Ending Empire: Contested Sovereignty and Territorial Partition (review)

Why did some European empires wind themselves up relatively painlessly while others became mired in bitter conflict? Why, in particular, did Britain emerge relatively unscathed while France, the Netherlands, Belgium and Portugal engaged in bloody, drawn-out conflicts with nationalists, leading in some cases to civil war and revolution and in all cases to troubling legacies both in the former colonies and at home?

In this theoretically ambitious and historically well-researched study, Spruyt shows that by 1945 the “international environment” had steadily become less and less favourable to empire. The economic gains – if such they had been – were increasingly seen as negligible. The security concerns were less relevant than in the past, especially after 1945 with the new military alliances, such as NATO, forged in the Cold War, and the development of nuclear weapons. Ideological rivalries made western imperialism a handicap in the competition to win friends and clients. The United States, with its interest in economic liberalism, was consistently hostile to imperial possessions and used every opportunity to put pressure on the imperial powers of Europe, most notably at the time of Suez..

According to the “realist” school of international relations, such international forces should have made every European power ready and willing to cede power to the colonial nationalists. Why then, with the exception of Britain, did they resist? Why did they ignore what appear clear self-interested reasons for giving up their colonial possessions? Spruyt argues that rather than look to the international environment we must consider domestic factors in each case. Against the “realist” school he offers an “institutionalist” analysis that focuses particularly on the nature of the political systems of the different European powers. Where there were multi-party systems, leading to a succession of often short-lived coalitional governments – as in France, Belgium, and the Netherlands – the “institutional architecture” offered a multitude of “veto points” allowing opponents of decolonization to resist the efforts of “rational-minded” elites to do the sensible thing. Among these opponents were in most cases the military, important business interests, and especially settler communities. Their ability to thwart decolonizing efforts led the French to get bogged down in Indo-China and Algeria, the Belgians in the Congo, and the Dutch in Indonesia.

In countries with established two-party systems and strong executive rule, as in Britain, elites on the other hand were able to ignore opposition to decolonization and to get out of empire relatively peacefully. Spruyt adds the case of the Soviet Union as a further example of this pattern. The centralized power of the Communist Party made it possible for Gorbachev and the reformers to overcome the resistance of the conservatives and, ultimately – though unintended by Gorbachev - for the Soviet Union to dissolve itself with remarkably little violence.

Portugal creates an obvious problem with this neat explanation. Under Salazar it was clearly no multi-party democracy but, by Spruyt’s own account, something akin to a military dictatorship in which the army called the shots throughout. For a long time – well past the time that other European empires had conceded independence to their colonies – the military leadership held to the view that Portugal’s African empire was crucial to its well-being. It fought a bitter war against nationalists in Angola and Mozambique. Once however significant groups in the military – the captains in the Armed Forces Movement, high-ranking officers such as Generals Spinola and Costa-Gomez – began to feel that Portugal was compromising its future with these policies, the game was up with the Portuguese empire. In other words, the Portuguese case sounds remarkably similar to the Soviet one. In both cases, an awareness of the international environment and fear that their country might be falling disastrously behind led significant elites to change direction and begin the process of reform. In one case it led to revolution, in another to peaceful disengagement. Multi-party systems and veto groups do not seem to have much to do with any of this. Spruyt tries to distinguish Portugal...