Ch. 22 Margin Questions
Why was African majority rule in South Africa delayed until 1994, whereas the overthrow of European colonialism had occurred much earlier in the rest of Africa and Asia?
• Black South Africans' freedom struggle was against their country's white settler minority, rather than against a European colonial power. • The intransigence of the sizable and threatened settler community played a role in the delay. • The extreme dependence of most Africans on the white-controlled economy rendered individuals highly vulnerable to repressive action, though collectively the threat to withdraw their essential labor also provided them with a powerful weapon. • Race was a much more prominent issue in South Africa, expressed most clearly in the policy of apartheid, which attempted to separate blacks from whites in every conceivable way while retaining their labor power in the white-controlled economy.
In what ways did thinking about the role of the state in the economic life of developing countries change? Why did it change?
• Early in the twentieth century, people in the developing world and particularly those in newly independent countries expected that state authorities would take major responsibility for spurring the economic development of their countries, and some state-directed economies had real successes. • But in the last several decades of the twentieth century, the earlier consensus in favor of state direction largely collapsed, replaced by a growing dependence on the market to generate economic development. • At the dawn of the new millennium, a number of Latin American countries were once again asserting a more prominent role for the state in their quests for economic development and social justice.
What conflicts and differences divided India's nationalist movement?
• Gandhi opposed industrialization, but his chief lieutenant, Jawaharlal Nehru, supported it. • Not all nationalists accepted Gandhi's nonviolence or his inclusive definition of India. • Some militant Hindus preached hatred of Muslims. • Some saw efforts to improve the position of women or untouchables as a distraction from the chief task of gaining independence from Britain. • There was disagreement about whether to participate in British-sponsored legislative bodies without complete independence. • A number of smaller parties advocated on behalf of particular regions or castes. • There was a growing divide between India's Hindu and Muslim populations, which led to arguments that India was really two nations rather than one.
How did South Africa's struggle against white domination change over time?
• In the opening decades of the twentieth century, the educated, professional, and middle-class Africans who led the political party known as the African National Congress sought not to overthrow the existing order but to be accepted as "civilized men" within that society. They appealed to the liberal, humane, and Christian values that white society claimed. For four decades, the leaders of the ANC pursued peaceful and moderate protest, but to little effect. • During the 1950s, a new and younger generation of the ANC leadership broadened its base of support and launched nonviolent civil disobedience. • In the 1960s, following the banning of the ANC, underground nationalist leaders turned to armed struggle, authorizing selected acts of sabotage and assassination, while preparing for guerrilla warfare in camps outside the country. The 1970s and 1980s saw an outbreak of protests in sprawling, segregated, and impoverished black neighborhoods as well as an increasingly active black labor movement. • The South African freedom struggle also benefited from increasing international pressure on the apartheid government.
How did India's nationalist movement change over time?
• India's modern nationalist movement began with the establishment of the Indian National Congress (INC) in 1885. • The INC was comprised of primarily of English-educated Indians from high-caste Hindu families. The INC was largely urban and had very moderate demands. They did not seek to overthrow British rule but rather sought more inclusive participation in the existing structure. • Because of their largely elite membership, the INC failed to attract peasants to its cause. • After World War I, the nationalist movement changed markedly. • British attacks on the Islamic Ottoman Empire upset Muslims in India. • Millions of Indians died in the influenza epidemic following the war further causing social unrest. • A series of repressive actions by the British, in particular the killing of 400 people who had been prohibited from celebrating a Hindu festival in the city of Amritsar, further fueled Indian antagonism toward the British.
What obstacles confronted the leaders of movements for independence?
• Leaders had to organize political parties, recruit members, plot strategy, develop an ideology, and negotiate both with one another and with the colonial power to secure the transition to independence. • In some regions—particularly settler-dominated colonies and Portuguese territories—leaders also directed military operations and administered liberated areas. • Beneath the common goal of independence, anticolonial groups struggled with one another over questions of leadership, power, strategy, ideology, and the distribution of material benefits.
What was the role of Gandhi in the struggle for Indian Independence?
• Mohandas Gandhi, an English-educated Indian lawyer from the Vaisya (business) caste, accepted a position working for an Indian firm in South African in 1893. In South Africa, he experienced overt racism for the first time. • He developed a philosophy of nonviolent political action. In 1914, he returned to India and rose through the ranks of the INC. • In the 1920s and 1930s, he organized mass campaigns to garner support from a wide spectrum of Indians, not just elites but peasants and the urban poor and including both Hindus and Muslims. • His support of Muslims was a particularly important shift in the nationalist movement. • Although radical in approach, Gandhi did not seek social revolution but moral transformation. He worked to raise the status of untouchables. • He also critiqued modernization and sought an India of harmonious, autonomous villages based on the traditional Indian principles of duty and morality. • Others rejected this approach, including his comrade, Jawaharlal Nehru who embraced science and industry as the keys to India's future. Militant Hindus rejected his acceptance of Muslims, and the All-India Muslim League called for a separate nation in Pakistan for India's Muslims. • As a result, when India achieved independence in 1947, it was as two separate countries—Pakistan and India. • Gandhi pioneered active and confrontational, though nonviolent, strategies of resistance that underpinned the Indian independence movement. • He became a leader in the Indian National Congress during the 1920s and 1930s. • He played a critical role in turning the INC into a mass organization.
What was distinctive about the end of Europe's African and Asian empires compared to other cases of imperial disintegration?
• Never before had the end of empire been so associated with the mobilization of the masses around a nationalist ideology, nor had earlier cases of imperial dissolution generated such a plethora of nation-states, each claiming an equal place in a world of nation-states.
What accounts for the ups and downs of political democracy in postcolonial Africa?
• Some have argued that Africans lacked some crucial ingredient for democratic politics—an educated electorate, a middle class, or perhaps a thoroughly capitalist economy. • Others have suggested that Africa's traditional culture, based on communal rather than individualistic values and concerned to achieve consensus rather than majority rule, was not compatible with the competitiveness of party politics. • Some have argued that Western-style democracy was simply inadequate for the tasks of development confronting the new states. • Creating national unity was more difficult when competing political parties identified primarily with particular ethnic or "tribal" groups. • The immense problems that inevitably accompany the early stages of economic development may be compounded by the heavy demands of a political system based on universal suffrage. • Widespread economic disappointment weakened the popular support of many postindependence governments in Africa and discredited their initial democracies.
In what ways did cultural revolutions in Turkey and Iran reflect different understandings of the role of Islam in modern societies?
• The cultural revolution in Turkey sought to embrace modern culture and Western ways fully in public life and to relegate Islam to the sphere of private life. With that in mind, almost everything that had made Islam an official part of Ottoman public life was dismantled, and Islam was redefined as a modernized personal religion, available to individual citizens of a secular Turkish state. • The cultural revolution in Iran cast Islam as a guide to public as well as private life. With this goal in mind, the sharia became the law of the land, and religious leaders assumed the reins of government. Culture and education were regulated by the state according to Islamic law.
What obstacles impeded the economic development of third-world countries?
• The quest for economic development took place in societies divided by class, religion, ethnic groups, and gender and occurred in the face of explosive population growth. • Colonial rule had provided only the most slender foundations for modern development to many of the newly independent nations, which had low rates of literacy, few people with managerial experience, a weak private economy, and transportation systems oriented to export rather than national integration; • Development had to occur in a world split by rival superpowers and economically dominated by the powerful capitalist economies of the West. • Developing countries had little leverage in negotiations with the wealthy nations of the Global North and their immense transnational corporations. • It was hard for leaders of developing countries to know what strategies to pursue.
Why was Africa's experience with political democracy so different from that of India?
• The struggle for independence in India had been a far more prolonged affair, thus providing time for an Indian political leadership to sort itself out. • Britain began to hand over power in India in a gradual way well before complete independence was granted. • Because of these factors, a far larger number of Indians had useful administrative or technical skills than was the case in Africa. • Unlike most African countries, the nationalist movement in India was embodied in a single national party, the INC, whose leadership was committed to democratic practice. • The partition of India at independence eliminated a major source of internal discord. • Indian statehood could be built on cultural and political traditions that were far more deeply rooted than in most African states.
What international circumstances and social changes contributed to the end of colonial empires?
• The world wars weakened Europe, while discrediting any sense of European moral superiority. Both the United States and the Soviet Union, the new global superpowers, generally opposed the older European colonial empires. The United Nations provided a prestigious platform from which to conduct anticolonial agitation. • By the early twentieth century in Asia and the mid-twentieth century in Africa, a second or third generation of Western-educated elites, largely male, had arisen throughout the colonial world. These young men were thoroughly familiar with European culture, were deeply aware of the gap between its values and its practices, no longer viewed colonial rule as a vehicle for their peoples' progress as their fathers had, and increasingly insisted on independence now. Growing numbers of ordinary people also were receptive to this message.