Carroll Quigley - Tragedy and Hope - A History of the World in Our Time

In any case, the Chinese resort to war on India must have been a consequence of very complex motivations, and surely gave rise to complicated consequences. It was aimed at the Soviet Union and at the United States rather than at India, but did serve to discredit all concerned, to demonstrate the power and vigor of the new China, and to cut down drastically the Indian way (as contrasted with the Chinese way) as a model for other underdeveloped Asiatic nations.

One notable consequence of the Chinese attack on India was that it served to pull Pakistan further out of the Western camp toward the Communist side of neutralism. Pakistan as a member both of CENTO and SEATO had a vital position in John Foster Dulles’s line of paper barriers surrounding the Soviet heartland, but in Pakistani eyes the controversy with India over Kashmir was of more immediate and more intense appeal. The Chinese humiliation of India was received with ill-concealed pleasure in Pakistan, although the Chinese were also intruding on some areas claimed by Pakistan. These disputes were settled by a frontier treaty with China in May 1962, and the Muslim state showed increased confidence that its claims against India over Kashmir would obtain Chinese support.

During all these events the divisions between the Soviet Union and Red China became increasingly public and increasingly bitter. As usual in Communist controversies, they were enveloped in complicated ideological disputes. By 1962 the Chinese had reached the point where they were accusing Khrushchev of betraying the revolution and the ‘whole Communist movement from a combination of increasingly bourgeois obsession with Russian standards of living and a cowardly fear of American missile power. Thus they accused the Soviet Union of betraying international Communism in accepting “polycentrism” (especially in Yugoslavia) and of weakness in accepting “peaceful co-existence” (as in the Cuban missile crisis). Khrushchev alternated between striking back at the Chinese criticism and seeking to stifle them in order to avoid a complete ideological split of the world Communist movement. The Chinese were adamant, and continued to work toward such a split, seeking to win over to their side the Communist movement and Communist parties throughout the world, especially in the more backward countries where the Chinese experience often seemed more relevant. By 1964 the split within the Communist movement seemed unbridgeable.

The Eclipse of Colonialism

One of the most profound and most rapid changes of the postwar period has been the disintegration of the prewar colonial empires, beginning with the Dutch in the Netherlands Indies and ending with the Portuguese in Africa and elsewhere. We have no need to go into any detailed narration of the events that accompanied this process in specific areas, but the movement as a whole is of such great importance that it must be analyzed.

When World War II began in 1939, a quarter of the human race, six hundred million people, mostly with nonwhite skins, were colonial subjects of European states. Almost all of these, with the exception of those under Portuguese rule, won independence in the twenty years following the Japanese surrender in 1945.

Except in a few areas, such as the Dutch Indies, French Indochina, and British Malaya, which had been under Japanese occupation during the war, the anticolonial movement was not significant until a decade or more after the war’s end. In many places, especially in Africa, the movement toward independence was of little importance until 1956. Nevertheless, the war may be regarded as the trigger for the whole process, since the early defeats suffered by the Netherlands, France, and Britain, especially when they were inflicted by an Asiatic people, the Japanese, gave a deadly blow to the prestige of European rulers. The war also mobilized many natives into military activities, during which they learned to use arms and were often moved to unfamiliar areas where they discovered that the subordination of natives to Europeans, and especially the subjection of dark-skinned peoples to whites, was not an immutable law of nature.

These events also showed many native peoples that their tribal divisions were but local and parochial concerns and that they could, and must, learn to cooperate with other persons of different tribes, different languages, and even different religions, to face common problems that could be overcome only by cooperative efforts. In many cases, the great demand and high prices for native products during the war gave native peoples, for the first time, a realization that the contrast of European affluence and native poverty was not an eternal and unchangeable dichotomy. Accordingly, such peoples were unwilling to accept the decreasing demand, falling prices, and declining standards of living of the postwar period, and determined to take political action to obtain independent control of their own economic situations. Moreover, just at that time, the Communist argument that colonial impoverishment and European affluence arose from the exploitation of colonial peoples by imperialist Powers began to spread in Asia and Africa, brought back from imperial cities like London and Paris where small groups of natives, in search of education, had come in contact with Communist propagandists.

Except for this last point, these factors were closely associated with the war and its outcome. But there were other influences of a much longer duration. The acquisition of European languages that permitted native peoples to surmount the linguistic isolation of their tribal differences had begun in the nineteenth century, but by the 1950’s had become a more widespread phenomenon, especially among those natives who were most unwilling to fall back into tribal apathy and an inferior status. Many natives, in one way or another, had acquired a smattering or more of European education, and with this, even when it entailed a respect and affection for European culture, they had picked up much of the basic libertarian outlook endemic in European politics. In fact, in British colonial areas, educated natives had been systematically inculcated with English theories of political resistance and self-rule which went back to Magna Carta and the Glorious Revolution. Thus the myths of English history became part of the solvent of the British imperial structure.

Another factor, which had been going on for a considerable time in 1956, was the process of detribalization associated with the growth of cities and the development of commercial and craft activities that brought many diverse subjects of colonialism together in urban districts or trade unions outside the stabilizing nexus of their previous tribal associations or

of their peasant communities. Better educated and more energetic individuals among these natives took advantage of this situation to organize groups and parties to agitate for a larger share in the political control of their own affairs and eventual independence.

In spite of the pressure and even the power of these changes in the colonial situation on the side of the subject peoples, there were at least equally significant, and largely unrecognized, changes on the side of their imperial rulers. For it must be recognized that in very few cases did native peoples achieve independence as a consequence of a successful revolt by force. On the contrary, in case after case, independence was granted, after a relatively moderate agitation, by a former ruling power which showed a certain relief to be rid of its colonial burden. This indicates a profound change in attitudes toward colonies within the imperialist countries. The significance of this change can hardly be denied; the real question is concerned with its causes.

Before 1940 the possession of colonial territories was of little direct concern to most persons in the imperial homeland. They knew that their country had colonies and ruled over peoples quite different from themselves, and this was regarded, rather generally, as probably a good thing, a source of pride to most citizens and probably of some material advantage to the country as a whole. The costs of holding colonial areas were not generally recognized and were usually felt to be minor and incidental. But in the postwar period these costs very rapidly became major and direct charges, quite unacceptable to the ordinary citizen, when the postwar period and increased anticolonial agitations required heavy taxation and compulsory military service to regain or to retain such colonial areas. Once this was recognized, the former rather vague satisfaction with colonial possessions soon disappeared, and there was a rapidly spreading conviction that colonies were not worth it. The burden of taxes and military service in remote areas was regarded as part of the war, to be ended, as completely as possible, with the war itself, not to be continued indefinitely into the postwar period.