Analyze nationalist movements in Africa and Southeast Asia, regional conflicts in the Middle East, and expanded rights for women and indigenous peoples

Learning goal: Explain how postwar global politics led to the rise of nationalist movements in Africa and Southeast Asia; explain how religious diversity, the end of colonial rule and rising nationalism have led to regional conflicts in the Middle East; and explain how political and social struggles have resulted in expanded rights and freedoms for women and indigenous peoples.

Why postwar global politics favored nationalist movements. Nationalism in the colonial world means the demand of a people to govern themselves as an independent nation. After 1945 several forces strengthened it. The European colonial powers were weakened and in debt. Japan's wartime conquest of Southeast Asia had shown that European rulers could be defeated. The Atlantic Charter of 1941 and the UN Charter spoke of self-determination, and colonial soldiers who had fought for the Allies asked why those principles should not apply to them. Both superpowers, for their own reasons, criticized the old European empires, and the Cold War let nationalist leaders seek support from one side or the other. Western-educated leaders used ideas of rights and self-government learned in colonial schools and European universities. Two movements had prepared the ground in Africa: the Pan-African movement, whose 1945 congress in Manchester was attended by Kwame Nkrumah and Jomo Kenyatta, called for African unity and self-rule, and the Négritude movement of writers such as Léopold Senghor of Senegal and Aimé Césaire of Martinique asserted the worth of Black African culture against colonial claims of superiority.

Southeast Asia. In Indonesia, Sukarno declared independence from the Netherlands in August 1945; after four years of fighting and diplomacy the Dutch recognized independence in 1949. In Vietnam, Ho Chi Minh, a communist and nationalist, declared independence in September 1945; France fought to restore control until its defeat at Dien Bien Phu in 1954, after which the Geneva Accords divided Vietnam temporarily at the 17th parallel. That division led to a long war in which the United States backed the South, ending with the North's victory in 1975 and formal reunification in 1976—an example of decolonization entangled with the Cold War. The Philippines gained independence from the United States in 1946 by prior agreement; Burma (Myanmar) from Britain in 1948; Cambodia from France in 1953; Malaya in 1957.

Africa. Ghana, led by Kwame Nkrumah, became independent from Britain on 6 March 1957, the first colony in British West Africa to do so and one of the first in sub-Saharan Africa, largely through mass political organizing and strikes. In 1960 alone seventeen African countries became independent, most of them former French colonies. Some paths were violent: Algeria won independence from France in 1962 after a war that began in 1954, and Kenya became independent in 1963 after the Mau Mau uprising, which British forces suppressed with mass detention. In the Belgian Congo, independence in 1960 was followed at once by crisis, the murder of Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba in 1961, and Cold War intervention. Portugal held its African colonies until after its 1974 revolution. Many new states inherited borders drawn by colonial powers that cut across ethnic and linguistic groups, and economies built to export raw materials.

The Middle East: roots of regional conflict. The Middle East is religiously diverse: Sunni and Shia Muslims, Christians of many churches, Jews, Druze and others, alongside ethnic groups such as Arabs, Persians, Turks and Kurds. After World War I the Ottoman Empire's Arab lands were divided into British and French mandates, following wartime agreements such as Sykes-Picot (1916), and Britain's Balfour Declaration (1917) supported a "national home" for the Jewish people in Palestine. As colonial rule ended, rising nationalisms—Arab nationalism, Zionism (Jewish nationalism), and later Palestinian, Kurdish and Iranian movements—claimed the same land or the same state power. Tension and violence between Jewish and Arab communities had flared repeatedly under British rule, including riots in 1929 and an Arab revolt in 1936–1939. After the UN voted in November 1947 to partition Palestine, the fighting escalated into civil war; when Britain withdrew, Israel declared independence on 14 May 1948, and neighboring Arab states invaded. During the fighting of 1947–1949, about 700,000 Palestinian Arabs fled or were expelled, which Palestinians call the Nakba ("catastrophe"). Further Arab–Israeli wars followed in 1956, 1967 and 1973; in 1967 Israel occupied the West Bank, Gaza, the Golan Heights, East Jerusalem and Sinai. Egypt and Israel made peace in 1979 after the Camp David Accords of 1978. Religious diversity shaped other conflicts: the Lebanese civil war (1975–1990) among Christian, Sunni, Shia and Druze factions; the Iranian Revolution of 1979, which created an Islamic republic; and the Iran–Iraq War (1980–1988). Some of these conflicts continue today, and students should treat recent events as ongoing and describe competing claims fairly.

Expanded rights for women. Political and social struggles have expanded women's rights. Suffrage campaigns won the vote in New Zealand in 1893, in Britain partly in 1918 and on equal terms in 1928, in France in 1944, and in Switzerland at the federal level only in 1971. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948) affirmed equal rights; the UN Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women was adopted in 1979. Struggles over education, property, equal pay and legal equality continue unevenly around the world.

Expanded rights for indigenous peoples. Indigenous peoples organized to reclaim land, language and self-government. Examples include Australia's 1967 referendum, which removed a constitutional clause excluding Aboriginal people from official population counts and let the national parliament make laws for them; Canada's Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which reported in 2015 on residential schools; and the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, adopted in 2007. In Bolivia, Evo Morales became the country's first indigenous president in 2006.

How a struggle produced a change: two cases. Britain, women's vote. Suffragists petitioned Parliament from the 1860s. From 1897 Millicent Fawcett's National Union of Women's Suffrage Societies campaigned peacefully, and from 1903 Emmeline Pankhurst's Women's Social and Political Union used militant tactics, including smashing windows and hunger strikes in prison; the government resisted and force-fed hunger strikers. After women's work in World War I, Parliament gave the vote to most women over 30 in 1918 and to women on equal terms with men in 1928. Australia, the 1967 referendum. Aboriginal activists and allies, organized from 1958 in the Federal Council for Aboriginal Advancement (which added Torres Strait Islanders in 1964), gathered petitions for nearly a decade; in 1967 about 91 percent of voters approved the change, the largest yes vote in any Australian referendum, though land rights came only later, as in the Mabo decision of 1992. International influence: how gains in industrialized nations opened opportunities elsewhere. One traceable case is India. Margaret Cousins, an Irish suffragist who had campaigned for the vote in Ireland and Britain, moved to India and in 1917 helped found the Women's Indian Association in Madras. That December a deputation of Indian women led by the poet and nationalist Sarojini Naidu asked the British minister responsible for India for the vote, using the petition and deputation methods of the British campaign. The reforms of 1919 left the question to India's provincial legislatures; Madras became the first province to give women the vote, in 1921, though only women who met property and other qualifications could vote; other provinces followed during the 1920s, and independent India's constitution of 1950 gave the vote to all adult women and men. Indian women led this campaign themselves, so the case shows influence, not a change simply imported. More broadly, the UN Commission on the Status of Women (1946), world conferences on women from Mexico City (1975) to Beijing (1995), and CEDAW gave activists in many countries shared standards, and examples from industrialized nations, to cite when pressing their own governments.

Pressure from inside and outside: South Africa. In the second half of the twentieth century, human rights organizations such as Amnesty International (founded 1961) and the news media carried evidence of abuses to a world audience, and governments came under pressure to end discrimination. South Africa is the clearest case. Under apartheid, from 1948, the white-minority government denied the Black majority the vote and segregated homes, schools and jobs by law. Inside the country the African National Congress, trade unions, churches and students (as at Soweto in 1976) resisted with protests, strikes and boycotts; outside it, reporting and campaigning led governments and the UN to impose sanctions and sporting and cultural boycotts. Nelson Mandela was freed in February 1990 after 27 years in prison, the apartheid laws were repealed, and in April 1994 South Africans of all races voted in the election that made him president. Expanded rights open participation in four ways: political (the vote and office), educational (schooling), economic (work, pay and property) and social (equal treatment in daily life). International pressure has not brought immediate or universal change; in some places women and indigenous peoples are still fighting for these rights.

Worked model: tracing one struggle to a result. Ghana: grievance (colonial rule, economic control) → organization (Nkrumah's party, strikes and boycotts from 1949) → pressure within a changed postwar world (weakened Britain, UN principles) → result (independence in 1957). The same pattern—grievance, organization, pressure, result—applies to the women's suffrage and indigenous rights struggles.

Worked comparison—two paths to independence: Ghana (1957) and Algeria (1962). Ghana: largely peaceful mass politics and negotiation with a Britain unwilling to fight to keep it. Algeria: a war beginning in 1954, because France regarded Algeria as part of France and about a million European settlers lived there. Conclusion: the colonizer's stake and the presence of settlers shaped whether nationalist movements won through negotiation or war.

Worked cause sort for the Middle East: Sort these: (a) competing Arab and Jewish national claims to Palestine; (b) British and French mandates ending after 1945; (c) Sunni–Shia rivalry in the Iran–Iraq War; (d) Kurdish demands for a state. Solution: (a) rising nationalism; (b) end of colonial rule; (c) religious diversity (combined with nationalism and state rivalry); (d) rising nationalism, with borders drawn after colonial rule. Most conflicts combine more than one of the three causes.

Worked rights timeline: Order and explain: Switzerland federal vote (1971); New Zealand women's vote (1893); UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (2007); Australian referendum (1967); CEDAW (1979). Solution: 1893, 1967, 1971, 1979, 2007. The sequence shows that rights expanded over more than a century through different struggles—national campaigns first, then international agreements.

Decolonization chart: For six countries—Indonesia, Vietnam, the Philippines, Ghana, Algeria and Kenya—record the colonial power, the independence year, the main leader or movement, whether the path was mainly negotiated or violent, and one way Cold War politics affected it.

Independent performance: Write a 400-word essay responding to "How did the end of empire change the world after 1945?" Success criteria: an explanation of at least three postwar forces that helped nationalist movements; specific, dated examples from both Africa and Southeast Asia; an explanation of how religious diversity, the end of colonial rule and rising nationalism have contributed to at least two Middle East conflicts, describing competing claims fairly; and at least two examples of expanded rights, one for women and one for indigenous peoples, each tied to a political or social struggle.