Worldmaking after Empire: The Rise and Fall of Self-Determination - Hardcover

Getachew, Adom

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0691179158 ISBN 13: 9780691179155

Verlag: Princeton University Press, 2019

Inhaltsangabe

Decolonization revolutionized the international order during the twentieth century. Yet standard histories that present the end of colonialism as an inevitable transition from a world of empires to one of nations—a world in which self-determination was synonymous with nation-building—obscure just how radical this change was. Drawing on the political thought of anticolonial intellectuals and statesmen such as Nnamdi Azikiwe, W.E.B Du Bois, George Padmore, Kwame Nkrumah, Eric Williams, Michael Manley, and Julius Nyerere, this important new account of decolonization reveals the full extent of their unprecedented ambition to remake not only nations but the world.

Adom Getachew shows that African, African American, and Caribbean anticolonial nationalists were not solely or even primarily nation-builders. Responding to the experience of racialized sovereign inequality, dramatized by interwar Ethiopia and Liberia, Black Atlantic thinkers and politicians challenged international racial hierarchy and articulated alternative visions of worldmaking. Seeking to create an egalitarian postimperial world, they attempted to transcend legal, political, and economic hierarchies by securing a right to self-determination within the newly founded United Nations, constituting regional federations in Africa and the Caribbean, and creating the New International Economic Order.

Using archival sources from Barbados, Trinidad, Ghana, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom, Worldmaking after Empire recasts the history of decolonization, reconsiders the failure of anticolonial nationalism, and offers a new perspective on debates about today’s international order.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Adom Getachew is the Neubauer Family Assistant Professor of Political Science and the College at the University of Chicago.

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Worldmaking after Empire

The Rise and Fall of Self-Determination

By Adom Getachew

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 2019 Princeton University Press
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-691-17915-5

Contents

Acknowledgments, ix, 
INTRODUCTION. Worldmaking after Empire, 1, 
CHAPTER 1. A Political Theory of Decolonization, 14, 
CHAPTER 2. The Counterrevolutionary Moment: Preserving Racial Hierarchy in the League of Nations, 37, 
CHAPTER 3. From Principle to Right: The Anticolonial Reinvention of Self-Determination, 71, 
CHAPTER 4. Revisiting the Federalists in the Black Atlantic, 107, 
CHAPTER 5. The Welfare World of the New International Economic Order, 142, 
EPILOGUE. The Fall of Self-Determination, 176, 
Notes, 183, 
Bibliography, 225, 
Index, 249, 

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...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Princeton University Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2019
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0691179158
• ISBN 13: 9780691179155
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 288
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Princeton University Press; https://press.princeton.edu/books; ; 7th Floor, New South Building; PRINCETON; NJ; 8544; USA
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar