UC Berkeley - HIST 186 - 2012 Spring - Sargent - International and Global History Since 1945 - Lecture 08 - The Socialist Alternative - 01h 20m 43s

The Cold War and Modern Foreign Policy Issues

[0:00]

Okay, it's 9:40 so it's about time for us to begin.

I would like to start today's lecture not in the past but in the present by sort of asking you to reflect upon what the most urgent foreign policy issues facing the United States and the world today are and whereabouts in the world they happen to be.

If Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton were to you know sit down over a picnic table to discuss the most urgent challenges facing the United States and the world what might they be talking about?

Here's an idea: they might be concerned about Afghanistan, you know what to do with the American military commitment in Afghanistan, how to wind it down or how to make a credible commitment to wind it down before the election.

They might be talking about Iran -- what to do with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad↗ and his sort of regime's regional aspirations you know for power and influence.

What to do about North Korea? This slide is a little bit out of date but what to... (laughter) but it's a... issue that has become only more urgent you know arguably with the transition from the regime of by Kim Jong-il↗ pictured in the slide to the new regime of his son that of Kim Jong-un↗ an uncertain transition. Where it will lead we know not yet.

But these among the most important foreign policy issues on the agenda today: Afghanistan, Iran, and North Korea. What links these issues if anything?

You know George Bush tried to link two of them with Iraq by calling them an Axis of Evil. That's rhetoric. It's not much more than that. But there are ways I would suggest in which these issues, major foreign policy issues, all are organically linked.

Modern Foreign Policy Issues and the Cold War

[2:08]

At some level each of these issues is a product of the Cold War. To explain the situation in which Afghanistan finds itself today we have to make reference to the Cold War. To explain Iran's politics, to explain why a theocratic regime rules in Tehran we have to talk about the Cold War and the impact of the Cold War on Iran's politics. To explain why Korea is divided, why half the country lives in affluent prosperity and political freedom, while the other half lives in sort of benighted darkness, we have to turn to the Cold War.

[2:43]

The Cold War had major consequences for each of these countries. It had major consequences for the developing world writ large.

The Hot Wars of the Cold War in the Developing World

[2:51]

Let's ask ourselves where was the Cold War fought for the most part? When we focused on processes of Cold War division we've focused for the most part on Western Europe and Northeast Asia. After all this is where the lines of the Cold War are drawn. This is where the frontiers you know are most vigorously defended.

But if we are to ask where the Cold War was fought you know not in terms of where the division took place but rather in terms of where the most human blood was shed I would suggest we'll get a very different sense of the Cold War's geography.

The Cold War was fought after all in places like Korea, Vietnam, here in Southeast Asia, Laos, and Cambodia, Afghanistan in the 1980s, in the Middle East, in Angola, in the Congo, in the Horn of Africa and in the Western Hemisphere too -- in Cuba, in Guatemala, in Nicaragua, in Brazil, in Chile, and Argentina.

You know many more people died as a consequence of the Cold War in these contexts than died in Berlin or in Britain or in Japan. The Cold War was deadliest ironically in those areas of the world that were sort of furthest removed from the front lines of Berlin where the Cold War's division you know was symbolically consecrated.

[4:20]

So this is one of the ironies of Cold War history -- that it was fought in locations far removed from sort of the European core of the Cold War international system.

Lecture Overview

[4:31]

And today that's what we're going to talk about. We're going to start by talking about sort of the creation of the Third World↗ as an aspect of decolonization's history.

[4:40]

After all Third World leaders did not for the most part construe their postcolonial future as that of a Cold War battlefield. The idea of the Third World at least at the outset was that of a region that would stand apart from the Cold War so how did this project become so sort of powerfully incorporated within the Cold War world?

We'll talk next about the Middle East as an important case study and we'll ask how sort of the Middle East become assimilated within the Cold War international system.

Next we'll do a similar exercise for Africa.

These are two regions that we haven't talked about particularly. so far our discussion has focused on sort of Asia so we'll deal with the histories of decolonization as well as the embroilment of postcolonial states in the Cold War for you know both of these regions -- the Middle East and Africa in today's lecture.

And finally we'll talk about the United States and Cold War interventionism and the Soviet Union and Cold War interventionism.

So rather than talking about you know sort of processes of Cold War intervention from the perspectives of the peoples whose affairs were intervened in we'll deal with the issue from the perspectives of the superpowers.

[5:49]

That's what we're going to do. It's quite a lot so we should get on with it.

As always if you have any questions please do just raise your hands and feel free to pose them at any point during the lecture.

Origin of the Third World

[6:00]

What was the Third World? How did it come to be?

Bandung Conference

[6:05]

The intrusion of the Cold War into the Third World was ironic and cruel. After all the Third World was created, at least at the beginning, as a neutral block in the Cold War world, as a block that would exist apart from the conflict between the United States and its allies and the Soviet Union and its allies.

The symbolic sort of point of departure for the Third World was the Bandung Conference↗ in 1955, a conference that was formally known as the Asia-African Conference, a conference that brought together leaders of Third World countries. The most important leaders to participate were Sukarno↗ of Indonesia, after all the conference was held in Indonesia, Bandung is an Indonesia city, Jawaharlal Nehru↗ of India who you can see just about see I think pictured in the slide, and Zhou Enlai↗ of China, the Premier of China. China's involvement in the Bandung Conference was some ways controversial. After all China was not a neutral country in the Cold War. China by 1955 was closely allied with the Soviet Union. But China was nonetheless a developing country and more than that the most populous country in the world -- the most important country arguably in Asia.

[7:24]

The Bandung Conference sought to lay down a challenge not only to imperialism, defined itself as a conference of nations opposed to imperialism, and committed to the overthrew of the colonial system, but also as a challenge to the logic of Cold War politics.

The participants in the Bandung conference committed themselves to create a new order of international relations in which neutrality in the conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union would be a foundational principle.

Non-Aligned Movement and Belgrade Conference of 1961

[7:55]

This effort to create a neutral block led in due course, six years later to the Belgrade Conference of 1961↗. Belgrade was an important sort of choice of location whereabouts is Belgrade city?

Serbia, where was Belgrade in 1961?

[8:14]

Yugoslavia -- exactly. The fact of the, of the Bandung countries including Yugoslavia in their group and choosing to meet in Belgrade suggested an expansion of the scope of the sort of Non-Aligned Movement↗ as it became known to include not only sort of countries that were situated economically and geographically in the developing world but also countries in Europe like Yugoslavia that defined themselves against the sort of bipolar division of the international system -- that of the Cold War.

[8:50]

The Belgrade Conference gives birth formally to the Non-Aligned Movement which sees itself as a third force in world politics, a force that will be opposed to both Cold War division, and which will refuse to align itself with either the United States or the Soviet Union.

[9:15]

The aspirations for this third force, the aspirations for the developing world, are high in the 1960s. Postcolonial leaders like Nehru are self-confident in their capacity to create a new order of world politics, an order apart from imperialism and apart from the Cold War.

[9:35]

Ultimately the promise of Bandung goes for the most part unfulfilled.

[9:43]

At least insofar as the ambitions of the Third World leaders to create a coherent international bloc are concerned. The Third World does not cohere into an autonomous force in international relations as Nehru and Sukarno and others hoped that it might.

Lack of Cohesion Among the Third World Countries

[9:59]

How do we explain this? Why did the Third World not become an organic cohesive international force on the model of the Soviet Bloc or the American Bloc?

Difficulty of Economic Cohesion

[10:13]

To explain the failures of Third World cooperation, the failures of Third World solidarity, I would suggest that we think first about the sort of limits of economic cooperation amongst the Third World Bloc countries. Bandung sets down a political agenda but realizing it will ultimately depend upon the economic integration of the Third World. After all consolidation of both the Western Bloc in the divided Cold War world and the East Bloc depended upon a degree of economic integration.

[10:49]

If the Third World economic integration proves much harder to achieve. There are obstacles to trade and these are both natural obstacles insofar as the goods that developing countries have to export are often you know very similar. It's more natural for developing countries that want to import industrial manufactured goods to import them from the West than it is to import them from other developing countries. So there are obstacles to trade.

Policy Obstacles

[11:20]

It also has to do with policy obstacles. Insofar as developing world countries for the most part pursue Import substitution industrialization↗ strategies -- ISI strategies -- there are major tariff barriers to trade, currencies are non-convertible, which makes it harder to integrate the Third World as a meaningful economic bloc than is the case for example in the West where the United States quite successfully integrates the economies of the West into a sort of cohesive international framework.

[11:52]

Conclusion: Lack of Cohesion Among the Third World Countries

Thus the Third World does not develop into you know cohesive bloc or unit in international relations at least not the kind of bloc or unit that either the West Bloc or the East Bloc represents. So what does the Third World become if not sort of a meaningful alliance of nation-states?

The Third World as an Ideological Construct

[12:14]

I'd suggest that the Third World enjoys greatest meaning as an idea, an ideological construct. The Third World exists not so much in space as in thought.

Proponents of Third World nationalism or Third-Worldism↗ what is known in French as Troisième-Mondisme embrace the Third World as ideological construct, as a sort of way of describing the vast region of the world, the vast portion of humanity, which is exploited and underdeveloped.

Leading Third World theorists, leading postcolonial theorists, as they're sometimes known, Frantz Fanon↗, a theorist whom you are reading this week in sort of the assigned texts for section discussion.

[13:11]

What do Third World theorists like Fanon claim? What do they argue? How do they define the Third World? What do they propose for it?

[13:22]

Fanon insists that the West, the developed world, is responsible for the setbacks of the developing world. He sees a direct relationship between the prosperity of the few and the poverty of the many.

In this respect he embraces a version of World-systems theory↗. He sees the existence of sort of concrete and tangible linkages between affluence and poverty.

[13:47]

More than that proponents of Third-Worldism offer strategies for overcoming this long history of dependence, and you're going to read more in Fanon as to what Fanon thought the colonized and recently postcolonial peoples should do in order to sort of improve their fortunes and to transform their relationships with the affluent prosperous West.

[14:11]

Third-Worldism becomes a sort of powerful ideological pole for Western intellectuals too in the era of the Cold War. Its influence on the French Left for example is profound. The French Left embraces Third-Worldism and transforms it in some cases into a sort of alternative paradigm for comprehending injustice and for acting to remedy it. And the alternative ... What is Third-Worldism alternative to for French intellectuals?

[14:44]

For some it displaces a Marxian framework, or at least as sort of transforms a Marxian framework, as a way of understanding inequality in the world.

[14:56]

For left intellectuals like Jean-Paul Sartre↗ the inequalities of nations structured by you know race and culture are as essential if not more essential to comprehending inequality as are sort of the old distinctions of class which Marx↗ and Engels↗ offered.

So the left in the West embraces Third-Worldism as a paradigm for comprehending injustice and inequality. This is true in Britain and the United States as well as in France though France is probably the more exemplary case.

[15:31]

Third-Worldism also has you know sort of practical ramifications for what you might construe as sort of anticolonial movements within nation-states. In the United States for example civil rights leaders self-consciously link their struggle with the struggle of colonized peoples to achieve independence and prosperity. The movement against apartheid in South Africa becomes internationalized in the 1960s.

The transnationalization, if you will, of antiapartheid politics is just one aspect of sort of the Third-Worldist mood that takes shape in the 1950s and 1960s.

[16:17]

You know Third-Worldism is a sort of complex intellectual or ideological movement. There are different strands or facets to it. But it's important to remember that Third-Worldism as an ideology challenges not only the West but also the East. Or at least it challenges the sort of Marxian ideology to which the Soviet Union adheres. Insofar as the Soviet Union identifies class inequalities as sort of the fundamental form of structural inequality existing in the world; Third Worldism offers a different kind of framework; one that sees inequalities on the basis of nationality and race as ultimately being sort of more consequential in the structuring of wealth and power in world politics.

[17:07]

There's a natural synthesis between these things. I mean Lenin points in that direction as early as sort of 1916 but it's Third-World theorists like Fanon who really make sort of Third-Worldism a major intellectual preoccupation in the 1950s and 1960s.

[17:25]

That's the theory. We're not going to belabor it. We're going to talk more today about sort of the practice of decolonization and the incorporation of the decolonizing and recently postcolonial world within the bipolar Cold War confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union.

Decolonization, Neocolonialism and Cold War Rivalry in the Middle East

[17:44]

Let's start this discussion by talking about the Middle East. The Middle East as you probably know was an important theater in the Second World War. Major fighting took place in North Africa. The Middle East became also a major sort of hub of Allied logistical operations. The British established Cairo, Egypt as a major center for the transshipment of supplies. Turkey and Iran in particular became sort of vital nodes on the communications network that linked the Soviet Union with its Western allies -- the United States and Great Britain. So the Middle East was sort of deeply and profoundly penetrated by Western power and influence before the Second World War.

[18:32]

Of course Western influence in the Middle East far predated the Second World War. The British had dominated Egypt since the late 19th century but the Second World War sort of amplifies the Western presence within the Middle East.

[18:46]

And this is important for what comes next. It's probably also important to note that besides the sort of geographical importance of the Middle East as a logistical hub for allied military operations during the Second World War the Middle East is also an important source of oil and the Western powers make use of it during the war itself.

Great Britain and Neocolonialism in the Middle East

[19:08]

What did Great Britain want to accomplish as the predominant sort of foreign power in the Middle East once the Second World War had been won? On Tuesday we talked about the example of India where the new Labor government that comes to power in 1945 was willing to cede independence sort of in order to rid itself of the problem that Indian nationalism threatened to become.

[19:35]

In the Middle East British objectives are rather different. The 1947 paradigm, the Indian paradigm, does not apply here. Rather Britain in the Middle East aims to sustain and perpetuate its colonial responsibilities.

[19:52]

That is not to say however that Britain sought to recolonize the Middle East. Britain didn't want to you know literally take over important Middle Eastern countries like Egypt and Jordan and Iraq. After all Britain had granted Iraq independence in 1930.

[20:08]

Rather Britain wanted to guide and dominate the Middle East's politics indirectly -- wanted to exercise what you might call a neocolonial rather than colonial influence on the region. The rationale for this was obvious from a British point of view. The Middle East was geographically vital as sort of, as a region sort of situated between Europe and Asia controlling the Middle East meant controlling the sea lanes in particular, the passage through the Suez Canal, and thence the Persian Gulf that joined the Mediterranean Sea with the Indian Ocean, and this was strategically valuable, and you know Great Britain wanted to retain control over it.

[20:56]

Besides the sort of logistical power, that control of the Middle East would convey, the British were understandably sort of interested in the fossil fuel resources of the region.

[21:13]

How did Britain want to accomplish this control? What would informal imperialism amount to in practice? Well, for starters it's important to remember that the countries of the Middle East: Egypt, Jordan, Iraq and Syria, would remain formally independent. They would remain nominally sovereign nation-states but that Britain would exercise sort of powerful privileges or responsibilities vis-à-vis these independent nations. Britain would retain control, at least in the British concept over defense, it would retain the authority and the right to protect foreign interests, you know, financial interests as well as the interests of European citizens. It would safeguard communications infrastructures and it would even protect religious minorities. Egypt's Christian population for example.

[22:06]

This was essentially the role that Britain saw for itself -- as the protector of the Middle East. An informal hegemon presumably exercising hegemonic responsibilities in accord with both its own interests and an enlightened view of regional interests.

[22:21]

How much of this was self-delusion depends of course upon your own perspective. But what the British wanted to accomplish was clear enough -- a sort of neocolonial managerial responsibility for the region writ large. How to accomplish this?

British Objectives and Palestine

[22:37]

That was the more difficult question. What were the obstacles to Britain exercising a postcolonial hegemonic role in the Middle East? One of the most powerful obstacles, at least at the beginning of the postwar era was Palestine, or rather the question of what to do with Palestine.

[22:59]

Let me just show you on the map. Palestine was, is this, in 1945, is this little territory here, which today comprises in part the State of Israel and in part of the territories administered by the Palestinian Authority.

[23:16]

In 1945 Palestine was a British possession -- to be more accurate -- it was a League of Nations mandate that Britain was responsible for administering.

[23:29]

The question of what would become with Palestine is a really contentious one and a very urgent one for Great Britain in the immediate postwar era. It was a question that had powerful repercussions for Britain's role in the larger Middle East.

[23:42]

The territory of Palestine was by 1945 already fiercely contested between the Palestinian population predominately Muslim, though with a few Christians, and the Jewish population of Palestine. Both sort of parties laid claim to rule in the mandate of Palestine once it became independent. What was Britain's relationship to this struggle between the Palestinians and the Jews? Britain had played a fairly duplicitous role, at least over the long term, in this conflict.

[24:19]

In 1917 Great Britain promised the territory of Palestine to the Jews in exchange for cooperation during the First World War. The document in which this promise was made, fairly notoriously, was the Balfour Declaration↗ -- 1917.

[24:35]

During the Second World War; however, Britain sort of reneged on this promise by telling the Palestinians that it would never turn the land of Palestine over to the Jews in exchange for Palestinian cooperation during the war.

[24:47]

So you know Britain hardly helped to facilitate a long term solution in the region. Of course the imperatives of devising a political solution for Palestine become all the more urgent in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War.

[25:04]

And in part that's because Palestine experiences a massive influx of refugee Jews from Europe. The story of what happened to the Jews in Europe during the Second World War is of course well known and tragic.

[25:21]

After the Second World War many European countries, such as Poland for example, which had a large prewar Jewish population adopt policies, which while less murderous than Nazi policies had been, were not necessarily much friendlier in intent. Poland was unwilling to sort of accept the return of its prewar Jewish population, a people who had been expelled and deported, by the Nazis during the war itself.

Where are these people to go? Initially they go to displaced persons camps but they are for all intents and purposes stateless. Palestine represents one possible home.

[25:59]

The Zionist Movement, the movement to create a Jewish State in the sort of historic context in which the State of Israel existed, you know a long time ago in biblical times of course far antedated the Second World War.

I don't want to go deeply into the history of Zionism here, but it will probably suffice to say that we should see Zionism as one of the multiple and myriad nationalist movements that take shape in the late 19th century and which have as their project the construction of sort of ethnically homogeneous nation-states.

[26:36]

You know Zionism is powerfully influenced by the example of Italian nationalism, of German nationalism, and so on and so forth. It emerges out of the same historical context in Europe.

[26:47]

But of course there is a key difference between the Palestinian territory and Italy or Germany which is to say that the territory itself is contested in a way that those national territories are not. The question of how to reconcile Jewish aspirations for the creation of a Jewish homeland with the interests of the Palestinian population of Palestine is you know an urgent one.

[27:14]

Now this is not a question that the British have much inclination to answer for themselves. Rather they try to you know bunt the question.

Britain tries at first to prevent Jewish immigration after the Second World War. This is not a particularly pleasant thing to do. After all we're talking about people here who are in many cases survivors of the Holocaust who have you know suffered through years in Nazi death camps or concentration camps.

For Britain to try physically to prevent their entrance to Palestine, even by force, is not a very happy position for the British to find themselves in.

[27:53]

Of course Jewish groups within Palestine resort to sort of direct action against British authority. What you might characterize as you know sort of terrorist tactics -- working to sort of force Britain to concede the rights of you know dominion and self-government to the Jewish population of this you know contested territory.

[28:14]

Beset by international opprobrium on the one side as a consequence of its refusal to let Jewish refugees enter Palestine and by direct action in Palestine on the other side the British simply decide to get out.

[28:29]

You know this is far too complex a problem for the British to resolve so what will they do?

[28:34]

They instead turn the issue over to the -- United States -- to the United Nations. As you know ships of refugees arrive off the coast of Palestine the British decide you know this is too much for us we're going to let somebody else resolve this.

[28:48]

The British turn the whole thing over to the United Nations which votes in 1947 to partition the territory into two states -- a sort of logical enough solution -- the territory is contested so let's decide it -- by dividing it.

[29:03]

That vote to divide Palestine is accepted by the Jewish inhabitants of Palestine. It's rejected by the Arab Palestinians.

[29:14]

Relations between the two communities quickly break down into a state of war. The war erupts in late 1947. In May 1948 the State of Israel is declared. The two sides, the Arabs and the Israelis as they're now known, reach an armistice in November.

Similarities and Differences Between Decolonization in Palestine and in India

[29:34]

Of course the consequences of this division continue to reverberate very powerfully. How should we see the postcolonial transition that took place in the British mandate of Palestine?

[29:52]

What exactly happened here? You know some ways we might see analogies between the Palestinian postcolonial succession, succession this produced sort of two successor states, the State of Israel and the Palestinian Territories as an analog to the division of India.

[30:10]

Right in both cases you have territory that is contested by different groups, groups that live amongst each other, and the process of postcolonial succession in a context in which there are rival claimants is necessarily an ugly, even a violent one.

The Maintenance of British Influence in the Middle East

[30:26]

There are key differences however. And one of the most important differences has to do with the intentions of the colonial power. In India Britain just wanted to get out. Get out of South Asia. In the Middle East Britain did not want to get out of the region writ large. Rather the British wanted simply to resolve the issue of Palestine's contested succession in order to facilitate the exercise of a larger you know sort of set of neocolonial responsibilities.

Insofar as the Palestinian issue was already a sore point with the Muslim Arab population of the Middle East the British wanted to you know shed themselves of responsibility for it so that it wouldn't be an impediment to the exercise of a larger neocolonial grand design.

[31:13]

This grand design would of course involve the maintenance of British military bases in Arab territories such as Aden -- a port city on the entrance to the Persian Gulf.

It would involve the exercise of, or the maintenance of alliances with key states such Iraq and Jordan, and most of all it would involve the maintenance of British power in Egypt.

Egypt had been a sort of ward of British protection since the late 19th century and the British were very eager to keep things that way.

Insofar as the contestation of Palestine was a source of instability and discontent the British just wanted done with it.

They wanted to focus on the larger post-imperial project.

The Fall of Farouk, The Rise of Nasser, The Suez Crisis and American Disapproval of the Military Action

[31:59]

Vital to the accomplishment of British neocolonial ambitions in the larger Middle East was Egypt. And in particular the Egyptian regime of King Farouk↗.

King Farouk was a British client, a longtime British client, and the British saw him as a reliable guarantor of British and Western interests in the region.

He was in a sense a key man or the key man for Britain's neocolonial design in the Middle East.

The Fall of Farouk and the Rise of Nasser

[32:30]

Unfortunately for the British, Farouk who was incompetent as well as sort of corrupt and corpulent, was overthrown in 1952 in a coup by members of the Egyptian army known as the Free Officers↗.

[32:45]

The Free Officers Coup of 1952 is a really important turning point. It overthrew a regime which nationalists saw as collaborationist and installed in its place a fairly dynamic nationalist political movement -- the leader of which would be Gamal Abdel Nasser↗.

[33:04]

One of the most important Arab political leaders of the postwar era. Nasser was neither a Communist nor a particularly market oriented capitalist rather his political philosophy had to do with nationalism -- with the assertion of the Egyptians and importantly of the larger Arab peoples. Nasser saw himself as the natural leader of Egypt and he saw Egypt as the natural leader of the Arab world.

[33:33]

The political philosophy that he promulgated could probably be best described as a Pan-Arabist political philosophy. It sought to rally the Arab nations of the Middle East under Egyptian leadership.

[33:47]

It sought to promote development, economic and well as political, development that would transform the Arab lands into sort of a vibrant, modern and economically diverse society.

The Great Powers Respond to the Free Officers Coup of 1952 in Different Ways

[34:02]

How did the great powers respond to this transformation in Egyptian politics? The overthrow of a corrupt British client and his replacement by a dynamic nationalizing modernizing project -- a project of Nasserism -- or Nasser's Pan-Arabism?

American Perspective

[34:20]

The United States was initially fairly sympathetic to Nasser.

The US didn't see King Farouk as a particularly reliable ally. Farouk was not an engaged or you know vibrant or creative leader. He spent most of his time driving imported cars.

[34:38]

He had a huge interest in automobiles. But so from an American perspective Farouk's replacement by Nasser seemed like a potentially positive development. Nasser might after all be able to build you know dynamic developing nation-states in the Middle East.

[34:57]

Nation-states that would presumably be more solid in the face of Communist challenge than a corrupt Egyptian state under Farouk might be.

The British Perspective

[35:07]

The British take a really different perspective. The British see Nasser virtually from the outset as an Arab Hitler.

That phrase -- Arab Hitler -- you know reverberates through London -- through Whitehall↗ in the immediate aftermath of the Free Officers Coup. The British are ill disposed towards Nasser from the outset.

The Suez Crisis

[35:28]

Doesn't take long for conflict between the British and Nasser to come to blows. The cause of the confrontation when it comes will be the Suez Canal -- the waterway that joins the Mediterranean with the Persian Gulf and thence with the Indian Ocean.

[35:45]

The Suez Canal was opened in 1882. Building it cost a lot of money as you can imagine. It's a big, big ditch. And the construction impoverished the Egyptian state so much so that the Egyptian state in effect mortgaged itself to British and French creditors and then when it was unable to you know pay the bills they did what lenders do which was to repossess the property.

[36:12]

The canal was taken over by Britain and France in the early 1880s. So it was an Anglo-French joint operation. Nasser in 1956; however, nationalized the Suez Canal. His reasons for doing so are complicated. The story you know involves Nasser's thwarted ambitions for Western funded development. Nasser wanted to build a dam on the Nile at Aswan -- the so called Aswan Dam. It was going to be financed with American capital. The United States got concerned that Nasser was pulling too close to the Soviet Union and canceled the funding which pushed Nasser even further towards to the Soviet Union.

[36:57]

So there's a complex local prehistory which you don't really need to get into. What's important is that Nasser in the process of estrangement from the West decided in 1956 to nationalize the Suez Canal -- to seize the canal and the strip of land surrounding it by force of arms and to transform this property, which was owned jointly by Britain and France, into an Egyptian national property.

From an Egyptian perspective this was reasonable enough. After all the canal ran straight through you know Egypt's territory. So Nasser was able to argue that Egypt was merely seizing what was by right its.

[37:37]

But from a Western perspective the Egyptian nationalization of the Suez Canal looked troubling indeed.

British and French Response to the Seizing of the Suez Canal

[37:48]

What to do about it? This was the burning question. The British and the French decided secretly, at least without telling the United States, that the thing would do be to retake the canal by force of arms. So they colluded with the State of Israel. Israel went to war against Egypt -- invaded Egypt in the fall of 1956 -- and the British and the French used that as a pretext for occupying the canal zone.

[38:19]

They said well we have to protect the canal zone in the context of this international war so as to ensure the free passage of shipping, but the whole thing was a collusion that had been cooked up between the British and the French and the Israelis beforehand.

International Outrage in the Suez Crisis

[38:32]

It became a major international crisis. The Soviet Union threatened to rain down a fuselage of nuclear missiles upon Britain if Britain did not remove its forces from the canal zone. Britain was condemned in the United Nations, and most important the United States was pretty outraged by what the British and the French had done.

American Outrage in the Suez Crisis

[38:57]

Eisenhower was absolutely furious by the covert Anglo-French Israeli action. These might be our allies he said but they've acted without giving us forewarning and by doing so they've put the future of the Western Alliance in peril. What was so damaging about the Suez Canal intervention from Eisenhower's point of view was that it looked like 19th century colonialism.

And Eisenhower said you just can't do this any more, you can't send it gun boats and paratroopers, or you know military force in order to seize a bit of territory because you don't like what the local ruler Nasser has done.

[39:36]

If we support the British, Eisenhower argued, in the cabinet meeting that was convened in the United States to discuss the crisis, then we're going to lose the developing world. There is no chance that a United States that aligns itself with naked colonialism like this will be able to win the sympathies of the developing world.

[39:55]

So Eisenhower coerces the British into pulling out. And he does this by exerting financial pressure against the British pound sterling.

Eisenhower's Opposition to Colonialism

[40:06]

This is a really interesting episode for a number of reasons. And sort of the first really interesting thing about the Suez Canal crisis is that Eisenhower was quite open in describing the Third World as an arena that was being contested in the context of the Cold War.

[40:24]

And Eisenhower asserted moreover that naked colonialism was not a suitable tactic with which to wage the struggle for the developing world.

[40:35]

Engaging in colonialism of the 19th century style, Eisenhower feared, would so outrage opinion in the developing world that it would condemn the United States and the West to lose the struggle for the Global South↗.

[40:49]

And that's the major sort of take away from the crisis. There are other interesting sort of consequences or ramifications to it as well that have to do with the internal politics of the Western Alliance.

Relations Within the Western Alliance and the Suez Crisis

[41:00]

The British felt really chastened by the whole thing, and decided in effect to never again defy the Americans. So subsequent to the Suez Crisis↗ British foreign policy cleaved closely to a Washington led line.

[41:16]

Sort of so it remains to the present day. The French on the other hand took a very different lesson from the crisis and this was that you can't trust the Americans. And so it remained more or less to the present day. (laughter).

Conclusion: The Suez Crisis

[41:29]

But were interested in the broader sort of contours of world history in this class not in Anglo-French diplomacy so let's set that to one side and see the crisis for what it was. Which as a major sort of moment of clarification in the West's relationship with the Global South. The Suez Crisis affirmed that colonialism of the old school style would not be tolerated at least not by the United States.

The Decolonization of Algeria and French Political Turmoil

[41:58]

At least formally a postcolonial era had arrived. The ramifications of decolonization would soon spread westward across the Middle East region to the territories of Northwest Africa, particularly Algeria, in which France exercised colonial role as it had done for some time.

Algeria after the Suez Crisis would become a sort of major focus for the struggle to achieve postcolonial independence on the part of a sort of colonialized population.

[42:41]

The Algerian Crisis↗ as it became in the 1950s reflected both dilemmas inherent to the project of Western colonialization as well as you know sort of aspects of French colonialism that were unique or particular within the larger sort of colonial experience.

[43:04]

What was general was that Algeria was a subject nation. A nation that had been taken over by France and turned into a colonial possession. Though also aspects of the Algerian experience that were somewhat unique and these had to do with the particular characteristics of French colonialism.

[43:22]

Whereas the British administered colonial territories as subject territories, as territories that were subordinate to British authority but distinct from the British isles, from the state of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. The French administered Algeria as an integral part of the French state. It was literally an overseas département of the French you know administrative structure. It was integrated to the French nation-state.

[43:52]

And this had important consequences for decolonization. It's harder to decolonize territory that is incorporated formally to your nation-state.

Moreover Algeria was home not only to tens of millions of Algerians but also to about a million French settlers -- the so-called Pied-Noir↗, black feet, literally translates as, of Algeria.

The question of who rules in Algeria; however, was an important question to, is an important question to complicate, to contemplate.

Though Algeria was sort of formally incorporated into the French state it did not follow that the Algerian population, the Arab population of Algeria, had sort of rights and privileges commensurate to those of French citizens.

[44:47]

A formal distinction is made between Algerians and French and this is one of the reasons that a nationalist movement seeking to sort of decolonize Algeria and to create an Algerian nation-state in the place of the French colony develops in the 1950s.

[45:04]

Much of the wealth in Algeria is controlled by the French settler population -- the Pied-Noir.

[45:09]

The for their part are very eager to maintain Algeria's status as a colonial possession, or as an integral part of the French state.

[45:18]

Their reasons for favoring a perpetuation of the status quo are fairly obvious. Who benefits?

[45:25]

All the white settlers, the Pied-Noir, are the beneficiaries of the status quo and they seek to preserve it.

[45:32]

As a nationalist movement emerges in Algeria the French state is placed in a very precarious difficult situation. Particularly after 1954 when the Algerian National Liberation Front↗, the FLN, Front de Libération Nationale, begins to wage open war against the French colonial authorities.

What is France to do? Should France let Algeria go as the British let India go or should it fight the nationalist movement? Should it meet force with force?

[46:08]

The interests and the presence of the Pied-Noir in particular put the French state in a very difficult situation. Simply to pull out and abandon Algeria would be to abandon these French citizens who reside in Algeria, and that's not something that the French government in Paris is eager to do. So instead France wages a fairly brutal counter-insurgency warfare against the FLN.

French Political Turmoil

[46:31]

This war becomes a major, major sort of focus of French politics. The right supports it. The left opposes it. Left intellectuals like Sartre you know who's taken with Troisième-Mondisme, Third-Worldism, as a sort of ideological preoccupation condemn the French colonial war in Algeria, and argue that is time to let Algeria go, it's time to decolonize. The right on the other hand supports the anti-insurgent war that the French state is waging.

International Outrage in the Algeria Crisis

[47:05]

As this war intensifies and becomes bloodier world opinion solidifies against France. The Eisenhower administration does not like the war that France is waging, sees it as a war that is detrimental to the interests of the West, the French condemned in the United Nations for waging a brutal anti-insurgent war. It is an increasingly costly struggle to sustain.

[47:30]

It's clear that not only world opinion but also history itself is on the side of the nationalists.

[47:37]

But the question remains for how long will the French try to you know perceive in the sustenance of their sort of colonial responsibilities, privileges, in Algeria.

The Coup Attempt by the Pied-Noir

[47:50]

As the French government sort of begins to contemplate devolution, even outright autonomy for Algeria, the French settlers, the Pied-Noire, strike back.

[48:04]

In May 1952 the Pied-Noire, sort of in concert with conservative elements within the French military, try to orchestrate a coup in Paris to overthrow the French government in order to create a new government that will be you know more protective of the French colonial interests in Algeria.

This is a big deal. I mean France is a pillar of the Western Alliance, a major, major state in democratic Western Europe. The specter of a right-wing military coup in France is a troubling one. And it attests to the sort of great instability that the Algerian crisis produces in French politics.

[48:46]

More than you know a troubling event for the West the coup is a transformative event in French politics. It marks the end of one constitutional order -- the Fourth Republic -- and ushers in a new constitution -- the Constitution of the Fifth Republic.

The Rise of Charles de Gaulle

[49:02]

The central figure in this drama turns out to be the man who led free France during the Second World War: Charles de Gaulle↗.

De Gaulle returns at the height of the crisis to in effect take over the leadership of the French state. De Gaulle presides over the drafting and implementation of a new constitution. This is a very different constitution from the constitution of the Fourth Republic.

The Fourth Republic had been a parliamentary system with a fairly weak political center. The Fifth Republic that De Gaulle orchestrates will be a very different system. It'll be much more centralized with a very powerful president.

[49:40]

And de Gaulle of course fills this presidential role. But de Gaulle does more than create a new constitutional order for France. He also commits himself to ending the war in Algeria.

[49:53]

And de Gaulle does this not because he's particularly sympathetic to the Algerian nationalist cause. De Gaulle is after all a conservative. He's not on the side of Third World Nationalism but de Gaulle is also a realist, and he recognizes that Algeria is a losing battle for France. He comprehends that this is a struggle that France cannot win and that it is in France's interest to dissolve as quickly as possible.

[50:18]

So de Gaulle comes to power in 1958 in Paris. And he immediately promises to transform France's relationships not just with Algeria but with France's other colonial possessions in Africa. And de Gaulle offers the colonies a choice. They can either become independent right away or they can transform their relationship with France to a more equal collaborative relationship. He creates a sort of new sort of postcolonial framework which he calls the French Union, a federation of francophone states, France and its former colonies, and offers membership of the French Union as an alternative to outright independence. But the choice is stark.

[51:01]

The colonies can either be free and independent or they can maintain their relationship with France with all of the attendant sort of privileges in terms of development assistance and trade rights that that would involve by being members of the new French Union.

De Gaulle Ends the War in Algeria

[51:18]

In Algeria de Gaulle moves quickly to end and liquidate the war. He enters into negotiations with the FLN which lead in due course to the Évian Accord↗ signed four years later which finally brings the war and France's long involvement in Algeria to an end. It takes a long time to end the war because the issue of the Pied-Noire remains so intractable.

[51:44]

What kinds of rights are they to have in an independent Algeria? Will they return to France? Will they remain in Algeria? If they remain in Algeria then what will become of the sort of property rights that they have which you know of course are a legacy of the privileges which they've long enjoyed as French citizens in a colonized state.

[52:03]

So the negotiations are difficult but they end ultimately with independence. Algerian independence is important because it's symbolic of a broader transformation that is occurring in Africa in the late 1950s and early 1960s.

[52:20]

(Student question)

Sure.

(Student question)

Why did the Pied-Noire try to assassinate de Gaulle?

Student: Yeah

Assassination Attempts on Charles de Gaulle

[52:34]

Because he was prepared to let the French colonial project collapse. One of the things that de Gaulle, you know, one of the consequences for de Gaulle, as a result of the decision to end France's colonial rule in Algeria is the undying antipathy of the hard right.

[52:52]

So even though de Gaulle was a conservative he ends up making bitter enemies on the right as a consequence of the decision to decolonize and the settlers in particular remain vehemently hostile to de Gaulle and there will be a series of assassination attempts on de Gaulle's life.

In fact one of the interesting facts about Charles de Gaulle during his presidency is that he never traveled without supplies on hand of his own blood.

[53:18]

Because he wanted there to be a supply of blood plasma with which he could be transfused in the event that he was shot or you know blown up by Pied-Noire terrorists.

[53:30]

So there it is.

Decolonization in Africa

[53:33]

But Algeria's transition to independence is part of a larger sort of wave of decolonization that happens in Africa. And this is sort of interesting because of when it happens as well as where it happens.

Decolonization Occurs Later in Africa than in South Asia

[53:49]

Why did decolonization come to Africa some you know ten, fifteen years after it came to South Asia? Why was decolonization in Africa late, in other words?

Africa was not any more underdeveloped than South Asia was. In fact African countries like Ghana, the Gold Coast as it was under British rule, were in fact rather richer and more affluent in the aggregate than India was in 1945. So you shouldn't imagine that Africa's late decolonization is determined by economics or by other sort of indices of social development. No reason to presume that.

Fragmentation in Africa's Political Geography

[54:32]

Rather I would suggest that you want to think about Africa's political geography.

Whereas South Asia was administered as a single colonial unit, British India, and had a single sort of overarching nationalist opposition, the Indian National Congress, Africa was broken as the map illustrates into a patchwork of colonial possessions and territories.

This fragmented political geography in the colonial era inhibits the organization of any Pan-African anticolonial movement. Africa's political geography is complicated and fragmented and this is one of the factors that explains its relativity late decolonization. So too does Africa's experience during the Second World War help to explain its relativity late decolonization.

African Nations Were Not Affected Heavily by the Second World War

[55:20]

What was Africa's experience of the Second World War?

Apart from North Africa?

(Student response)

That's right. I mean there's some dispatch of African troops to serve in colonial armies but for the most part Africa is not centrally involved in the Second World War. Sub-Saharan Africa is one of the regions of the world that is relatively unafflicted by the war.

[55:48]

And this also helps to explain Africa's relatively late decolonization. Whereas India was you know actually invaded by the Indian National Army under Subhas Chandra Bose↗. Its resources were sort of powerfully mobilized for the war with all of the attendant disruption that that involve Africa was less affected by the Second World War as a consequence colonialism in Africa was relativity unscathed.

[56:14]

It's another reason why you know sort of decolonization comes relatively late.

Postwar European Colonialism in Africa and Modernization

[56:18]

After the war the Europeans don't move to decolonize in Africa rather they try to invent a new kind of colonialism -- a colonialism that will justify and legitimate itself as a modernizing project.

Talk of shared progress displaces talk of the white man's burden. The consequences of this are sort of ironic. Prior to the Second World War Anglo-French colonialism in Africa had often been a skeletal project. The administration of colonies had involved relatively small number of civil servants or colonial administrators. Once the British and the French set out to modernize Africa, to transform African colonies into sort of economically vibrant and vital societies, the intensity of colonialism in some cases increases.

[57:10]

So African historians will you know sort of often identify the immediate postwar decades as a period of heightened or amplified colonial intervention in African society.

[57:22]

Africans encounter more, not less, colonial intrusion. But the promise of modernization, the promise of an enlightened colonialism does bring with it in some cases a commitment to political reform.

[57:36]

This creates space in due course for nationalism. Here the example of Ghana is exemplary.

Decolonization in Ghana

[57:45]

In Ghana the British began fairly early to devolve political power to African nationalists, the most sort of important of whom, we've already encountered Kwame Nkrumah↗. The British in the early 1950s begin a process of political devolution permitting elections to take place in the Gold Coast to elect sort of local representatives or leaders.

[58:12]

Nkrumah becomes Prime Minister of the Gold Coast under sort of British auspices as early as 1952.

[58:19]

There's five years before the Gold Coast becomes independent as Ghana and Nkrumah, an African, a Ghanaian, is already Prime Minister -- albeit sort of within a framework of British imperial federation.

[58:33]

As an African nationalist political leader Nkrumah espouses an ambitious anticolonial agenda. He sees independence as not only Ghana's destiny but also Africa's destiny and supports and becomes a powerful spokesperson for sort of Pan-African decolonization.

In this promotion of African decolonization Nkrumah does receive important support from the United States. It's important to note that much of the support that Nkrumah receives from the United States comes not from the US government but from American citizens.

Particularly from African-American leaders in the United States who sort of see parallels between Nkrumah's struggle to achieve decolonization and their own efforts to achieve civil rights at home.

[59:28]

But the British ultimately prove amenable to Ghanaian decolonization. Nkrumah as I mentioned becomes Prime Minister in '52 and Ghana votes for formal independence in 1956. The British quickly grant this and Ghana becomes independent -- free.

[59:49]

There's no violence involved. The whole thing is an exemplary model of how decolonization can be achieved within a democratic framework.

[59:58]

Ghana is the first Sub-Saharan African state to decolonize and its example will be ... will be encouraging to anticolonial nationalists elsewhere in Africa who seek to sort of emulate the Ghanaian model.

Decolonization Within Africa

[60:16]

It's not only Ghana that serves as a example in the 1950s -- in the late 1950s -- its independence coming in 1957, but also France.

[60:25]

Remember that de Gaulle in 1958 offers French colonies in Africa the opportunity to be independent -- immediate autonomy or membership in the French Union. That is the choice that de Gaulle presents in 1958.

It's a stark choice, and its message reverberates beyond France's own colonial possessions. It's encouraging to African nationalists elsewhere.

[60:49]

By 1960 the so-called winds of change are clearly sweeping through Africa. Sixteen African states become independent in 1960. And in part this is because the British and the French are both willing to grant African nationalist movements independence where they can easily do so.

The phrase the winds of change was actually uttered by a British Prime Minister, Harold Macmillan, who spoke in 1960 of the winds of change you know progressing through the African continent.

And he intended a positive meaning to the phrase. He wasn't saying that the winds of change were a destructive gale but rather that they were something to be encouraged and welcomed, that Africa was you know moving on.

[61:38]

Of course the postcolonial transition was relatively easy to accomplish in Ghana where Ghanaians could vote for their own independence and where the British could graciously grant it.

Decolonization in Kenya

[61:50]

Independence was much harder to achieve in contexts where Africans lived alongside powerful minorities of white settlers. And Britain faced one such dilemma on the other side of Africa, in East Africa, in Kenya.

[62:06]

Unlike the Gold Coast, Kenya, was home to substantial minority of white settlers who had settled particularly in the you know upcountry where temperatures more closely resembled those of Europe and farming on the European model was you know possible to do.

[62:24]

From the mid-1950s the question of Kenya's postcolonial future becomes an increasingly anguished problem in London and in large part you know this has to do with the fervent opposition of white colonial settlers to any you know proposition of independence for the territory.

[62:48]

Because of course in an independent Kenya the minority of white settlers would be vastly outnumbered and outvoted by the country's black majority.

[62:59]

Concerns over Kenya's fate in the mid-1950s come to fixate upon a sort of complex you know phenomenon known at the time as the Mau Mau Movement↗. The Mau Mau movement was really an internecine conflict within the Kikuyu tribe. But it's sort of misconstrued and misrepresented by white settlers as an anti-white settler movement with attendant sort of brutality and violence. The suppression of the Mau Mau Movement which is not really an insurgency but rather a sort of as I mentioned an internecine conflict becomes a priority for the British state in the late 1950s. And the British state persecutes the struggle against Mau Mau with some violence.

[63:52]

In Kenya the British struggle to preserve a political center which will be capable of assimilating and reconciling the interests of white settlers and the African majority.

[64:04]

And the fact that the British struggle to accomplish this does not reflect a lack of you know ingenuity or will on the part of British policy makers. The fact is that it's very, very difficult, probably impossible, to orchestrate a political solution that will be capable of reconciling the interests of a white minority that holds a great deal of land and much of the natural wealth of the country with the black majority that constitutes a majority of its population.

[64:28]

I mean how do you reconcile those competing interests? You probably can't. And the British struggle to accomplish a viable solution for Kenya.

[64:37]

You know eventually Kenya will win its independence and many of the white settlers will return to Europe from whence they came.

Decolonization in South Africa

[64:44]

Nowhere is the struggle over decolonization more complicated than in South Africa.

[64:50]

And in part this is because South Africa is not a colony of Europe but an independent country. South Africa wins its independence around the turn of the twentieth century. But the country is ruled not by its African majority but by a minority of white settlers.

[65:06]

Who for the most part are Boers↗, people of sort of Dutch descent, speaking Afrikaans↗, a creolized form of Dutch.

[65:17]

As decolonization becomes you know increasingly powerful international force after the Second World War the Afrikaans in South Africa become more and more defensive of their own prerogatives as a white minority ruling over an African majority.

In 1948, apartheid is formally constructed as a system for segregating the races and for keeping, sort of African, the African population of South Africa, you know firmly in its place.

As a nationalist movement, the movement of the African National Congress, or ANC builds during the 1950s the apartheid state will resort to greater and greater violence in an effort to suppress black nationalism and to preserve the political monopoly of South Africa's whites.

[66:08]

This struggle against African nationalism will be waged with considerable violence. There will be sort of really notorious and unpleasant incidents including the Sharpeville Massacre↗ of 1960 in which South African police opened fire on a crowd of unarmed demonstrators killing about seventy of them. The Sharpeville Massacre reverberates very powerfully through the larger international community.

[66:33]

And it besmirches South Africa's reputation, a reputation that doesn't really begin to recover until the early 1990s, when South Africa begins to make the move to democratization and freedom for the majority of its population.

[66:49]

We're going to talk much more about apartheid and the sort of internationalization of the struggle against apartheid in due course but it's important to situate the sort of consolidation of the apartheid regime in South Africa in relation to the history of decolonization as a way to sort of avoid the, what seems elsewhere, like an inevitable outcome of you know nationalism and freedom.

The Cold War and Decolonization in Congo

[67:13]

Africa is also an interesting case insofar as it illustrates the intrusion of the Cold War into the politics of decolonization.

[67:23]

Here the most important example is that of the Congo. The Congo was a long time Belgium colony, became a Belgian colony in 1885 at the Congress of Berlin. Belgian colonialism in the Congo was especially nasty. Probably nowhere else in Africa was colonialism more brutal, more vicious, and more extractive than it was in the Congo.

The legacy of Belgian colonialism would be a sort of devastated, wrecked society. A very large country the Congo lacked the kinds of institutions of government and administration that the British bequeathed in India.

[68:00]

The Congo nonetheless became independent in 1960. Upon its independence elections were held which returned to power Patrice Lumumba↗ the most prominent and important of the Congo's nationalist political leaders.

[68:20]

Lumumba struggled to control and command a complex and expansive state however. Within a couple of weeks of Congolese independence the southern province of Katanga tried to secede from the Congolese state. Katanga was a state very rich in mineral deposits. It secession was in large part prompted and facilitated by Belgian economic interests.

Belgian mining companies wanted to sort of keep hold of the resources of Katanga. They didn't want these resources to be nationalized by the Congolese state. So Belgian interests encouraged Katangan secession and the Belgian military, residual Belgian military forces, even play a role in helping to accomplish it.

[69:06]

What is at stake in the Katangan secession is really significant. For Lumumba it is the integrity of the Congolese state that is at stake here. If Katanga secedes then what will hold the rest of the Congo together? Why won't all of the provinces sort of break off to exploit their natural resources for their own benefit?

[69:25]

Lumumba is desperate to hold the Congo together. To this end he calls on the United Nations which agrees at first to send a military mission to assist Lumumba and to sort of reincorporate, or to facilitate the reincorporation of the Congo, as a unitary nation-state.

[69:44]

Lumumba is dissatisfied however with the United Nations task force. He concludes that the UN is insufficiently willing to utilize military means to facilitate the Congo's reintegration and he turns instead in the summer of 1960 to the Soviet Union. He says will if the UN won't help me maybe the USSR will, and calls upon the USSR to provide sort of limited military assistance to facilitate resolution of the Katanga secession.

[70:16]

This is sort of the step that leads to Lumumba's downfall. Lumumba has powerful domestic political opponents and they turn against him. They do so with the assistance of the United States.

[70:32]

The United States encourages a military coup which takes place in the fall of 1960 which brings to power a new leader -- Joseph Mobutu↗ who deposes Lumumba, and in a sort of cruel and ironic twist he packs Lumumba off on an airplane and sends him to the disputed province of Katanga to let the Katangans do with him as they will, and what they do is not very nice.

[70:58]

Lumumba's sort of assassination, murder, marks a really important turning point in Africa's relationship to the Cold War. Lumumba to some extent precipitated the intrusion of Cold War rivalries himself when he turned to the Soviet Union. His opponents within the Congo will turn to the United States and receive support and encouragement from the United States.

[71:25]

With the Congo crisis of 1960 Cold War tensions begin to penetrate the African continent, and this marks a really important turning point in the history of the Cold War.

The Shift in the American View Toward Colonialism

[71:36]

Why does the United States get involved in the Congolese crisis in 1960? Why does the US see fit to intervene as a source of material aid to Lumumba's opponents? Why does it inject its own power into this very disputed and very difficult territory?

[71:52]

This is a particularly vexing question when we think about the sort of historical identity of the United States as an anticolonial power. We talked about this on Tuesday. I'm not going to belabor the point. Americans self-construe as an anticolonial people. They don't want to set themselves on the same side as British or French or Belgian imperialism.

[72:14]

Besides the sort of political identity of the United States is an anticolonial power the United States has obvious material interests in opposing the colonial division of the world. As a power that does not itself exercise vast colonial responsibilities the United States stands to be sort of excluded from the spoils in a world in which colonial powers like Britain and France and Belgium carve up the developing world and administer it for their own benefit. So for reasons having to do with both identity and interests the United States is at the beginning of the postwar era an anticolonial superpower. Of course this changes.

The Rise of Communism in China and the Rise of McCarthyism in the United States

[72:56]

In 1949 China falls. The rising tide of McCarthyism↗ at home sort of rabid you know anti-Communist Cold War politics create a new set of pressures on American statecraft. And the United States will decide to throw its lot in at least in Indochina with French imperialism.

Indochina as a Pivot Point for the American Relationship to Imperialism

[73:17]

Indochina marks a really important pivot for the relationship of the United States with imperialism. The United States gets involved supporting French neocolonialism in Vietnam and will eventually sort of take on, upon its own shoulders, responsibility for propping up the French successor state, the Republic of Vietnam, with military and economic aid.

[73:42]

We're going to talk more about Vietnam in due course. We'll sort of deal with the origins of the Vietnam War in a comprehensive way. But it's important as we think about the relationship between the United States and colonialism to see the decision in 1949 to provide military assistance to help the French as a crucial sort of disjuncture in the sort of long association of the United States with anticolonialism and the beginning of a sort of new willingness to countenance collaboration with colonialism even to take on sort of neocolonial responsibilities itself in the name of the Cold War.

American and British Activities Relating to the 1953 Coup in Iran

[74:18]

Cold War interventionism, call it imperialism if you will, soon manifests itself elsewhere. Among the most notorious early cases will be the case of Iran. In 1953 the United States and Great Britain orchestrate a covert intervention in Iran that succeeds in deposing Iran's nationalist prime minister Mohammad Mosaddegh↗ and accomplishes a sort of a consolidation of a pro-Western authoritarian government under the emperor of Iran -- Mohammad Reza Pahlavi↗.

[74:52]

How does this come about? Mosaddegh comes to power in the early 1950s, 1952, and immediately sets about sort of nationalizing Iran's oil wealth in order to finance Iranian social and economic development. As a nationalist Mosaddegh proclaims that Iran's resources are Iran's and that they ought to be utilized for the purposes of promoting Iranian development.

[75:17]

This does not much please the directors of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, a British oil company that owns mineral rights to Iran's vast oil fields, Anglo-Iranian by the way is the oil company later known as British Petroleum, so you know, there you have it.

[75:34]

From Iran to the Gulf Coast, but, this is an episode in which Cold War interests are also at stake. The British who are committed to overthrowing Mosaddegh, they want to replace him with a more pliant leader, go to Eisenhower in 1952 immediate subsequent to Eisenhower's, sorry in 1953 immediately subsequent to Eisenhower's inauguration.

[76:05]

Truman had previously rebuffed British sort of encouragement, or British discussion of a coup in Iran, Eisenhower proves more sympathetic to it. In large part because his Secretary of State John Foster Dulles↗ believes that vital Cold War interests are at stake.

[76:21]

It's true that Mosaddegh's political party was a party of the left. There's some association with Communists though Mosaddegh is not himself a Communist -- not by any stretch of the imagination.

[76:35]

But that association is nonetheless a sufficient taint that the Eisenhower administration agrees to collude with the British in the orchestration of a coup against Mosaddegh.

[76:45]

The Anglo-Americans provide encouragement and material assistance to Mosaddegh's internal political enemies which helps to produce a coup that ultimately succeeds in overthrowing Mosaddegh and replacing him with an authoritarian monarchical regime.

Interpretation of 1953 Coup in Iran

[77:01]

The question of responsibility still you know sort of rankles. It's not all together clear how responsible the British and the Americans were. Mosaddegh was a contentious leader. He had powerful domestic opponents. The extent to which the British and the Americans were really the driving force behind the coup is contested. And the contestation of the question has political stakes, right.

[77:25]

And this is sort of interesting from a historiographic↗ vantage point. From a certain point of view a nationalist interpretation of the 1953 coup would emphasize the role of the British and the United States. Of course that seems to prove a point about the, you know, sort of capacity of the Western imperial powers to tamper in Iran's politics.

[77:48]

That's an interpretation of the 1953 coup that the current regime in Iran favors. At the same time it's an interpretation of the coup that does not allow great latitude of agency to Iranians in the making of their own history.

[78:01]

Were Iranians really just the passive victims of Anglo-American intervention or did they play an active part in the making of their own political outcomes? Today a growing number of historians would sort of dispute the view that the coup was you know simply an imperial imposition in which Iranians played no role. Sort of new historical work tends to emphasize the sort of autonomous aspects of Iranian politics that contributed to Mosaddegh's overthrow and to the creation of a new regime.

[78:34]

It's also important to remember that the British and the Americans do not intervene militarily. There was enough opposition to Mosaddegh within Iran that his overthrow was accomplished with minimal external support for his opponents.

The 1953 Coup and Shifting American Policy Toward the Developing World

[78:49]

But the coup nonetheless has important implications for American policy in the Cold War -- particularly vis-à-vis the developing world. It represents the first direct US involvement in regime change outside of the Western Hemisphere.

The US had previously supported the overthrow of leaders that it didn't like in the Western Hemisphere, but never before outside of the Western Hemisphere. Iran marks that turning point. Moreover it marks a critical sort of pivot in America's relationship with the Middle East. With the Iranian coup the United States interjects itself forcefully in the politics of the Middle East for the first time.

[79:32]

The coup prefigures the Eisenhower Doctrine of 1957 in which Eisenhower commits to use American military forces to support regimes threatened by Communist subversion.

[79:45]

So we should see the Iranian coup as sort of one step in the escalation or ratcheting upwards of American commitment to use American power in the developing world so as to prevent outcomes which American leaders perceive to be disadvantageous to the national interests of the United States.

[80:04]

You know call that neocolonialism if you will it certainly amounts to a history of intervention or meddling. And as we come back to the Cold War we'll talk much more about this history of intervention and meddling and we'll discuss you know sort of where -- where it goes.

[80:20]

It's important as we think about though to see the United States as acting in the developing world not upon a blank slate but rather in a world which has been powerfully shaped by the legacies of colonial rule and by the processes of decolonization and the uncertain legacies which those processes of change leave behind them.

[80:37]

And we'll come to this more in due course.