de-colonization :: essays research papers

After the end of the Second World War in which, to Britain, it was nearly a repeat of the First World War that Britain had experienced the same things as the aftermaths. The war put severe strains on her economic resources as well as the undermining of her export markets. Even though Britain had won the war, the impacts on Britain afterwards were not always positive, in that, as everyone know, war created tragedy. It did not make any good to anybody, even the winner. The victors also had to spend expenditures on reconstructing the destructive infrastructures. Money was not the only main factor that was primarily used to rearrange the whole society, but it took time as well. After the war, a certain country may have to lose something she did not intended to like in case of the Britain that though she won the Second World War, unexpectedly, she had to give freedom to her colonials. Why was that? As a result of a war, as I have mentioned, it definitely created a huge negative impact on a certain country as in this case of the Britain, a post war condition was so bad that some of the right-wing historians have condemned the whole war effort as inefficient and as a major cause to responsible for an upcoming subsequent British economic. (www.fordham.edu) After the discontinue of the World War II, the Britain succumbed to an illusion that she could remain in a status of one of the world’s greatest superpowers, because at that time, she still possessed a huge empire as well as a fairly good relationship with the United States of America, a country that always achieved a status of the world’s superpower. Both of these countries were also shared a good partnership in the Cold War as well. As a consequence, Britain still considered herself as one of the major countries that can influence the world affair as Ernest Bevin , the Foreign Secretary of Britain after 1945, did. His purpose was to remain Britain as one of the three major powers like the United States of America and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics: Ernest Bevin was prepared to strain the British economy to breaking point. By 1950 Britain still had an army of 900,000 men, something unheard of in peacetime, and she spent 14 per cent of her gross national product on defense (Pugh, 1999: 220)