constitutional regimes in Europe, in the imperial metropoles, had largely collapsed. After the war, Europe was a region of more or less failed states in the outskirts of the two ‘super-powers’ of the new world order, the Soviet Union and the United States.[1] With a few significant exceptions – the United Kingdom, Switzerland and to some extent the Scandinavian states – the European constitutional regimes as well as the faith in the international order that underpinned them had been destroyed.[2]
World War II led to the ‘fall’ of ‘European’ international law and the emergence of a new global order, a ‘universal’ international law, with a number of new significant international institutions such as the United Nations (UN), the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund.[3] An important aim of these institutions was to facilitate the transformation of colonial territories into sovereign states as well as to control and manage the new ‘Third World’.[4] The members of this new ‘community of nations’ were no longer separated into ‘civilised’ and ‘uncivilised’ nations but rather ‘developed’ and ‘underdeveloped’ countries as the old ‘civilising mission’ was replaced by a project of ‘modernisation’.[5]
5. Decolonisation and the transformation of Europe
With the end of the ‘age of extremes’, Droit Public de l’Europe was finally drawing to a close, even though decolonisation was yet to happen in earnest. The German and Italian projects of fascist imperialism had been quashed and it became clear that the foundations for the new world order would not be built on the old world of European empires. Nevertheless, for the first two decades after World War Two, the European metropoles attempted desperately to cling on to their imperial possessions by relying on a mixed strategy of imperial constitutional reform and violent repression.[6] The most ambitious constitutional reforms projected a vision of the transformation of the British, French and Dutch empires into Federal Unions or Commonwealths based on the extension of imperial citizenship and other constitutional rights.[7] However, when these projects failed or turned out to be stillborn, the European states attempted, and failed, to hold on to empire through violent coercion, for example during the Indochina War/Anti-French Resistance War (1946–54); the Indonesian War of Independence (1945–49); the Malayan Emergency/the AntiBritish National Liberation War (1948–60); the Mau Mau Uprising/the Kenya Emergency (1952–60); the Algerian War of Independence (1954–62); and the 1956 Suez crisis.[8]
- ↑ See, for example, Judt, Postwar ch 1; Westad, The Cold War ch 1.
- ↑ Eric J Hobsbawm, Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century, 1914–1991 (Abacus 1994); Westad, The Cold War ch 1.
- ↑ For a discussion of the imperial roots of the UN, see Mark Mazower, No Enchanted Palace: The End of Empire and the Ideological Origins of the United Nations (Princeton University Press 2009).
- ↑ This process, however, already started after World War One with the establishment of the Mandate System of the League of Nations that placed the former colonies of the Ottoman Empires and the German Empires under a ‘system of international tutelage’, see Anghie, Imperialism, Sovereignty and the Making of International Law ch 3. On the Bretton Woods institutions as the successors to the Mandate System, see specifically 190ff. See also Sundhya Pahuja, Decolonising International Law: Development, Economic Growth and the Politics of Universality (Cambridge University Press 2011).
- ↑ For a classic work on modernisation theory, see, for example, Lucian W Pye and Sidney Verba (eds), Political Culture and Political Development (Princeton University Press 1965). For a history of modernisation theory, see Nils Gilman, Mandarins of the Future: Modernization Theory in Cold War America (Johns Hopkins University Press 2004). See also Joseph Morgan Hodge, ‘Writing the History of Development (Part 1: The First Wave)’ 6 (2015) Humanity 429.
- ↑ ‘Even after the end of the Second World War, the European nations that had not lost the conflict clung tightly to their colonial possessions, which they considered an extension of the metropole, a central component of their prestige and national identity, and vital economic “living space,” not to mention a strategic reserve of cheap labour’, see Garavini, After Empires 8. See also Shipway, Decolonization and Its Impact; William Roger Louis, Ends of British Imperialism: The Scramble for Empire, Suez and Decolonization: Collected Essays (IB Tauris 2006).
- ↑ Frederick Cooper, Citizenship between Empire and Nation: Remaking France and French Africa, 1945–1960 (Princeton University Press 2014); Burbank and Cooper, Empires in World History 415ff.
- ↑ For a comparative history of decolonisation in the British, French and Dutch empires, see Martin Thomas, Bob Moore and Larry J Butler, Crises of Empire: Decolonization and Europe’s Imperial States, 1918–1975 (Bloomsbury Publishing 2010). See also, Mark Mazower et al, Post-War Reconstruction in Europe: International Perspectives, 1945–1949 (Oxford University Press 2011) pt 4: Empire. For a discussion of the Portuguese Empire’s attempt to hold on to its African colonies after World War Two, see Thomas, Moore and Butler, Crises of Empire ch 16.
