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

Another closely related change occurred in economic aspirations. The citizens of the European colonial Powers had survived six years of hardships in the war itself and, in most cases, a decade or more of economic hardships in the prewar depression. The war demonstrated that such economic hardships had been needless. The massive economic mobilization for the war showed clearly that there could be an equally massive postwar mobilization of resources for prosperity. The ordinary European was determined to obtain the rising standards of living and welfare security that he had been denied in the depression and war, and he had no stomach to be denied these any longer in order to hold in subjection native peoples who wanted independence. Thus the former beneficiaries and upholders of empire, usually restricted to an upper-class minority or specialized interest groups, found that these interests no longer would be supported by the majority of their own citizens.

In some cases independence was achieved after a period of violence, rioting, and guerrilla warfare, although in no case did these actions, however extensive, become a matching of force between the colonial area and the imperial Power. In no case could these powers be matched, since the latter was overwhelmingly larger. In most cases, a more or less token display of force by the colonial peoples showed that they could be subdued only by an expenditure of resources and inconveniences which the ruling Power decided it did not care to make. The existence of the Soviet bloc and the appearance of the Cold War, with its almost irresistible demands for expenditures of resources, helped to tip the decision toward independence. Moreover, the opinion of the United States was favorable to independence for subject peoples in a rather doctrinaire and naïve anticolonialism, rooted in the American revolutionary tradition, without regard for the very great benefits the native peoples had obtained from their European rulers.

Resistance to the decolonizing process was strong only in exceptional cases, such as in the French Army and in the Portuguese ruling groups. In Portugal the despotic character of the regime made it possible for the adherents of the colonial system to sustain the policy of resistance to independence, but the role of the French Army, especially in Indochina and Algeria, was almost unique.

This unique quality in the Algerian crisis rested on three factors: (1) Algeria, which had been held by France since 1830, was constitutionally part of France, and its problem was part of the domestic history of the metropolitan country, since 30 of the 626 members of the French Assembly represented Algeria; (2) in Algeria there was a large group of European settlers (about 12 percent of the total population) who could not be turned over to an independent Arab majority, whom they had treated as inferiors for years; and (3) the French Army, after a series of defeats from 1940 to Indochina in 1954, resolved not to be defeated in Algeria and was prepared to overthrow by civil war any French cabinet that wished to grant independence to that area. Bitterness in Algeria was intensified by many other issues, including drastic religious, economic, social, and intellectual contrasts between the European settlers and the Algerian majority. The latter, for example, as a result of French medical skills, had one of the world’s major population explosions, while the settlers owned most of the land and almost all the local economic activities.

The bitterness of the Algerian struggle almost exceeded belief, as the extremists on each side adopted intransigent positions and sought to eliminate by assassination the more moderate of their own groups. Both sides resorted to strikes and riots in the cities, guerrilla operations and farm burnings in rural areas, and assassination in France itself. By 1960 indiscriminate bombings and reprisals against innocent peoples were alienating increasing numbers of persons from the extremes toward more moderate positions nearer the center, although the extremists as they decreased in numbers became more violent in action. In 1958 the crisis brought General de Gaulle back to office in France from retirement, largely because his supreme self-confidence and ambiguous position on the chief issues of controversy gave grounds for belief that he could find some solution to the crisis, or at least could maintain domestic order. This change ended the Fourth French Republic and brought into existence a new regime, the Fifth Republic, whose constitutional provisions were custom made to De Gaulle’s type of despotic ambiguity (October 1958).

It took almost four years more before agreement was reached between the Algerian rebels and the De Gaulle regime on a settlement of the Algerian dispute (March 18, 1962). Even then, sporadic violence continued for months. The final cost of the Algerian crisis, over seven years, has been estimated at 250,000 lives and $20 billion.

The intensity of this conflict and the socialistic policies of the new Algerian government of Muhammad Ben Bella provided an unattractive future to the previously superior European settlers, and many of these left the country to seek residence elsewhere, chiefly in France although only a small portion of them were of French origin. The erratic instability and demagogy associated with so many newly independent states was displayed by Ben Bella during his visit to the Western Hemisphere in October 1962. Although he came to seek economic concessions and was given an especially warm welcome by President Kennedy, a few days later he visited Castro in Cuba and made a scathing attack on United States policy, demanding American evacuation of the Guantanamo Bay Naval Base. The following month, on his return home, Ben Bella nationalized mines, power, foreign trade, and much of the lands of European settlers. At the same time, the Communist Party was outlawed and hundreds of “enemies” of the regime were arrested.

A number of newly independent states followed what we might call the Nasser pattern of postcolonial policy. This involved a large amount of verbal attack on the United States and the European ex-colonial powers, a rather ambivalent but generally favorable attitude toward the Soviet bloc, and a less public effort to obtain Western aid or economic concessions to compensate for the basic inability of the Soviet bloc to provide such aid. With this double policy, there frequently went a rather aggressive attitude toward neighbors with which the new state had real or fancied grievances, which were played up at critical moments as a cover for the inability of the new regimes to cope with the postliberation economic and social problems of their own peoples. In many cases, such as Sukarno of Indonesia, Nasser, Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana, and Castro, these leaders sought to exercise the qualities of personal popularity and superhuman personification of popular aspirations that we call “charismatic leadership.”

None of these policies or attitudes was much help in coping with the very real problems that have faced the newly independent nations with growing urgency. The enthusiasm that greeted independence and the acceptance by the world of that status through admission to the United Nations was followed, in most cases, by a post independence reaction as the scope and almost insoluble nature of each country’s problems had to be recognized.

The nature of these problems must be evident from what has already been said. At a minimum they could be divided into three or four groupings concerned with the patterns of power, of wealth, of social relationships, and of outlook.

In the European tradition, power has tended to rest on some kind of synthesis of military (force), economic (material rewards), and ideological elements and on some kind of political structure (such as the parliamentary system) in which the opposition was incorporated into the constitutional system. In most colonial or backward areas, power has tended to rest on other aspects of the total social structure, notably on religion or on social pressures derived from kinship and tribal groupings or from stable social patterns in villages or residential patterns. There has been a tendency toward conformity and even uniformity; opposition groups and diversity have tended to be encapsulated into exogamous social groupings like the castes of India.