Pristine_Condition said:
:lol Huh?
Which is it, the British Empire began to disintegrate between the 20's and the 60's, or with the Spanish in the mid-1800's?
Seriously, wtf is wrong with your reading comprehension?
About the first european empire to go was the Spanish, in the 1800s, and much later were the rest, like the Dutch, English, French etc. who lost their's in the early 20th Century with the decline of traditional imperialism.
Having trouble holding comprehending two different pieces of information in the same scentance?
The point I was making is that the thought that during the years the European powers, particularly the British and French, lost their empires, average people were rural peasants with no knowledge of what was going on in the world is, pardon my french: fucking bollocks. There'd been 300 years of newspaper publishing and by the 1920s even the BBC had been formed, and between the 1940s and 1970s when the majority of British and French colonies dissolved, TV and radio was widespread.
One of the first to go, Ireland, 1921, after
700 years British rule, the first years of the Republic and the continuing Troubles broadcast for decades by the newly created BBC:
Algiers, 1954 to 1962, after over 130 years French occupation.
Indian handover ceremony, 1947, after 190 years of the British Raj:
Rwanda, 1960, the Belgians are forced to hold national elections, leading to independance after German and Belgian rule since the late 1890s, followed shortly after by civil war caused by the racial divides instigated by Europe:
Hong Kong handover ceremony, 1997, after 150 years British Rule:
Countless revolutions, handover ceremonies, dissolution of colonies came thick and fast throughout the entire late 19th, and 20th Century. This had an extremely significant influence on the status of Europeans abroad, European economics, European diplomacy, and the attitude of Europeans at home toward their own nations and the rest of the world.
Vietnam is a drop in the ocean in comparison to the vast upheavel in the entire face of the earth that the combined dissolution of European imperialism caused.
As you can see, these were all well into the era of mass media :lol You thought Britain looked like this didn't you
:
If you think the British Empire fell when the French and Americans beat the British in Yorktown, you need to
go back to school. Yet again your view of history is entirely America-centric. Do I have to repost the map?
That's the British in 1921 mate.
Think.
EDIT: Here's a combined map of the British, French, Dutch and German Empires as they were ~1890-1960, the majority of all which overlapped around the 1920s. Admittedly the European psyche was less unified than the American psyche during 'nam, but it was to a significant extent in race and cultural identity in relation to the rest of the world, and even a single one of those empires, even one so small as the German's, dwarfs the scale of vietnam, which, as has already been pointed out to you, was a 15 year war of invasion against a country the US had no prior stake in. Try the French who had been there since 1887, the adjustment in the imperial attitude of the French I think it's safe to say was greater than that of the Americans, of whom probably a handful happened to be living in Vietnam.
You go from
that to single nations in 100, 80, 60 sometimes 40 years, and you're going to see a lot of change in popular attitudes.
iThat's losing an empire. America's was intact before and after 'nam, it didn't lose anything but one particular attempt to expand it.
Not that 'nam didn't have significant impacts on the American attitude (although that seems to have worn off somewhat), but they were of an entirely different kind, and on a COMPLETELY different scale.
Don't get me wrong, European governments, particuarly the more right leaning amongst them, over the years since have tried their hand at little imperial endeavors, but those wars have often been deeply unpopular, supported only by the remaining few who cling on to the memory of imperialism. Just look at the
Falklands War - for the Argentinians it's still a major talking point, but for the Brits, who were dragged into it on Thatcher's whim, can barely remember what it even was, despite the fact that Britain won.
The French and Brits are notorious for giving this a go anytime a war-happy leader is elected, ie. Thatcher, and now Sarkozy and his new plans for "active foreign policy", but they nevertheless jar with popular public opinion and quickly become deeply unpopular. They can never be viewed from an imperial perspective again, only vague manipulations of humnitarianism or protecting Brit/French citizens who live there.
Unlike the US which seems to adopt a thinly veiled ("liberation!") attitude that it is inherently charged with policing the world because of it's divine, perfect nature.
I'd argue that Americam military presence, coupled with it's economic and diplomatic clout, make it an effective empire roughly mapped as such:
With economic influences alone being less capable of specific political manipulation, but more or less covering the whole globe.
You wait until Cuba reclaims the Gulf of Guantanamo or Latin America starts shedding itself of the countless military bases, and NATO dissolves, and Eastern Europe turns toward Russia instead of the US, that would be American imperial decline. The moment that map starts to shrink, that's when the comparisons begin, then start looking at the American psyche.
Losing shortlived attempts to expand/increase prescence like Vietnam or Iraq (though that may still succeed) are not even nearly comparable to losing the very basis for your international power in the first place - that's what Europe had, and it changed European psyche dramatically.
I'm just suggesting this plays and important part in the current prevailence of patriotism and jingoism in the United States, it mirrors early 2th Century Europe, and I'm also arguign Europe philosophically benefited from having it's empires crushed.
