Worldmaking after Empire: A response

Peter Brett responds to Adom Getachew's book Worldmaking after Empire: The Rise and Fall of Self-Determination. This is part of a book symposium from the Africa and International Studies Working Group.

Political theorists and historians have already noted many of Worldmaking's achievements. I will begin by only listing some which I consider especially relevant for African international relations. Like the other contributors to this symposium I will do so from the perspective of my own research interests (in human rights and international law).

Most obviously, Worldmaking demonstrates precisely why post-colonial politics cannot be reduced to a conflict between human rights and sovereignty, as it so often has been in recent decades. British students frequently treat the question of sovereignty as one of cultural relativism vs universal values. This book should help give them pause. Sovereign equality, after all, is a form of universalism. Getachew, for example, shows how Black Atlantic leaders and intellectuals, building on Lenin, have long argued against annexations of territory everywhere. This is a universal value that the West is now having to rapidly rediscover for a new geo-political era. During the creation of the International Criminal Court (ICC), meanwhile, African states were the most determined to criminalise aggression and territorial expansion. This attachment to sovereign equality, we have argued elsewhere, helps explain why African states have so often ceded sovereignty to international courts, but have singled out the International Criminal Court for criticism. The problem is not simply that the ICC (only) prosecutes African leaders. Rather the Court's constitution, reserving powers for the Security Council, reflects the continent's long history of domination by the Great Powers; the same domination that Getachew's worldmakers - George Padmore, Kwame Nkrumah, Nmandi Azikiwe, Julius Nyerere - sought to overcome.

Another great virtue of Worldmaking, at least as I see it, is that it makes sense of how Africa's international relations were discussed during decolonisation. Getachew criticises Hedley Bull and Adam Watson for approaching this period as simply an 'expansion of international society'. Her worldmakers sought to transform the international society they were joining. This chimes with an argument advanced by Bull's main African interlocutor in 1964. Ali Mazrui argued that African and Asian states were revolutionising the United Nations by making human rights and 'human dignity' its moral foundation, whilst older members continued to see it only as a peace project. These words will be almost incomprehensible to many readera today (a situation that Worldmaking will hopefully redress). But they helpfully highlight how we need not equate sovereignty with ideas about order, and human rights with ideas about justice, as Bull famously did in 1971.

During the rise of self-determination, indeed, sovereignty could be seen as a precondition for rights. As Getachew writes, following Hannah Arendt, 'the right to have rights' came first. Anti-colonial worldmakers spoke this language of radical republicanism. With UN Resolution 1514 - Declaration on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples (1960) - they turned the principle of self-determination into a right. They argued that rights were meaningless when no state or political community existed to deliver them. Over time they also came to recognise that viable political communities required a New International Economic Order. This recognition extended Arendt's insights into new and more material territory. (I note in passing that Getachew's arguments are important for the new historiography of human rights. Some discussions sparked by Sam Moyn's groundbreaking The Last Utopia assume that we already know that rights relate to essential features of individuals, and that the scholarly task is to date their emergence and political 'breakthrough'. For Getachew, by contrast, the content of rights is unstable. They are the outcome of political and legal contestation, with no necessary connection to individuals. The human right to popular self-determination is thus no aberration.)

Getachew is of course well aware that not everything African anti-colonialists did furthered human dignity. Instead of romanticising this tradition she aimed for a 'sympathetic reconstruction' of it 'at its best and most compelling'. Like Mazrui she thus does not overlook 'the fact that internationalist values are sometimes invoked for tactical reasons rather than out of genuine conviction'. She dwells at length, for example, on how self-determination shielded Nigerian atrocities from critique during the Biafran civil war. And although she focuses on Nkrumah's arguments for the democratisation of international relations, she does not set out to deny the rapidity of his authoritarian turn at home. That such double-standards existed, however, does not mean that radical republican arguments were not taken seriously, or that they are not (still) correct. This book suggests that they were, and that they are.

Given these achievements it seems unfair to ask the book to do more. Some contributors to other symposia have wondered whether other influences could have been included (socialism, Latin America, black women's international thought, cultural politics, and so forth). There must be limits, however, in how many could feasibly have been incorporated. By focusing on a limited number of Black Atlantic (male) elites Worldmaking already foregrounds many American and Caribbean connections that I, for one, had certainly underestimated. The influence of socialism, meanwhile, is also already underscored. For Getachew Pan-Africanists like George Padmore were manifestly the products of both the Comintern and Black Atlantic traditions. Her worldmakers inherit traditions and then develop them. 'Conscripts to modernity', like the rest of us, they nonetheless adopted a 'creative relationship to their conscription'. There is no claim here to have reconstructed an autonomous, self-sufficient intellectual tradition, as in some de-colonial (as opposed to post-colonial) writing.

I will try, then, to make my own queries amount to more than just complaints about exclusions. The first relates to the argument for neglecting anti-apartheid in Southern Africa. Getachew argues that anti-colonial republicans endorsed a 'saltwater' definition of imperialism (pp. 86-7). United States promoted this order to undermine European empires, but without endangering its colonies and record of indigenous dispossession. Only 'alien rule' at 'geographic distance' was thus rendered illegitimate. For Getachew this move was understandable as a means of 'warding off violent secessions in plural postcolonial societies' but nonetheless had the unfortunate effect of 'excluding indigenous claims to self-determination in the classic cases of settler colonialism'. It 'left unaddressed the specificities of the settler colonial experience in the Americas, Australia, New Zealand and southern Africa'.

This point about indigenous dispossession in the Americas and Australasia is well taken. Chapter 4 of Worldmaking provides some fascinating detail about how Nkrumah and Eric Williams (historian and first Prime Minister of Trinidad and Tobago) analysed the United States as a model of anti-colonial federation rather than of settler colonialism. And chapter 5 describes the influence how that generation of leaders were influenced by modernisation theory, which effectively treated dispossession as an inevitable early 'stage of development'. I'm less sure, however, that indigenous claims to self-determination in southern Africa were, in practice, excluded by this understanding of imperialism. It's perfectly true, as Getachew says, that the region's white minority governments used 'saltwater' definitions to claim that they were not denying self-determination, since 'the territories they governed were internal to their own political units'. And it's also true that these definitional difficulties posed particular problems for movements dominated by intellectuals and theorists: the South African Communist Party had to endorse a theory of apartheid as 'Colonialism of a Special Type ('CST')' before they could justify working with the ANC in the early 1950s. But for the most part, it seems to me, 'saltwater' definitions and radical republicanism did little to prevent anti-colonial worldmakers from recognising apartheid's settler colonial dimensions as an international political problem.

Indeed the campaign against apartheid saw new African states transform international law and institutions just like Getachew describes elsewhere in Worldmaking. Their demands extended well beyond sovereignty and non-intervention. In the early 1960s, as Ryan Irwin puts it, 'the fight against apartheid gave form to the political project known as the Third World'. In 1962 this led to General Assembly Resolution 1761, which for the first time interpreted a country's domestic policies as a threat to 'international peace and security' under the UN Charter. This was also the first time that states pressured the UN to exclude a member from technical agencies on political grounds.[i] Tanzania led a campaign to give the General Assembly power to exclude South Africa from the UN Conference on Trade and Development, whilst South Africa withdrew from the Food and Agriculture Organisation in 1963 after Ghana proposed a similar constitutional amendment. It withdrew from the International Labour Organisation in 1964 after Nigeria had successfully co-ordinated efforts to allow for suspension and expulsion. Liberation movements won the right to represent South Africa and Namibia at the International Telecommunications Union. Even an organisation so apparently unpolitical as the Universal Postal Union came under sustained pressure. These demands were not, moreover, just liberal ones to remove racially discriminatory laws. African states framed them in terms of both human rights and self-determination. In the words of a 1960 UNESCO General Conference resolution, theirs was a campaign against 'colonialism in all its forms and in all its manifestations'.

This is not to say that African leaders consistently condemned apartheid. Some outside Getachew's Black Atlantic networks, notably Côte d’Ivoire's Félix Houphouët-Boigny, preferred 'dialogue diplomacy'. Even Nkrumah in the early days of Ghanaian independence faced Pan-Africanist criticism for not supporting boycotts. But his attitudes changed dramatically in the wake of the 1960 Sharpeville massacre. Until 1963 Ghana then became the most important African provider of practical support to the armed struggle against apartheid. Again, this was support to organisations that had declared themselves committed to the overthrow of settler colonialism and not just the repeal of racially discriminatory legislation. In short, therefore, I am not so sure that the theory of saltwater imperialism did much to prevent anti-colonial worldmakers from recognising apartheid as a problem of self-determination. 

By now I am almost certainly guilty of belabouring a minor point tangential to the main argument of the book. I've tried to do so, however, in order to raise a broader question about how far political actors, and especially politicians, are constrained by specific intellectual traditions. On the one hand Getachew (p. 77) draws on Quentin Skinner (via David Scott) to analyse 'political thought' as a 'response to specific, historically situated questions'. Skinner, famously, has related even Hobbes to immediate ideological conflicts rather than grand debates within and about the republican tradition. This approach fits easily with the account of anti-apartheid I have tried to sketch above where a specifically republic understanding of Empire could be downplayed if became unhelpful for particular ideological purposes. It may fit less easily, however, with Worldmaking's attempt to view the writings of Nkrumah and Azikiwe - albeit at their best and most compelling - as contributions to a coherent Black Atlantic tradition of republican anti-colonialism that spans generations and contexts.

Perhaps a similar point could perhaps be made about the analysis of federations in chapter 4. Here Getachew describes disagreement between Azikiwe and Nkrumah about whether African Unity and federal union required a centralised federal state. And she identifies similarities with earlier Caribbean debates between Eric Williams and Michael Manley (who would go on to be Jamaican Prime Minister). Both debates, she argues, can be understood as anti-colonial appropriations of a tradition of federalist thinking in the United States. This appropriation recast federation as an 'institutional form that could achieve redistribution and address both the political and economic aspects of neocolonial domination' (p. 141). Anti-colonial worldmakers were thus attentive to 'the ways in which international domination creates the conditions for domestic domination', in ways that North Atlantic republican thinkers today - such as Skinner and Philip Pettit - have not been (p. 35).

I suspect, however, that these debates about federation can also be understood as 'response[s] to specific, historically situated questions' that had little to do breaking the bonds of (neo-)colonialism. By 1964, for example, Julius Nyerere, suspected that one reason Nkrumah favoured a centralised model was because it provided rhetorical cover for Ghana's efforts to dominate and even annexe the territories of neighbouring states: '[M]ost ridiculous and cynical of all: Upper Volta [now Burkina Faso] complains that Ghana has swallowed up a bit of her territory; she wants it back. The response to this? We can guess. 'Union Government!'. Nkrumah, similarly, had criticised the artificiality of the Togo-Ghana border since independence, and suggested a federal union between the two countries 'as an opportunity to demonstrate and conceretise his own 'devotion to the cause of African unity'. For Togolese President Sylvanus Olympio, however - typically remembered as an enemy of French neo-colonialism - this devotion merely disguised Nkrumah's desire to turn Togo into the 'seventh region' of Ghana. Such domination and annexation was, of course, precisely what Getachew's anti-colonial worldmaking project was intended to overcome.

There is unlikely to be anything I've just said that Getachew is not already very well aware of. In a response to another symposium she has written critically - even harshly - of her decision to focus on anti-imperial contexts relevant to cosmopolitan political theory, instead of (say) more specifically African contexts like those I touch on above:

I positioned anticolonial worldmaking as an alternative tradition where the preoccupation with global politics always begins from the predicament of empire. The problem with this framing, however, is that it consigns anticolonial thought yet again to the position of speaking back to the metropole, which contorts its vision, and registers its relevance to us primarily in terms of the kind of conceptual and political resources it might offer cosmopolitan theorists situated in the North Atlantic. 

Likewise, in the same response, she acknowledges, difficulties associated with her 'intertwined aspirations for historical reconstruction and engagement with contemporary political theory'. It is hardly easy for one book can historically reconstruct all the immediate and unexpected ideological stakes for political thought - as Skinner recommends - whilst still showing how this thought can help us with our very different present predicament. Indeed many have thought that Skinner himself has struggled for more than half a century to find a satisfactory solution to this problem. His powerful analysis of texts as 'response[s] to specific, historically situated questions' persuaded many of his readers to abandon broad categories such as republicanism, liberalism or anti-colonialism. Yet elsewhere he has himself written in very general terms of 'our [European] republican heritage'.

For my part, I certainly have no better ideas about how Getachew's intertwined aspirations could be pursued. It would be shame, however, if such methodological puzzles prevented us from attempting to use history to answer questions about the present. We need more, not less, books like Worldmaking. Getachew has a rare combination of skill and ambition that allows her to speak to both historians and theorists. I hope her example will inspire other scholars of anti-colonial international thinking.

References

[i]    Unless otherwise indicated this paragraph draws on an unpublished manuscript by Nat Rubner that expands his 2011 Cambridge PhD. But much of the information can be found here.