1 - A Colonial War in a Postcolonial Era

Summary

The available accounts of the exchanges among the leaders of the grand alliance against the Axis powers in World War II make it clear that Franklin D. Roosevelt rarely passed up a chance to debunk European-style colonialism. Although Roosevelt explicitly rejected the idealistic moralizing that had earlier pervaded Woodrow Wilson's dealings with the other great powers, allies and enemies alike, he evinced a good deal more concern than Wilson had for the condition and future of the colonized peoples of Africa and Asia. Wilson was undoubtedly convinced that the principle of self-determination - and the ideals of justice, open diplomacy, and democratization it enshrined - was a vital component of the new world order that he sought to fashion from the wreckage of the Great War. But as African and Asian leaders as diverse as Ho Chi Minh and the members of the Egyptian delegation (wafd) to the Versailles peace conference soon learned, Wilson intended self-determination for Poles and Czechs at best, and certainly not Vietnamese and Arabs. In sharp contrast, Roosevelt was convinced that the war had accelerated the demise of an obsolescent European colonial order and that the forces unleashed by decolonization movements were bound to shape the postwar global order in major ways.