A Decolonised World?

Abstract

Despite the currents of decolonisation that carried most colonies to independence from the 1940s to the 1970s, some 50 overseas territories remain formally attached to Britain, France, the Netherlands, Denmark, Spain, the United States, Australia and New Zealand. They range from populous Puerto Rico to Antarctic—areas with only seasonal inhabitants—from geographically large Greenland and French Guiana to tiny Ascension and Pitcairn islands, from places occupied largely by descendants of Europeans to those with indigenous peoples. Sometimes dismissed as the ‘confetti of empire’, these diverse territories nevertheless command attention because of international conflicts (for instance, over Gibraltar in the wake of Brexit), illegal migration (as in Spain’s Ceuta and Melilla or Australia’s Christmas Island), episodic independence movements (notably in New Caledonia), fragility because of climate change (Greenland and Tokelau) and tensions between different ethnic and cultural groups in many places. The past 20 years have seen important constitutional and political changes in these overseas territories, though with a continuing clear preference among most residents for autonomy or semi-sovereignty rather than independence. These overseas territories reveal the ambiguities of the nation-state and sovereignty in the contemporary world, and despite their generally diminutive size and population, they provide microcosms of crucial political, economic, cultural and strategic issues facing the world today.