Debating Dependency at the United Nations: The Belgian Thesis and Europe’s Critique of Informal Empires in a Decolonizing World

After the Second World War, colonial powers struggled to justify their continuing rule over their overseas territories not only to their colonial subjects and citizens, but also to new international organizations like the United Nations. As they came up against the UN’s evolving role in supervising colonial territories, colonial administrators and diplomats did what they could to redefine the terms of the debate. They did this by questioning what they saw as the UN Charter’s inherent bias against formal overseas empires and its failure to protect dependent populations in independent territories. This idea came to be known as the Belgian thesis, after the Belgian delegation refused to continue its participation in the UN Special Committee on Non-Self-Governing Territories, claiming a desire to demonstrate the hypocrisy of the UN’s approach to dependent populations. British and French colonial administrators supported the Belgian’s position. A 1957 book by British colonial administrator Sir Alan Burns, for example, denounced new postwar forms of imperialism, both in the Soviet and American forms. Burns condemned what he called “internal colonialism,” wherein “an educated minority…controls the indigenous population.” Burns noted that in many cases, over-land empires involved many of the same mechanisms of rule as overseas empires. [1]

This paper explores the questions: what is a dependent territory and who defines what it means to be dependent? By exploring this question in the context of the United Nations Organization’s expanding role in overseeing colonial governance in the post-World War II world, I aim to show the ways in which international organizations were increasingly becoming an essential forum for the most important debates in the process of colonial reform and decolonization.  

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[1] Sir Alan Burns, In Defence of Colonies: British Colonial Territories in International Affairs (London: George Allen and Unwin Ltd., 1957), 16-17.

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