Decolonization in Britain and France: The Domestic Consequences of International Relations

by Miles Kahler

Overview

Professor Kahler focuses on organizations below the state, investigating party competition and sensitivity to political change produced by the characteristics of commercial firms. In addition, he explores transmission of external shocks to the domestic polity by the state itself and the domestic politics of settler societies under external threat.

Originally published in 1984.

The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780691640501
Publisher:	Princeton University Press
Publication date:	04/19/2016
Series:	Princeton Legacy Library , #721
Pages:	442
Product dimensions:	6.10(w) x 9.30(h) x 1.50(d)

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Decolonization in Britain and France

The Domestic Consequences of International Relations

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By Miles Kahler

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 1984 Princeton University Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-07672-0

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CHAPTER 1

Introduction. Decolonization: Domestic Consequences of International Relations, Domestic Sources of Foreign Policy

In France discussions of decolonization frequently evoke the word drame. Few would deny the tragic and apparently inexorable quality of the events that accompanied the end of the colonial empires, stretching from the partitions of India and Palestine to the final episodes enacted today in southern Africa. The birth of dozens of new states came at a high cost to their future citizens in displacement and death; their heritage has been, in many cases, lingering conflict. For the European states, decolonization seemed the last precipitous act in their decline from world preeminence, leaving doubts about their place in the international order. But drame connotes more: an event on such a scale that judgments, particularly moral judgments, are difficult; an occurrence unique in its impact on the history of our century and the societies in question. Decolonization, like the world wars, has been viewed as a great watershed, which it undoubtedly was. Unfortunately, declarations of its unique quality have served to suspend efforts by social scientists and historians to situate decolonization within the context of either international or comparative political analysis.

Perhaps the simplest way to frame these events would be to consider European colonial policies as a special case of foreign policy, even though the ties between colonial power and empire were of a different order than those between two "foreign" states. In comparing the two cases, one would ask why the French elite seemed to resist change so tenaciously; why their British counterparts conceded more gracefully. In this view, Britain and France were challenged by colonial nationalists, yet remained "in control."

A second glance, however, brings into the field of vision aspects of decolonization that a conventional analysis of this kind cannot explain. Under the pressure of external events, political parties split. Settlers and soldiers raised the banner of resistance. Investors and traders dependent on the empire shifted their position from hostility to acquiescence in political change. Britain and France did not seem to be "in control"; elites had to examine carefully the domestic consequences of alternative courses of action. Any explanation of the contrasting French and British courses in decolonization must, then, take a further step: recognizing that the domestic sources of external policy (colonial policy in this case) may be affected in their turn by changes in the international environment or in other societies. The overarching argument presented here is that Britain and France were not entirely "in control" of the process, that they were not simply actors in their relations with the colonial empires, but were also acted upon by the empires, or, put another way, that the empires themselves, directly and indirectly, entered into the shaping of colonial policy during these years.

Two superficially similar episodes during the 1950s vividly illustrate the necessity of taking this second step and examining the ways in which changes on the periphery could undermine or strengthen the position of those at the center. In January 1953, at the height of the emergency in Kenya, the murder of a European family by African insurgents (the Mau Mau) led to a threatening demonstration by white settlers at Government House in Nairobi. Although it is difficult to imagine now, the threat by Kenyan settlers to "take matters into their own hands" or to ally with the South African Nationalists was a persistent worry for those in London. In this instance, however, events took a course rarely seen in the French case. The governor, Evelyn Baring, refused to receive the unruly mob; when they attempted to storm the building, he sent their own leaders out to placate them. Following the dispersal of the protesters, his only remark to one of those leaders, Michael Blundell, was "Well done." The British military — hardly allies of the settlers — were not involved in the attempted storming of Government House or in the dispersal of the crowd. The incident caused hardly a ripple in the politics of Britain.

Five years later, in May 1958, a similar crowd of European settlers, this time in Algeria, moved against the Government-General in the center of Algiers. The governor himself, Robert Lacoste, who was a strong supporter of the cause of French Algeria, had left his post. Led by students, the mob seized the building and began to pillage its official files; a cry went up for a Committee of Public Safety to be formed, in defiance of the Paris government. The army command, headed by General Salan, threw in their lot with the settlers, increasing the danger for the metropolitan regime. Confronted with this challenge, the parliamentarians in Paris replied in kind, by investing the government of Pierre Pflimlin, whose alleged intention to negotiate a solution to the Algerian conflict had spurred the revolt in Algiers. In the face of military threats and efforts by the Gaullists to bring their leader back to power, however, the regime's will to resist crumbled. What had begun as a riot in a colonial capital had been transformed into a change of political regime.

The events of May 1958 were only the most significant exemplars of the manner in which decolonization was able to shape politics in Paris to a greater degree than Paris was able to shape and contain the course of decolonization on the periphery. Two years earlier, a Socialist premier elected on a peace platform had visited Algiers, been greeted by a similar display of settler hostility, and returned to Paris to escalate the war that France was conducting in Algeria. In similar fashion, the ability of the British representatives in Kenya to assert their authority and to insulate British politics from events in Africa was also characteristic of a national pattern of policy, in which the metropolis was far less influenced by events in the colonial empire. Despite assiduous efforts by settlers and others to undermine governments intent on decolonization, Britain managed to decolonize while minimizing its domestic political costs. Noting the effects of external events on metropolitan politics and society, however, raises a further question, the importance of such a viewpoint for explaining outcomes in the two national cases. Does it illuminate essential aspects of decolonization that other approaches omit?

An answer to this question cannot be provided before presentation of the argument in the chapters that follow. Numerous competing explanations have been advanced for the difficulties encountered by France during decolonization and the apparent "success" of Britain. Some of these explanations, discussed in the final chapter, can be incorporated into an approach based on the domestic consequences of external change; others cannot. The explanation offered here, however, should not be taken as a total one: it emphasizes the metropolis and its links with the empire; it does not attempt to explain the contrasting colonial nationalisms which provided most of the pressure for change during these years. Nor will each instance of decolonization be considered: in an effort to ensure comparability between the British and French cases, only postwar decolonization will be considered, excluding the decolonization of Ireland and India. The settler colonies — most troublesome politically — offer the most complete and parallel instances of the international-domestic links at the center of the argument. The causal sequence under consideration is one of two steps: first explaining the differing effects that change in a particular set of external relations — those with the colonial empires — could produce within the metropolitan societies, and second, using those effects as partial explanations of the contrasting courses followed by France and Britain in divesting themselves of colonial rule.

Four means by which the empires implanted themselves have been chosen for closer examination: political parties and ideology; economic actors, particularly interest groups and individual firms; the populations of the empires, European and non-European; and the state, including colonial administrators and the military.

In the terms developed later in this chapter, political parties and the ideologies that they incorporated exemplify an indirect external influence. The metropolitan societies themselves had constructed an indirect link or anchorage for the empires in individual beliefs and political organizations; these ties proved the most resilient. Because of these links, political parties of the Right suffered contrasting fates — successful survival for the British Conservatives and the Gaullists, failure and eventual disintegration for the French modérés and the Poujadists.

The political competition that reinforced or weakened these indirect ties was organized on a spectrum of accommodation or resistance characteristic of societies under external pressure. Differences in the structure and content of nationalist and imperialist ideologies influenced outcomes in each national case, but these ideologies were more than lenses for interpreting changes on the colonial periphery; they were also significant organizationally to political groups on the Right. Relying upon nationalist incentives to maintain the support and participation of their members, representing a disproportionate share of colonial economic and political interests, these parties were the most vulnerable to disruption by the political disputes accompanying decolonization. In confronting the internal disengagement from empire that was required, the British Conservative Party possessed numerous advantages in the structure of political competition in Britain, the pattern of power within the party, and its long-established monopoly over the loyalties of a substantial portion of the British electorate. In France, a succession of right-wing parties were willing to employ resistance to decolonization as a means of attracting a nationalist constituency and hesitant to endorse moderate or liberal colonial policies for fear of their competitors in the next election. The causes and the consequences of contrasting conservative responses to decolonization are investigated in Chapter II.

Although the parties of the Right in Britain and France governed and influenced those who governed throughout the years of decolonization the parties of the Left, discussed in Chapter III, were not without effect on the course of decolonization. Their organizational sensitivity to the changes underway in the empires was also determined by ideological attachment, in this instance a commitment to "socialist foreign policy." The contrasting outcomes for British Labour — unified by that ideological core and pressing for speedy decolonization — and the French Socialists — who escalated the Algerian War under Guy Mollet in the face of dissidence and eventual rupture — substantially affected the course of national policy toward the pressure for change abroad. As in the case of the conservative parties, a particular link to the exterior in the form of party ideology had profound effects on the future of the organization.

In contrast to political parties, rendered sensitive to external change by their ideological stakes, economic actors, examined in Chapter IV, could influence metropolitan politics by both direct and indirect means. In a curious reversal of the pattern of penetration examined by students of developing economies, firms attempted to enter the metropolitan political arena in order to influence the pace of change on the periphery, singly and as represented by business organizations. Their resistance to or acquiescence in change — determined by their political exposures — also led them to attempt to influence the course of events indirectly, by shaping political debates in London or Paris on the economic value of empire. Influence of both sorts was finally limited by the overriding economic estimates and strategies of the metropolitan political elites, including their perceptions of the costs of a precipitous disengagement, all weighed against a calculation of political benefits and liabilities shaped by the ideological considerations described in Chapters II and III.

The populations that inhabited the empires could also influence metropolitan politics directly. Quickly situating themselves at the resistance pole of the nationalist spectrum, the settlers, representatives of fragment societies described below, were central actors in the imperial grip on French and British societies. Disparity of access to metropolitan society set them apart from their Arab or African adversaries and ensured that the pace of disengagement was slowed.

One sector of the colonial populations was particularly important in its political impact: the representatives of the state itself. Decolonization, like other forms of external pressure, could place disintegrative pressures on the bureaucracy that conveyed metropolitan authority to the colonial empires. Analysis of the social groups that are particularly sensitive to nationalist appeals and external threat correctly predicts the trials of France at the hands of rebellion within the state, by the military and administrators of empire. The men who ruled not only thwarted implementation of metropolitan policy on many occasions; they also openly attempted to influence the formulation of that policy in Paris, a pattern of meddling that culminated with the downfall of the Fourth Republic in May 1958. Britain's empire had relied upon indirect means of control; the principal role of the British Army was not colonial and the shift to the nuclear era had thus come more easily. The contrast between the two national cases is perhaps greatest in the impact that decolonization had upon the state itself. This final contrast is described in Chapter V.

DECOLONIZATION AND THE STUDY OF INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS

The domestic consequences of international politics, as typified in the course of decolonization, provide illumination and explanation of the contrast between British and French politics. Domestic consequences in their turn have implications for external policy and for the ways in which international relations are studied, setting a second task for this study. The approach taken here has two sorts of applications for international relations. First, in contrast to most studies of external policy-making, an examination of decolonization suggests that the determinants of foreign policy must be viewed as themselves influenced by the international environment or external actors. One cannot assume that feedback from a society's environment is mediated exclusively by state elites, particularly in relatively open societies such as the two under consideration. The effects of a particular choice in external relations may in turn undermine the bases of political power or economic success of those very elites. Like the politicians of the French Fourth Republic, those responsible for foreign policy must constantly look over their shoulders at the domestic effects of their actions and the international events with which they must contend. Those domestic consequences can paralyze the shaping of an external response or force leaders into courses of action difficult to explain by means of a state-centered reading of the national interest.

Attention to the domestic consequences of external change also has a second, broader set of implications for the analysis of international relations: by directing attention to questions of structure, it lends support to a different paradigm for research and explanation. Instead of emphasizing decision-makers and their stream of actions, attention is directed to obstacles in the path of any change in external orientation, to the anchors that particular patterns of external relations create within societies.

(Continues...)

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Table of Contents

• FrontMatter, pg. i
• Contents, pg. ix
• List of Tables, pg. xi
• Preface, pg. xiii
• CHAPTER I. Introduction. Decolonization: Domestic Consequences of International Relations, Domestic Sources of Foreign Policy, pg. 1
• CHAPTER II. Decolonizing Nationalism: Conservatives and Empire in Britain and France, pg. 59
• CHAPTER III. French Socialists and British Labour: The Lure of Empire, The Benefits of Principle, pg. 161
• CHAPTER IV. Metropolitan Politics and the Economics of Empire, pg. 265
• CHAPTER V. Colonial Populations, the State and the Politics of Britain and France, pg. 316
• CHAPTER VI. Conclusion: The Decolonization of British and French Societies, pg. 354
• Bibliography, pg. 389
• Index, pg. 411