Worldmaking after Empire by Getachew Adom;

Author:Getachew, Adom; [Getachew, Adom;]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780691179155
Publisher: PrincetonUP
Published: 2018-10-30T00:00:00+00:00

The Promise and Failure of Postcolonial Federalism

However, before the collapse of the “federal moment,” federalists in the Black Atlantic gave voice to a distinctive vision of the postcolonial world.119 Through a critique of neocolonial domination, they reimagined relations between postcolonial states and strove to transcend the limits of the nation-state through new regional formations. Their federal imaginaries blended their political and economic concerns and presented federation as a strategy for exiting international dependence while creating egalitarian regional institutions. If the right to self-determination prioritized the political and legal over the economic and the New International Economic Order privileged the economic realm over the political, this federal phase of anticolonial worldmaking marked the most sustained effort to design international political institutions that were directly linked to the remaking of the economic relations at the heart of neocolonial dependence.

Recovering this vision of postcolonial federation in the context of renewed interest in federation among historians and political theorists challenges and expands contemporary discussions. Historians of the French Empire have recently pointed to the model of decolonization without independence advocated in the French Antilles and in French Africa as an exemplary instance of postcolonial federation. According to Gary Wilder, Senghor’s and Cesaire’s visions of a federated French union “warrant the attention of those on the left now attempting to rethink democracy, solidarity, and pluralism beyond the limitations of methodological nationalism.”120 In contrast, the federations examined in this chapter emerged in a moment where decolonization without independence was neither available nor sought—a position that for better or worse Williams and Nkrumah shared with most anticolonial nationalists of the twentieth century. Their federal projects were as a result concerned with a different problematic— that of an independence made illusive in the face of new forms of international domination. In their hands, federation offered an institutional structure through which postcolonial states could secure nondomination in the international sphere while realizing self-government domestically.

The West Indian Federation and Union of African States also took a distinctive form in relation to the historically contemporaneous project of European integration. Though the fallout of the Great Recession, and more recently Brexit, has tempered optimism about European integration, the European Union functions as an exemplary case through which theorists grapple with the promises and perils of supranational government. However, portraying the EU as paradigmatic not only elides the concurrent projects of postcolonial integration but also casts the particular conundrums of European integration as generalizable. Attending to the specificity of postcolonial federation highlights how the anticolonial preoccupation with economic dependence gave postcolonial federation a distinctive orientation. Rather than mitigating interstate conflict, the social question was at the forefront of Nkrumah’s and Williams’s federal visions. Because of this orientation, they presciently pointed to the limits of economic integration without political union. In the efforts to dissociate regional free trade from the political question of federation, they saw the ways that regionalism could engender new forms of inequality and dependence. Their fears are borne out not only in the forms of regional integration that succeeded their

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.