The Cold War and the Decolonization of the British Empire

The Cold War did not cause decolonization, but it decisively shaped the speed, language, and limits of the British retreat. The same bipolar confrontation that gave the United States the confidence to demand an end of European empire also gave the Soviet Union a propaganda windfall from every colonial war it could publicise. For Britain, caught between an American ally that wanted colonial questions closed and an Afro-Asian opinion that wanted them answered, the result was a strategic cage. As Wm. Roger Louis put it in The End of the British Empire in Africa (2006), anti-colonial nationalism, American pressure, and the Cold War formed “an unbreakable triangle” that made the old gunboat diplomacy unthinkable.

The Atlantic Charter and Its Discontents

The Atlantic Charter of 14 August 1941 committed the Allies to “the right of all peoples to choose the form of government under which they will live.” Roosevelt, weighing the sensibilities of Latin American and African-American voters, intended the language to apply globally. Churchill, with characteristic bluntness, insisted to the Cabinet that “we had no thought of consulting the peoples of the British Empire, and still less of consulting their representatives” about the Charter’s third point. The contradiction was deliberately preserved, and it became the founding text of post-war anti-colonial argument. Jawaharlal Nehru read Article 3 as a promise; the British government read it as a war aim that did not bind its colonial practice.

Washington, Moscow, and the Two Anti-Colonialisms

American opposition to European empire combined anti-colonial tradition with Cold War calculus. The State Department under George Marshall and Dean Acheson calculated that a defensive perimeter in Western Europe and East Asia was incompatible with the indefinite retention of colonial dependencies. India mattered most: in 1946–47 the United States pressed London to accept the Cabinet Mission plan, in part because New Delhi’s alignment seemed, in Acheson’s words, “almost certain to swing to the Soviet Union” if British rule persisted. The point was dramatised at Suez in 1956, when Eisenhower and Dulles forced Eden and Mollet into a humiliating withdrawal that announced, in John Darwin’s phrase, “the end of Britain as an independent great power.”

Moscow’s posture was cruder. The USSR used its UN Security Council veto to back anti-colonial resolutions, sponsored the 1960 Declaration on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples, and trained several thousand African and Asian students a year in Patrice Lumumba University. Soviet and East German media, above all the GDR’s Neues Deutschland, publicised British counter-insurgency operations in Kenya, Malaya, and Aden in ways that no British press organ could match. Anti-colonial nationalists could almost always find an external patron, and the certainty of that patronage stiffened their demands.

The Third Way: Bandung, Accra, Belgrade

The 1955 Bandung Conference, attended by 29 Asian and African states, asserted a non-aligned position that refused Cold War patronage on either side. Kwame Nkrumah, who had been a co-organiser of the 1945 Pan-African Congress in Manchester, hosted the 1958 All-African Peoples’ Conference in Accra, and the meeting gave institutional form to pan-African demands for independence. The Non-Aligned Movement, formally founded in Belgrade in September 1961, was the diplomatic projection of that position. Tito, Nehru, Nasser, Sukarno, and Nkrumah agreed that the new states would not join either Cold War bloc, and they used the UN General Assembly, by the early 1960s the principal forum for the anti-colonial cause, to extract concessions that London could no longer refuse.

Cold War Limits: The Settler South

The Cold War did not, on its own, produce rapid decolonisation everywhere. Portugal, sheltered by NATO membership and the strategic value of the Azores bases, clung to Angola, Mozambique, and Guinea-Bissau until the Carnaton Revolution of 25 April 1974. The 1965 Unilateral Declaration of Independence in Rhodesia was supported, materially and diplomatically, by apartheid South Africa and by Portuguese Mozambique, and Rhodesia only fell with the 1979 Lancaster House settlement, negotiated by Lord Carrington in the wake of the Muzorewa–Smith “internal settlement” failure. The British withdrawal from the Gulf in 1971 and from East of Suez in 1968 was, in both cases, a recognition that sterling could no longer sustain a global military role that the United States was already performing.

The Last Years of British Withdrawal

The Cold War shaped even the very last acts of British withdrawal. The 1968 Defence Review, completed under the Labour government of Harold Wilson, ended the policy of “East of Suez” and reduced the British presence in the Persian Gulf to a token force. The Hong Kong handover of 1997 was negotiated between 1984 and 1997, the exact middle of the post-Cold War transition. The 14 British Overseas Territories that remain under British sovereignty — among them the Falklands, Gibraltar, and Bermuda — are the residual inheritance of choices taken in a period when the legal and political vocabulary of decolonisation was being remade under Cold War pressure.

Historiographical Note

Three positions have framed the Cold War–decolonisation debate. The orthodox school, associated with John Darwin and the late Wm. Roger Louis, treats decolonisation as the necessary adjustment of an over-extended power to a Cold War system dominated by the United States. The “Second Decolonisation” school, represented by Christopher Lee and Adom Getachew, places the 1940s moment at the centre of a longer intellectual history of race, rights, and international order. The neo-Marxist school, in the tradition of Cabral, Rodney, and more recently Sven Beckert’s Empire of Cotton (2014), treats Cold War anti-colonialism as an instrument of American and Soviet rivalry, masking continuities of metropolitan capital. The truth, as Darwin has argued, is that the three dynamics — metropolitan exhaustion, colonial revolt, and superpower competition — operated simultaneously, and that no single causal account can do justice to the period.

In this Section

Other Sections