Nations after Empire?

It is not only newly independent states that defend their prerogatives in national terms. China defends its control of Tibet—in the face of Tibetan demands for au­tonomy or independence—not in the name of empire, but in the name of national sovereignty.

One cannot understand these conflicts and tensions without analyzing both the experience of the Balkans, the Middle East, Africa, and Asia under different forms of imperial power. But is “the post-colony” a sufficient expression for describing an African or Asian country?^[2926] The danger is that the complex history of different peoples and places becomes reduced to a single quality, the fact of having been colonized. It in no way minimizes the importance or trauma of the experience of colonization to suggest that no people were ever colonial subjects and nothing more.

In Africa and the Middle East, the struggle against empires entailed varying degrees of mobilization—from armed struggle to electoral politics—but new rulers were concerned to demobilize the populations or at least to ensure that a single narrative of struggle would lead to a unified politics led by the revolutionary van­guard. Most states lacked the means to satisfy the demands of citizens and feared that open political competition would lead to chaos, or at least the leadership’s loss of power. In a highly unequal world, elites sought patrons abroad and clients at home. The tendency—despite efforts to the contrary—created the dynamic that Sally Cummings and Raymond Hinnesbusch describe for the Middle East: “state­builders have filled imperial-created shells of statehood with neo-patrimonial practices that typically combine personalistic leadership (monarchies and presi­dential monarchies) and clientelism with institutional underdevelopment and un­incorporated opposition.”^[2928]

The emergence out of empires of juridically equal states does not mean that we now have a world of states with equal control over their own destinies. But it does mean that we need to think seriously about the give and take of world politics and popular mobilizations; collective actions might have its consequences.

Decolonization was often violent, sometimes negotiated. Some scholars followed Frantz Fanon in arguing that “bourgeois nationalists,” in West Africa for example, had found it too easy to negotiate regime change—taking over colonial states without fundamentally transforming the social, economic, or political order— whereas armed struggle purged dominant, oppressive elements of society and gave peasants and the urban poor a sense of their own power to remake society.^[2930] Part of this critique of the uneven process of reform in Sub-Saharan African regimes after independence is valid, but oversimplifies the process. In places where decoloniza­tion was “peaceful,” there was often intense civic mobilization—of trade unions, farmers' organizations, student associations, and political parties—making clear to colonial powers that they would have to make good on their reformist promises, at an expense colonial regimes ultimately did not want to pay. The vitality of electoral politics and social movements in the years before independence led to heightened expectations, and afterwards new rulers realized they had even fewer resources than colonial regimes to meet them.

Knowing quite well the force of civil mobilization, many African regimes were eager to dismantle independent trade union organization and marginalize farmers whose economic importance might create concentrations of wealth and influence alternative to those controlled by the government. Independent states had gained control over the narrow channels—often based on one port and one railroad line—linking internal and external economies, and they made the most of it. Most African regimes after independence were gatekeeper states, with relatively weak control over internal economies but tight control over import-export licenses and revenues, foreign aid, and distribution of state resources.

That armed struggle does not necessarily lead to unity in the quest for radical social change became evident within weeks of Algeria's independence after one of the most intense and bitter colonial wars (1954-1962). The nationalist movement— the Front de Liberation Nationale—had already been beset by factionalism and had undergone repeated purges of leadership, but right after victory was finally achieved, conflict broke out among the victors.^[2932] Algeria has experienced coups and episodes of violent conflict ever since, and while socialist agendas have been pursued, nei­ther democracy nor social integration has been achieved. Similarly, after the fall of a white-supremacist regime in Rhodesia in 1979 after over a decade of anti-colonial warfare, the new state of Zimbabwe soon experienced a falling out among its lead­ership and a violent attack on the region where Robert Mugabe's main rival had his base of support. Despite Zimbabwe's wealth in minerals and agriculture, it turned out to be an economic disaster, where scarce resources are monopolized by a ruling clique and distributed to its clients. Part of the roots of the situation lie in armed conflict itself, whose “with us or against us” dynamic—with each sides coercing peasants to deny resources to the enemy—fosters polarization and the expecta­tion of ex-fighters that the rewards of victory will go to them.^[2933] Post-revolutionary Angola and Mozambique were also rent by conflict, as a result of outside meddling from the two sides in the Cold War, plus apartheid South Africa, but also because anti-colonial armed struggle had not overcome political fragmentation but had brought to power an elite convinced that it knew the only way forward.^[2934]

Economists and economic historians are in the midst of a debate over the causes of poverty in Africa and Asia and its relation to the problem of empire. There is no one answer and no one timeframe in which to consider the question.

For Africa, scholars have argued over whether the continent was trapped by its colonial heritage—the post-independence economy is sometimes characterized as “neocolonial”—or by the weight of its own culture.

An imperial past is not necessarily fatal for either economic development or democracy: there are examples in Latin America (Brazil, to name one) of coun­tries that have experienced empire and dictatorship and have, at times, produced democracies and periods of economic growth, although not without tensions. So too have some of the post-Habsburg, post-communist nation-states, the Czech Republic for example. South Korea, after 35 years of Japanese colonization and a longer period of de facto domination, has become a leading industrial power with a respectably democratic government. India is a great democracy and an increas­ingly powerful economic actor. One can cite examples in Africa—such as Ghana or Senegal—of political systems that, after much experience of authoritarian rule during and after colonialism, conduct elections in which incumbents or their protegees lose. So one should not assume a colonial or imperial determinism, inde­pendent of the actions of specific groups of people to make their way in political and economic life. But one should not assume the opposite either: that the nation-state form brings with it the “self-determination” of the people or the opening up of eco­nomic opportunities.

In the early 1970s, leaders of a third of the world's states, many of them having achieved independence from colonial empire in the previous decades, got to­gether to form the Group of 77, to demand what they called a New International Economy Order (NIEO). They wanted international bodies to change the rules of commerce to address the gap between rich and poor states: to recognize and enforce the rights of underdeveloped states to control their own natural re­sources, to help them export goods and develop their own industries, and to redistribute global resources to overcome the blockages to economic growth in poor regions of the world. Their initiative grew out of earlier efforts to ob­tain UN action of development issues, and indirectly at least from the Bandung process that had sought to make ex-colonial states into an influential force. The effort failed. Not only did the rich states and international financial or­ganizations reject the specific demands for a NIEO, but they - and supportive economists - mounted an ideological offense against the very basis for the demands being placed on them. They insisted that the market constituted the legitimate basis for economic transactions, that bad governance lay behind the poverty of African, Asian, and Latin American states, and even that the pre­vious arrangements to provide development assistance were counterproduc­tive - in short that poor states had no legitimate redistributive claims against the rich. In the harsh economic conditions of the late 1970s and 1980s, poorer countries needed financial assistance too much and their elites, with their own self-interest, valued their patrons too highly to counter this push toward free market orthodoxy and enforced austerity. Forty years later, despite periods of economic growth and poverty reduction in some countries, it is hard to see that either the ideological or the material basis for a fundamental challenge to global inequality has arisen.^[2938]