I'm just on page 1 of 12 and it might be beaten to death by now, but the troubling thing about this sort of Eurocentric explanation of 21st century Euro-colonies persisting is that it set the agency of colonized peoples at nought.
Well, it's been a year and a half now but I haven't been able to develope the TL as much as I would have wanted to initially, no worries. Keep in mind that what I explained in those first posts was a general recap of what factors led me to justify this particular creative setting, I'm certainly not saying that absent WWs this would be what happened, the world is more different than that.
Certainly OTL colonized nationalists were able to use the leverage of two Great Wars weakening European authority and power projection--but it does not follow that their independence must only be the result of European weakness.
It doesn´t, as you say, that's why not every colony is dependent: see the
nations of Central Africa, among many others (India, South East Asia, Indonesia...). It's not only that no WWII has resulted in stronger European nations (and Japan) , what I also meant was that pre-war forms of thought remain unchallenged far longer (if at all), that no Fourteen Points of Wilson enshrining self-determination nor the UN charter have been made (for example), that ITTL a random German from 2020 has a way of understanding the world closer to a German of 1910 than to a German of OTL 2020.
The
general theme of the TL is precisely that the world remains more anchored in the past except for some places (Spain and some Spanish American nations, mainly) as an intended contrast. Then again, those few places should be the focus of the TL but I have long been creatively blocked on their plots and find that people like them less than, say, articles about great powers and such.
After all, colonialism was never universally popular in the metropolitan countries themselves; the considerable voting (and general class struggle) bloc of Socialists and their more radical rivals asserted the common humanity of all people, including colonial subjects, as a matter of principle for instance. This did not mean that British Labourites or counterparts on the Continent all were opposed to colonial systems root and branch, of course. But it did mean that the ruling nations were not of one mind.
Again, what you say is 100% true, leftist movements in particular are most sympathetic to the plight of colonized peoples in TTL as well. But the thing is, except for the UK, nations which keep colonies up untill
nowadays are precisely nations which have traversed long periods as dictatorships of a right-wing flavor and more importantly, regimes which predicated that those overseas territories were an integral part of their nations (Portuguese Lusotropicalism, Italian
Quartaspondaism, French delusional "civilizational mission" along a twisted right-wing bent of their republican universalism, Japanese goals in Taiwan and Korea). Meanwhile, international socialism does noot have a state as the USSR to sponsor it, which I believe is a huge handicap.
It might seem reasonable to argue that with the pro-imperial factions less weakened and nations less drained and thus able on paper to muster greater force to maintain a system against the will of the colonized, OTL independence-seeking nationalists, and their metropolitan political allies such as they were (few deeply principled, many fair-weather semi-friends), would be channeled instead into liberalizing their local governance under a somewhat looser, semi-autonomous federal-imperial banner.
This is indeed the way that the UK took with those colonies that for some reasons (mostly, sizable European-descended populations) were not deemed susceptible to be let go, and Italy once the mentioned dictatorship phased and the question of what to do with those colonies were Italians were a majority (Libya) or an important minority (around 10%, in Tunisia) arose.
The obvious problem with taking left wing assertions of universal rights of man and democratic equality to the limit is that colonized peoples tended to greatly outnumber the colonizers; principled democracy would turn each empire into an Asian or African republic with a European annex minority.
This is the case of Portugal (which i haven't yet touched in updates) and the great dilemma of France: fullfil the republican promise even if it means becoming de facto a West African republic with European territories, or retreat to a core identity at the cost of not being able to compete as a Great Power anymore. It's a great contradiction for the French right and and even a bit for the left, and it is intended.
And this flies in the face of the organization of liberal society, in which wealth greatly multiplies the importance of persons in a quite undemocratic fashion; European metropolitans are consistently far richer per capita than their subjects overseas and this means applying democracy seriously puts a bunch of people both much poorer than their erstwhile master peoples and culturally alien to them in charge of the great concentrations of global wealth. Common working class Europeans and their capitalist overlords can easily make common cause against being drained by the masses their nations collectively rule to equalize the wealth.
These societies are quite more illiberal than ours, but once again you're right. In the British case, the Empire is big enough that the
Dominions (they're not called that, but for the sake of simplicity) which have native majorities (Cape, Natalia, Rhodesia) do not outbalance the Home Nation Dominions and the settler Dominions, and even then each one has enough autonomy to prevent a direct massive transfer of wealth even if all the others wanted to. They cannot prevent the setting of Empire-wide minimum standards of healthcare, education etcetera, but those are more easily justifiable to metropolitan (and diaspora) voters. In the Italian case, again the metropolis outweighs the overseas territories, and in Libya there's even a Euro-descended majority.
Nor do policies have to take on socialistic extremes of leveling to create resentment; just privileging the per capita growth rates of the colonized over the colonizers will be enough to have majorities in the global north up in arms.
This is Portugal's case, the European mainland has in fact become an appendix of Angola, which is the region that bears the greatest part of the economical growth. Increasing numbers of European Portugueses would want Portugal to secede from its own state because the economical and demographic center of the state has been migrating to Angola and it fuels resentment also in white Angolans (
angolenhos brancos, numbered around 3.5 million out of a total population of 30 million, but 25 to 35% of them have significant native recent ancestry and would be better described as
mestiços, although they identify with the European community) and native Angolans.
The alternative then is that in the name of imperial glory (and more crass but strong economic interests) the ruling powers maintain a plainly exploitive and stratified political order. It does seem entirely possible on paper anyway that a clever system of colonial administration can identify the most promising and capable native peoples and promote them invidiously to a privileged track, this select minority having a strong stake in perpetuating the overarching imperial allegiance as guarantors of their own status. In fact I believe every imperial system OTL did this to a certain extent. The danger here is manifold too of course. On one hand, such elites may, especially if given rewards in the form of respectable and important high level administration or private business opportunity, conceive themselves capable of running their colonies as independent nations and shrug off their dependence on imperial favor in favor of controlling their own movements and believing in their own personal merit as decisive. Grant even a fraction of the hand-picked "evolve" as the French called them some remnant of personal loyalty to their own historic people, and such a cooptive approach sows the seeds, if not of destruction, anyway opposition. Meanwhile it is highly unlikely imperial authorities of an alien culture will be able to either cherry pick and coopt or identify and neutralize all potential leaders of talent, and anyone with grievances will flock to explicitly anti-imperial and nationalist movements. Certainly success in raising up a coopted pro-imperial local elite assists in divide-and-rule, and nations that do tear themselves loose can be hamstrung by deep suspicion between the agents of the former colonizers and partisans of uncompromised nationalism.
And this is (more or less) the French or Japanese cases. There's obviously the economic sphere of having exclusive access to the raw materials and labor of the hunderds of millions of Algerians and West Africans as well as their captive market, but there's an specific emphasis on the
Imperial aspect: West Africa to France is the only way to compete with the other great powers like the UK (190 million pop.+global sphere), Germany (130 million pop.+Eastern European sphere) or Russia (320 million pop), and we are talking of a nation that suffered a great defeat which it never dealt with the appropriate way (kinda like OTL interwar Reich). Losing the Great War and 6 o 7 decades of dictatorship have led to a national trauma that doesn't allow France to properly deal with its ghosts in a healthy way, and it won't end well.
The idea then that the colonized were not strong enough to toss off their foreign rulers without these being driven to the wall of failure by rival Europeans first seems first of all to neglect the motives and numbers and capability of the ruled majority in the Global South, in a quite patronizing manner. And secondly, the logic of maintaining formal rule seems deeply antagonistic to liberal-democratic norms; possibly a sufficiently ruthless European power can maintain supremacy over poorer majorities--but by means of repudiating democracy and doubling down on authoritarian and violent methods. So it seems likely, if realistic, to be associated with a dystopian sort of world where the major exponents of humanistic equality and democratic values are radicals largely out of power.
As I have commented earlier, it's not that I have treated all the situations the same i.e. every colony remains colony nor every colony achieves independence in the timeframe of OTL. There are colonies that achieved independence by the force of arms, others that did so through agreements, and colonies that up to the moment remain so because of specific motives (bot ITL and creative). It's not that I believe that no WWII means France keeps West Africa indefinately. Moreover, this France and this world diverges from OTL's much earlier than that, we are not talking of a liberal democratic republic that exists since 1870, but of an imperfect compromise regime emerged from a decades-long dictatorship.
I'm no historian, just an amateur which uses his free time to build a world that attempts to be interesting, and that includes conflict. The only part of the world that is intended as
utopian (or simple better than) vs ours is Spain and some Hispanic nations (like Sonora, Colombia, Argentina or Phillippines), the rest is not perfect nor presented as such. I appreciate that you took your time to write the comment and hope I have addressed your concerns. Even if you disagree with the direction taken, I hope you at least understand better why I made the creative choices I did, which I have tried have an in-world root and not just
because.