Ch23

The twentieth century witnessed the demise of many empires such as the Austrian, Ottoman empires, and the Russian empires following the collapse of World War I.  After World War II, the German, Japan, African, and Asian empires ended.  Though, Africa and Asian movements for independence shared with the ideal of national self-determination.  Belief in national self-determination gained a global following in the twentieth century.  The idea that only legitimate government is self-government was not so widespread at the beginning of the century.  At the international level, the world wars had weakened Europe, while discrediting any sense of European moral superiority.  Both the United States and the Soviet Union generally opposed the older European colonial empires.  All of this soon contributed to the global illegitimacy that was encouraging to Africans and Asians seeking political independence.  The early twentieth century in Asia and the mid-twentieth century in Africa, a second or third generation of Western-educated elites had risen throughout the colonial world.  Many groups such as veterans of war, young partially educated people, those with no jobs, small-scale traders; all have reason to believe that independence held great promise.  It was now possible to imagine retaining profitable economic interests in Asia and Africa without the expense and bother of formal colonial government.

            The British never assimilated into Indian society because their acute sense of racial and cultural distinctiveness kept them apart.  In India, cultural identities were primarily local and infinitely varied, rooted in differences of family, caste, village, language, region, tribe, and religious practice.  The most important political expression of an all-Indian identity took shape in the Indian National Congress (INC).  Initially, the INC did not seek to overthrow British rule because they hoped to gain greater inclusion within the political, military, and business life of British India.  During the first two decades of the twentieth century the INC remained largely an elite organization.  Ghandi and the INC or Congress Party leadership had to contend with a wide range of movements.  Though after intense disagreement the two finally agreed to partition as the British declared their intention to leave India after World War II.

The freedom struggle in South Africa took a different direction than it had in India.  This is incredibly different from how independence was won in Africa.  In Africa the rule was delayed until 1994, while India, lacking any such community, had achieved independence almost a half century earlier.  The South Africa situation was the overwhelming prominence of race, expressed most clearly in the policy that wanted to separate blacks from whites.  The Black Consciousness movement was at the center of an explosion of protest in 1976 in a sprawling, segregated, impoverished black neighborhood called Soweto.  It was race, ethnicity, and ideology that generate dissension and sometimes violence that divided South Africa, rather than religion in India.