Union Intercoloniale

In March 1921, Nguyen Ai Quoc (Nguyễn Ái Quốc aka Ho Chi Minh) creates the Union Intercoloniale (Intercolonial Union). A few months before, the British-led "League of Versailles" (Swiss wording in the 1920s and 1930s) held his first annual meeting. Also in Geneva, Switzerland, the league's palace would be built at the end of the organisation's first decade.

At the end of the Great War, Ái Quốc, a student from the French colony of Indochina, carefully watched the events at the Paris Peace Conference. He sent a request to the Allied and Associated delegations in which a representation for his Vietnamese nation was claimed. After all, US President Woodrow Wilson brought the principle of self-determination to the French metropole. He was hailed as the advocate of internationalism. Next to similar requests of the Irish as well as the African National Congress, Ái Quốc's one was turned down by the Entente leaders and Wilson.

As a consequence of the British Empire's colonial coup at the outset of the conference, colonised people such as Ái Quốc turned anticolonial activists. The French conference host followed the Entente lead. As a revisionist reaction to the imperialist Paris/Versailles diktat of June 28th, 1919, the Intercolonial Union was founded. A hundred years later, this union's centenary could have been celebrated or commemorated, e.g. by the United Nations. Apart from an Aufa100 impulse, it was not. The UN's Virtual Panel Exhibition, '100 Years of Multilateralism in Geneva', sounded promising. Since countries such as Germany were excluded from both the conference and the League, this title may be regarded as window-dressing. Versailles is not even mentioned a single time. On all but one of the forty panels, not the actual centenary event was elaborated on but the aftermath of the Paris conference i.e. the whole of the first post-war period. In March or April 2023, it was taken offline. Altogether, another lacuna in the postcolonial debate can be observed. The Anglo-Saxon predominance of historiography is being sustained until way into the 21st century.

Later on, the founder of the Intercolonial Union would lead the Vietnamese independence movement to ultimate success. After defeating France in the 1950s, Vietnam fended off the United States of America over Ho Chi Minh's final years. The illustrious freedom fighter died amid of the second war of liberation, most notably a postcolonial one.

Support Aufa100's Call for a Novel Anniversary! Decolonize Versailles.