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Decolonisation and Political Socialisation with Reference to West Africa

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 November 2008

Extract

Decolonisation in British and French West Africa presents some interesting parallers and contrasts. The pressures facing the most important colonial systems during and after World War 11 came from the two new superpowers — particularly the United States — nationalist movements, and internal dissensions. The war Seriously undermined the power of Britain and France and brought into question the moral right of one nation to rule over another. Initially both remained unconvinced about the merits of independence, and in fact the evidence suggests that considerable efforts were made to thwart the process of decolonisation. By the mid-1950s, however, Britain and France succumbed to the three pressures mentioned above, and rather than wait until the situation was uncontainable they chose to guide their colonies along an ‘approved’ path to independence.

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Articles
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1986

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References

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Page 665 note 2 Ibid. p. 19. According to Louis, p. 43, the Americans ‘found the French morally deplorable’.

Page 665 note 3 Ibid. pp. 3 and 21.

Page 665 note 4 Roosevelt had initially opposed the restoration of Indo-China to France, but by 1945, influenced by the conciliatory tone of the Brazzaville Conference, he changed his views; ibid. pp.28 and 42. By 1954 the Americans were underwriting the war in Vietnam and ‘American aid accounted for nearly 80 percent of French expenditures on the conflict’; Karnow, Stanley, Vietnam: a history (Harmondsworth, 1984), p. 170.Google Scholar

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