Far Eastern Roads to Independence: Burma, Indochina, Indonesia, Malaysia

Far Eastern paths to independence: Burma, Indochina, Indonesia, Malaysia.

World War II marked the beginning of the decolonization of Asian countries. He did not follow a uniform pattern, there were probably more differences than similarities. What determined the fate of the countries of the Far East in the 40s and 50s?

The most important event of the era of great geographical discoveries was not the discovery of America by Columbus and not the encirclement of the globe by the expedition of Magellan, but the victory of the Portuguese in a naval battle in the port of Diu off the western coast of the Indian Peninsula. On February 3, 1509, Francisco de Almeida defeated the "Arab" fleet there - that is, the Mamluks from Egypt, supported by the Turks and Muslim Indian princes - which ensured Portugal's control of the Indian Ocean. From that moment on, the Europeans gradually took possession of the surrounding lands.

A year later, the Portuguese conquered Goa, which gave rise to Portuguese India, which gradually increased its influence, reaching China and Japan. The monopoly of Portugal was broken a hundred years later, when the Dutch appeared in the Indian Ocean, and half a century later the British and French arrived. Their ships came from the west - across the Atlantic. From the east, from the Pacific, came the Spaniards in turn: the Philippines they had conquered had once been ruled from American estates. On the other hand, the Russians reached the Pacific Ocean by land.

At the turn of the XNUMXth and XNUMXth centuries, Great Britain won hegemony in the Indian Ocean. The jewel in the crown of British colonial possessions was British India (where the modern Republics of India, Pakistan and Bangladesh come from). The modern states of Sri Lanka and Myanmar, better known as Burma, were also administratively subordinate to British India. The modern Federation of Malaysia was in the XNUMXth century a conglomeration of principalities under the protectorate of London (the Sultanate of Brunei chose independence), and now wealthy Singapore was at that time only a poor British stronghold.

Illustration for Rudyard Kipling's poem "The White Man's Burden": this is how the colonial conquests at the end of the XNUMXth century were ideologized: John Bull and Uncle Sam trample on the stones of ignorance, sin, cannibalism, slavery on the way to the statue of Civilization...

The Dutch Indies became modern-day Indonesia. French Indochina today is Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia. French India - small French possessions on the coast of the Deccan Peninsula - were united into the Republic of India. A similar fate befell little Portuguese India. The Portuguese colony in the Spice Islands is today East Timor. Spanish India was conquered by the United States at the end of the 1919th century and is today the Philippines. Finally, the former German colonial possessions lost by Berlin back in XNUMX make up the bulk of the Independent State of Papua New Guinea. In turn, the German colonies in the Pacific Islands are now generally associated countries with the United States. Finally, the Russian colonial possessions turned into the Mongolian Republic and became part of China.

One hundred years ago, almost all of Asia was subject to the colonial power of Europeans. The exceptions were few - Afghanistan, Iran, Thailand, China, Japan, Bhutan - and doubtful, since even these countries were at some point forced to sign unequal treaties or fell under European occupation. Or under US occupation, like Japan in 1945. And although the US occupation is now over - at least officially - the four islands off the coast of Hokkaido are still occupied by Russia, and no treaties have been signed between the two countries.

peace treaty!

yellow man's burden

In 1899 Rudyard Kipling published a poem called The White Man's Burden. In it, he called for colonial conquests and justified them with the introduction of technological advances and Christian customs, the fight against hunger and disease, the promotion of education and higher culture among the indigenous peoples. "The burden of the white man" became the slogan of both opponents and supporters of colonialism.

If colonial conquests were to be the white man's burden, the Japanese took on another burden: the liberation of the colonized peoples of Asia from European rule. They started doing this as early as 1905, defeating the Russians and driving them out of Manchuria, and then continued during World War I, driving the Germans out of Chinese colonial possessions and seizing their Pacific islands. The subsequent Japanese wars also had a similar ideological basis, which today we would call anti-imperialist and anti-colonial. The military successes of 1941 and 1942 brought almost all European and American colonial possessions in the Far East to the Empire of Japan, and then further complications and problems arose.

Although the Japanese were sincere supporters of their independence, their actions did not necessarily indicate this. The war did not go according to their plan: they planned to play it as in 1904-1905, i.e. after a successful offensive, there would be a defensive phase in which they would defeat the American and British Expeditionary Forces and then begin peace negotiations. The negotiations were to bring not so much territorial benefits as economic and strategic security, primarily the withdrawal of the powers from their Asian colonies and thus the removal of enemy military bases from Japan and the provision of free trade. Meanwhile, the Americans intended to fight the war until Japan's unconditional surrender, and the war dragged on.

According to international law, during hostilities it is impossible to make political changes: to create new states or even to draft the inhabitants of the occupied territories into the army (even if they want to). We must wait for the signing of the peace treaty. These provisions of international law are not at all artificial, but follow from common sense - until there is peace, the military situation may change - and therefore they are respected (allegedly the creation of the Kingdom of Poland in 1916 by the German and Austrian emperors was not the creation of a new state, but only the reconstruction of the existing since 1815 the “kingdom of congresses”, occupied since 1831, but not liquidated by the Russians; a peace treaty would be needed to liquidate the Kingdom of Poland, which, after all, was not signed).

The Japanese, acting in accordance with international law (and common sense), did not declare the independence of the nations they had liberated. This, of course, disappointed their political representatives, who had been promised independence even before the war. On the other hand, the inhabitants of the former European (and American) colonies were disappointed with the economic exploitation of these lands by the Japanese, which many considered unnecessarily cruel. The Japanese occupation administration did not perceive their actions as cruel, the inhabitants of the liberated colonies were treated according to the same standards as the inhabitants of the original Japanese islands. These standards, however, differed from local standards: the difference was primarily in cruelty and severity.