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CHAPTER 1
A Political Theory of Decolonization
JUST THREE YEARS after Ghana's achievement of independence, seventeen African states joined the United Nations, marking the high point of decolonization in the Black Atlantic world. In what would come to be called the year of Africa, the newly constituted African bloc in the United Nations successfully led the effort to secure passage of General Assembly resolution 1514, titled "Declaration on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples." The declaration described foreign rule as a violation of human rights, reiterated the right to self-determination, and called for the immediate end of all forms of colonial rule. Resolution 1514 offered a complete repudiation of foreign rule and rejected any prerequisites for the attainment of independence. Soon after its passage, the resolution formed the basis of a new committee with broad powers to investigate colonial rule and hear petitions from colonial subjects, making colonial rule subject to international scrutiny and to the demands for self-determination.
While 1960 marked a radical rupture in the history of modern international society, it has largely been subsumed in a standard account of decolonization where the transition from empire to nation and the expansion of international society to include new states is a seamless and inevitable development. This account of decolonization is premised on the view that anticolonial nationalists appropriated the language of self-determination from the liberal internationalist tradition of Woodrow Wilson in order to secure independence from alien rule. In adopting the language of liberal self-determination, the nationalists of the colonized world are thought to have mimicked the existing institutional forms of the nation-state. And while decolonization is credited with universalizing this state system, its nationalist and statist premises are viewed as anachronistic in a postnational and increasingly cosmopolitan world order.
Recasting anticolonial nationalism as worldmaking disrupts the central assumptions of this standard account. First, it expands the account of empire beyond alien rule by illustrating the ways black anticolonial critics theorized empire as a structure of international racial hierarchy. Drawing on W.E.B. Du Bois's famous diagnosis that the "problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line," the central characters of this book drew critical attention to the enduring legacy of racial hierarchy and slavery in the making of modern international society. Second, in response to the political dilemmas international racial hierarchy posed, anticolonial nationalists in Africa and the Caribbean insisted that self-determination required a combination of nation-building and worldmaking. Their vision of a postimperial world order prompted nationalists to create international institutions that could secure the conditions of nondomination. This claim that national independence required international institutions was a key insight of the anticolonial account of self-determination. Finally, recovering their global aspirations highlights the persistence of international hierarchy and outlines new directions for contemporary debates about global political and economic justice. Together, the expanded account of empire, the rethinking of anticolonial nationalism, and the theorization of a postcolonial cosmopolitanism constitute elements of a political theory of decolonization.
Beyond Empire as Alien Rule
As postcolonial states worked to pass resolution 1514 in 1960, historians, philosophers, and political scientists offered their first interpretations of the unprecedented process of decolonization. That same year, the Oxford philosopher John Plamenatz published On Alien Rule and Self-Government, while, across the Atlantic, the Harvard political scientist Rupert Emerson published From Empire to Nation. Emerson and Plamenatz sought to explain how "alien rule" suddenly became illegitimate in the twentieth century, and they found their answer in the global diffusion of Western ideals. The delegitimation of alien rule in the mid-twentieth century, Plamenatz argued, was itself a product of the gradual Westernization of the world. European imperial expansion fueled the spread of principles like self-determination, democracy, and freedom and made possible anticolonial nationalists' critique of alien rule. Emerson concurred, arguing that "through global conquest the dominant Western powers worked to reshape the world in their own image and thus roused against themselves the forces of nationalism which are both the bitterest enemies of imperialism and, perversely, its finest fruit."
Key tenets of these early interpretations — the emphasis on alien rule, the inattention to the international conditions and context of imperialism, the identification of decolonization with the globalization of the nationstate, and the expansion of international society — continue to shape our understanding of the collapse of territorial empires. From international relations to normative political theory, the recurring emphasis on alien rule conceives of empire as a bilateral relationship between metropole and colony. On this view, empire is a "a system of interaction between two political entities, one of which, the dominant metropole, exerts political control over the internal and external policy — the effective sovereignty — of the other, subordinate periphery." Involuntary subjection, nonreciprocity, and inequality characterize this relationship between the colonized and colonizer. The international component to alien rule is understood as exclusion of the colony from international society. Such exclusion differentiates alien rule from other forms of international hegemony that emerge within a rule-bound international order. As a result, the international order is conceived as a dual structure that grants metropolitan states membership as sovereign equals and excludes colonies outside of its boundaries. With this bilateral account of imperial domination and a bifurcated view of international society, the alien rule thesis understands self-determination as a double move of overcoming alien rule and achieving inclusion in international society. Empire comes to an end when formerly excluded colonies enter international society as full members, and central to this inclusion is the universalization of the nation-state as the accepted institutional form of self-determination. Twentieth-century decolonization is thus viewed as the culmination of a long history in which the nation-state is progressively globalized and becomes the counterpoint to empire.
While the empire-to-nation narrative appears to capture the transformations of the international order in the mid-twentieth century, this account of decolonization also obscures the more far-reaching efforts to remake rather than expand international society. Characterizing decolonization as a process of diffusion, in which a "gradual Westernization" of the world took place, blunts anticolonial nationalism's radical challenge to the four-century-long project of European imperial expansion. Like British prime minister Harold Macmillan's evocative phrase "the wind of change," the diffusion narrative naturalizes decolonization, rendering it an irresistible development that necessarily follows from empire. Indeed, well before the rapid decline of the British Empire, interwar metropolitan intellectuals and elites coined and adopted the term decolonization to reconcile their imperial past and present with what they believed was an inevitable postimperial future. In this early articulation, decolonization was pictured as already immanent within the project of empire and did not signal imperial defeat. Decolonization thus "worked to absorb and deflect the phenomenon it ostensibly described."
Rather than a seamless and inevitable transition from empire to nation, anticolonial nationalists refigured decolonization as a radical rupture — one that required a wholesale transformation of the colonized and a reconstitution of the international order. For Kwame Nkrumah, decolonization was not a wind blowing over the African continent but instead a "hurricane of change ... [that is] razing to the ground the many bastions of colonialism." From this perspective, "independence means much more than merely being free to fly our own flag and to play our own national anthem. It becomes a reality only in a revolutionary framework." Nkrumah's vision of decolonization as revolution was directed toward undoing the dependencies that colonial domination left behind. Dependence structured the condition of formerly colonized subjects as well as the relationship between the former colony and the international order. According to Nkrumah, a people "long subjected to foreign domination" become habituated to their dependence. The nationalist movement and postcolonial state would combat the economic, political, and moral-psychological forms of colonial dependence through an expansive politics of postcolonial citizenship. This nation-building project, however, was insufficient in a context where dependence also characterized the new nation's condition in the international order. The hoisting of national flags and singing of national anthems — the mere transfer of power — left intact the economic and political position of new states. Decolonization understood as a revolutionary project thus required remaking the international order that sustained relations of dependence and domination. Nation-building was to be situated and realized through worldmaking.
Nkrumah's concern with the persistence of domination in the international sphere points to the ways that anticolonial accounts of empire extended beyond alien rule and homed in on the problem of international hierarchy. Anticolonial nationalists argued that a bifurcated system with sovereign and equal members and excluded colonies did not characterize the international order. Instead, colonies and peripheral states were internal to international society but appeared in that space as unequal and subordinated members. For instance, the colonization of Africa in the late nineteenth century was facilitated through international treaties and conferences. In those contexts, African states and political communities were endowed with an international personality that had made possible their domination. Viewed from this perspective, colonization was not experienced as exclusion from but as unequal integration into international society.
Unequal integration conceives of international society as an internally differentiated space that includes sovereign states, quasisovereigns, and colonies, which are organized through relations of hierarchy. The hierarchical ordering of international society ensured that non-European states were not afforded the full rights of membership in international society. The distribution of rights and obligations was such that non-European states and colonies were encumbered with onerous obligations and had only limited or conditional rights. In highlighting the ways that unequal integration is embedded in the formal institutions of international society, this account of hierarchy departs from theories that emphasize how dominant states exercise economic and military authority over states. Distinct from hegemony, unequal integration as a constitutive practice of international law produces differential legal and political standing in international society. This unequal international standing functioned as the enabling background of European imperialism. It coincided with and facilitated political and economic domination.
The concept of unequal integration is drawn from recent histories of international law and international relations that have highlighted the centrality of empire in the constitution of these disciplines. While both fields are concerned with an international order composed of sovereign and equal states, key figures in the history of international thought, such as Francisco de Vitoria and Hugo Grotius, took up the colonial encounter as a primary site for theorizing international politics. As Antony Anghie has argued, the sovereignty doctrine, the central concept of international law, "emerged out of the colonial encounter." Rather than view international law as first articulated among European states and later expanded, Anghie highlights the ways that unequal integration was always at the center of modern international society. And while unequal integration took a variety of forms during Europe's long history of imperial domination, the incorporation of non-European societies in the law of nations and the mobilization of treaties to usurp resources and sovereignty emerged in the early colonial encounter and remained prevalent in the twentieth century.
The early colonial encounter in the Americas forced European jurists to reckon with the possible limits of the law of nations. In addressing the question of whether the law of nations applied to the New World peoples, Vitoria offered an equivocal answer that would be foundational for subsequent debates in international law. On the one hand, he confirmed the universality of the law of nations and found it to be binding for Native Americans owing to their capacity for reason. However, their political and cultural practices were simultaneously marked as violations of the law of nations, which required disciplining and transformation. According to Anghie, the application of the law of nations to Native Americans created a discrepancy between "the ontologically 'universal' Indian and the socially, historically, 'particular' Indian [which is then] remedied by the imposition of sanctions which effect the necessary transformation." In this early encounter, Native Americans are both included within the ambit of international law and found to be deviating from its prescriptions. The result was a partial and burdened form of inclusion — partial because it did not entail equal membership and burdened because Native Americans could be legible only as criminal actors who violated the law. As a result, the obligations and duties of their inclusion would be more pronounced than their rights.
This partial and burdened membership in international society did not stem from exclusion but instead depended on recognizing the international personality of non-European societies. More often than not, international treaties and alliances with local authorities, rather than outright conquest, were central to the making of European empires. While Europeans largely rejected alliances with non-Christians until the seventeenth century, this prohibition on treaties with infidels was gradually dropped in the course of imperial expansion in the Americas and Asia. Grotius's justification of Dutch treaties with East Indian rulers in a struggle against Portugal was central to this reversal. According to Richard Tuck, once Grotius's permissive attitude became commonplace in the seventeenth century, "Europeans were morally freed to become fully involved in the complex politics of the Indies," marking a transition from an empire of "purely commercial relations" to a more interventionist project.
Even in the nineteenth century, when international society was at its most exclusionary, marking its boundaries through the standard of civilization, colonial treaties "presupposed a common legal universe to which both parties adhered." While the standard of civilization denied non European societies sovereign membership in international society, key figures in the development of nineteenth-century international law argued that treaties and other legal relations with nonsovereign states made sense only because these states "are in some way or another International Persons and subjects of International Law." International society was thus governed by a "logic of exclusion-inclusion," in which non-European nations were excluded from the full rights of membership but remained subject to the obligations of inclusion. Partial recognition of this kind granted legal personality to non-European peoples, but it was a recognition that afforded native subjects the right only to dispossess of themselves. Thus, as Anghie concludes, "the native is granted personality in order to be bound."
From this perspective, imperial domination structured modern international society and was internal to the very development of the legal regimes that came to govern international relations. These processes of unequal integration engendered legal and political hierarchy within the boundaries of international society. By the height of European imperialism, international hierarchy had become entrenched and stabilized through appeals to racial difference. To be clear, ideas of difference were always constitutive of unequal integration. What Anghie calls a "dynamic of difference" worked to generate "a gap between two cultures, demarcating one as 'universal' and civilized and the other as 'particular' and uncivilized," and helped to justify empire as a civilizing project. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, this difference came to be formulated in terms of race. It was this transformation that prompted W.E.B. Du Bois to conclude that "the problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color-line, — the relation of the darker to the lighter races of men in Asia and Africa, in America and the islands of the sea." While often associated with the Jim Crow US South, in Du Bois's thinking the color line was an international phenomenon of which segregation and racial domination in the United States were only a domestic iteration.
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Excerpted from "Worldmaking after Empire"
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