Georges Fischer - Decolonisation and After: The British French Experience

STUDIES IN COMMONWEALTH POLITICS AND HISTORY

No. 7

DECOLONISATION AND AFTER

About the Series

Legatee of a vast empire, the Commonwealth still carries the imprint of its past. And in doing so it may be said to have a collective identity which, in a very varying degree, each of its members exhibits. This, we believe, can sustain a collective inquiry into the political history and institutions of countries which were once governed within the British Empire and we note signs of a revival of interest in this field. In recent years area studies have been encouraged, but there is also a sense in which the Commonwealth is itself a region, bounded not by geography but history, and imperial history in particular. Seen thus the region cannot exclude areas into which empire overspilled as in the Sudan, or areas now outside the Commonwealth such as South Africa and Burma, or the unique case of Ireland. No account of the dilemmas which face the government of Canada or Nigeria or India or indeed of the United Kingdom which examines the present in relation to the past can be complete which omits some consideration of this imperial dimension. Without in any sense trying to claim that there is a political culture common to all Commonwealth countries it is certainly the case that some of the institutions, some part of the political life, and a certain element in the political beliefs of many Commonwealth leaders, can be said to derive from the import of institutions, practices and beliefs from Britain into its former colonies.

Nor is the Commonwealth merely a useful category of study. It is also a community of scholars, many of them teaching and writing within the growing number of universities throughout the member countries who share an interest in the consequences of imperial experience and have common traditions of study.

The present series of books is intended to express that interest and those traditions. They are presented not as a guide to the Commonwealth as a corporate entity, but as studies either in the politics and recent history of its member states or of themes which are of common interest to several of the countries concerned. Within the Commonwealth there is great variety of geographical setting, of cultural context, of economic development and social life : they provide the challenge to comparative study, while the elements of common experience make the task manageable. A cross-nation study of administrative reforms or of legislative behaviour is both facilitated and given added meaning ; so also is an examination of the external relations of one or more member states; even a single country study, say on Guyana, is bound to throw light on problems which are echoed in Sri Lanka and Jamaica. The series will bring together and, we hope, stimulate studies of those kinds carried out by both established and younger scholars. In doing so, it can make its distinctive contribution to an understanding of the changing contemporary world.

If it may be said that the Commonwealth is a peculiarly British creation, two qualifications have at once to be added. First, its emergence would scarcely have proved possible had it not been for the contributions of the other member states initially the white Dominions, later the new states of South Asia. Their own stirrings of nationalist feeling coupled with their willingness to retain links pushed London towards a partnership relation in the management of which each had some share. Second, that collective leadership aspect of the Commonwealth assumed overwhelming predominance with the establishment in the 1960s of the Commonwealth Secretariat and the almost simultaneous disappearance in Whitehall of a separate and distinctive Commonwealth Relations Office.

This Commonwealth is the framework within which Britain has conducted both the delicate operation of decolonisation and a large part of her dealings with her former colonial territories. Other ex-imperial powers have found their own somewhat different instruments and frameworks for the same tasks. It should be instructive to place side by side the different experiences of European colonial powers in respect of this process of ending imperial links while still fashioning other ties to sustain ongoing connections. This exercise has not been extensively attempted but it is precisely what this particular book in our series sets out to do with respect to Britain and France.

Even though the papers contained here are not the result of scholars from the two countries actually having worked together, they are at least the outcome of each set seeking to explain their experience to the other. It may well be that the contrasts stand out more sharply than the similarities: the French lacked any equivalent of the white Dominions as forerunners of decolonisation; the British seldom seem to have focussed as sharply as the French on the links of law and language ; the French experience is, with the awesome exception of Indo-China, almost entirely African rather than global as with Britain; the process in Britains case extends over decades, is untidy but mainly peaceful, and is produced by governments of different political parties, whereas in the case of France the stages begin late and in painful blood, only to be completed with despatch under de Gaulles vision and drive.

Yet such different patterns and others too when the process is viewed from the position of the ex-colonial peoples cannot conceal the parallel purposes and character of the enterprise in both cases. No doubt it is too naive and too crude to speak of comparisons enabling each to learn lessons from the experience of the other. On the other hand it would be to claim too little to say merely that one only fully understands ones own experience when one hears about that of another. Probably each reader will find messages for himself somewhere between these maximum and minimum positions.

W. H. MORRIS-JONES

DENNIS AUSTIN

List of books in the series

DECOLONISATION AND AFTER

The British and French Experience

Edited by

W. H. Morris-Jones

Institute of Commonwealth Studies, University of London

and

Georges Fischer

Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, Paris