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 ‘Bund von 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 the Vietnamese people, part of the French colonial empire, was claimed. After all, the acclaimed United States President brought the principle of self-determination to the French metropole. Woodrow Wilson was hailed as the advocate of internationalism. Next to similar requests of the Irish as well as the African National Congress, Ái Quốc's 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, which caused the overruled US President to sacrifice leading principles, colonised people such as this Vietnamese turned anti-colonial 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. Notwithstanding a timely Aufa100 impulse, it was not. At the same time, 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, alternatively the diktat, are not even mentioned a single time. On all but one of the forty panels, the aftermath of the Paris conference i.e. the whole of the first post-war period was elaborated on instead of the actual anniversary.

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 kicking out the French coloniser in the 1950s, Ho Chi Minh led the Vietnamese people in another war against the invading United States of America. At the time of his death in 1969, the illustrious freedom fighter, being eventually more successful in opposition to the West's imperialist diktat than the Germany' democratic and authoritarian revisionists altogether, may have been convinced that the war of decolonisation's success were to be reiterated in the postcolonial war against Lyndon B. Johnson's US and Wilson's other successors.

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