Is decolonisation inevitable?

rtaker

Banned
Is there anyway to preserve the European empires? Stop WW1 and WW2 from happening? Prevent a few rebellions? Weaker Americans? Stronger Inter-European Alliances?

Or are the European empires doomed to fade with the rise of nationalism? Could, for example, Britain, federate the "White Dominions," and keep the rest of the empire happy? Could France keep IndoChina peaceful, and could the Europeans keep China from being able to shrug off their influences?

I put this in Post-1900 because it is relevant to the time. PoD's and such can go back as far as necessary.
 
i think keeping true colonies is kinda hard, but when they become like dominions it is very likely to keep them up till today. Its all about how much rights they get and how it is done.
 

BlondieBC

Banned
Sure, some of them could be kept, all of them would be very hard to keep. Colonies at one time were seen as morally correct and profitable, the more modern view is that they are immoral and money losers. A list of things that would help in rough order.


1) A belief that white men are morally superior to brown/black men among the general population. To some extent, Europe lost its will to keep the colonies. South Africa was able to keep attached black colonies for decades after the Europeans started to shed colonies.

2) No WW1. And stopping it just in 1914, Europe needed to find a solution that was fair enough to stop pushing so close to war every few years. Europe is much stronger in this scenario, and has much larger immigrant population. And Europe is bankrupt and exhausted after the war.

3) Changes in policies that steer European immigrants to each countries respective colonies. The higher % of people in a colony from the home country, the easier the colony is to keep. WW1 helps a lot by not stopping the mass outflows of Europeans.

4) A way to deal with new players that want Colonies such as Germany, Italy, Japan, etc. This would involve some swapping of colonies and/or allow new colonies to be made. For example, Germany either gets its Greater middle Africa Colony, Germany gets the Yangtze river basin, or something else large enough to absorb the German population outflow. Italy will also need something to absorb the outflow and merely Tunisia and Libya are too small. Maybe as a partly ASB, but the most stable situation is where the white colonist in each country are from the country that control the colonies.

5) The USA has fears about having markets, and stirred up issues. America often supported Colonial independence, so this needs to be handled. Maybe something like a formal recognition of an American Sphere of influence in part of Latin America in exchange for an American acceptance of the Colonial structure.

6) Ethnic issues in Europe need to calmed down. Promotion of ethnic minorities in other European powers just provides a moral frame work for colonies later to use against the European.

Changing any one of this would be possible, especially if only partially. To change all of them simply means we live on a different planet. I tried writing a partial sample time line, but it quickly got ASB. But in broad terms, without WW1 or another great European war I could see the following colonies surviving.

1) Russia still has Central Asia. To me, Central Asia looks like colonies attached to Russia, but some may not see it that way.

2) Japan. Taiwan, and Korea is possible.

3) UK. India is way to big to keep and the dominions are largely independent by 1910, but the UK cold keep some smaller Areas. Singapore, Hong Kong, Suez Canal Zone, Malta, Cyprus are plausible.

4) Italy: Libya as a Colony, especially if oil is found early enough and the Italian government encourages Italians to move to Italy.

5) France. A stronger France keeps Algeria and perhaps a bit more of north Africa.
 

MSZ

Banned
As long as they are profitable, yes. Most colonies were economic burdens for their metropolises, discovering oil and other rare resources would remedy the situation.
 
Avoiding world wars would help a lot.
Some colonies are particularly hard to keep: to my mind, Indochina is a fitting example.
 
There is a way to preserve it, for a certain definition of preserve, though it involves scrapping any and all pretense that the colonies serve any other purpose other than to be looted and pillaged and the men from the colonies impressed by the metropoles on a scale that would make Heinrich Himmler and Lavrenti Beria blush like schoolgirls. And that kind of "preservation" is of the Vietnam/Tacitean "make a desert and call it peace variety."

In short, no, the empires cannot endure in anything like the classical form.
 
I think the only way to have a European power dominating a far-away overseas territory is if the majority of the people there consider themselves a part of the nation colonizing them. A way to do that is sending nationales from your own country to the region you want to colonize. The problem with that is that, many times, there are just too many natives already leaving that region, and they will always outnumber whatever people you send in there. You can try to genocide or ethnically-cleanse the natives (I'm not supportive of that under any circumstances, but that IS a way), but this requires a lot of resources, gives natives throughout your entire empire a reason to revolt, and increases hostility towards your regime both at home and abroad.
Another possible way is education and/or other programs meant to make the natives loyal to the colonizing power in the long-term - but that's also problematic, because it just costs way too much money to ever be worth it, especially if you have a large empire.
 

Delta Force

Banned
Colonies could only survive long term if they went from being symbols of power and prestige to having economics taken into account in their acquisition. For example, Spain had no reason to run Western Sahara as it is just a desert. However, Libya and Mesopotamia and portions of Iran would make economically sound colonies.

The biggest problem in a colonial venture is that you end up engaging in export led growth. The only way to keep a colony profitable, even one with oil, is to keep resources flowing out in massive quantities and keep resources going in as low as possible. You have the keep the colony from consuming the resources that it is supposed to be exporting, because that is the only way you make money. Poor people cannot really buy too much, so ultimately colonialism is an inferior system to the free market because it involves a small group of people getting rich off of larger groups of people who essentially unable to participate in the economy as consumers or workers. You end up with smaller markets and lower economic growth (from smaller labor pools and markets) than if the colonies were allowed to keep the proceeds from their resources to fuel their own development.

If you decolonize after colonizing you do gain an improved (from the colonial power's perspective) situation because you still run the economy through dominating exports through experts and managers who have to help with farming or oil production and the burden of security, welfare, and infrastructure gets thrown onto the decolonized country.

If you improve the economy of the colony, you make more money off of exports of goods to the wealthier population (from the home country), but over time you are guaranteed to lose any measure of control over it. To make the people more wealthy you need to industrialize and educate the population. The more wealthy and educated the population, the less likely they will be willing to go along with colonialism. That is why colonies that industrialized like Taiwan and Korea (and to some extent India) were able to do much better after decolonization than colonies that were used as resource and manpower pools to draw from, like most of Africa.
 

Hendryk

Banned
You will find that this question gets asked with a regularity that one might find worrying around here. But whichever way one spins it, the answer always boils down to this:
There is a way to preserve it, for a certain definition of preserve, though it involves scrapping any and all pretense that the colonies serve any other purpose other than to be looted and pillaged and the men from the colonies impressed by the metropoles on a scale that would make Heinrich Himmler and Lavrenti Beria blush like schoolgirls. And that kind of "preservation" is of the Vietnam/Tacitean "make a desert and call it peace variety."

In short, no, the empires cannot endure in anything like the classical form.
And that's the long and short of it. Colonial empires were organized robbery on a global scale, and they could only survive so long as brute force was used to keep the subjects in line. And then one day even brute force was no longer enough.
 
Consider Presidents Wilson and Roosevelt...

Wilson's interference at Versailles is considered by some to have done as much damage as the revanchism of Clemenceau. Lloyd George commented that he had had Jesus Christ one side of him and the Devil on the other.

Roosevelt was determined to destroy all European Empires. He replaced them by US 'areas of interest'. So how did his Imperial ideas differ from the more blatant Imperialism of other nations?

Roosevelt allowed Stalin to seize all of Eastern Europe at Yalta, to the dismay of Winston Churchill. The damage that Roosevelt did lives on today.
 
Roosevelt allowed Stalin to seize all of Eastern Europe at Yalta, to the dismay of Winston Churchill. The damage that Roosevelt did lives on today.

Despite Chruchill's objections, there really isn't much that could have been done to keep Russia out of Eastern Europe at Yalta.
 
Wilson's interference at Versailles is considered by some to have done as much damage as the revanchism of Clemenceau. Lloyd George commented that he had had Jesus Christ one side of him and the Devil on the other.

Roosevelt was determined to destroy all European Empires. He replaced them by US 'areas of interest'. So how did his Imperial ideas differ from the more blatant Imperialism of other nations?

Roosevelt allowed Stalin to seize all of Eastern Europe at Yalta, to the dismay of Winston Churchill. The damage that Roosevelt did lives on today.

Roosevelt had nothing to do with that, Adolf Hitler's mad attempt to invade Russia and kill all the Slavs had everything to do with it. Hitler wanted a racial war of annihilation, he got what he wanted, the USSR was just better at waging war. Roosevelt didn't make Hitler invade the USSR, and when Hitler made that decision Hitler's chances of anything looking like victory died in his own desire to create a pure, ideological social-Darwinist racism.

Edit-And one more thing, Winnie signed off on a percentage agreement with Stalin in 1944 so his condemnation of the Iron Curtain was classic Churchillian self-serving mythology, if he were really opposed to it, he'dve not been willing to try to split percentages of influence with the USSR. Roosevelt was rather smarter in that regard.
 
You will find that this question gets asked with a regularity that one might find worrying around here. But whichever way one spins it, the answer always boils down to this:

And that's the long and short of it. Colonial empires were organized robbery on a global scale, and they could only survive so long as brute force was used to keep the subjects in line. And then one day even brute force was no longer enough.

Quoted for truth.

In India the crushing of the Mutiny in 1857 kept the natives down for a few decades but by the 1890s Indian nationalism had already developed.

Here's the thing a lot of people fail to understand. In the whole European colonial system, India was by far the biggest and most prominent colony. By the 1890s, Indian independence was inevitable- the idea had been formulated and it was only a question of time and of the amount of brutality Britain was willing to use to keep itself in power.

Once India achieves independence, colonised people all over the world are going to look at that example and start asking themselves questions.

Could, for example, Britain, federate the "White Dominions," and keep the rest of the empire happy?

I'm sorry but how could they keep the rest of the Empire happy? In the end Imperialism still boils down to being ultimately governed by a foreign power which is running your country primarily for profit. The era of Imperialism may seem fine and romantic and certainly in some ways it was- but to people like me whose skin happens to be brown, whenever I picture it I always know that in that scenario I'd be a second class citizen at best. The British Empire wasn't all bad but it was still based on the idea that people like me don't deserve to govern themselves.
 
In the end, yes I think decolonisation is inevitable. After a while the people in the colonies will demand their rights and influence to govern their land. Sure, the colonizing nations could militairy defeat the people living in their colonies, but after a while it will become too expensive and the people living in the homenation will stop their support for the wars. You can't make the big colonies part of the homenation. Imagine Indonesia becoming an equal part of the Netherlands. The Dutch people would lose all the influence in their own nation. They would never accept that. In the end Independence is the only option.

Sure without the world wars decolonisation would change. It would be slower,ut in the end the inevitable would come. Also some parts could remain part of the homenation. Usually the smaller, less populated parts. Surinam for example could have easily remained part of the Netherlands. In theory Dutch New Guinea could too or even the Maluccan islands. Every country has its colonies that could remain part of the nation. Usually small islands or parts with a lot of immigrants, with small populatians of natives that are close to Europe, like some north African colonies (although in some of them genocide is necessary, sadly that is hardly ASB).
 
Colonies will demand autonomy and home rule. Question therefore is whether these can only be found through full independence or not.

I think what is required is that European motherlands accept their former colonial subjects as equals. That'll be hard - unless it's about settler colonies. Furthermore, the governance of the motherland should allow for that. I think federal systems will have it easier.

Even if the colonies would be accepted as equals, there's still the problem of them being a lot less developed - so that would have to change as well. Each European country would have to invest in their colonies - and not just to extract more profits, but to establish a modern economy. that requires education as well. On the long-term, this would benefit the motherland as well as it would provide markets and increase mutual trade.

All in all, I can hardly imagine that to happen for anything but settler colonies like Australia or Canada and maybe some smaller, but valuable outposts (say Sinai, Singapore, Bahamas, Kuwait or Hong Kong for the British). The number of settler colonies, however, could largely be increased: Namibia for the Germans, South Africa for the British, North Africa for the Spanish, French and Italians, Angola and Cap Verde for the Portuguese...
 
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