The Rise and Decline of Postimperial “Worldmaking”

At its founding in 1945, the UN had 51 member states; today it has 193.  This increase is largely though not entirely the result of decolonization, one of the major events of the twentieth century.  As readers of this website know, the European imperial powers gave up most of their overseas territories, often because they were forced to do so by popular movements or wars of national liberation.  Though the details are complicated (as details always are), the basic story line of decolonization seems, at least at first glance, straightforward.  Empires ended and new nation-states emerged.

In 1960, the Harvard political scientist Rupert Emerson published From Empire to Nation, a book whose title perfectly captured this view of decolonization as the demise of formal empire and the triumphant spread of the nation-state.  In Worldmaking after Empire, Adom Getachew aims to redraw and enlarge this picture.  Many of the leading proponents of decolonization, she argues, had broader objectives than simply achieving independence.  Figures such as W.E.B. Du Bois, Kwame Nkrumah, Julius Nyerere, George Padmore, and Michael Manley — all of them “black Anglophone anticolonial critics and nationalists” – wanted not only to establish independent countries but also to “create a domination-free and egalitarian international order” (2), one that, purged of the legacies of racism and imperialism, would enable rather than hinder democratic and egalitarian nation-building in the new postcolonial states.

In this telling, anticolonial nationalism aspired to create “a world where democratic, modernizing, and redistributive national states were situated in thick  international institutions designed to realize the principle of nondomination.” (28)   By the late 1970s or early 1980s, both aspects of this aspiration were in tatters,  victims of “internal contradictions” and “external challenges” (29).  The “collective projects of self-government” (33) championed by anticolonial nationalists were compromised from within and without.

Worldmaking after Empire has an ambitious agenda.  On one hand, it looks backward, aiming to reorient our perspective on the era of decolonization and to recover the internationalist character of anticolonial nationalism.  It also looks forward, arguing for a particular normative position “that retains the anti-imperial aspiration for a domination-free international order.” (10)

In my view, the book is more successful with the retrospective part of its agenda than with the prospective part.  In particular, the idea of a “domination-free international order” remains at a high level of abstraction.  Getachew writes that “[n]ondomination recasts the current configurations of international hierarchy as infringements on collective projects of self-government” (33), but she does not spell out precisely how those infringements would be reversed or what the resulting international order would look like.  It’s clear enough that a “domination-free” international order would be a multipolar system with a more even distribution of power and wealth than the current one, and that the power and prerogatives of transnational corporations would be curtailed, as would those of certain institutions such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF).  Getachew also indicates that the idea of nondomination, with roots in “the long tradition of republican political thought” (23), aims at an international order in which the citizens of postcolonial states are free to engage in democratic deliberation and action with a minimum of external (or internal) constraints.  Beyond that, the reader is mostly left to guess, although Getachew’s enthusiasm for the program of the NIEO (see below) offers some hints.

Despite these reservations, the book is an impressive study in several respects.  A brief review cannot cover everything in it, so I will concentrate on selected points and leave readers to discover the rest for themselves.

The key chapter argues that the signal accomplishment of anticolonial nationalism was the transformation it wrought in the meaning of self-determination.  Self-determination was originally a vague principle, but opponents of imperialism reconceived it as a right – specifically, a right to be liberated immediately from the “enslavement” of alien rule.  The UN’s 1960 Declaration on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples codified this change.  It was, among other things, a direct blow against a centuries-old international racial hierarchy, one that the UN had theretofore done relatively little to disturb – and before that, the League of Nations even less.  The overarching theme here is that the reinvention (to use Getachew’s term) of self-determination was an important break or rupture, and she contrasts this view with the interpretation that sees in decolonization only an extension of existing norms and an expansion of international society.

Independence was a major achievement, but it still left the new states in a structurally weak position, both economically and politically.  Regional federation, driven by the notion that strength lies in forms of political and economic integration and/or unity, seemed to be a possible solution.  Chapter Four of Worldmaking after Empire deals with two brief experiments in regional federation in the late 1950s and early 1960s, one in West Africa and the other in the Caribbean, and why they collapsed. Using archival sources, Getachew shows, among other things, that Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana and Eric Williams of Trinidad and Tobago, the architects of these projects, “recast the United States as an exemplary model of postcolonial federation.” (110)  Nkrumah’s ouster in a coup in 1966 removed from power the main proponent of robust regional federation in Africa.

Getachew then turns to the New International Economic Order (NIEO), which she views as the culmination or “highpoint” (167) of postimperial worldmaking.  By the 1970s, it had long been clear to some observers that the structure and operations of the global economy were biased against what was then called the Third World.  The developing countries’ terms of trade – the prices of their exports relative to the prices of their imports – were steadily declining.  The NIEO, formally announced at the UN General Assembly in 1974, responded with a set of proposals for restructuring the rules governing global trade, aid, and foreign investment, with the aim of giving poor countries a fairer share of the world’s wealth and resources, as well as more control of their economic destiny.  Although the NIEO was influenced by Marxian critiques of economic dependence, its “prescriptions were articulated within the terms of a liberal political economy” (145).  While acknowledging its internal tensions, Getachew regards the NIEO as “a compelling vision of what a just and egalitarian global economy required” (145-46) and as “an interconnected account of nation-building and worldmaking” (174) that, among other things, “situated injustice in a shared imperial history” (175).

Although it was far preferable to the neoliberal agenda that had defeated it by the early 1980s, the NIEO had significant weaknesses.  It was silent on issues of domestic distribution, which means that it was silent on the fate of individuals.  Michael Manley and Julius Nyerere, leaders of Jamaica and Tanzania respectively, saw the NIEO as a complement to socialist transformation within poor countries, but that was not true of all the NIEO’s proponents.  The NIEO’s relevance as a model for today’s egalitarians is therefore more limited than Getachew suggests.  A genuinely egalitarian and nonhierarchical international order should not be indifferent to the life chances and welfare of individuals.  While not endorsing such indifference, the NIEO also did not interfere with it; rather, the NIEO elevated state sovereignty, and the concomitant power of governments to act as they please within their territories, to a nearly sacrosanct status.

Getachew’s position is that sovereignty and related principles, while sometimes shielding autocratic or repressive or reactionary regimes from outside scrutiny, “also have served as the foundation of anti-imperial visions of international justice,” working against “hierarchy…and domination in the international sphere” (34).  The problem, though, is striking the balance.  When “the equal moral worth of persons” comes into conflict with “collective claims for self-government” (33), which should take priority?  I’m not sure that Getachew’s “postcolonial cosmopolitan” perspective finds the right balance here, though in fairness it’s not always an easy problem to solve.

Although Getachew ends the book on a cautiously optimistic note, her thoughtful re-evaluation of the era of decolonization does not dislodge the impression that a just world order remains, in the early twenty-first century, a rather distant prospect.

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Louis F. Cooper has written on U.S. foreign policy and other subjects.  He is a graduate of Harvard College, Catholic University Law School, and the School of International Service at American University.