Alternatives to Empire and the Nation-State

Citizenship is a claim-making construct, no more effective than efforts to make the claims stick. It became a framework for political contestation in French Africa. In Algeria, citizens of French origin were able to use their own rights—and their own connections to political parties and the military in France—to dilute citizenship for Muslim Algerians to the point that it offered little share in political power, although it did convey the right of “libre circulation” that brought hundreds of thousands of Algerians to European France even during the Algerian war.

In both Sub-Saharan and North Africa, the political dynamics were unstable, and ultimately uncontrollable. In Algeria, where the fiction of being a full part of the French Republic made conflicting claim-making into a zero-sum game, the conse­quence was a bitter war, whose outcome was—as Matthew Connelly has shown— to a significant extent shaped by the more peaceful prior decolonizations that had eroded the normality of empire and by the changing international context.

The extremes of violence exercised by the French in Algeria or the British in Kenya were not so much a defense of a die-hard colonial status quo as an attempt to control a process of change, exacerbated by the bitterness top officials felt toward political movements that rejected the state's self-proclaimed modernizing frame­work. Such a dynamic gave the most repressive elements within the military and settler communities the opportunity to seize the initiative, but neither could hang on in the face of the eroding normality of empire and the eventual realization of Paris and London that their resources were better directed elsewhere than a defense of a settler colonialism in which governing elites no longer believed.^[2913]

The point of departure for political contestation after World War II was not an imagined world ofnations, but a world of complex sovereignties. The Commonwealth, especially after the Nationality Act of 1948, seemed like another variation on the theme of manipulating the differential relations of the parts of what was hoped to be an imperial whole.

Even as anti-colonial movements forced concessions from imperial rulers or moved closer to national independence, some of them seemed to long for a su­pranational political reconfiguration. As Adom Getachew has argued, ardent advocates of independence often feared that the nation-state was an inadequate basis for economic and social progress. They advocated different forms of what she terms “worldmaking,” concerted action to change the framework of international politics.^[2915] Besides the efforts of Senghor and others to turn empire into some sort of Franco-African confederation were attempts at federation of territories in the process of decolonization, in the British West Indies and British East Africa for ex­ample.^[2916] All these possibilities ran into the fact that decolonization was a process, not an event, and the piecemeal steps toward political participation which colonial regimes were willing to allow established relationships between political leaders and the territorial constituencies they represented, a political base they were reluc­tant to give up for the elusive promises of federalism or unity.

A particularly tragic instance of failed efforts to find a post-imperial struc­ture for a polity whose highly heterogeneous social structure had been rigidified by a colonial regime was India. There was first a double blow to the demands of Indian activists for imperial citizenship within the British imperial system: the government’s reneging on its promise to devolve a measure of political responsi­bility in response to the support Gandhi and the Indian National Congress had pro­vided the British war effort in 1914-18, and the refusal on racial grounds of British dominions, South Africa, Australia, and Canada most notably, to allow Indians to enter their territories on the same basis as other British subjects, a policy that voided empire-wide citizenship of its substance.

Even as nation-states emerged from empires, the quest for some kind of supra­national political reconfiguration took on new forms. No sooner had the first Sub­Saharan African territory become an independent state in 1957 than its leader, Kwame Nkrumah, proposed giving up some of that hard-won national sovereignty to create a United States of Africa. The Bandung Conference of 1955 posited a block of ex-colonial states whose governments would steer clear of subordination to ei­ther of the Cold War rivals and would speak together in world venues for the poor and the heretofore powerless. The founding of the Non-Aligned Movement in 1961 was another attempt at cooperation among states to change the international order.^[2919]

We know the outcome—there was and is no United States of Africa. The French Community ceased to be meaningful in 1960, and bilateral agreements with states becoming independent softened the separation of citizenships until France decided in the 1970s to raise barriers against people it now termed immigrants.

However much alternatives were being foreclosed by the 1960s, the place of empire in the configuration of power had dramatically changed. The comparison in Nkrumah's implicit reference to the United States of America underscores the systemic transformation. After 1783, there was a heated debate in former British North America over whether the thirteen colonies should unite. Some looked to the Roman republic as a model for a future polity, respectful of citizens' voices and eager to point the way toward the creation of what Jefferson called an “empire of liberty.” Others feared a Rome of the Principate—that uniting the states would lead to dicta­torial ambitions and to tyranny. But the newly independent states of 1783 existed in a world of empires—Spanish, French, British. Leaders feared that imperial rivalries would lead to attempts to take over the fledgling states and that divisions or conflict among those states would make it easy for other empires to move in.^[2920] But in 1958, independent African states did not have to survive in a world of empires.

There were plenty of sharks swimming in global waters, but those powers now saw their interest in a world of sovereign states, juridically equivalent but politically, economically, and militarily unequal, a world of nations that could be manipulated. Occupations would periodically take place, but colonizations were a thing of the past. Africa did not have to unite—but it had to face the consequence of the nation­state form which had come to be dominant. Big powers would continue to play an old imperial game—exercising power, in a variety of forms, at a distance.^[2921] But they would steer clear of one of the basic characteristics of empires throughout history—their incorporative dimension, their insistence that certain territories and certain peoples had a long-term (subordinate) place within a polity.

The role of the United Nations in such a process was ambiguous and changing. Its name—and its General Assembly—seem to suggest a widely held vision, after a terrible war, of a world of equivalent nation-states. But its Security Council—with a veto power given to the major powers and rotating memberships for everyone else—suggested that the non-equivalence of states would be an enduring feature of world politics. Some people hoped—and others feared—that the UN could become the vanguard of a world government, and others thought its existence, its Charter, and its Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948 could provide a way to ar­ticulate and perhaps to enforce some principles of human rights over and above nation-states. But the ambiguity of these positions and aspirations became clear as UN bodies discussed the problem of colonial empires.

Even before the UN's founding, suggestions had occasionally been made to, in effect, internationalize colonialism: for the League of Nations to supervise the col­onies of all powers, as it theoretically did in the case of the mandates. That did not come to pass, but even raising the possibility reflected paternalistic assumptions in some internationalist circles for a global project of uplift that would go beyond the interests and missions of individual colonizing states.^[2922] Once the UN became a more open forum, including new actors from the former colonies, the discourse became broader and more controversial. Arguments that self-determination and national independence should be the international norm competed for the high ground with arguments for new versions of “trusteeship,” stressing a global duty to promote economic and social development. As India in 1947 led the march of new nations out of empire and into the UN—and as the USSR, some Latin American states, and others criticized colonial rule—the great powers' control over interna­tional debate became harder to sustain.^[2923] Yet it was only in December 1960 that the UN passed its Declaration on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples (overwhelmingly, but with the United States, France, Britain, and other colonial powers abstaining).

Some scholars stress the conflict between arguments for generalizing sover­eignty and arguments for promoting human rights; others see them as overlapping, pointing to the invocation of human rights by certain leaders in their campaigns for independence. But by the 1960s, the two arguments converged. For, once former colonies acquired independence their rulers tended to regard outsiders' critiques of their record on humanitarian issues as violations of their sovereignty, as a form of neocolonialism.^[2924] Has the autonomy of the nation-state become such a funda­mental value that it supersedes all others—including the rights of individuals to protection against their rulers, of ethnic or religious communities to have their in­tegrity recognized and of all people to have at least minimal access to food, health care, and education? If not, what kinds of institutions can be given—or arrogate themselves—the right to intervene? Can some states be considered “failed” or “rogue,” thereby legitimating the interventions of states that are considered—or consider themselves—to be successful and therefore arbiters of what makes an­other state dangerous to its own people or to the people of other states? That such questions are unresolved reflects the fact that the breakdown of colonial empires has not brought about a world of truly equivalent nation-states.