How will the United States, Canada, Australia, etc. be decolonized?
How will the United States, Canada, Australia, etc. be decolonized?
USA, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and similar nations are settler-colonial nations where the indigenous people have been genocided to the point where settlers vastly outnumber them. How is decolonization going to work in this situation?
Bonus: How is a post-revolution Japan going to reconcile with the Ainu and Ryukyu people?
For the USA, Canada, and Australia, I think we should create something like the Soviet of Nationalities in the USSR where all nations in the country have a certain number of representatives. In the USSR it was 25 or 32 for a union republic, 11 for an autonomous republic, 5 for an autonomous oblasts, and 1 for autonomous okrugs. The Soviet of Nationalities, along with the Soviet of the Union elected based on population, had to approve all laws by a majority vote and Russia (excluding non-ethnic Russia autonomous regions within Russia) held less than 10% of the seats in the Soviet of Nationalities in order to prevent Russian chauvinism. All of the autonomous regions had to have their leader be from the local nationality even if ethnic Russians or other non-native ethnicities were a majority, and China has the same policy for its autonomous regions. In the USSR, all union republics were allowed to secede if they wanted to but ASSRs and smaller divisions couldn't because they weren't considered big enough to support themselves. For decolonized settler-colonies, I think all colonized nations should have full self-determination.
New Zealand would be more simple since they only have one indigenous group but could apply a similar method. For Japan, the Ryukyuan islands could hold a referendum on whether to be independent and become an autonomous region if they decide to stay like how Xinjiang and Tibet are in China. Although the Ainu are a minority in Hokkaido, they should also have an autonomous region in all or part of the island and be guaranteed some representation.
Autonomous regions of China:
USSR regions (blue: non-Russian union republics, green: ASSRs, orange: autonomous oblasts, red: autonomous okrugs)
They won't be until the illegitimate states balkanize on their own. Collapse, essentially. It'd be easier to walk a camel through the eye of a needle than to coax the settler naturally out of white supremacy; and the western left is neither large enough, nor organized enough, nor serious enough.
Honestly? As someone who's been raised partly in the rural Canadian prairies and has seen how things are there- before there is any decolonization in sight, I'd expect things to get much worse first and foremost- in a similar fashion to how Israel is increasing its genocidal slaughter of the Palestinians as they see their window of opportunity running out in the region, etc.
The white settler-culture, particularly in rural regions, sees the very existence of natives as an insult and a threat to their own settler existence- one that, whether with official state support or unofficial approval, they are more than willing to do their part in destroying, whether through their individual actions in policing, medical sabotage (for instance the involuntary/coerced sterilizations), through the child welfare services, etc. For now there tends to be an uneasy and unjust peace- but as calls for decolonization (whether in the form of reparations, land back, increased autonomy, etc) increase, eventually I'd expect the settlers to start behaving exactly like the Zionists currently are- and exactly like the settler-societies across the Anglosphere behaved for much of their history.
There's been some social progress and education in the west since those times (not that the issues have wholly gone away or anything close to it), but ultimately, the sentiments still remain in a considerable enough fashion- and I'd expect most people to act on what they see as their "best interests" in defending their ill-gotten privileges and land- and whether explicitly or implicitly (nowadays more implicitly), the settlers will always have the state's support, particularly as the natives are the biggest eyesore to the settler-state and settler-capital. IMO these two factors will have to be dealt with first, before any kind of decolonization can truly begin.
Speaking as an Australian I don't see it happening through any natural means. Even if daddy US collapsed over night, the leadership of these countries would sooner try to ape the glory days of the US than they would bolster their own nations people
Individual nations building power and alliances and eventually overthrowing the government. Afterwards there might be a borderless confederation, and settlers would have to be powerless until they earn respect by being helpful.
Idk if Japan and Australia have futures.
For Australia, it will be a long slog. The land rights acts getting through parliament that previously were making progress started to dry up about 15 years ago. IMO it was a sign Australian politics was going down the toilet.
Previous acts granted ownership of particular areas to various indigenous land councils. The councils would manage the land and it's effectively a perpetual lease owned by the indigenous community. So post-revolution, those land rights concepts would have to come back and get expanded further to make decolonization work.
My reading is that they for the most part didn't decolonized per se, the colonists won, they successfuly colonized those regions and then broke off as a country from the imperial force but the people in charge of the region were, the most part from the imperial country or descended of them, it kept being a colonized land and indeed the colonization expanded towards the native lands, only not more with the flag of England but with an American, Canadian, Australian or New Zealand flag. But it is to this day colonized land. Decolonization would mean to me, the native people taking the land back, but in US at least there is barely any natives left, and the idea of their taking back the land is absurd nowadays.
