba, did its best to avoid collapse. Lumumba was a radical Congolese nationalist, a former postal clerk who had campaigned for Congo’s independence and who headed the only political party with at least some representation in most of the country’s many provinces. The Belgians detested him, and preferred to work with separatist groups to keep their mining interests intact. The Americans opposed him, since they saw the Left-wing Lumumba as a possible conduit between Moscow and his country’s mineral riches. Within weeks of independence, Congo was fragmenting. Lumumba appealed for, and got, the dispatching of UN troops, but not their assistance in keeping the country together. In desperation, he appealed publicly to the Soviets for assistance.

From the beginning of the Congo crisis, the Eisenhower Administration had viewed Lumumba as a threat to US interests in Africa. According to Secretary of State Dulles, it was “safe to go on the assumption that Lumumba had been bought by the Communists.”¹⁸ The United States tried to prevent him from coming to power and, when he was in power, tried to get him ousted through a military coup. Meanwhile, Lumumba condemned Western policies: “We know the objects of the West. Yesterday they divided us on the level of a tribe, clan and village. Today, with Africa liberating herself, they seek to divide us on the level of states. They want to create antagonistic blocs, satellites, and, having begun from that stage of the cold war, deepen the division in order to perpetuate their rule.”¹⁹ But the appeal for Soviet support—which started slowly arriving in Kinshasa—signed Lumumba’s death warrant. The CIA planned an assassination attempt in September 1960, but, before it could be carried out, the prime minister was overthrown by the military. They handed him to his secessionist enemies in the province of Katanga, where he was tortured, and murdered three months later.

For Khrushchev and his advisers the Congo crisis was an eye-opener. A legitimate African government had appealed for Soviet support, and in July 1960 Khrushchev had promised to help: “If the states that are ingeniously carrying out an imperialist aggression against the Republic of Congo… continue their criminal actions, then the Soviet Union will not refrain from decisive measures to stop the aggression. The government of Congo can be sure that the Soviet government will offer to the Republic of Congo the necessary help that can be required for the triumph of your just cause.”²⁰ Six months later Lumumba was dead, Congo was under the control of a US-supported military dictatorship, and the only thing the Soviets could do in response was to fulminate and name a new college for foreign students in Moscow after the martyred Congolese leader, Patrice Lumumba University. The Soviet Union did not yet have the logistic or military capacity to project its power to central Africa. It was a lesson those Central Committee staffers, Red Army officers, and KGB officials who had been involved would never forget.

For other Third World states, Congo’s tragedy was also a sign of their own weakness. Ghana and Egypt had hoped to help Lumumba stay in power, but they were too weak and too slow to do so. The only way out, both Nkrumah and Nasser concluded, was to strengthen the economic development of their own countries. Other core Third World regimes, such as Ben Bella’s Algeria, thought likewise. Only if national economic development could be jump-started through state intervention and planning could their countries grow powerful enough to satisfy the aspirations of their own peoples while also acting in solidarity with others. The Soviet economic experience had some of the keys to such growth, but these had to be invigorated and maximized through the abilities of the new states’ own populations. A common Third World belief was that by removing colonial controls and creating a state that acted on behalf of the people, quick economic growth could be achieved. Instead many leaders found that their countries did not have the expertise needed to advance fast, especially in building new industries, and that the few resources they could export were still hostage to conditions set by multinational companies and international trade regimes. Almost from the beginning, many countries found that development efforts were hampered by increasing levels of official corruption. By the mid-1960s many Africans, especially, found that they were worse off in their daily lives than they had been under colonial rule. They were beginning to look for more stability, order, and incremental progress than the postcolonial regimes were able to offer.

Algeria is a good case in point. The man who emerged as the key leader of the FLN, Ahmed Ben Bella, had become radicalized when he served in the French army and later in France as a political prisoner. When the country finally got its independence, Ben Bella’s government nationalized most industries and aimed for a gradual nationalization of Algeria’s oil industry, the most important economic activity in the country. Land that had been abandoned by its European owners, most of whom fled to France after 1962, was given over to peasants’ and laborers’ self-managing collectives. Agricultural production dropped as a result of lack of expertise, equipment, and investments. The plans to build new industries were mainly unfulfilled, in part because those who were supposed to build them had enough to do fending for themselves and their families as prices rose and rapid urbanization drove rents up. The Algerian growth rate in the Ben Bella years was not low: a little bit less than 5 percent on average. But this was mainly due to oil exports. All other industries declined, and the state spent its oil income inefficiently and erratically. As doubts spread, Ben Bella himself became increasingly autocratic, given to long public speeches in which he sought support for the immediate implementation of policies ranging from the nationalization of newspapers to the introduction of compulsory membership in the Muslim boy scouts. The crowds shouted “Long Live Ben Bella,” but when the military deposed him in 1965 most Algerians seem to have drawn a sigh of relief.

In spite of its domestic failures, however, Ben Bella’s Algeria became a centerpiece for Third World revolutionaries from Africa and the Middle East. Two of the main groups fighting against Portugal, which still held on to its African colonies, were headquartered there—the Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA) and the African Party for the Independence of Guinea and Cape Verde (PAIGC). Nelson Mandela, the leader of the South African National Congress (ANC), spent time in Algiers, where he received military training, as did revolutionaries from Congo, Rhodesia, and Palestine. Malcolm X and other African-American militants visited, and several of the leaders of the Black Panther movement later took refuge there. Many of Ben Bella’s key advisers were western Europeans or Yugoslavs (but very few Soviets). Together with the Egyptians, the Indonesians, and the Indians, Algerian leaders underlined that only broad international solidarity and cooperation could complete the decolonization of Africa and break away from the stranglehold of the Cold War.

In 1961, the year before Algeria gained its independence, an extensive coalition of states had joined together to form what was to become the Non-Aligned Movement. All of them felt that the Cold War threatened their international interests and was in the way of their domestic development plans. Many of the same countries participated in the founding congress as had taken part in the Bandung Conference six years earlier. But nonalignment was not simply a follow-up to Bandung. Solidarity among peoples, and especially racial solidarity, was conspicuous by its absence. Instead the conference focused on the part of the Bandung agenda that underlined sovereign rights of states and the need for international peace as a precondition for the abolishment of all forms of colonialism and foreign intervention. With the first meeting held in the Yugoslav capital, Belgrade, the new initiative was intended to be much broader than just the independent countries of Asia and Africa. The purpose was to challenge the Cold War system through new forms of international cooperation. China was not invited, but Cuba was a full member from the beginning, as was Cyprus and even conservative monarchies such as Ethiopia and Saudi Arabia. Sukarno summed it up in his address:

Non-alignment is not directed against any one country, or against any one bloc, or against any particular type of social system. It is our common conviction that the policy of non-alignment is the best way for each of us to make a positive contribution toward the preservation of peace and the relaxation of international tension. And let us be quite frank: It is no mere accident that we countries gathered here happen to be the ones who have set ourselves on the path of non-alignment.… This is the era of emerging nations and a turbulence of anti-nationalism, the building of nations, and the breaking of empires.²¹

By the early 1960s decolonization had changed the world beyond what most people could have imagined in 1945. Not only were there many more independent countries around, but all of the new countries were led by non-Europeans. Europe, on the contrary, had lost much of its power, not least because the postcolonial states demanded their own say in world affairs. A majority of them disliked the international order that the Cold War had created. They felt constrained by it and believed it to be yet another form of European control. But at the same time the Cold War was inexorably engulfing them through conflicts at home and abroad. Already by the end of the 1960s rulers in what had constituted the Third World were searching for stability and new forms of economic growth, be it through Soviet or American models. Many of these second generation leaders were military men who preferred orderly change over revolution. The Third World was a moment; fifteen years after Bandung, more and more new states found it difficult to manage without strong links to one or the other Superpower.