The article examines the complex prerequisites for the collapse of the colonial system in Asia and Africa in the mid-1940s - mid-1970s, and provides a brief historiographical overview of this problem. The stages of the decolonization process, the main models and schemes of its implementation in different colonial empires are highlighted. In conclusion, the author deals with the problem of predictability of decolonization.

Key words: decolonization, colonial empire, metropolis, colony, national liberation struggle, independence.

One of the main socio-political processes in the countries of Asia and Africa in the first post - war decades was decolonization-the acquisition of political independence by the colonies of European powers. This was a long process that began in the last weeks of the Second World War, and ended in the mid-1970s. In the twenty years after the war, the total area of colonies decreased from 37 to 6 million square kilometers, and their population - from 660 to 36 million people [Rymalov, 1966, p. 40]. About 60 colonies gained independence.

The relevance of the topic of colonialism in general and decolonization in particular is growing in modern world science due to the ongoing decline of the nation-state in the era of globalization (see, in particular: [Naumkin, 2014]). On the one hand, the organizational forms that preceded the nation-state (including empires) are of increasing interest, and on the other hand, the processes during which nation - states or similar forms (including decolonization) were born. The purpose of this article is to briefly review the prerequisites and stages of decolonization, highlight its main models and schemes of implementation in different colonial empires.

PREREQUISITES FOR DECOLONIZATION

A number of factors contributed to the collapse of the colonial system. All of them are interrelated, but among them we can distinguish internal for colonial empires and external 1. Both groups of factors were present as (socially)- both economic and political.

Internal factors related to the functioning of the empires themselves.

First, there is the relative economic and military-political weakening of the mother countries, which began in the first half of the twentieth century, and has its roots in the last third of the nineteenth century, when the industrial power of Great Britain began to weaken.

1 Of course, among the internal factors were specific to each empire separately, but we are talking about factors that are common to all empires.

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Secondly, it is an inversely proportional strengthening of the economic position of national entrepreneurship in colonial countries. So, if in 1896 Indian textile factories met the needs of their country only by 8%, then by 1945-by 75% [Ferguson, 2003, p. 217, n. 1]. Under the direct influence of colonialism in the Afro-Asian world, new elites were forming-entrepreneurs, managers, large landowners, who were increasingly burdened by the power of the overseas metropolis. This process was accompanied by an increase in the influence of political parties and organizations that expressed the interests of elites in the general population; it meant an increase in the ability of these parties to mobilize the population for various forms of anti-colonial protest. The degree of national consciousness of the population of the colonies as a whole was directly proportional to the strength of local elites and national capital.

Third, there is a growing contradiction between the democratic system of most metropolitan areas and the autocratic system of administration of colonies (although in a number of countries the latter had already undergone partial liberalization by the middle of the 20th century through the reforms carried out by the authorities). The reason for this aggravation was the further rise of mass society in European countries and national consciousness in the colonies. It became increasingly difficult for the ruling circles of empires to justify the" double standard " of governance, which led to political concessions to national forces.

Fourth, the continuous growth of expenditures of colonial empires on the maintenance of the administrative apparatus (administration) and enforcement (police, army). In the face of increasing economic difficulties of the mother countries and increasing pressure on the authorities from national forces, the maintenance of colonies became increasingly expensive.

A group of external factors is equally important.

First, the rise of two twentieth-century superpowers. Both geopolitical forces that increasingly determined the development of the world-the United States and the Soviet Union - expressed a negative attitude towards colonialism, albeit from different positions and to different degrees. In 1918, US President W. Wilson put forward the idea of the right of nations to self-determination. Booming American industry needed markets and sources of raw materials, and the existence of vast colonial empires with their protectionist economic barriers, although not blocking, but seriously hindered the access of American capital to the colonial markets. An even more hostile course to colonialism was pursued by the Soviet Union, whose ideology was strongly anti-colonial (recognition of the right of nations to self-determination was included by V. I. Lenin in the draft program of the RSDLP as early as 1902) and which already had a long experience of subversive struggle against colonialism with the help of the Comintern (1919-1943).

Secondly, the processes in the world economy that are unfavorable for colonialism. In the industrialized world, the use of artificial substitutes for many types of natural raw materials increased, which made pumping the latter out of the Afro-Asian world less and less profitable. These are synthetic and artificial fibers, plastic materials, artificial rubber, etc. Thus, in the early 1960s, the share of synthetic and artificial fibers in the textile industry of the West was more than a third [Rymalov, 1966, p. 114]; in 1964, the production of artificial rubber in the capitalist world exceeded the production of natural rubber.

Third, the development of military technology, in particular aviation, and then the creation of nuclear weapons, which led to a decline in the importance of strategic colonies, important in the era of ocean fleets.

The Second World War dramatically increased the intensity of the impact of all these factors, accelerating the collapse of the colonial system. Military operations on the territory of France and the Netherlands, their defeat by Germany, surprisingly (for the European powers) easy capture by Japan of all the colonies in East and Southeast Asia (British

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Hong Kong, Malaya, Singapore and Burma, Dutch India, as well as French Indochina controlled by the Vichy regime, which was directly occupied at the end of the war) seriously weakened the colonial empires in industrial, financial and military relations. Their external debt has increased dramatically, and their production, exports, and merchant fleets have declined. The British government was forced to devalue the currency in 1949, and in 1951 it was forced to devalue the currency. it is facing a balance of payments crisis. In addition, during the war years, something happened that the colonial powers always tried to prevent at all costs: the prestige of their power in the eyes of the population of the dependent territories was irreparably shaken. Capitulation to the enemy of the colonial authorities, and even the mother countries themselves, dispelled the myth of the invincibility of the white man among the peoples of the colonies. At the same time, the capture of colonies in Southeast Asia by an Asian power (Japan) convinced their inhabitants that they could take their fate into their own hands and achieve liberation themselves. Moreover, during the years of resistance to the Japanese occupation, militant organizations emerged in a number of countries in the region that gained experience in modern (guerrilla) warfare and, if desired, could turn it against former colonialists (Hukbalahap in the Philippines, Viet Minh in Vietnam, Burmese National Army, Indian National Army of S. C. Bose-in part, since after the war it was disbanded).

During the Second World War, even more than during the First, there was a weakening of the economic ties of the colonies with the mother countries. Even more than then, this contributed to the growth of national entrepreneurship, especially in India, where the position of trade and usurious groups (castes) was initially strong, and industrialization began in the middle of the XIX century. In addition, the urgent and unprecedented mobilization of material and human resources, including the organization of public works to provide the front with raw materials (such as forced labor of peasants in tin mining in Nigeria), accelerated the breakdown of traditional socio-economic relations.

This is associated with the growth of the national identity of colonial subjects. The war dramatically broadened their political horizons. It is hardly possible to overestimate the fact that Britain and France, in the context of the struggle against Nazism and fascism, had to weaken the ideological foundations of their power in the colonies, focus on democratic ideals and on the common interests of colonialists and subjects. Under these circumstances, it became increasingly difficult to maintain the loyalty of the subject population by using the same methods as before. The means by which the British mobilized vast resources for the war effort (i.e., promises of further reform) created such high social and political expectations among the colonial population that the Empire never met them: in the end, the cost of defending the British Empire in World War II was the Empire itself (Jeffery, 1999, p. 4). 327].

In some colonies and dependent countries, there was a surge of protest moods during the war years, which forced the authorities to resort to unprecedented measures to suppress them in wartime conditions. These are mass repressions against the "Get Out of India!" movement organized by the Indian National Congress (INC) in 1942, the overthrow of the government of this country by the British Ambassador M. Lampson in Egypt, which was actually occupied by Britain, in the same year, and others. Moreover, the revolt of the Indian squadron crews in Bombay in 1946 showed that the British could no longer rely implicitly on the Indian army. All this increased the cost of maintaining the empire beyond reasonable measure.

It was the Second World War that finally turned the United States and the USSR into superpowers - external forces hostile to colonialism. Article 3 of the Anglo-American Atlantic Charter of 1941, which affirmed "the right of all peoples to choose their form of government," shows that the United States explicitly made it a condition of its military assistance to cornered Britain to dismantle its colonial empire. In 1945.

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The principle of self-determination of peoples was enshrined in the UN Charter. The United States cultivated its image as a champion of democracy, a country that once got rid of colonial power itself, which could not but influence the public thought of colonial countries in a certain direction. American capital did not fail to take advantage of the difficulties of European capital in the colonies to further penetrate there, and during Operation Torch, American troops visited Morocco and Algeria, clearly demonstrating the power of the liberated colony.

Soviet historiography tended to overestimate the role of eliminating the monopoly position of imperialism in the world economy and politics in explaining the causes of the crisis of the colonial system. However, the post-war prestige of the Soviet Union as a victorious power and the creation of the foundations of the world socialist camp as a result of the war, including in Asia, were indeed far from the last factors in the weakening of colonialism. Both the demonstration effect of a powerful socio-economic system independent of the West and the active foreign policy of the USSR in the Afro-Asian world with its anti-colonial orientation played a role here. In a number of colonies, especially in Africa, the mother countries rushed to independence in order to prevent the field of national forces.

As for the transition to substitutes for natural raw materials, the process of their invention and production received a significant boost in wartime conditions due to the difficulty of trade relations between the industrial world and the colonies or the loss of a number of colonies themselves.

Thus, empires became more and more "luxury goods" for their mother countries and less and less brought real economic benefits. After the war, the colonial system was caught between the Scylla of American hegemony in the capitalist world and the Charybdis of the world camp of socialism.

The causes of decolonization are one of the central issues in the voluminous body of work on this topic. Most representatives of the historical science of the liberated Asian and African countries themselves tend to give priority to the national liberation movement2 in explaining the reasons for decolonization. The same is true of Soviet science, but here the second key element was the policy of the world camp of socialism3. In Russian historiography, the works of G. K. Shirokov stand out: considering the whole range of reasons for decolonization, he assigned a key role to economic factors, convincingly showing that by the time of the Second World War, the importance of the periphery of the capitalist system (including colonies) in the internal reproduction of metropolitan areas was constantly decreasing [Shirokov, 1995; Shirokov, 2010].

The development of Western historiography of decolonization went through a number of stages. In the beginning, in the late 1940s and 1950s, authors who wrote about the end of empires, especially representatives of metropolitan countries, tended to explain the granting of independence mainly by their political will.4 In the 1960s, the approach became more balanced,

2 For example: [Kiwanuka, 1973; Roesopedogo and Notosusanto, 1993; Thakur, 1959]. However, in a number of influential Western works, the factor of Afro-Asian nationalism (as well as socialist ideology) is emphasized as a subject of separate research or even singled out as the main reason for decolonization. For more information, see [Grimal, 1965; Hargreaves, 1988; Lowe, 2009].

3 See: [Vasilyeva, 1958; The Collapse of the British Empire, 1964; Cherkasov, 1985].

4 At the same time, liberal-minded authors attributed decolonization (at least in part) to the fulfillment of the colonial power (Britain) of its civilizing mission (for example, Burt, 1956). Conservatives, on the other hand, wrote bitterly about the betrayal of a part of the ruling circles of the metropolis [Reid, 1947]. However, the Dutch works of this time emphasize the external factor-the pressure of the international community, especially the superpowers, which negated the success of the" police actions " of the Netherlands in Indonesia (Nederlanders over de zeeën, 1955).

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historians began to identify other, "objective" factors, 5 and since the 1970s, the desire to explain decolonization by a complex interaction and interweaving of various factors (the decline of metropolitan areas, the rise of national struggles, the position of superpowers as "decolonizers") has been increasingly determined, among which it is hardly possible to single out the primary one, and only in some cases situationally, a particular factor that acted under the current set of circumstances came to the fore.6 Finally, in the last decade, generalizing works have appeared that interpret decolonization through the logic of the development of world capitalism [Tarling, 2004], as well as provide a historiographical overview of approaches [Cooper, 2005]. It is interesting that English-language historiography has made a circle: among the works of recent years, there are some that emphasize the systematic withdrawal of the British from the colonies on their own terms [Grob-Fitzgibbon, 2011]. Western economists and political scientists approached the problem of decolonization somewhat differently, emphasizing their own "subjects of competence" 7.

STAGES OF DECOLONIZATION

There are three main stages in decolonization. The first occurred in the second half of the 1940s-first half of the 1950s, the second - in the late 1950s-1960s, and the third - in the mid-1970s. Of course, some colonies existed after this time (Namibia, Hong Kong, Macao), not to mention a number of small (sometimes strategically important) overseas territories, but in general, the process of decolonization was completed by this time.

The prologue to decolonization can be considered the independence of the French mandated territories of Syria and Lebanon, which received it at the height of the Second World War. This was due first directly to the war, and then to the Anglo-French contradictions. Shortly before the fall of the Vichy administration in Syria and Lebanon, the Free France Committee of Charles de Gaulle promised the population independence after the war, which was supported by Britain. However, he fulfilled his promise earlier, in 1943, in order to reverse the creeping establishment of British control that was already beginning in these two countries of the Levant.

The beginning of the first stage of decolonization can be dated to the very end of the war, August-September 1945, when the leaders of the national forces of the other two countries - Indonesia and Vietnam - themselves declared their independence (Sukarno in Jakarta, Ho Chi Minh in Hanoi) in the face of the defeat of Japan, which occupied them, and the resulting political vacuum. However, in both cases, the metropolises did not accept the will of the national forces. French troops and administration returned to Vietnam, and Dutch troops returned to Indonesia.

It is characteristic that the leadership of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV) formed in the north of Vietnam, led by communists, counted on the support of the United States against the claims of the old colonial power. The Americans were faced with a dilemma: either decolonization, but at the same time further strengthening the position of the Communists in Vietnam, or supporting France as a colonial power, but at the same time countering the spread of the "red contagion". Without abandoning the rhetoric of self-determination, the United States chose the latter in the context of the beginning of the cold war.

5 Thus, J. M. Lee focuses not only on developments in the mother country, but also on changes in the international order [Lee, 1967]. S. Easton explains decolonization primarily by the pressure of two superpowers [Easton, 1960].K. Young especially notes the "rise of world opinion" [Young, 1970].

6 The number of publications on this topic is huge. Here are just a few: [Adegop, 1990; Burgers, 2010; Darwin, 1988; Holland, 1992; Porter and Stockwell, 1987; The Transfer of Power in Africa..., 1988; Woodcock, 1974].

7 Examples of economic explanations for the collapse of colonial empires: (Wagap, 1957; Cain and Hopkins, 2001). Works with a political science bias: [Kahler, 1984; Murphy, 1995].

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They followed this model in other possessions of the colonial Powers. At the same time, by supporting these powers against the left-wing forces, the Americans actually pursued a policy of ousting Europeans from the colonies, replacing their interests with their own.

The colonial wars of France in Vietnam (1946-1954) and the Netherlands in Indonesia (1947-1949) ended in the defeat of the mother countries. In Vietnam, the Democratic Republic of Vietnam strengthened, and in Indonesia, after an unsuccessful federal experiment in 1950, the unitary Republic of Indonesia emerged. For both countries, the road to independence after the war was bloody, but relatively short: the mother countries, even with the return of troops and officials, were no longer able to regain control of their entire societies. The same is true of the Philippines, which was granted independence by the United States as early as 1946.

The central event of the first phase of decolonization was certainly the British granting of independence to India, which was demographically and territorially the largest dependent territory8 in the history of colonialism. South Asia has been the core of the British Empire since the late eighteenth century, and its ownership has long brought the metropolis enormous economic and geopolitical benefits. Their value began to decline after the First World War, and during the Second World War almost disappeared. After a series of difficult negotiations between the British authorities and the main national forces (INC, Muslim League) in August 1947, the Indian Empire was divided into two dominions - the Indian Union and Pakistan.

In 1948, Ceylon was granted dominion status, Burma immediately became a republic, and the State of Israel was formed on the former territory of British mandatory Palestine, although it did not receive independence from the hands of the British, who, desperate to resolve the largely inflated Arab-Israeli conflict themselves, referred the issue to the UN. The year 1951 refers to the granting of independence to Libya, which was divided between the British and the French during the war. In the same year, Britain's "informal empire" in the Middle East suffered an irreparable blow when the Iranian government nationalized its country's oil fields, which had been at the disposal of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company since the beginning of the century; the overthrow of Prime Minister Mossadegh two years later did not return to the previous situation, but strengthened the position of American energy companies in Iran. In 1953, during the protracted Vietnam War, France considered it best to recognize the independence of Cambodia and Laos.

By the mid-1950s, most of the colonies of European powers in Asia had gained political independence. The center of gravity of the colonial system shifted to Africa.

The second stage of decolonization was preceded by a period of lull in the national liberation struggle and acts of transfer of power, when a significant part of the ruling circles of the colonial empires did not consider further granting of independence to be a matter of the near future, referring it to a more or less distant period. The lull in the struggle was due to the fact that by 1950, those colonies that had been supposed to be granted self-government in the foreseeable future before the war, or that were able to achieve it immediately after the war, had been released. In other colonies, the formation of anti-colonial interests and their articulation were delayed, which was due to the slowness of socio-economic and socio-political processes in these countries compared to the countries of the first wave of decolonization.

8 Legally, it was not a colony, but an Indian Empire (1877-1947) led by the British King-Emperor / Queen-Empress. By the way, unlike India, Kaiser's Germany or the Russian Empire, the British Empire was never legally an empire.

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By this time - the 1940s and 1950s-there were state programs of significant investment by Britain and France in the economies of their colonies, primarily African ones, in order to boost their agriculture, extractive industry, and education, so that they would serve as a support for the metropolises in the face of the world's industrial giants that had overtaken them. In Britain, a series of Acts on colonial development was adopted, and in France, in 1946, a ten-year plan for the development of each colony was adopted. At the same time, it was supposed to prepare local elites for the transfer of power, but not just like that, but through their long-term "training". The partial stabilization of the colonial system was also related to the position of the United States: during the Cold War, they temporarily muted anti-colonial rhetoric in order to prevent the weakening of NATO allies that was too much for their interests.

However, in the second half of the 1950s, centrifugal processes reached the" second echelon " of the colonial system. At the same time, the national liberation movement in the African colonies was spurred by (among other factors) the very fact of decolonization of the colonies of Asian countries (as it happened "in miniature" within the framework of South Asia). As a result, decolonization hit the empires much earlier than the ruling circles of the mother countries expected. At the second stage, it was even more cumulative: granting independence to one colony gave an incentive to others to demand the same, and at the same time made it meaningless for the mother country to try to retain them, since the loss of one link of the empire often devalued neighboring ones. The Suez crisis of 1956 served as a prologue to a new stage of decolonization. It clearly demonstrated the weakening of the positions of European powers, showed that they can no longer act on the world stage independently, without the consent of the United States. The crisis was triggered by the withdrawal of British garrisons from Egypt and Sudan, and led to the withdrawal of the British from Jordan and the fall of the government in Iraq as part of the British "informal empire". It is significant that in the year following the Suez crisis, 1957, the United States proclaimed the D. Eisenhower doctrine, claiming to ensure regional security in the Middle East instead of Britain.

The second stage of decolonization was opened in 1956 by France's renunciation of the protectorate over Morocco and Tunisia, and Spain's renunciation of the Spanish zone of Morocco. It is difficult to overestimate the event of 1957 - the first granting of independence to a colony in sub-Saharan Africa: the Gold Coast became Ghana. The very fact that this country gained independence and its path to it served as a model for many African colonies. In the same year, the British granted independence to Malaya. Guinea (1958) served as the standard for the French colonies of Africa to gain independence. 1960 went down in history as the "year of Africa", as 17 colonies received independence at once: all of French West and Equatorial Africa, French Madagascar, British Nigeria and Somalia, Belgian Congo. It was in 1960 that the Prime Minister of Great Britain, H. Macmillan, after a tour of the African colonies, delivered a famous speech in the Parliament of the Union of South Africa about the "wind of change", which was a declaration of readiness on the part of the mother country to respond positively to the demands for the transfer of power: "The wind of change is blowing over this continent. Whether we like it or not, this growth of national consciousness is a political fact."

In 1954-1962. France waged another colonial war, this time in the geographically closest and chronologically first to capture (apart from a number of ports in India, which it returned in 1954) the colony of its Afro-Asian empire-Algeria. Like the Vietnam war, this war lasted eight years, cost the mother country a lot of effort and resources, and ended with its withdrawal from the country. In the same year, 1962, Britain granted independence to Tanganyika and Uganda, and Belgium granted independence to Rwanda and Burundi. In 1964, it was the turn of the British colonies in the east and south of Africa-Kenya, Nyasaland

9 See, for example, [Birmingham, Chamberlain, Metzger, 1994].

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(Malawi) and Northern Rhodesia (Zambia). The empire's longest-established part-time colony was Southern Rhodesia, but when it became clear that London would grant independence only if a majority of the population was represented in the legislative assembly, the white colonist government adopted a unilateral declaration of independence, repeating the precedent of the thirteen North American colonies of 1776. The same issue of interethnic relations became a factor in the withdrawal of the British Dominion, the oldest in the Afro-Asian world, the Union of South Africa, from the Commonwealth in 1961.

The third stage of decolonization occurred in the first half of the 1970s and was associated with the collapse of the Portuguese Empire, which was triggered by the 1973 oil crisis. The following year, the metropolis was forced to grant independence to Portuguese Guinea (Guinea-Bissau), and in 1975 - to Angola, Mozambique, Cape Verde, Sao Tome and Principe and East Timor.

The final acts of decolonization can be considered the independence of Namibia from South Africa in 1989 and the return of two small enclaves to China-British Hong Kong in 1997 and Portuguese Macau in 1999.

MODELS OF DECOLONIZATION

In decolonization, at least four models can be distinguished: the transfer of power by constitutional means through a dialogue between the metropolis and national socio-political forces ("independence from above"), the recognition by the metropolis of the independence of the colony as a result of its armed struggle ("independence from below"), the mixed model and the reconquest of territories by the former colony. (During the Second World War, another colonial empire, the Japanese Empire, collapsed, and its model was the liberation of the Japanese colonies (Korea, Taiwan, and in fact Manchuria) by military means from the outside, by the troops of the USSR and the United States.)

The first model - the gradual granting of independence from above as a result of successive administrative reforms-is typical for most countries of the colonial system. In many of them there were large-scale protest movements aimed at putting pressure on the colonial authorities (India, Burma, Ghana and other African countries). Armed uprisings may also have taken place in the countries of this model, but the empires, even if not immediately, successfully coped with them and did not grant independence under the threat of complete loss of control, although the surge of discontent was taken into account (Madagascar-the guerrilla war of 1947-1948, Malaya - the Chinese Communist uprising of 1948-1960, Kenya-the May-May uprising of 1952-1956 years). However, recent Western historiography emphasizes that the special British way of decolonization is a myth, since the harsh measures taken to suppress uprisings in Malaya and Kenya are similar to the colonial wars of the French and Dutch [Walton, 2013, p.237].

The second model - "independence from below" - was implemented in a smaller number of colonies, but in the Dutch and French Empires, their main, most valuable possessions were freed up in this way - Dutch India (Indonesia), French Vietnam and Algeria. In these cases, the metropolises not only grossly miscalculated the degree of acceptability of their power, but also persistently tried to restore it by military means, which was counterproductive. The same model applies to British mandatory Palestine, where in the mid-1940s the conflict between Arabs and Jews got out of control of the colonial authorities. In the history of the British Empire, this is the only time when the British, playing on the contradictions of two ethno-religious communities, beat themselves. The "independence from below" model also includes the decolonization of Aden, from which the British were literally squeezed out by leftist rebels in 1967 and they left in a hurry without any transfer of power.

The third model - mixed - is a combination of the first two. This includes the Portuguese colonies in Africa, where the left-wing par-

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For decades, armed resistance to colonial rule began in the 1960s and was persistent, although independence was gained only through regime change in the mother country - the "carnation Revolution" of 1974. The same model applies to Cyprus, where, under the terror of the Greek nationalist organization, the British were forced to impose a state of emergency in 1955 along the lines of Malaya and Kenya, and four years later decided to transfer power to the Cypriots before the Palestinian scenario could be implemented.

According to the fourth model-the reconquest of territories by an already liberated state, and not from the former metropolis - the Portuguese possessions of Goa, Daman and Diu were decolonized in 1961, when the Republic of India sent troops there and unilaterally annexed them. This model is limited to one case because of a rare combination: India as one of the few sufficiently strong third World countries and Portugal as the weakest of the colonial powers.10
The time of granting each colony independence was influenced by several factors: the degree of development of the national liberation movement, the establishment of constructive ties between the metropolitan authorities and local elites, the degree of pressure from superpowers, and the degree of economic and military value of the colony for the metropolis. Countries with developed forms of protest against colonial rule (whether it was civil disobedience campaigns like in India or Ghana, or large-scale population struggles with weapons in their hands, like in Indonesia or Vietnam) were more likely to gain independence earlier.

At the same time, the mother country's close ties and mutual understanding with the national forces contributed to its independence. The pressure of one of the superpowers also stimulated decolonization, and it fluctuated based on the conjuncture of the Cold War. Thus, during the Korean War of 1950-1953, the United States needed the support of the colonial powers, and at its end, in 1956, took a tough stance against the Anglo-French aggression against Egypt. In some cases, the United States and the Soviet Union exerted pressure on a European power in parallel (the formation of Israel, the Suez crisis). Finally, the more valuable a colony was economically, or the more strategically located it was, the less likely it was - all other things being equal - to gain independence soon (Algeria with its oil, Malaya with its rubber and tin, strategically located colonies like Cyprus, Singapore, Zanzibar, Aden). However, this factor should not be absolutized, since in some cases the value of the colony just forced the colonial authorities to make concessions to national forces in order to maintain their positions after independence (Ceylon, to some extent Malaya).

An important motive that regulated the timing of the British Empire's decolonization was the mother country's course towards post-war stabilization of the pound as a world currency. In the 1950s, City financiers assigned a prominent role to the colonies in this process. In 1958, the full convertibility of the pound was restored, after which it was decided in financial circles that the British currency would benefit more if it left the sterling zone. Along with the value of the empire to the pound, the economic obstacles to decolonization were also decreasing [Cain and Hopkins, 2001, p. 619-620]. The cascading granting of independence to the colonies was a direct consequence of a change in fiscal policy. True, this exchange rate ended with a series of crises of the pound and its devaluation in 1967, but by that time most of the British colonies had managed to gain independence.

10 Inspired by the example of India, Indonesia tried to take Dutch New Guinea (later known as West Irian) by force from its former mother country in the same year, but was strongly rebuffed. Trained by experience, it did not use force to seize former colonial territory until after the departure of the colonial Power, namely Portugal, from East Timor in 1975.

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At the same time, it should be borne in mind that some of the colonial elites did not always seek to obtain self-government immediately: like the British, she sometimes advocated gradualism, aware of the difficulties on the path of state-building, including those born of tribalism.

SCHEMES OF DECOLONIZATION IN DIFFERENT EMPIRES

Despite the reasons and essence of decolonization common to all colonial empires, it took place in different empires in different ways. This depended on the specifics of the management systems and relations of metropolitan areas with national elites.

The British Empire was the only one that was able to transfer power to local elites in most cases in an evolutionary way and smoothly flowed into the Commonwealth of Nations, where the former metropolis retained some of its economic positions and political influence. This is largely due to the principle of guardianship, which was the basis of British colonial policy, according to which the mother country assumed the role of guardian of a country that was politically immature, in its opinion, in order to promote its development and, in the future, when it "grew up", to grant it self-government. Only the British Empire is characterized by a gradual evolution of the administrative mechanism in the direction of increasing self-government. In some objectively more developed colonies (India) this evolution began in the 19th century, but in others it was "compressed" in a shorter time.

Initially, the colony was usually a crown colony, where all power belonged to the executive council appointed by London, headed by the governor. Then an advisory legislative council was added to it. The next step was to include indigenous appointees on the board and a number of non - official members on the executive board, who were still Europeans. At the next stage, the principle of electing a part of council members on the basis of a high qualification was introduced. Over time, elected members of the Legislative Council were granted a majority. After that, the imperial center entrusted leading national politicians with secondary executive positions (as under the diarchy system in India since 1919). This stage was called the "membership system", since such officials were known as "members (of the legislative council) with special responsibility". The next stage was the ministerial system, in which officials - elected representatives of national forces - were introduced to the executive council. At first, they were a minority in it, but at the end of the probationary period, they were allowed to form a majority ("semi-responsible government"). When elected members held the key posts of Attorney-General, Colonial Secretary, and Treasury Secretary, a full cabinet was formed and the Governor was instructed by London to follow the advice of his ministers, except in emergencies ("responsible government"). The Governor retained the right to suspend the operation of the adopted constitution, as well as a number of powers in the field of foreign policy. When he himself was appointed only after consultation with an elected government, the status of a dominion was achieved - a fully self-governing country within the empire. Finally, full independence presupposed the emergence of a head of State elected by the people or Parliament.

Such a detailed scheme of gradual transfer of power provided Britain with a soft path of decolonization and withdrawal from many colonies on its own terms. The model of " independence from above "was primarily characteristic of the British Empire, which" implanted " its Westminster political model in the colonies. Granting the colony the status of a dominion moved it from the British Empire to the Commonwealth of Nations (which already in 1949 ceased to be called British, in order to create the legal possibility of India's entry into it, which was being prepared

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become a republic). At the first stage of decolonization, the country where the transfer of power went particularly smoothly was Ceylon. Not only did Burma choose to avoid the status of a dominion, but also to withdraw from the Commonwealth altogether. Therefore, the motto of the British governors was "more Ceylon and less Burma" [Louis, 1999, p. 337], which in most cases was implemented. A typical example is Malaya, whose dollar revenues in 1948 exceeded the cost of industrial production in the metropolis [Walton, 2013, p. 164]. Malaya's rubber and tin exports were vital to the Sterling zone, so Britain could not afford to lose the country: it had fiercely suppressed the Chinese Communist uprising and negotiated with loyal national forces.

The Dutch and Portuguese Empires, on the contrary, collapsed only after the armed resistance of the colonial peoples, failing to reach an agreement with their elites (models of" independence from below " and mixed). They did not develop a viable mechanism for the transfer of power, nor did the Belgian Empire, which did not take measures to prepare local elites for the transfer of power, so the surge of mass discontent in 1959 caught it by surprise and forced it to grant independence to the Congo as soon as possible in the face of loss of control over the situation.

The Portuguese Empire collapsed last paradoxically due to the economic and military-political weakness of the mother country. A special feature of this empire is the active attraction of foreign, primarily Anglo-American, capital to the colonies, so that the major powers would be interested in preserving Portuguese power here. This calculation proved to be correct for a long time. At the same time, not dominating the economy of their own colonies, the Portuguese understood that if they lost their political power, they would lose these countries altogether, so they resisted decolonization until the last opportunity [Khazanov, 1986, pp. 45-47]. In the 1950s and early 1970s, the metropolis made only a number of cosmetic reforms. The Portuguese Empire was a case of an ossified colonial structure, which was the reason for the widespread rise of armed struggle.

The French Empire occupies an intermediate position between, on the one hand, the Dutch and Portuguese empires (it did not let go of its two main colonies without long and persistent wars - "independence from below") and, on the other hand, the British (the French left West and Equatorial Africa and Madagascar peacefully, having agreed with the elites and in many respects by keeping these countries in their sphere of influence - "independence from above").

According to the Constitution of the Fourth Republic of 1946, the French Empire was renamed the French Union. Although critics called it only a change of facade, this structure, unlike the British Empire / Commonwealth, had its own Assembly, where delegates from all the constituent Territories met. But for a long time the French did not encourage political responsibility in the colonies and systematically did not prepare representatives of local elites for the gradual transfer of power. Against the background of active political processes in the British colonies, the political life of the French colonies in the mid-1940s and mid - 1950s looked stagnant. At the same time, the participation of African deputies in the work of the Federal Parliament brought them valuable political experience, which they later applied in their homeland. An important milestone on the road to decolonization was the 1956 "Framework Law" adopted by the National Assembly, which introduced universal suffrage and effectively made the executive authorities of the colonies responsible to their elected assemblies. This law marked the abandonment of France's tradition of centralized colonial administration. The second phase of French decolonization came after the establishment of the United States in 1958. The Fifth Republic. The Empire changed its official name for the second time to the French Community, and this time the colonies were granted the right of exit. It was immediately used by French Guinea, whose example was followed two years later by many other territories.

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The fundamental difference between the British way of decolonization and the French one was that reform commissions, as a rule, did not include representatives of the indigenous population, and the right to vote was limited for a long time, indirect election methods and the practice of electoral curia prevailed. On the other hand, the delegates of the native inhabitants of the French colonies were members of parliamentary commissions, participated in discussions and voting, and the French introduced universal suffrage quite early. The various schemes of decolonization of empires were ultimately based on different traditions of power-society relations in the metropolitan areas, which they extrapolated to Afro-Asian societies. If the British preferred to keep their distance and leave the decisions of their commissions to the Africans from above, the French created conditions for (at least the appearance of) an equal dialogue.

* * *

The collapse of the colonial system is a process that gradually fades away rather than abruptly ends with some final act, especially since the former metropolises still retain small remnants of overseas territories in the Atlantic, West Indies, Indian and Pacific Oceans. However, in general, decolonization ended in the mid-1970s. It had a whole set of prerequisites that, working in one direction, reinforced each other, "speeding up" historical time and shortening the life of the colonial system.

There are three main stages in the history of decolonization, which differ in the geography of the process and in the priority of the factors that led to it. At the first stage, the "center of gravity" of decolonization was South and Southeast Asia, which were among the most developed countries in the colonial world and were directly affected by the Second World War. In the second stage, the " center of gravity "shifted to the British and French colonies in Africa, which" grew up " to decolonization largely due to the intensive economic development initiated by the mother countries in the 1950s, although it is difficult to call the results of this policy counterproductive for the mother countries, since by the end of the decade they saw their own interest in leaving the colonies. It is no coincidence that the second stage of decolonization, unlike the first, was mostly peaceful, with the exception of Algeria, which partially "grew" into France due to the mass immigration of Europeans. The third stage is the collapse of the ossified Portuguese Empire.

The typology of models of decolonization presented in the article confirms the thesis about the complexity of its prerequisites, in which various factors came to the fore in different countries and at different times. Finally, a look at the schemes (scenario) of decolonization in different empires allowed us to identify the patterns of this process that are characteristic of each empire; of course, there were exceptions to the rules.

Speaking of decolonization, it would make sense, following the example of the famous British media intellectual and researcher of empires N. Ferguson, to summarize a brief "balance sheet", the pros and cons of colonialism for the Afro-Asian world. However, on the economic component of colonialism and its social consequences, this is generally done in another publication (see: [Fursov, 2010, pp. 40-42]). I will only add that the positions taken in the "third world" economy thanks to colonialism made it easier for the West to create offshore zones there after decolonization, which became an extremely important mechanism of neo-colonialism and allowed huge amounts of capital to be exported from developing countries, primarily African ones [Shaxon, 2012].

As for the political component, the main positive legacy of the colonial system can be considered the spread of the European model of political structure with its separation of powers, the rule of law and the phenomenon of political parties as a means of expressing the interests of population groups. In denial-

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On the negative side of the balance, we should first write down the artificial division of many ethnic groups by the imperial borders, which after decolonization led to numerous territorial conflicts.

Was decolonization a predictable process, and if so, to what extent? Perhaps, it was clearly predictable only in India, with respect to which the British, after the First World War (with the introduction of diarchy), began to pursue, albeit slowly, a course towards granting dominion status in the more or less foreseeable future (Indianization of the administrative apparatus and partly the army, the constitution of 1935, etc.), which in many respects was It is associated with a decrease in the economic value of the country for the metropolis 11. However, as noted above, the Second World War was an unforeseen factor for many, which dramatically brought the transfer of power to the national forces closer. The newfound independence of India made the independence of other South Asian countries quite predictable, which received it through a "chain reaction" [Safronova, 2008, p.627]. The background to the wars of liberation in Vietnam and Algeria could have been predicted by the short-sighted agricultural policies of France since the nineteenth century, but their catalyst was again the weakening of the mother country in the World War (including the Japanese occupation of Indochina). As for most of the African colonies, their fate remained unclear for a long time, including the 1950s, and only the" snowball " of centrifugal processes by the end of this decade allowed us to consider the departure of the colonial powers as a matter of the near future.

Related to the problem of predictability of decolonization is the problem of the subject of forecasting. Naturally, active participants in the process (on both sides) were inclined in their forecasts to approach or delay the moment of decolonization, based on their own plans and efforts. The "decolonizers" (the big capital of India, the communist parties of the East, the superpowers, and other forces, including the British Labour government, all to varying degrees) tended to predict a relatively rapid departure of the colonialists, while those who resisted them hoped to slow down, or perhaps even freeze, the process.

This brings us to another problem - the manageability / spontaneity of decolonization. To what extent was the process of independence of Afro-Asian countries consciously directed by the elites (metropolises and colonies), and to what extent did it occur under the influence of objective socio-economic factors, the world War, spontaneous mass protests, and the atmosphere of anti-colonial sentiment in the post-war world? Many liberal Western historians were inclined to the former explanation (with the latter playing a marginal or insignificant role), while Marxists and nationalists tended to combine the former with the latter. The answer to this question requires further research, especially considering the role of informal associations of representatives of imperial elites (such as the Milner Group in the British Empire).

As further history has shown, decolonization largely turned out to be a change in the West's methods of exploiting the Afro-Asian world and smoothly moved into globalization, serving as one of its prerequisites. Having "shaken off" the colonies, the West continues to exploit these countries (to varying degrees), no longer bearing the responsibility for managing them. Getting rid of the colonial system made a significant contribution to the new economic breakthrough of Europe. As for the former colonial and semi-colonial countries, the elites of some of them were able to take advantage of the gains (the independence gained and the positive aspects of the economic and socio-political legacy of colonialism) and gradually became independent themselves.

11 It is not by chance that a book by E. Carthill (1924) was published in 1924. The author insisted that the growing democratization of political life in Britain will soon lead to the independence of its largest colony. By the way, according to the liberal historian Sir Penderel Moon, an official of the Indian Civil Service, Britain should have "let go" of India already at the turn of the 1920s and 1930s, saving it (and itself) from many future hardships [Moon, 1999, p.1187].

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They are also the subjects of globalization along with the elites of Western countries, increasing their economic presence in the "third world" and even in the West. I emphasize that this applies only to a few countries (India, Malaysia and some others), while the hopes of most countries for decolonization as a guarantee of a bright future have not been fulfilled.

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