Metropolitan Identities and Twentieth-Century Decolonization

This book focuses on the role of the processes and mechanisms involved in metropolitan identity construction, maintenance, and change in twentieth century decolonization, an event integral to world politics but little studied in International Relations.

Metropolitan Identities and Twentieth-Century Decolonization focuses on the processes involved in metropolitan identity construction, maintenance, and change, and their role in decolonization, an event integral to world politics but little studied in international relations. Tan examines the British response to Indian nationalism during the interwar period and the Indonesian disengagement from East Timor, and complicates the existing ideational and constructivist picture that the adoption of positive norms like racial equality, democracy, human rights, and self-determination by colonial powers was primarily responsible for how they came to reject colonialism. More specifically, this book argues that these norms were embedded in discursive structures, processes and mechanisms of far greater complexity than previously realized, and the latter must be examined for a more complete understanding of their role not only in decolonization but also in North-South relations.