“The change in the position of the people of Asia and Africa and their relations with Europe was the surest sign of the advent of a new era.” Discuss. (1997)
The statement comes from the British historian Geoffrey Barraclough, whose An Introduction to Contemporary History (1964) predicted that, seen in long perspective, no theme of the century would prove more important than the revolt against the West: the end of European domination over Asia and Africa. For him, decolonisation marked the transition from a European to a global international system. The claim is largely right, but more in status than in power.
The case for the statement
- Scale of change: in 1914 Europe ruled most of Asia and Africa. Between 1945 and 1965 the number of sovereign states roughly doubled, and in 1960 alone seventeen African states became independent.
- A new international society: Hedley Bull (The Expansion of International Society, 1984) traced this revolt through five struggles: for equal sovereignty, for political liberation, for racial equality, for economic justice and for cultural liberation. Each changed the rules, not just the membership, of the system.
- New collective voice: the Asian Relations Conference (New Delhi, 1947), Bandung (1955), where Sukarno hailed the first intercontinental conference of coloured peoples, and the Non-Aligned Movement (1961) let former colonies speak as principals.
- Institutional transformation: an Afro-Asian majority in the General Assembly passed Resolution 1514 (1960), declaring colonial rule a denial of human rights, and later the G-77 and the New International Economic Order agenda.
- Indian anchor: Jawaharlal Nehru presented India’s independence as part of Asia’s re-emergence, and India led the campaigns against colonialism and apartheid.
Critiques
- Realist: for Kenneth N. Waltz and others, the era was defined by bipolarity and nuclear weapons. Asia and Africa became arenas of superpower rivalry, from Korea and Vietnam to Angola and Afghanistan, rather than independent shapers of order.
- Dependency and Marxist: Kwame Nkrumah‘s Neo-Colonialism (1965) argued that formal independence left economic control intact. Commodity dependence, debt and the failure of the NIEO suggest relations with Europe changed in form more than substance.
- Post-colonial: Partha Chatterjee (Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World, 1986) shows that anti-colonial nationalism inherited the European state form and the language of modernity, a “derivative discourse”. The new era was partly written in Europe’s own vocabulary.
- Europe’s own transformation: the decline was also Europe’s eclipse by the United States and the Soviet Union, and its turn to integration.
The verdict from today
History has largely vindicated Barraclough. Giovanni Arrighi (Adam Smith in Beijing, 2007) opens with his claim and argues that the revolt created the political conditions for the economic empowerment of non-Western peoples, which East Asia’s renaissance has begun to deliver. Asia is now the centre of the world economy, and the rivalry that matters most runs through the Indo-Pacific. The African Union joined the G20 at the New Delhi summit in 2023. At New Delhi in September 2026, the BRICS declaration criticised unilateral tariffs and called for reform of the IMF, World Bank and WTO, an agenda rooted in the NIEO.
Conclusion
Barraclough was right that the shift in Asian and African standing was the deeper revolution of the century: it outlasted the Cold War and continues to reshape world order. The change was, however, more complete in status than in power. Political equality was won within two decades, while economic and institutional equality, the unfinished half of the revolt, remains the Global South’s central demand.