The experience of decolonization had an embittering effect on Dutch public life, already hard hit by the war and its sufferings. Many ex-colonials and their friends pressed what became known as ‘the Myth of Good Rule’, blaming the Left for the Dutch failure to reassert colonial authority following the interregnum of Japanese occupation. On the other hand conscripted soldiers (the overwhelming majority) were just glad to be home in one piece, after a colonial war of which no-one was proud, in which many felt that military success had been impeded by UN insistence on a negotiated transfer of power, and that was very quickly consigned to a national memory hole.
In the longer run the enforced Dutch retreat from the colonies facilitated a growing national sentiment for ‘Europe’. World War Two had demonstrated that the Netherlands could not stand aside from international affairs, particularly those of its large neighbors, and the loss of Indonesia was a timely reminder of the country’s real standing as a small and vulnerable European state. Making a virtue of necessity, the Dutch retooled as ultra- enthusiastic proponents of European economic and later political integration. But the process did not just happen painlessly, nor was it an overnight switch in the collective sensibilities of the nation. Until the spring of 1951, the military calculations and expenditures of post-war Dutch governments were targeted not for European defense (despite Dutch participation in the Brussels Pact and NATO) but to hold on to the colonies. Only slowly, and with some suppressed regret, did Dutch politicians pay undivided attention to European affairs and abandon their ancient priorities.
The same was true, in varying degrees, of all the colonial and ex-colonial powers of Western Europe. American scholars, projecting the experience and preoccupations of Washington onto the rest of the West, sometimes miss this distinctive feature of post-World War Two Europe. In the United States, the Cold War was what mattered and foreign and domestic priorities and rhetoric reflected this. But in The Hague, in London or in Paris, these same years were much taken up with costly guerrilla wars in far-flung and increasingly ungovernable colonies. National independence movements were the strategic headache for much of the 1950s, not Moscow and its ambitions—though in some cases the two overlapped.
The French Empire, like the British, had benefited from the re-distribution after 1919 of Asian and African holdings seized from the defeated Central Powers. Thus in 1945 liberated France ruled once again over Syria and Lebanon, as well as substantial swaths of sub-Saharan Africa and some island holdings in the Caribbean and the Pacific. But the ‘jewels’ in France’s imperial crown were her territories in Indo-China and, especially, the old- established French settlements along the Mediterranean coast of North Africa: Tunisia, Morocco and most of all Algeria. In French history texts, however, the place of colonies was perhaps more ambiguous than across the English Channel—in part because France was a Republic in which imperial dominion had no natural place, in part because so many of France’s early conquests had long since been taken over by English-speaking rulers. In 1950 there were still millions of French men and women who remembered the ‘Fashoda Incident’ of 1898, when France backed down from a confrontation with Britain over control of Egypt, Sudan and the Upper Nile. To speak of Empire in France was to be reminded of defeat as well as victory.
On the other hand French schoolchildren were insistently presented with the image of ‘France’ itself as a trans-oceanic continuum, a place in which the civic and cultural attributes of Frenchness were open to all; where elementary schools from Saigon to Dakar taught about
During the war, the French, like the British and Dutch, had lost their prized South-East Asian colonies to the Japanese. But in the French case the Japanese occupation came late—until March 1945 French Indo-China remained under the tutelage of the Vichy authorities—and was anyway incomparably less traumatic than France’s own defeat at home in 1940. France’s humiliation in Europe accentuated the symbolic significance of its overseas empire: if the French were not, in their own eyes, quite reduced to a ‘helpless, hopeless mass of protoplasm’ (Eisenhower’s description of them in 1954) this was in large measure due to their continuedcredibility as a leading colonial power, which was thus a matter of some importance.
In Africa, De Gaulle had re-established France’s presence at the Brazzaville Conference of early February 1944. There, in the capital of French Equatorial Africa across the river from the Belgian Congo, the leader of the Free French had given characteristic expression to his vision of France’s colonial future:
‘In French Africa, as in every land where men live under our flag, there can be no true progress unless men are able to benefit from it morally and materially on their native soil, unless they can raise themselves little by little to a level where they can partake in the management of their own affairs. It is the duty of France to bring this about.’
What exactly De Gaulle meant is—as so often—unclear, perhaps deliberately so. But he was certainly
Reformist talk in impoverished, isolated francophone Africa was cheap, especially before metropolitan France itself was even liberated. South-East Asia was another matter. On September 2nd 1945 Ho Chi Minh, the Vietnamese nationalist leader (and a founder member of the French Communist Party, thanks to his youthful presence at its December 1920 Congress in Tours), proclaimed the independence of his nation. Within two weeks British forces began to arrive in the southern city of Saigon, followed a month later by the French. Meanwhile the northern districts of Vietnam, hitherto under Chinese control, were restored to the French in February 1946.
At this point there was a serious prospect of negotiated autonomy or independence, as the authorities in Paris opened talks with nationalist representatives. But on June 1st 1946 the French admiral and local plenipotentiary Thierry d’Argenlieu unilaterally proclaimed the separation of Cochin China (the southern part of the country) from the nationalist-dominated north, sabotaging his own government’s tentative efforts to reach a compromise and breaking off government conversations with Ho. By the autumn of that same year the French had bombed Haiphong harbor, the nationalist Vietminh had attacked the French in Hanoi and the first Vietnam War had begun.
France’s post-war struggle to re-establish its authority in Indo-China was a politicaland military catastrophe. Ho Chi Minh received double credit among the French domestic Left, as a fighter for national independence and as a Communist revolutionary—two identities as inextricably intertwined in his own thinking as they were in his burnished international image.[104] Sending young men to fight and die in a ‘dirty war’ in Indo-China made little sense to most French voters; and letting Hanoi take over was not obviously more ill-advised than supporting the palpably inadequate Bao Dai, whom the French established as the country’s new ‘emperor’ in March 1949.
The French officer corps, on the other hand, was certainly keen to pursue the struggle in Vietnam; there, as later in Algeria, France’s martial heritage (or what remained of it) seemed at stake and the French High Command had a point to prove. But the French economy could never have sustained a long drawn out war in a far-flung colony without significant external aid. France’s war in Indo-China was funded by the Americans. At first, Washington’s contribution was indirect: thanks to US loans and aid, the French were able to divert considerable resources to an increasingly expensive and unsuccessful struggle to defeat the Vietminh. In effect, the USA underwrote post-war French economic modernization while France dedicated its own scarce resources to the war.
From 1950, American aid took a more direct form. Starting in July of that year (one month after the outbreak of war in nearby Korea) the US sharply increased its military assistance to French forces in South-East Asia. The French bargained hard before consenting to support the doomed European defense project and conceding West German membership in NATO: what they got in return (for allowing the US to protect them, as it seemed to aggrieved Washington insiders) was very substantial American military aid. Of all the European states
