Contenu du sommaire : La décolonisation

Changer pour conserver. Pierre Mendès France governed from June 1954 to February 1955. During his brief mandate, he signed the armistice in Geneva which ended the Indo-China war. By the Carthage Declaration he gave internal autonomy to Tunisia. He solved the conflicts with India concerning French trading posts, and with Libya concerning the French presence in Fezzan. On November 1st 1954, the Algerian war broke out. Neither « liquidator of the Empire » nor « precursor of decolonisation », Pierre Mendès France dealt with each of these crises focusing on one central goal : to contribute to the grandeur of France. This policy did not however apply to Algeria.

L'indépendance par la monnaie : la France, le Mali et la zone franc, 1960-1963The aim of this article is to analyze the decolonization process in Mali and the evolution of its relations with France. The history of Mali is different from that of the Guinea of Sekou Touré, who broke off relations with Paris, but also from that of other francophone states. Oriented towards socialism, Mali reclaimed full control of its economic and monetary policy. But the Franc zone, to which Mali belonged, limited national sovereignty in these fields. Bamako therefore tried to develop a new kind of relationship with Paris. Its attempt to do so is important because it raises questions related to the second phase of the decolonisation process : how can the new African states become really independent from an economic point of view, if they do not have the resources to finance their development ?

This study takes decolonisation as being the time during which several political formations were suggested and ideas for economic strategies forged. For Senegal, this period began roughly after the Second World War and ended in 1963, when the moderate forces had won against the more radical ones. This analysis focuses on the most powerful political actor, the main party on the Senegalese side. The party's main concerns were the improvement of living standards, the removal of colonial and racist structures, and the reconquest of cultural dignity. During the decolonisation process, cultural emancipation and strategies for economic development were discussed by Senegalese intellectuals and politicians. The idea of federalism, reaching beyond borders and covering all or part of French West Africa, was also one of the slogans of this fight against colonisation and for the advent of a solid economic ensemble. But as can be seen today, all this eventually only lead to the formation of a nation-state.

La réaction internationale face à la chute de Goa (fin décembre 1961)Since its independence, India had faced the ultraconservative colonial policy of Portugal's leader, António de Oliveira Salazar, who was determined to keep his Goanese possessions which had been established on the sub-continent since 1510. Therefore, for fourteen years Portugal organized its resistance along the lines of the pacifist principles of Nehru's foreign policy, with the support of the Western powers which did not accept Indian non-alignment in a bipolar world. The affirmation of the decolonization movement by the end of the fifties nevertheless convinced Nehru, who no longer had arguments to do otherwise, to send his army against Goa, on the 18th of December of 1961. This article aims to analyze the violence of international reactions to this symbolic military action that soiled forever the Pandit's moral authority in the West, as well as underlining the fragility of the UN system in a world in crisis.

La rivalité anglo-égyptienne au Soudan : les enjeux de la décolonisation
The Sudan had condominium status, administrated jointly by Great Britain and Egypt. The 1899 Agreement was deliberately vague about the question of the sovereignty of the Upper Nile Valley. At the end of the Second World War, this question, and beyond it the question of the decolonization of the Sudan and of its future, was raised by Egypt, which demanded the recognition of the unity of the Nile Valley under the Egyptian crown, while the objective of British policy in the Sudan was to divide the two parts of the Nile Valley. The point of view of the two co-domini needs to be explained. The new revolutionary government of Egypt refined the problem : Egypt abandoned its claim and accelerated the pace for independence of the Sudan.

Le Comité international de la Croix-Rouge et le soulèvement des Mau-Mau au Kenya, 1952-1959The ICRC had been concerned by the situation in Kenya since 1952, but the British Red Cross and the British authorities did not allow the Committee to play its traditional role in an area where it had no automatic right to intervene. The British Red Cross actually did what it could to prevent the intervention of the Committee in a field it considered as its own, and where it did not tolerate competitors in the humanitarian field. The initial aim of the ICRC to visit Mau-Mau detainees was finally achieved, once in 1957 and once in 1959. Nevertheless, the ICRC had a major moral responsibility for the kind of argument that it developed against an intervention in Kenya, in contradiction with the universality principle of the Red Cross.