Decolonization

European states that had just been occupied, bombed, or bankrupted by the Second World War still clung to their colonies, because empire meant prestige, raw materials, and a claim to still matter among the great powers. But the war had also armed colonial independence movements with new arguments: if Britain and France had fought against domination by Germany, how could they deny self-rule to Algerians, Indians, or Vietnamese? Nationalist movements that had organized during the war pressed harder once it ended, and the occupying powers no longer had the money or the will to hold on everywhere at once.

Two crises exposed how fast the old order was slipping. In Algeria, a war that began in 1954 dragged on so brutally, and so divided French society, that by 1958 settlers and army officers in Algeria were threatening to seize power in France itself. The Fourth Republic's governing coalitions could not survive that threat, so Charles de Gaulle returned and wrote a new constitution, the Fifth Republic. In 1956, Britain, France, and Israel invaded Egypt after Nasser nationalized the Suez Canal, only to be forced to withdraw when both the United States and the Soviet Union demanded it. Suez showed that neither European power could act abroad anymore without a superpower's consent.

Independence rarely erased the old ties. Britain's hurried partition of India in 1947 drew a border between India and Pakistan that triggered mass displacement and communal violence, a pattern of rushed, violent borders repeated elsewhere. Yet former colonies kept trading heavily with Europe, former colonial languages stayed official, and migration flowed back toward the old imperial centers, so decolonization reshaped power without fully severing the connection.