National liberation movements

Definition and scope

The Russian encyclopedia defines a national liberation movement as an organisation leading the struggle to free a people from foreign domination, and notes that UN documents treat such movements as a provisional form of states still being formed. Its nineteenth-century examples are Young Italy, which fought to free Italian lands from Habsburg rule and unite Italy, the Fenians, who fought for Irish independence, and the Bulgarian Revolutionary Central Committee against the Ottoman Empire; the Hungarian Revolution of 1848–1849 and the Italian wars of independence are also described as national liberation struggles. In the twentieth century, and especially as the colonial system collapsed after the Second World War, movements such as the Indian National Congress, the Viet Minh, Algeria's FLN, the PAIGC of Guinea and Cape Verde, the MPLA in Angola, FRELIMO in Mozambique and the African National Congress appeared. Their politics varied, and not all were led by communists, but after the Russian Revolution many anti-colonial leaders shared the revolutionary aims of communism and socialism. Korea's independence movement is likewise called a national liberation movement; the March First Movement of 1919 declared the annexation treaty void and Korea independent.

The Haitian Revolution and the nineteenth century

The Haitian Revolution (1791–1804) is considered one of the first wars of national liberation; the French encyclopedia calls it the first successful slave revolt of the modern world. In 1790 the free man of colour Vincent Ogé demanded the vote under the Declaration of the Rights of Man and led a 300-man rising, for which he was executed; in August 1791 a slave revolt signalled by Dutty Boukman took the entire Northern Province within ten days. The ex-slave Toussaint Louverture emerged as its most prominent general, and Napoleon's 1802 expedition to restore slavery relaunched the war. Haiti declared independence on 1 January 1804; France recognised it only in 1825, against an indemnity of 150 million francs. The Spanish American wars of independence (1808–1833) created new Latin American states in the same period, and in the twentieth century Augusto Sandino's forces fought the US Marines occupying Nicaragua.

Lenin, the Comintern and the colonial question

Lenin theorised imperialism in Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism (1916), and in "On the Right of Nations to Self-Determination" (1914) he distinguished oppressor from oppressed nations while arguing against Rosa Luxemburg, who equated that right with encouraging bourgeois nationalism. The Comintern's Second Congress (1920) gave the national liberation movements of the colonies of Asia, Africa and the Americas serious attention for the first time. Lenin drafted the theses on the colonial question; supplementary theses came from M. N. Roy of India, Avetis Sultan-Zade of Persia and Pak Chin-sun of Korea. The final resolution directed communists in colonial countries to support the "national-revolutionary" movement in each, even where non-communist elements such as the bourgeoisie and the peasantry dominated. In September 1920 the Congress of the Peoples of the East in Baku, with nearly 1,900 delegates, marked the Comintern's commitment to revolutionary nationalist movements in the colonial "East". The League Against Imperialism, founded in Brussels in 1927, drew 107 of its 175 delegates from 37 countries under colonial rule. The young Nguyen Ai Quoc, later Ho Chi Minh, read Lenin's theses in L'Humanité and, by his own account, exclaimed that this was the path to liberation; at the Congress of Tours in 1920 he joined the new French Communist Party.

Decolonisation and the Cold War

After the Second World War came the Indonesian War of Independence (1945–1949), the First Indochina War (1946–1954) and the Algerian War (1954–1962); Portugal's colonies of Angola, Mozambique and Guinea-Bissau were recognised as independent by 1975, after the Carnation Revolution. The Bandung Conference of 1955 brought together 29 countries opposed to colonialism and neocolonialism. On 14 December 1960 the UN General Assembly adopted the Declaration on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples, a compromise on a decolonisation declaration first proposed by the Soviet Union, by 89 votes to none with nine abstentions. In January 1961 Khrushchev pledged support for "wars of national liberation" throughout the world, and from 1965 modern small arms from the USSR, Czechoslovakia and China reached insurgents in large numbers. Cuba supported the movements in Angola and Mozambique, and the Tricontinental Conference in Havana (1966) gathered some 500 delegates from 82 countries. Amílcar Cabral founded the PAIGC in 1959 and began armed struggle in 1963; he was assassinated in Conakry on 20 January 1973 by two members of his own party, and Guinea-Bissau proclaimed independence on 24 September 1973. Frantz Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth (1961), which examines the violence between coloniser and colonised, became a reference for anti-colonial liberation movements.

Interpretations and disputes

The term's use depends on the observer. The English encyclopedia notes that the same war is called an insurgency or rebellion from the other side, and that Western states tended to treat such wars as civil wars while Third World and communist states treated them as international wars. Soviet support was presented as anti-imperialism; critics saw it as an expansion of the Soviet bloc's influence, and the People's Republic of China denounced the Soviet Union as social-imperialist. Where the nation was defined ethnically, the same article notes, liberation wars have entailed the expulsion or killing of other population groups. How far to back national movements was also disputed within the communist movement: at Baku the Russian delegation rejected the arguments of the national communists who proposed another revolutionary centre in the region.