Throughout the twentieth century, independence movements and nationalism have risen in response to the decline or defeat of colonial powers. The primary mission of these movements has been to resist and expel foreign occupiers. In some cases, the new nations have been able to negotiate their independence with a relative lack of violence, depending on their economic, social, and historical relationship to the colonial power. Factors in the outbreak of colonial warfare included the size of European settler populations, the perceived importance of the colony to the ruling country’s economy and national prestige, and the radicalism of the independence movement’s ideology.
India’s nationalist movement under the British Empire, originating in the late nineteenth century, was led by the upper-class members of the Indian National Congress. From the beginning, India’s nationalists were divided between Hindu and Muslim factions. The Muslim population was in the minority, over all, and its leaders often deviated from Congress’ insistence that British India was destined to be a single independent federated nation. After World War I, Britain’s Government of India Act of 1919 granted some domestic power to the Congress but left far more power in British hands compared to the “white” dominions of Canada and Australia, which were also agitating for more independence at this time. Britain balanced its reform effort with increased prosecutions for sedition, arousing popular resentment. At Amritsar, a British general ordered troops to fire on a protest rally, killing many hundreds of unarmed civilians. This shocking episode, and the British public’s approval of it, began to push Indian opinion away from Dominion status (domestic self-rule within the Empire) and towards complete independence.
At this time, Mohandas Gandhi emerged. Gandhi focused on the peasant roots and spiritual traditions of India and helped turn the Congress Party from an elite debating society into a disciplined mass movement. His methods of satyagraha, civil disobedience against unjust laws, and ahimsa, nonviolence in the face of police action, highlighted the injustice of British rule. In the 1930s, Britain proposed a federal structure for India to protect minority Muslim rights, but the Muslim League, under Muhammad Ali Jinnah, countered with a demand that India be divided into two separate states, Muslim and Hindu.
When World War II began, the British offered domestic rule in return for cooperation against Germany and Japan. Despite Gandhi’s “Quit India” resistance campaign and Japan’s attempts to recruit an Indian liberation army as it approached the Bengali border, the Indian people again generally supported Britain in the war. After the war, the British realized they could no longer count on the Indian bureaucracy for governing and policing, but they could not afford a military campaign of suppression and conquest. On August 15, 1947, independence was granted to India.
However, increasing violence between Hindus and Muslims had persuaded the British to agree to an India/Pakistan Partition, which led to the creation of Hindu India and Muslim Pakistan. This division led to a mass cross-migration of Muslim and Hindu refugees amid terrible civil slaughter. Hundreds of thousands were killed, which poisoned relations between India and Pakistan going forward. The two nations fought four wars over the next fifty years. Pakistan itself was composed of western and eastern provinces, separated by India. The populations, of different ethnic groups and ancestral history, shared only their Muslim religion. In 1971, East Pakistan fought for its national independence and became Bangladesh.
Islands have been important for expanding European empires since the Age of Exploration, either as plantation colonies or for their strategic position on the sea lanes. In the twentieth century a large number of island colonies achieved independence as national movements confronted weakened or restructured empires. The first was Cuba, which rebelled from Spain in 1898, only to come under effective political domination by the United States; it would take another sixty years for a Communist revolution to expel U.S. influence. Ireland, long dominated by nearby Great Britain, waged a guerrilla war after World War I to achieve home rule as the Irish Free State, a Dominion like Canada and Australia. Complete independence as the Irish Republic followed soon after in 1937. Britain’s rule in Protestant Northern Ireland remained a source of conflict and terrorist violence for decades to come.
After the Second World War, the United States conceded independence to island colonies that were unprofitable, strategically unnecessary, or unsustainable in the face of nationalist resistance. The Philippines, Papua-New Guinea, and many Polynesian island groups in the Pacific; Jamaica and a number of smaller islands in the Caribbean; Cyprus in the Mediterranean; and Madagascar and Sri Lanka in the Indian Ocean all negotiated their national freedom in the postwar period. As with their continental counterparts, these countries were often consumed by factional or ethnic strife that had been suppressed by the colonial powers.
Several European colonies in Africa had developed relatively large settler communities. These groups, supported by the colonial governments, resisted independence movements by the native majorities, leading to armed conflicts and full-fledged wars. In Kenya, the violent Mau Mau rebellion was suppressed by the British Army, but this accelerated the movement towards full independence in 1963. Similarly, since 1848 coastal Algeria had been part of metropolitan France, and a large white settler community had lived there for many generations as a privileged class over the native Algerians. In the 1950s, the National Liberation Front (FLN) began a terrorist campaign to drive out the French. A large French army waged counterinsurgency war for years, and the local French government collapsed as the conflict proved unwinnable. After Algerian independence in 1962, large numbers of colonial whites departed; Algeria has since been torn between Islamic and modernizing socialist currents, leading to civil war in the 1990s.
The story of nationalism in the twentieth century would be incomplete without reviewing the many instances of regions or peoples who failed to achieve independence. Some struggles involved violence, terrorism, and guerrilla warfare; others were tied to regional or superpower politics; and others still were expressed more through art and mobilization. Just a few of the most prominent examples were: the Basque region, Catalonia, Northern Ireland, and Turkish Cyprus in Europe; Chiapas, Quebec, and Puerto Rico in the Americas; Biafra and Darfur in Africa; Tibet, Taiwan, Okinawa, Mindanao, East Timor, Kashmir, West Papua, Kurdistan, Palestine, Tamil Sri Lanka, and Chechnya in Asia.