How did the process of European integration allow western European democracies to redefine their global role in the aftermath of decolonization?
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How did the process of European integration allow western European democracies to redefine their global role in the aftermath of decolonization?
The creation of the European Union in 1992 was the endpoint of a long process of integration that began in 1945. In many ways, it was a remarkable achievement. Why was it remarkable?
First of all, everything in European history up to this point had been the history of the creation of sovereign nation-states. In 1992 with the European Union, you had an extraordinary thing: a group of nations came together to surrender a portion of their sovereignty and submit to the authority of a super-national organization that contained executive functions (a president), a parliament, an international court, and it had a unified economy with its own currency. That's remarkable because it was driven by two nations, France and Germany, who had been at war three times since 1870-the Franco-Prussian War, the First World War, and the Second World War.
Now, we shouldn't think they did this because Europeans were feeling particularly generous. Everybody involved did this because they perceived it to be in their national self-interest. First of all, in the context of the Cold War and the division of Europe into separate spheres, with the Soviet Union dominating the east and a region in the west aligned with the United States, meant that the number of states that could join this union in its early years was rather small. And the fact that it was small made it possible. It was in the economic interests of the United States to foster the economic development of Europe in the aftermath of World War II and they did so with the Marshall Plan. It was in the national interests of France and Germany to find some way of cooperating with one another.
The common market was created in 1958 and it was so successful that many other nations asked to join. And in some way, the sad point about the end of this story with the creation of the European Union in 1992 was that it occurred at a moment of crisis in Europe: the collapse of the Soviet Union. One of the first things that the European Union was forced to do was accommodate itself to this new reality, the possibility that these other states which had been under Soviet authority could petition to join, as many of them did.
Yet still today, the European Union has a very uncertain eastern border. Should it include the Ukraine? Should it include Turkey? If it includes those two, could it include Morocco or Tunisia? Where does Europe stop?
Those kinds of questions mean that Europe has quite a few things to deal with in the future and unfortunately the European Union has shown itself to be limited in its ability to contain crises. An example might be the civil wars in Yugoslavia, where the European Union seemed to be powerless to stop the spread of ethnic cleansing. The European Union hasn't solved the problem of national sovereignty but they have offered a vision of a possible future whose success really remains to be demonstrated.
Can one separate the history of decolonization from the history of the cold war?
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Can one separate the history of decolonization from the history of the cold war?
Between 1945 and the early 1960's, a major realignment in global relations occurred with decolonization, the end of the age of European empires. This was quite an extraordinary period. A huge number of nations that had formerly been colonies of European empires emerged. This was a process that in some places was relatively straightforward and peaceful, with a transfer of power that was confirmed in negotiation. In other places there was real violence. That violence could have come about because in these newly independent nations there were differences within the population that couldn't be resolved before the transfer of power. The most significant occurrence was perhaps in India, where the need to partition the country into a Muslim state (Pakistan) and a Hindu state (India) produced horrific ethnic violence at the moment of partition.
Another reason the decolonization could become violent was in the settler colonies that had a particular kind of relationship with the empires - a large presence of European settlers - that could complicate the process by which a new nation could emerge and declare its independence. For example, in the French colony of Algeria and the British colony of Kenya, the presence of settler populations demanded that the British and French send troops to suppress movements for national independence in ways that prolonged the conflict in extremely bitter ways.
Finally, it was inevitable that decolonization would become enmeshed in the politics of the Cold War. Because the Soviet Union and the United States couldn't confront one another directly, in Europe they were strongly tempted to influence the process of decolonization by supporting proxies that they favored in other parts of the world. You can see this outcome in many places, most famously in Indochina.
Ho Chi Minh, a communist leader in Vietnam, asked the United States for help in defeating the French, comparing himself to the original thirteen colonies demanding self-determination for the United States. The United States turned him down. When Ho Chi Minh wrote this letter in 1945, the United States was faced with an implicit Soviet threat in Eastern Europe and didn't want to trouble its relationship with an ally. The situation was reversed in 1960 when France asked the United States for assistance in suppressing the Algerian independence movement. And here, too, the United States refused. They could not afford in the midst of a very tense moment, The Cuban Missile Crisis, they couldn't afford to take a strong stance against national self-determination.
Finally, maybe the most important way in which the Cold War acts as a context for the process of decolonization can be seen in the Bandung Conference of 1955. The Indonesian government, newly independent, invited representatives from other former colonies to sign a charter, a declaration of aims that included a condemnation of European racism and an affirmation of the dignity of non-European cultures and the need to preserve them. They very clearly positioned themselves as what would come to be known as the non-aligned movement. This is the origin of the term, Third World: a non-aligned movement of former colonies that would attempt to pool their resources, to exert their influence in global affairs, independent of the United States or the Soviet Union.
In that sense, can we say that decolonization needs to be seen within the Cold War context? Yes, but we might also say that the Cold War needs to be seen in the context of decolonization.