The United Nations and Decolonization

Nicole Eggers, Jessica Lynne Pearson, Aurora Almada e Santos

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781351044011
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Differing interpretations of the history of the United Nations on the one hand conceive of it as an instrument to promote colonial interests while on the other emphasize its influence in facilitating self-determination for dependent territories. The authors in this book explore this dynamic in order to expand our understanding of both the achievements and the limits of international support for the independence of colonized peoples. This book will prove foundational for scholars and students of modern history, international history, and postcolonial history.

Part I

The politics of oversight

1 National prerogatives versus international supervision

Britain’s evolving policy toward the campaign for equivalency of United Nations’ handling of dependent territories, 1945–1963¹

Mary Ann Heiss

Between 1945 and 1963, anticolonial activists at the United Nations (UN) waged a successful campaign to extend the activism that characterized the trusteeship system governing the dependent territories once controlled by the defeated Axis powers, as well as the colonies of World War I’s Central powers that were still held as League of Nations mandates, to the territories controlled by the World War II victors themselves. Where the UN Charter, in Article 73(e), placed only one substantive obligation on the Allied administering states—regular transmission to the secretary-general of information about economic, social, and educational conditions in the territories they controlled, by 1963 the General Assembly had acquired powers that were virtually identical to those that inhered in the trusteeship system. It could determine the status of individual territories, require the transmission of information about political development, and gather first-hand information about individual territories by receiving petitions, hearing petitioners, and undertaking site visits. By significantly expanding the Western allies’ responsibilities to the General Assembly and creating what amounted to a shadow trusteeship system, these moves replaced the national interest approach to nontrust dependent territories reflected in the charter with the concept of global or international responsibility.²

What this chapter terms “the campaign for equivalency” began during the first General Assembly and reached its culmination in the early 1960s. For fifteen years, proponents of equivalency worked through what ultimately came to be known as the Committee on Information from Non-Self-Governing Territories, which the first General Assembly established as a forum for considering the information the administering states were required to transmit in conformity with Article 73(e). Hamstrung by the limited terms of reference, the administering states demanded as a condition of their participation that the body never approach the sort of activism vested in the Trusteeship Council.³ In 1960, following the admission of seventeen new members, all of them former dependent territories, the General Assembly went on record condemning “colonialism in all its forms and manifestations” when it approved Resolution 1514 (XV), the Declaration on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples.⁴ A year later, Resolution 1654 (XVI) created a powerful entity, the Special Committee on the Situation with Regard to the Implementation of the Declaration on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples (known informally as the Committee of Seventeen), to put the declaration into practice. Two years after that, the General Assembly dissolved the Committee on Information and vested all UN authority for dealing with nontrust dependent territories in the Committee of Seventeen, thus marking the equivalency campaign’s conclusion.⁵

The equivalency campaign largely owed its success to the growth of what came to be called the Afro-Asian bloc within the UN General Assembly. By 1963, when equivalent UN treatment of dependent territories was achieved, 38 of the 113 UN member-states were former dependent territories of some sort; at just over one-third of the organization’s membership, they could block approval of what the charter referred to as “important questions” requiring a two-thirds majority vote and thus exert considerable sway over the General Assembly, helping to move it away from Cold War geopolitical concerns and the East-West divide and toward the social, economic, and human rights issues that the nascent Non-Aligned Movement came to champion after its founding in 1961.⁶ Equivalency was thus one way that decolonization altered the nature of the UN agenda. The burgeoning literature on the intersection of decolonization and human rights demonstrates another.⁷

The campaign for equivalent UN treatment of dependent territories elicited strong pushback from the administering states. France and Belgium consistently challenged growing UN activism vis-à-vis their territories and at different times refused to participate in the work of the Committee on Information.⁸ Portugal resisted even more strenuously after joining the UN in 1955; its refusal to admit that it administered any non-self-governing territories threw the organization into turmoil.⁹ The world’s leading colonial power, Great Britain, adopted a less militant approach to UN activism that sought to protect its national prerogatives while also recognizing limited international interest in its non-self-governing territories. At its heart, the British response to equivalency was designed to prevent outside interference in the process of decolonization that might thwart London’s efforts to guarantee that former colonies would remain solid trading partners, potential allies, and loyal members of the Commonwealth. Because UN control over the pace of decolonization could drive Britain’s former colonies in another direction, it had to be resisted. To that end, British officials employed a series of arguments and policies designed to forestall that eventuality, moving from legal arguments rooted in the charter through a fervent defense of the nation’s colonial record (and concomitant criticism of Soviet colonialism), to eventual acceptance of a modest UN interest, and finally to active resistance when that interest challenged what they saw as their colonial authority. This chapter uses the evolving British response to the equivalency campaign as a vehicle for exploring the nation’s transition from colonial empire to global citizen.

British opposition to the sort of international responsibility for dependent territories that suffused the idea of equivalency was clear during World War II. Colonel Oliver Stanley, secretary of state for the colonies, for example, spoke directly to the issue of international supervision in an early March 1943 speech to the Oxford Conservative Association, asserting that the empire “must continue to be the sole responsibility of Great Britain,” which had “a longer history of real self-government perhaps than any other [country]” and thus “the best reason to know what benefits flow to the development of individual character and of individual life from the rights of self-government.” In other words, Britain knew the value of self-government and did not need outside interference to help develop it in the territories it administered.¹⁰ Prime Minister Winston S. Churchill was more direct when he explained to Secretary of State Edward R. Stettinius at Yalta that it was all well and good for “territorial trusteeship” to be extended to “existing mandates of the League of Nations,” “territories detached from the enemy as a result of the present war,” and “any other territory which might voluntarily be placed under trusteeship.” But “under no circumstances would [Britain] ever consent to forty or fifty nations thrusting interfering fingers into the life’s existence of the British Empire.”¹¹

The first postwar British resistance to the “interfering fingers” of international supervision as reflected in the equivalency campaign was legalistic and rested on the charter’s limited language regarding the obligations of the administering states. British approval of that document, this position went, had been predicated on the “understanding that nothing in [it] … established any system of [administering state] accountability.”¹² British officials therefore objected strenuously to efforts to expand the UN role in the nontrust dependent territories. When anticolonial activists proposed the creation of a permanent body to consider the information that Britain and the other Western administering states transmitted to the secretary-general, British officials denounced such an entity as “a backdoor compulsory trusteeship organization” that “the Charter and its authors never contemplated” and would consent to nothing more than a regularly renewable committee with no real power, a stance that explains the weak nature of the Committee on Information.¹³ They characterized requiring the transmission of political information as “an attempt to rewrite the Charter by means of a resolution of the General Assembly” that was, British representative to the UN Sir Gladwyn Jebb declared in 1951, “ultra vires.”¹⁴ They felt similarly about “the right of petition,” “the granting of oral hearings,” or “the sending of Visiting Missions,” none of which the charter required.¹⁵ Nor could they agree to report on progress in implementing the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights in the territories they administered, which “would amount to accepting trusteeship status” in contravention of the charter.¹⁶

British officials accompanied their legal challenges to equivalency with fervent defenses of their colonial record, with much of that campaign echoing wartime efforts to defuse what they considered “outdated” American “misperceptions” regarding the empire’s true nature and an accompanying impression that it was untoward and unsavory.¹⁷ Contrary to prevailing United States (US) opinion, they insisted, the empire was not “a vehicle for exploitation incompatible with [Allied] war aims” or something “based on force and coercion.” Such characterizations harkened back “to the empire of yesterday” that had rightly earned the ire of “Hobson and the early twentieth century liberals” but that no longer existed. Gladwyn Jebb of the Foreign Office bemoaned “American ‘misunderstanding and ill-informed criticism’ of British colonial purposes” when he reported to London from Dumbarton Oaks in the fall of 1944. “The Americans misrepresent us, … we rightly resent this, and so it goes on,” he lamented. Clearly piqued by the lack of US appreciation for the empire’s importance, not only to Britain but to the entire democratic world, British officials took pains to note, not unjustifiably, that “the British Empire saved the world from the threat of Nazi dominance” and to claim, again with some degree of justification, “that American economic and political security partially depend[ed] on the continuation of a stable and integrated British empire.”¹⁸ British officials believed quite emphatically that if their American counterparts would only look at the empire through objective eyes, they would have no choice but to concede its value—past, present, and future.

Colonial Secretary Oliver Stanley had sought during the final months of the war to sell the empire’s value to a variety of American audiences. He used a January 1945 address before the Foreign Policy Association in New York, for example, to debunk a number of prevailing misconceptions. “No Colony makes any contribution to the British Treasury,” the secretary contended, confronting the popular belief that the colonies paid taxes or tribute to London or were otherwise financially disadvantaged by the metropole. Nor did the much-maligned system of imperial preference “shut out from the Colonial Empire the trade of the world” and keep that trade exclusively within the hands of British merchants. Far from an exploiter, Stanley insisted, Britain was a force for good in the colonies, spending a great deal of money each year to develop what he referred to as “all the essential accessories of a modern state” and in many places preventing “a disastrous disintegration” into war and violence. He concluded his address with a firm reminder that Britain considered international efforts to interfere in the administration of the colonies to be “impractical … and unde...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• PART I: The politics of oversight
• PART II: Decolonizing global governance?
• PART III: Unraveling empire
• Index