11 ms·
I thought this was an interesting quote A: Two thoughts. First, you can leave a foreign country behind in an orderly way. Ask the British Empire, which mostly
by brsg 5y ago
I thought this was an interesting quote
A: Two thoughts. First, you can leave a foreign country behind in an orderly way. Ask the British Empire, which mostly ended its colonial occupations in an orderly way.
The interviewee says this as though it's common sense, but is it true? The examples that stick out to me are India, Israel/Palestine, and the South African colonies. Can these really be described as safe and orderly withdrawals? What are the examples of successful withdrawals? Are they really that much better than US withdrawal from Vietnam or Afghanistan?
- __d 5y agoAustralia and New Zealand would probably be considered successful withdrawals? Canada? Less so the colonies that became the US, I guess.
- thaumasiotes 5y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Velvet_Divorce https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Velvet_Divorce
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- docdeek 5y ago> What are the examples of successful withdrawals? Australia or Canada, perhaps.
- macdice 5y agoThose are settler colonies, a completely different kettle of fish. From the point of view of the (majority) settler population, they gradually ceased to consider themselves as British and underwent a multi-step disentanglement of legal and constitutional connections to the UK beginning almost a century ago but still ongoing. From the point of the (minority) indigenous populations, well I'm sure it varies but they may not agree that a withdrawal has occurred...
- perardi 5y agoIt still strikes me as a bit weird that Canada did not have its own constitution, as in technically completely independent of the British Parliament, until 1982. And technically the head of state is…well it’s complicated. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Governor_General_of_Canada https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Governor_General_of_Canada
- macdice 5y agoYeah, similar stories and timeline in other former dominions. I find https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sue_v_Hill https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sue_v_Hill fascinating, when a court in Australia was forced to consider whether the UK was a foreign power.
- bpodgursky 5y agoThe withdrawl from India was safe (for the British, let's ignore the partition bloodshed) and didn't lead to immediate regime collapse... so I certainly don't think it went as badly as Afghanistan or Vietnam.
- charlescearl 5y agoNo let’s not ignore the loss of over 1 million lives. Borders are still contested, with several wars having been fought, the scale of the disaster dwarfs Vietnam.
- dmurray 5y ago> What are the examples of successful withdrawals? Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and the Caribbean territories. Arguably Hong Kong. You could also make a reasonable case for Egypt, Ghana, India/Pakistan... The withdrawal itself was peaceful and didn't leave the state in immediate civil war, even if it wasn't stable in the medium term.
- Wowfunhappy 5y agoI’d say the difference is that those territories were more or less “at peace”. The colonists had “won” the war, at least per some definition of winning. Afghanistan was a barely held together mess even before we withdrew. I’m not arguing one way or the other for Taiwan—I don’t want to go to war with China for all sorts of obvious reasons—but we would have the backing of the Taiwanese people, and that’s a major difference versus Afghanistan.
- rjsw 5y agoWithdrawal from Malaysia and Singapore went well.
- 908B64B197 5y ago> Canada, Australia Ask the natives about it.
- mc32 5y agoThat's a non-sequitur. Did the British leave Canada & Australia in a peaceful state? As far as I know, there were no civil wars or disarray in those countries, whether ex British subjects or original stock of native populations.
- danielheath 5y agoAustralian here. Firstly, the monarch of England is still our head of state. Secondly, the genocide was so thorough that there weren't enough indigenous inhabitants left (outside of those enslaved) to hold a war. So yeah - after the British pulled out (except they didn't), we had peace between the living and the dead.
- bpodgursky 5y agoI'd argue that the Soviet withdrawls from Eastern Europe went pretty well. Safe, orderly, no real bloodshed.
- nradov 5y agoThe Soviets militarily occupied Eastern Europe, but they never really colonized it to a significant extent.
- NotSammyHagar 5y agoThe Baltics would disagree. Think of all the problems for the elderly retired Russian speaking people that stayed behind.
- abrowne 5y agoThe Baltic states were part of the USSR, unlike Poland, Hungary, Bulgaria etc.
- mannerheim 5y agoAnd the US was once part of the UK, which doesn't mean the latter didn't colonise the former.
- abrowne 5y agoPedantically, I don't think the US was ever part of the UK. The UK ultimately had sovereignty, but that's not the same thing. Even now the United Kingdom's former colonies are not part of the UK: it "has sovereignty over 17 territories which do not form part of the United Kingdom itself: 14 British Overseas Territories and three Crown dependencies.¹ But that's kind of the same point that I didn't articulate. A colony is not part of the country that is ruling it. The Baltic states were part of the Russian Empire, independent between the wars, and then reincorporated into the USSR. They weren't "militarily occupied", they were part fully incorporated. When someone says "militarily occupied Eastern Europe", I'd only assume they meant the countries that were "behind the iron curtain" but de jure independent, like Poland or Romania. 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Kingdom#:~:text=The%20United%20Kingdom%20has%20sovereignty%20over%2017%20territories%20which%20do%20not%20form%20part%20of%20the%20United%20Kingdom%20itself%3A%2014%20British%20Overseas%20Territories%5B27%5D%20and%20three%20Crown%20dependencies.%5B27%5D%5B223%5D https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Kingdom#:~:text=The%20U...
- throwawaysea 5y agoI personally don't think those withdrawals are truly orderly. Let's take India - leaving aside the partition of India (which is a huge matter in itself), a big crime is that the country that was left behind by the British did not resemble its historical culture or way of governance. It was instead turned into a secular nation, which just means defaulting to a status quo of colonial Western values. Ironically the partitioned areas (like the Islamic Republic of Pakistan) were not secular, but Hindus no longer had a land to practice a life that was fully dictated by their principles and their principles alone - instead they would live by rules and structures the British left behind. India also retained a lot of colonial structures outside of its government. For example the British education system continued, meaning that Indian children were taught out of Western-controlled/sourced materials that glossed over the horrors of British rule. Those children were also not taught the cultural things they would have learned in a pre-colonial era. This pattern isn't unique to India, but I wanted to call it out as an example of how seemingly peaceful withdrawals still result in long-lasting damage to a people and their culture. Is that peace? Maybe in the most literal sense. But it's not the same as making that place whole.
- hackeraccount 5y agoI don't want to speak well of the USSR/Russia but it's not hard to make an argument that they left Eastern Europe in an orderly way... well at the end. Honestly between Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Poland, and others there were some bad times in the there.
- Razengan 5y ago> I don't want to speak well of the USSR/Russia Why?
- HideousKojima 5y agoThe multiple genocides and general suppression of human rights?
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- Razengan 5y agoWould you add a similar disclaimer before pointing something positive about the U.S. because they’ve done some bad shit too, like, I dunno, being the only nation to actually nuke another?
- mc32 5y agoGorbachov left the Eastern Block in relative peace I would say. Afghanistan of course was an exception.
- seanmcdirmid 5y agoWasn't the Soviet Union pretty much done with Afghanistan when Gorbachov took over in 1985?
- rich_sasha 5y agoCzechoslovakia and Romania made attempts at leaving peacefully and that didn't go so well. Though yes, in the end it was "fine".
- tragomaskhalos 5y agoThe intention was there - according to Pakenham's "The Scramble for Africa" the idea was that prior to independence you educate a generation of civil servants who will then run the country along essentially British lines. I'd argue this worked well in India, largely though because Indians were already running the country in most important particulars. In Africa less so because independence movements gained unstoppable momentum which preempted such planning, plus many of those countries had been colonies for decades rather than centuries.
- throwawaysea 5y ago> civil servants who will then run the country along essentially British lines While this may mean structural continuity, I can’t help but feel this is also a bad outcome - it’s just a continuation of imperialist force/cultural projection.
- nine_k 5y agoI won't say that a working electoral / parliamentary / judicial system, civil engineering, medicine, etc left intact is a bad outcome. It's a much better outcome than a civil war. With some exceptions, there were no comparable systems in native cultures; those that existed (some definitely did) often were not capable to keep together a country, even if they worked well on tribal level, or were scalable but belligerent by design. I also don't think that cultural projection, to a degree, is not a bad thing. It happens constantly, and allows for cultural cross-pollination. It is, of course, best done in peaceful ways.
- AmericanChopper 5y ago> the idea was that prior to independence you educate a generation of civil servants who will then run the country along essentially British lines. I'd argue this worked well in India… I certainly wouldn’t draw that conclusion. Immediately after the British left Nehru adopted 5 year plans based on the soviet model. Nehru and Stalin didn’t get along because he was still too Britain-friendly for Stalin, but India and The USSR developed very close relations within a very short period of time. Some elements of India’s governance structure were distinctively non-Soviet, like having a multiparty democracy. But if you look at the way the country was run, it was done in the style of soviet central planning, most certainly not along British lines.
- ekianjo 5y ago> Ask the British Empire, which mostly ended its colonial occupations in an orderly way. Oh, like the independence of the US did go like a major peaceful operation. And yes the US used to be a british colony, in case people forgot.
- dexter89_kp3 5y agoDecisions taken by British still haunt India to this date. Especially their division of states.
- wonnage 5y agoYeah this statement kinda discredits everything he says. The world is littered with countries that exist only because some existing adjacent kingdoms happened to both be colonized by the British, and they merged them into one colony. Countries fell apart after they left because there was no shared national identity to begin with.
- xenocyon 5y ago* India: the Partition led to massive loss of life, displacement in the tens of millions, traumatized communities, and deadly polarization between peoples to this day. * Palestine: the end of the Mandate and the 1947-1949 Palestine war saw largescale displacement, loss of life, and (as is obvious to everyone) once again a deadly and unshakeable polarization between peoples that persists to this day. On the one hand, it is certainly true that the British did not intend for these consequences, but on the other, the British were fully in charge as the sovereign government of India and Mandatory Palestine (unlike the US in Vietnam or even Afghanistan) - in particular having ruled India for over three centuries by the time they left - and so more deserving of blame.