Question

8.Discuss the process of colonization and decolonization and the role that recognition plays in acquiring sovereignty or self-determination.

9. What was the Cold War? How did it start? How did it end?

Answer 1

• 8.Colonization and decolonization are social processes even more than they are political processes. Governance over a people changes only after the people themselves have sufficiently changed.
• Process of colonization typically includes systematic cultural genocide or assimilation of the indigenous culture into the invasive one, this process can be of varied duration or success, dependent in large part on the number of carriers of the original cultural matrix as individuals and as an aggregate.It is the act of one nation controlling another for economic gain. An example of colonialism was England's control over India.
• For decolonization to be complete, in cases where members of the colonizing cultures remain dwelling within the previously subject territories, and/or their governing apparatus, modification of the relative positions and relationships between all parties concerned to a dynamic of parity is required, something that if accomplished at all so far is yet still a rarity.
• It is commonly associated with the Cold War because of the influence exerted by the USSR and the USA on the newly independent countries. Some tried to remain independent with non-alignment and some took a side.
• Decolonization refers to a polity’s movement from a status of political dependence or subordination to a status of formal autonomy or sovereignty. In modern usage, it is generally assumed that the imperial or metropolitan center is physically separated from the dependency and that the two societies are ethnically distinct. The term refers specifically to the disintegration of Western overseas empires and their replacement by sovereign states in the Americas, Asia, and Africa.
  
• While the first period of decolonization was limited to the Americas, twentieth-century decolonization was global in scope. It included the independence of most of the Indian subcontinent, Southeast Asia and Australia, the Middle East, Africa, and the Caribbean.
• Recognition constitutes the acceptance of a specific position by identifying an entity both in periods of the applicable factual criteria and in periods of resultant lawful repercussions and may generally take two forms, de jure or de facto. De jure recognition is one that is bound by a constitution and considered as legitimate and so accepted by all.
• When a government as a matter of fact, has effective control over a territory and exercises this control ‘in good faith', but not recognised formally by the existing states, such an entity or government is said to have a de facto recognition.
• Both in practice and in theory, recognition is the sovereign prerogative of those states that are already recognised within the international legal system.
• According to international law, the use of force, or racial discrimination or the general abuse of the principle of self determination cannot form grounds for acquisition of statehood. It is only by recognition that the new states acquire the status of a sovereign state under international law in its relations with the third state recognising it as such.
• 9/After World War II, the United States and the Soviet Union were the world’s strongest nations. They were called superpowers. They had different ideas about economics and government. They fought a war of ideas called the Cold War.The Cold War began in Europe after World War II. The
  Soviet Union won control of Eastern Europe. It controlled half of Germany and half of Germany’s capital, Berlin. The United States, Britain, and France controlled western Germany and West Berlin.
• The Cold War was waged on political, economic, and propaganda fronts and had only limited recourse to weapons.
• The Western Powers weary after the long war with Germany initially did consider initiating combat operations against USSR but they were not economically strong enough for another long war. US population was war weary and their Nuclear Arsenal was not big or powerful enough to force a vast and heavily armed country like USSR into submission. UK and France were not strong enough to fight the Reds.
• This was one of the reasons behind the quick formation of German Defence forces in West Germany to get more manpower in case the Soviets decided to make a push.
• During 1989 and 1990, the Berlin Wall came down, borders opened, and free elections ousted Communist regimes everywhere in eastern Europe. In late 1991 the Soviet Union itself dissolved into its component republics. With stunning speed, the Iron Curtain was lifted and the Cold War came to an end.
• The Cold War ended as a result of internal factors such as Gorbachev's reforms, the weak economy of the USSR and the Satellite States breaking away from the USSR, and external factors such as US-Soviet diplomacy, and various treaties being signed that limited arms.