Diplomacy and Decolonisation

It is tempting to see diplomacy as the peaceful pursuit of a sovereign state’s interests in relations with foreign states. Yet it can be instructive to set this view in perspective. Before decolonisation, diplomacy was largely an affair conducted in high-domed chancelleries of imperial capitals by men from a thin white upper crust. Decolonisation brought to this stage leaders of anticolonial movements, many freshly emerged from jails or jungles. Their path had been difficult and bloody. As Congo and Palestine both remind us, despite distances of time and space, much blood was shed because colonial powers were determined to fashion postcolonial interlocutors and settlements acceptable to themselves. Diplomacy in such colonial wars might equally be about burying the evidence with the bodies.

To speak of diplomacy and decolonisation is thus inevitably to dwell on their ironies and paradoxes. Colonies were not sovereign and diplomacy in the conventional sense had to wait until they became sovereign at least in a de jure sense. Pitfalls littered this path. Colonial powers regarded sovereignty as a gift rather than a right, guarding it jealously, refusing to admit colonies to the jurisdiction of international law, and managing their affairs under municipal or imperial law. Any colonies developing an international personality before the 1950s did so under imperial tutelage. Politicians and colonial bureaucrats, rather than diplomats, negotiated independence, and since protecting the interests of the departing power was the main precondition, independence necessarily meant scrambling the boundaries of domestic and foreign, of what constituted the inside and what lay outside, to produce a bilateral middle space of postimperial privilege.Diplomacy in colonial wars was often about burying the evidence with the bodies. To speak of diplomacy and decolonisation is thus inevitably to dwell on their ironies and paradoxes. 

Colonial powers went to great lengths to protect this space and privilege, for instance interposing themselves in relations between former colonies and the rest of the world through arrangements like the sterling area and the franc zone, and seeking to naturalise it through institutions like the Commonwealth or nebulous notions like Françafrique. France’s relations with its ex-colonies were managed until the late 1990s by the former Ministry of Overseas France, renamed Ministry of Cooperation in 1961, not its foreign office, and Britain’s by the Commonwealth Office until its merger with the Foreign Office in 1968 to form what is still today the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office.

A Commonwealth shrivelling before our eyes might seem a vainglorious symbol of a vanished era. Yet, despite failing in its pretence that the empire was a free association of countries under the Crown, Britain’s efforts to limit postcolonial sovereignty through the Commonwealth found an outlet in the diplomatic sphere. In a practice dating from the colonial period, Commonwealth representatives in one another’s countries continue to be called high commissioners, rather than ambassadors. Embassies are likewise high commissions. It even remained moot for a time whether they were entitled to diplomatic privileges and immunities. For instance, suspecting the sympathies of the Indian commissioner in Nairobi, Apa Pant, Kenya’s colonial police repeatedly raided his home in the early 1950s to hunt for anticolonial activists, and once to rough him up for hosting the well-known British socialist and antiwar campaigner Fenner Brockway. The grey zone high commissioners occupy in the diplomatic sphere is reflected in their omission in Article 14 of the 1961 Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations, where only “ambassadors or nuncios” are recognised as “heads of mission”, in addition to sundry “other heads of mission of equivalent rank”. If the difference between ambassadors and high commissioners nevertheless appears merely symbolic today, it is because Britain’s illusions of the Commonwealth turning into a pocket borough for shoring up its declining power and influence did not long survive encounter with reality, not least the resistance of its former colonies.Though the United Nations was founded as an adjunct to empire, it was where newly independent countries made their diplomatic mark. 

Setting aside the tender susceptibilities of imperial plenipotentiaries, the United Nations was where the newly independent countries quickly made their diplomatic mark. The UN was not founded to dismantle colonialism. Rather, many, like Jan Smuts, the white supremacist South African prime minister responsible for the UN charter’s lofty preamble, believed the UN would function as an adjunct to empire and cement the values that his country, “a little epic of European civilization on a dark continent”, represented in Africa. Yet Smuts suffered two stinging defeats at the hands of the “darker nations” in the very first session of the UN General Assembly (UNGA), which rejected his plan to annex South West Africa (a League mandate under South African control) and passed a resolution criticising his country’s treatment of its Indian population. This resolution was one of the earliest international condemnations of South Africa’s racial policies.

By 1950, there was an active Asian caucus at the UN, followed after the landmark Bandung Conference by an Afro-Asian caucus and in 1958 by an African grouping. The 1960 UNGA resolution on decolonisation was a concerted expression of this emergent “third world”. Other milestones, and setbacks, followed in the 1960s and 1970s, reflecting newly independent countries’ aspirations, and their savvy public and collective diplomacy, to advance decolonisation and build a new, more equitable world, and the unrelenting, and often violent, resistance of the colonial powers. The struggle continues.