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ASIA
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- The colonised peoples of South-East Asia were the first to demand the departure of the Europeans and to claim independence. In the space of a few years, all the colonies, except the Portuguese possessions of Goa and Timor, became independent.
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Country/Region
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Brief
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India
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- In 1947, the British decided to leave India
- Few months later, India gained its independence
- In 1948, the United Kingdom also granted independence to Burma and Ceylon, and in 1957 to Malaya
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Indonesia
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- Indonesia endured four years of military and diplomatic confrontation with the Netherlands before the Dutch Government recognised the independence of the Dutch East Indies in December 1949
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Emergence of Third World
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- The independence movement led to the emergence of a series of countries that did not belong to the Western bloc or the Soviet bloc.
- These countries had various features in common, including underdevelopment and rapid demographic growth, and they became known collectively as the ‘Third World’
- In the 1950s, five newly independent Asian countries (India, Pakistan, Ceylon, Burma and Indonesia) took the initiative to rally the Third-World countries to form a united front against colonisation.
- On 17 April 1955, the first Afro–Asian Conference was held in Bandung in a bid by Third-World countries to consolidate their position on the international stage.
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Suez Crisis
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- The Suez Crisis directly threatened the interests of France, the United Kingdom and Israel, leading to a trial of strength that culminated in a joint military operation by the three countries against the former British protectorate in October 1956.
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AFRICA
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- The Bandung Conference and the Suez Crisis led to the second phase of decolonisation, which chiefly took place in Africa.
- In North Africa, France had to face a serious crisis which began in Algeria with the uprising of the National Liberation Front in 1954.
- The war then spread to Morocco and Tunisia and eventually even threatened the French Republic itself.
- The protectorates of Morocco and Tunisia were granted independence in March 1956 without any armed struggle.
- Algeria, on the other hand, was considered to be an integral part of France, and events took a different turn. It was only after a painful eight-year-long war, which lasted from the 1954 insurrection to the Évian Accords of March 1962, that Algeria became an independent state
- From 1957 onwards, it was the turn of the former British, French, Belgian and Portuguese possessions in sub-Saharan Africa to gradually gain independence.
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United Nations Trust Territories
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- When the United Nations was formed in 1945, it established trust territories.
- These territories included the League of Nations mandate territories which had not achieved independence by 1945
- In this process, by 1990 all but one of the trust territories had achieved independence, either as independent states or by merger with another independent state
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Europe
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- Italy had occupied the Dodecanese islands in 1912, but Italian occupation ended after World War II, and the islands were integrated into Greece
- British rule ended in Cyprus in 1960, and Malta in 1964, and both islands became independent republics.
- The Republics of the Soviet Union become sovereign states—Armenia, Azerbaijan, Byelorussia (later Belarus), Estonia, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Latvia, Lithuania, Moldova, Russia, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Ukraine and Uzbekistan by the 1990s
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