Liberal Internationalism, Decolonization, and International Accountability at the United Nations: The British Dilemma

Abstract

Even as policymakers in both the United States and Britain agreed that decolonization should be gradual, the principles and institutions that the Americans advocated undermined the very prospect of the sort of gradual change they claimed to prefer. At the heart of the matter was the notion of political accountability to an international organization. While American policymakers assumed that such accountability would – and should – be established after the Second World War, British policymakers recognized that the mere assent to the principle of international political accountability would lead to the pressure to decolonize more rapidly. American policymakers would constantly reassure their British counterparts that the commitments to international accountability which they had undertaken under American pressure were safely restricted to the moral and legal realm and would therefore not undermine their ability to govern in the colonies. But policymakers in Britain accurately predicted that once admitted in principle, the moral commitment to political accountability to the international community would become a political weapon against the colonial powers. The American conviction – which stemmed from a thoroughgoing liberal internationalism – that the colonial powers could persuade the anti-colonial powers to moderate their stance and sympathize with the dilemmas of decolonization was refuted time and again.