Grand Colonial Debates
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The Grand Colonial Debates refer to a roughly 22-year period of time stretching from 1918 until 1940 in Belhavian politics, especially in the Imperial Senate, over the nature of Belhavia's Empire and foreign policy.
Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, a grand debate over Belhavia's colonial empire, policy of expansion, and empire-building was raging. The imperialist right, led by the Federalists, Fascists, and some conservative liberals within the Liberal Democrats supported the continuation of the Empire and the policy of territorial expansion and acquisition when and where feasible. The decolonizationist left, led by the mainstay of the Liberal Democrats and proto-paleoconservatives within the Federalists, sought to discard imperialism, colonialism, and expansionism in favor of decolonization and independence for Belhavia's far-flung territories and respect for other nation's sovereignty, a growing liberal value emerging from Emmerian and Arthuristan circles.
The so-called "Imperialist Consensus", emerging in 1715 after Belhavia defeated Estovnia in the Great Southern War and first acquired overseas territories, continued unabated, though ebbing and rising, until the late 1910s. Both the Liberals and Federalists supported this pro-colonialist imperative, though cracks emerged as early as the 1890s, when large swathes of the emerging left-wing populist agrarian third-party Democrats adopted an anti-imperialist and anti-colonialist foreign policy plank in their platform, calling for isolationism so resources could be directed to help struggling rural Belhavia at home.