After the end of colonialism in africa, middle east, asia and latin america in the 30s-70s how many of these countries then went on to try to become imperial powers themselves by conquering other countries to make them vassal states?
Offhand I can think of
Iraq with kuwait and maybe with Iran too
Indonesia with East Timor
Syria with Lebanon
The pan-arab ideas of Syria, Egypt & Iraq
Vietnam and cambodia in 1979 (maybe. Evenso, this wasn’t a bad invasion since it removed the Khmer Rogue)
I don’t know if the USSR counts since I don’t think they were ever conquered by outside invaders in recent history, but they were quite an imperial power even though they were founded on anti-imperialism.
There are probably alot of other examples but I don’t know beyond that
I would say communism and muslim fundamentalism were/are both strongly in favor of colonialism too even though they had their roots in anti-colonialism. But I do not know examples of these countries trying to force themselves on other countries in any effective way aside from the USSR. Maybe Saudi Arabia exporting Wahabbism.
I wouldn’t class most of the examples you cite as colonialism per se, but rather attempts to re-unite culturally cohesive territories that had been disrupted by colonialism. (Whether or not there is real historical justification for this is moot, but this is at least the way the invading power viewed it, or at least portrayed it.)
Although the territory that is now Indonesia was not united when the Dutch conquered it, East Timor is really part of the same cultural area, and it is an accident of history that it became (or remained) Portuguese. The Indonesian government viewed it as a natural part of what should have been Indonesian territory, but which had been artificially divided by colonial powers. (To a certain extent this was the case with formerly British Malaysia as well.)
Much more “colonial” in nature was the Indonesian governments taking over of Dutch New Guinea, now Irian Jaya, in 1963. The Dutch had retained this as a separate colony after Indonesian independence in 1949, and the territory had little to do culturally or historically with Indonesia. This is one of the best examples of a former colony becoming a true colonial power in another territory.
In the cases of Iraq and Kuwait, and Syria and Lebanon, all had at one time been part of the Ottoman Empire. The boundaries between these states is due mainly to decisions by the former colonial powers (Ottoman, British, and French), rather than reflecting the actual distributions of any groups that could be seen as “nationalities.”
Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait was done for several Imperialistic reasons
So Iraq wouldn’t have to repay Kuwaiti debts for the Iran-Iraq war
To have 230+ billion barrels of oil
To find a use for a million+ army
To start Husseins quest for a Pan Arab government under his control
The fact that Kuwait used to be part of the ottoman empire doesn’t change the fact that the motives for the invasion were imperialistic. Within 60 years of Iraq freeing itself from imperialism it attempts to fight an imperialistic war itself.
China had been an imperialistic power itself for a long time before it was dominated by the Western Powers and Japan. The Manchu Empire controlled all those areas in the 1700s, and had vassal states in Indochina. In the cases you mention it was re-asserting an imperial control it had lost to some degree during the period of Manchu decline. So this wasn’t really anything new.
You have a case there. I would agree that Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait was motivated by greed rather than any sense of pan-Arabism. However, I would class the pan-Arabist movement itself as a nationalistic one, rather than colonialist. Of course, that doesn’t stop people like Saddam Hussein as smoke-screen for imperialistic aggression.
Besides Iraq and Kuwait, another case of a former colony invading another is Morocco’s annexation of Western Sahara, formerly a Spanish colony. Morocco’s contention is that the area once was part of its territory, but the primary motive is probably access to its mineral resources.
A case comparable to Indonesia and East Timor is India’s unilateral annexation of the Portuguese colony of Goa in 1961. This was probably done primarily for nationalistic, rather than imperialistic (i.e. economic) reasons, even though Goa long pre-dated the existance of India as a nation. The Goans themselves might well have preferred independence, but unlike East Timor no widespread rebellion took place.
The USSR was simply the old Russian Empire in a different guise. A fiction was employed that the various SSRs had freely banded together to form the Union, rather than being colonies dominated by Russia, which they effectively continued to be. The Russian “Soviet Empire” was only anti-imperialistic with regard to the colonies of other empires, not to its own internal ones (the SSRs) or external ones like Mongolia.