British and Dutch decolonization in East Asia began in 1947 with the independence of India and the creation of Pakistan. Burma and Ceylon followed in 1948, and the Dutch East Indies in 1949. Malaya’s independence was delayed until 1957 by a communist campaign of terror, quelled by both a sophisticated antiguerrilla campaign and a serious effort to win what the British General Sir Gerald Templer called “the hearts and minds of the Malayan people.”
French decolonization proved more troublesome. France had given the name “Indo-China” to a million square miles in Southeast Asia, an area nearly 10 times the size of the mother country, which it had colonized in the 19th century—a union of settlements and dependencies in Tonkin, Annam, Laos, Cambodia, and Cochinchina around Saigon. As early as 1925, the Vietnam Revolutionary Party had been founded to fight for the unity and independence of Tonkin, Annam, and Cochinchina. In 1945 it proclaimed a democratic republic and fought the French for eight years. Following the French defeat at Dien Bien Phu in 1954, Vietnam became independent and was partitioned between Hanoi and Saigon. When communist North Vietnam began threatening and attacking the South, the United States was drawn into 10 years of unsuccessful and divisive hostilities, at a heavy cost in human life and political credibility.
France faced similar problems in North Africa. Morocco and Tunisia obtained independence in 1956, but Algeria, legally part of the French republic, aroused far fiercer passions and led to another eight-year war, from 1954 to 1962. Whereas Dien Bien Phu had brought down a French government, the Algerian War caused the downfall of the French Fourth Republic and the accession to power of de Gaulle, who had been in retirement (his second) since 1951. French settlers in Algeria cheered him when he told them: “I have understood you.” Only later did they realize that his understanding embraced the need to grant Algeria independence and to crush attempted coups on the part of the settlers’ right wing.
In sub-Saharan Africa, what Harold Macmillan called “the wind of change” blew less stormily. There were violent incidents and atrocities, as in the former Belgian Congo; and there were tribal and civil wars. Some white settlers hotly resisted decolonization, as in Rhodesia and South Africa. But by the 1990s only South Africa maintained white supremacy, and even there the apartheid system was dismantled by 1994. Europeans were aghast at Africa’s recurrent famines and concerned at the persistence of apartheid. Yet no aspect of Africa’s development seemed likely to affect Europe as deeply as Indochina and Algeria had affected France.
One feature of the postcolonial period, however, was the reflux into Europe of emigrants from the former colonies. Some, civil servants and business people, had little difficulty in settling themselves. Others faced latent racism. In Britain the first such immigrant groups, from the West Indies, were broadly welcomed. But between 1950 and 1957 Britain’s immigrant population doubled, to 200,000; and the busy diligence of Indian and Pakistani shopkeepers, though welcomed by many, also aroused envy and hostility, as it had in Uganda, whence some of them had fled. In France, too, there was racial hostility, directed more often against North Africans than against black immigrants. Neither France nor Britain seemed to have studied the careful preparations that the Netherlands had made to meet similar problems with immigrants from East Asia.
In eastern Europe there was also pressure for independence from quasi-colonial rule. Signs of unrest had begun in Poland, where in June and July 1956 strikes and riots in Poznań had ended with the deaths of 53 workers. In October of that year in Hungary, there was a full-scale revolt, finally quelled on November 4 by Soviet tanks. A similar fate ended the “Prague Spring” of 1968 in Czechoslovakia. For a long time, it seemed as if eastern Europe would never be free.
Yet there too the winds of change were blowing. The accession to power of Mikhail S. Gorbachev in 1985 marked a real turning point in the U.S.S.R.: glasnost (“openness”) replaced compulsive secrecy, and attempts at perestroika (“restructuring”) sought to replace with efficiency the dead hand of state control. Already in Poland the workers’ leader Lech Wałęsa had rallied supporters round the union banner of Solidarity; in Poland and elsewhere, as the 1980s ended, a new era began. Victims were rehabilitated; oppressive regimes were overthrown; dictators were executed; and free elections were held. For many, the most moving moment was on the night of Nov. 9–10, 1989, when the Berlin Wall was breached. Erected by the East German authorities in 1961 to prevent their citizens from fleeing to the West, the Wall was a concrete symbol of the division of Berlin, of Germany, and of Europe. Less than a year later, on Oct. 3, 1990, Germany and Berlin were both formally reunited. How long would it be before Europe was reunited too?
Ever closer union?
Discussed by philosophers for centuries, actively promoted from the 1920s onward by Count Richard Coudenhove-Kalergi’s Pan-European Movement, and officially proposed in 1929 by Aristide Briand on behalf of France, the idea of uniting Europe was revived again as World War II approached. In Britain a small private group that called itself Federal Union—in close touch with others at the Royal Institute of International Affairs (Chatham House)—began to campaign for unity in Europe as a last frail hope of preventing war. Some of the papers produced by its distinguished supporters, including work by Lord Lothian and Lionel Robbins, found their way to another group of activists in the Italian Resistance, led by, among others, Altiero Spinelli. One of the most stubborn of Mussolini’s political prisoners, he was freed in 1943 from confinement on an island off the coast between Rome and Naples. Admiring what he called “the clean, precise thinking of the English federalists,” he echoed it in the declaration he drafted for a secret grouping of Resistance leaders from eight other countries, including Germany. Britain thus contributed to Continental developments that British governments shunned for many years.
Support for European unity came from the right as well as the left, from liberals as well as dirigistes, from clerics as well as anticlericals, from “Atlanticists” as well as those who saw Europe as a “Third Force” between East and West. It even received official support, overt as well as implicit.
In 1939 the British Labour Party leader Clement Attlee declared: “Europe must federate or perish.” In 1940, prompted by Jean Monnet, Churchill’s government, in agreement with General de Gaulle, proposed a political union between Britain and France. In 1943 Churchill called for a Council of Europe after the war, and de Gaulle’s colleague René Mayer suggested an economic federation. In 1944 the exiled governments of Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg signed the Benelux Convention for a future customs union. Pope Pius XII, meanwhile, had envisaged a close union of European states.
Individual supporters of European unity included not only statesmen such as Paul-Henri Spaak from Belgium, Alcide De Gasperi from Italy, Robert Schuman from France, Johan Willem Beyen from the Netherlands, Konrad Adenauer from Germany, and Joseph Bech from Luxembourg but also such well-known writers as Albert Camus, Raymond Aron, George Orwell, Denis de Rougemont, and Ignazio Silone. All urged, and many helped to organize, what Winston Churchill called in 1946 “a kind of United States of Europe.”