Causes and Global Framework of Decolonization

The Second World War left Britain, France, and the Netherlands militarily and economically exhausted, and this exhaustion opened the door to a wave of independence movements that would dismantle their empires, first across Asia and then, a decade later, across Africa. Japan's wartime occupation of large parts of Asia between 1941 and 1945 had already shattered the myth of European invincibility, an effect Japan actively exploited for propaganda purposes through its notion of a "Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere." Nationalist movements on both continents drew legitimacy from two landmark declarations: the 1941 Atlantic Charter, which proclaimed peoples' right to self-determination, and the founding of the United Nations in 1945, whose Charter enshrined self-determination as a guiding principle in its very first article. The new superpowers, the United States and the Soviet Union, applied pressure against traditional European colonialism, while maintaining these empires had become economically unsustainable in the war's aftermath.