The Arab League is founded before the war has ended

The Arab League was founded on 22 March 1945, less than two months before the war in Europe ended. It confirmed the independence and sovereignty of its member states while laying the basis for a federation in which they could strengthen political, economic and cultural ties without interfering in one another's form of government. Its immediate precursor was Anthony Eden's statement at the Mansion House on 29 May 1941 promising British support for any scheme of Arab unity that won general approval. Independence came in a rush around the same date. French and British troops left Syria on 17 April 1946 and Lebanon on 31 December of that year, and Transjordan became independent on 22 March 1946, with Abd Allah proclaimed king two months later. Two world wars and a quarter century of dealings with Europe had made one thing plain, which was that Arab nationalism could no longer be ignored.

On 1 January 1946 the student paper La Ruche, edited by Rene Depestre and Theodore Baker, greeted the new year as the year democracy would beat fascism, and printed four lines of verse: down with the Francos, long live democracy on the march, long live justice, long live the workers of the world. Within two days the editors were in the police station on the Champ de Mars and the paper was banned. Medical students walked out first, then the rest of the university, then the lycees, then children as young as ten, crossing the Champ de Mars shouting for liberty and democracy and against dictatorship. The Garde answered with clubs. On 7 January, Jacques Stephen Alexis, Depestre and Baker announced a new party demanding the release of political prisoners, immediate elections and a free press. On the 8th and 9th the government clerks struck, then the teachers, then the shopkeepers. Elie Lescot went on the radio promising drastic measures. On the afternoon of 11 January, Alexis and Georges Rigaud went to his residence and told him to go. He asked for time to arrange his affairs. Two hours later Fort National fired three times.

The National Party's laws after 1948 sorted South Africans by colour and fixed where each group could live, work and travel. A small African elite came through the system anyway and organised against it. In the 1950s the African National Congress, until then moderate and slow, was taken over by a younger group around Nelson Mandela, Oliver Tambo and Walter Sisulu. The defiance campaign of 1952 and 1953 brought mass breaking of the pass laws and mass arrests. By the middle of the decade African, Indian and coloured organisations had come together behind a demand for a democratic South Africa with no racial qualification at all. The alliance was fragile. Zulu crowds had attacked Indians in Durban in 1949, and inside the ANC some leaders resented the influence of white liberals and of communists. A breakaway group formed the Pan Africanist Congress at the end of the decade. A state that had spent ten years dividing people by colour had given them one thing to agree on.

In 1945 Manuel Arturo Pena Batlle told his readers that under the Trujillo regime Dominicans had won unimaginable victories, above all in preserving the Spanish character of their nationality. He was a serious historian who had built a whole account of Dominican history around the idea of a Spanish community defending itself against outsiders, and he took a leading part in the border negotiations with Haiti. Among the victories he counted was the massacre of Haitians in the border zone eight years earlier. He argued that fixing a line on a map was the simple part of the border question and that the real problem was Haitians settling on Dominican soil, which had been dealt with by what people called la poda, the pruning. The regime he was defending ran on anti Haitian feeling and on an admiration for Spain, and he wrote at the moment when European fascism had just been defeated.