We all know what a colonial war looks like. We know it from Graham Greene’s novel The Quiet American. The novel’s narrator—cynical, weary, humane Mr Fowler—lays it all down for us right at the beginning as he explains what life for the coloniser was like in French Indochina in the 1950s. “The French control the main roads until seven in the evening,” Fowler says. “They control the watch towers after that, and the towns—part of them. That doesn’t mean you are safe, or there wouldn’t be iron grilles in front of the restaurants.” 

Greene’s novel was published in 1955, right after the disaster of Dien Bien Phu, when the French colonialists were defeated by the communist Viet Minh. This decisive moment is not mentioned in the book, but still Greene knew which side was winning. The novel’s anti-hero, however, does not: he is a terribly well-meaning American named Pyle who believes the communists can be beaten. No such illusions for our narrator! At the end of the book, he accompanies a French pilot, Captain Drouin, on one of his missions. The pilot does what colonial pilots do: he bombs, he strafes, he commits war crimes. He sinks a Vietnamese boat which, presumably, is full of harmless civilians. Once the mission is over he tells Fowler: “You know the road to Hanoi is cut and mined every day. You know we lose one class of St Cyr every year.” (St Cyr is a military academy, the French version of West Point.) “But we are professionals: we have to go on fighting until the politicians tell us to stop. Probably they will get together and agree to the same peace we could have had at the beginning, making nonsense of it all.”

But what comes after the victory of the anti-colonial movement? Here is a short history of Western colonialism in the 20th century. The French fought the Vietnamese communists until they lost and went home. A few years before, the Dutch had fought the Indonesian nationalists; then they lost and went home. Later the French fought the Algerian nationalists. In 1962, they called it quits and went home. As everybody knows, under Lyndon B. Johnson, the Americans took over where the French had left off. They fought a long and terrible war, lost some 58,000 soldiers, killed perhaps two million Vietnamese, and committed several war crimes. In 1973, President Nixon betrayed the South Vietnamese ally and the Americans went home. 

In the end, they all went home: the Belgians, the Spaniards, the Italians. In Portugal, the desire to go home—to leave Angola and Mozambique—was so intense it triggered a left-wing military coup which turned the motherland into a democracy. Arguably, the German war of aggression against Poland and the Soviet Union was another colonial war. Only it was much more vicious than all the others taken together: the Germans dropped all moral pretences. They didn’t want to civilise the Eastern Europeans, they wanted to enslave them. As for the Jews, the goal was complete extermination to the last grandfather and baby. But in the end, the Germans, too, were beaten. And then they surrendered and rebuilt their home.

Did defeat harm the colonisers? Not in the least; there was not even a drop in living standards. The United States still exists. France still exists. Britain still exists. Portugal still exists. Even Germany still exists. Granted, the Fatherland was divided for a while and East Germany became, in effect, a satrapy of the Soviet Union. But the Western part flourished and once forty years of partition were over, East Germany experienced an economic boom the likes of which southern Italians could only dream about.