Belize evolved through several stages of decolonization, from universal adult suffrage in 1954 to a new constitution and internal self-government in 1964, when George Price, a middle-class Roman Catholic intellectual of mixed Creole and mestizo ancestry, became premier.
The policy of the postwar Belgian governments, apart from the "royal question" settled in 1951, was dominated by five major issues: consolidation of the mixed economy, the ideological controversy concerning education, the process of decolonization, the matter of language and regional autonomy, and Belgium's role in the new postwar supranational organizations.
After the decolonization period of the 1950s and '60s, new states exerted increasing power and influence, especially in the General Assembly.
After the massive decolonization of the 1950s and early 1960s, less-developed countries became much more numerous, organized, and powerful in the General Assembly, and they began to create organs to address the problems of development and diversification in developing economies.
Radical change in the social position of nonwhites has depended less upon emancipation than on decolonization.
By this time labour disturbances were about to break out throughout the region, a consequence of the Great Depression and the lack of means for democratic dissent; popular demands for development and decolonization were spreading from Jamaica to Trinidad.
France's decolonization proceeded as rapidly as Britain's, culminating in 1960 with the partition and independence of French West Africa.
(The approval of the UN Security Council was technically necessary for the cessation of the trusteeship, but politically motivated efforts by the Soviet Union to obstruct the decolonization process necessitated a unilateral U.S. termination of the trusteeship, which was approved by a majority vote of the Trusteeship Council of the UN).
Cardoso tried to distinguish her book from Isabela Figueiredo's acclaimed Caderno de memórias coloniais (2009), also about the decolonization of Lusophone Africa in the 1970s, stating in a TV interview that her own work was neither autobiography nor therapeutically oriented.
