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Rh constitutional regimes in Europe, in the imperial metropoles, had largely collapsed. After the war, Europe was a region of more or less failed states in the outskirts of the two ‘super-powers’ of the new world order, the Soviet Union and the United States. With a few significant exceptions – the United Kingdom, Switzerland and to some extent the Scandinavian states – the European constitutional regimes as well as the faith in the international order that underpinned them had been destroyed.

World War II led to the ‘fall’ of ‘European’ international law and the emergence of a new global order, a ‘universal’ international law, with a number of new significant international institutions such as the United Nations (UN), the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. An important aim of these institutions was to facilitate the transformation of colonial territories into sovereign states as well as to control and manage the new ‘Third World’. The members of this new ‘community of nations’ were no longer separated into ‘civilised’ and ‘uncivilised’ nations but rather ‘developed’ and ‘underdeveloped’ countries as the old ‘civilising mission’ was replaced by a project of ‘modernisation’.

5. Decolonisation and the transformation of Europe

With the end of the ‘age of extremes’, Droit Public de l’Europe was finally drawing to a close, even though decolonisation was yet to happen in earnest. The German and Italian projects of fascist imperialism had been quashed and it became clear that the foundations for the new world order would not be built on the old world of European empires. Nevertheless, for the first two decades after World War Two, the European metropoles attempted desperately to cling on to their imperial possessions by relying on a mixed strategy of imperial constitutional reform and violent repression. The most ambitious constitutional reforms projected a vision of the transformation of the British, French and Dutch empires into Federal Unions or Commonwealths based on the extension of imperial citizenship and other constitutional rights. However, when these projects failed or turned out to be stillborn, the European states attempted, and failed, to hold on to empire through violent coercion, for example during the Indochina War/Anti-French Resistance War (1946–54); the Indonesian War of Independence (1945–49); the Malayan Emergency/the AntiBritish National Liberation War (1948–60); the Mau Mau Uprising/the Kenya Emergency (1952–60); the Algerian War of Independence (1954–62); and the 1956 Suez crisis.