Independence Movements

Independence movements have helped to shape the modern world. In many cases, they have been responses to the global reach of imperial control, including the global pattern of colonialism. At the same time, as an ideology of national liberation, the movements have constituted a global pattern of their own, leading to a world vision of independent sovereign entities.

As European powers started colonizing many parts of the world in the 17th and 18th centuries in pursuit of raw materials and markets, they soon encountered opposition and then resistance from local people. The American War of Independence against British rule leading to the Declaration of Independence in 1776 was a defining landmark in this history. The movement for independence in Latin America in the 19th century against Spanish and Portuguese colonialism added new dimensions to this struggle. It is the 20th century movements for independence, especially the achievement of independence by a large number of nations after World War II in Asia and Africa, which brought out the deeper dimensions of freedom.

What is remarkable about this trend is the impact that one set of movements has had on others. As individual movements for independence became part of a global wave, the global community felt compelled to support them and lend its signature to the urges for independence and the legal frameworks that would institutionalize them. Yet, the process was not simple. There were many controversies about the political shape that the new nations would take and unfinished tasks in providing equal political participation for all citizens that have lingered for decades. Black people of South Africa received their full political rights with the end of apartheid in 1990, and the movement for an independent Palestine has continued into the 21st century. However, it can be safely said that movements for independence are among the central features of global history of humankind during the past two centuries.

“Swaraj is my birth right and I shall have it”—was the slogan given by Tilak, one of the prominent leaders of India's freedom struggle in the 1890s. Swaraj, or freedom (swaraj literally means self-rule), has been the central theme in the modern history of people fighting for independence from colonial rule. Mohandas Gandhi made this term popular by attributing to it a profound meaning in his work Hind Swaraj in 1909, in which swaraj meant not only freedom from alien rule but a steady process of achieving freedom for the individual and groups and regions, especially deprived ones. Even after India received its independence from the British in 1947, the struggle for swaraj in that sense continued.

Like swaraj, the term liberation has also been a potent concept symbolizing the process of struggle against imperialism, colonialism, and neocolonialism. The Chinese revolution had an anticolonial component together with an antifeudal dimension since the time of the May Fourth Movement in 1919. But it entered a crucial phase when Japan completed its occupation of Manchuria in 1931 and launched its military aggression on China in 1937, after which the struggle against Japanese occupation was characterized as a “liberation war.” China's freedom from Japanese occupation was achieved in 1945, but another form of liberation—from semicolonial and semifeudal domination by the upper classes in China—was announced by the Communist Party of China in 1949. Similarly, the term liberation got a great deal of currency during the Vietnam War of 1965–1975 when a resistance movement in both North and South Vietnam fought against the U.S. forces who had intervened in the region with vast military forces to keep Vietnam from becoming united under a communist regime. The Vietnamese resistance successfully fought what was described as a “national liberation struggle” and forced the United States to withdraw.

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