Title: How did Cold War rivalries affect European decolonization? - lawpark's JimdoPage!
Headings: How did Cold War rivalries affect European decolonization?
How did Cold War rivalries affect European decolonization?
Works cited:

Content: Cold War and European decolonization were global processes that largely overlapped in time. The interrelationships between them were complex. To achieve better analytical clarity, let me begin  with some definitions. I take Cold War to be the “bipolar conflict between the United States and the U.S.S.R.” (20-3). European decolonization refers to Europe’s “withdrawing from its formal,  territorial claims overseas.” ( Note 1) This latter definition excludes the widespread phenomena of spheres of influence, client states, military occupation and nationalistic secessions – and  covers “in the main … Africa, the Middle East …, and Asia.” ( Note 1) In this essay, I argue that while Cold War was not a primary cause of European decolonization, United States’ Cold War  strategies and actions did produce a conducive environment for European state’s withdrawal, and U.S. (together with its European allies) tended to suppress independence movements in colonies  where there were local militarized Communist groups that might ally with the Soviet Union. For evidence for these arguments, I will limit my examples to the period between 1946 and 1976. Cold War was not a primary cause of European decolonization, in the counterfactual sense that if the two superpowers emerging from WWII stayed friendly, the withdrawal of European imperial powers  from their colonies were still likely to happen. To understand why this might be, it is useful to review why European powers obtained colonies in the first place.