Reviewing Worldmaking After Empire (November 2024)

Published in 2019, Worldmaking after Empire: The Rise and Fall of Self-Determination, is Adom Getachew’s first book. It comes recommended by Aslı Ü. Bâli, Professor of International and Comparative Law at Yale Law School, on the occasion of an interview with the New York Times’ Ezra Klein on the topic of 'The Disastrous Relationship Among Israel, Palestinians and the U.N.' Getachew is Professor of Political Science and Race, Diaspora & Indigeneity at the University of Chicago. The book falls in the category of postcolonial studies. Written for an International Relations (IR) audience and unnecessarily stiff and academic at times, it is nevertheless an interesting and provocative counternarrative to what many of us in North America may be accustomed to. It is by no means the last word, but it does lead the reader to raise questions about our perspective on the Global South. This is especially the case for those of us who are not supremely confident of the virtuousness of Western history in general or U.S. history in particular.

Getachew uses the term ‘worldmaking’ to refer to the international agenda of anticolonial nationalists. It is a bit confusing, because ‘worldmaking’ could also be used to describe the international order dictated by the Great Powers at the end of World War I through the League of Nations and at the end of World War II through the United Nations. Her use of the phrase ‘the rise and fall of self-determination’ is intended to mark the almost euphoric peak of anticolonialist nationalism in the U. N. General Assembly around 1960 and the subsequent deflation of ideals since the 1970s. According to Getachew, U.S. opposition to the growing power of anticolonialist nationalism in the U.N. is represented by the views of former U.N. Ambassador Daniel Patrick Moynihan and the ideological victory of neoliberalism (the retooled theory of market capitalism, aided by the state) after the collapse of the U.S.S.R. Getachew quotes Moynihan saying that the economic conditions of the Third World are “of their own making and no one else’s,” which she wholeheartedly disputes.

In the Introduction, Getachew explains that anticolonialist worldmaking is about more than just nominal statehood. Its essence is that the new states created from decolonization must achieve full independence in political and economic affairs and equality vis-à-vis other nation-states recognized by the U.N. and the international community.

Against the standard view of decolonization as a moment of nation-building in which the anticolonial demand for self-determination culminated in the rejection of alien rule and the formation of nation-states, I recast anticolonial nationalism as worldmaking. The central actors of this study reinvented self-determination reaching beyond its association with the nation to insist that the achievement of this ideal required juridical, political, and economic institutions in the international realm that would secure nondomination. Central to this claim was an expansive account of empire that situated alien rule within international structures of unequal integration and racial hierarchy. On this view, empire was a form of domination that exceeded the bilateral relations of colonizer and colonized. As a result, it required a similarly global anticolonial counterpoint that would undo the hierarchies that facilitated domination.

Getachew notes in particular the perpetuation of hierarchy, especially through racialized structures, in the League and the U.N. by means of mandates and trusteeships, respectively. In each postwar international order, former colonies were not accorded the same measure of respect as European nation-states. She cites the League’s tacit acquiescence to Italy’s ‘humanitarian intervention’ in Ethiopia (the country of her birth) in 1935. She acknowledges that Italy used Ethiopia’s continuing slave trade as a pretext for the invasion, but she then points to the hypocrisy stating that “by invoking Ethiopia’s barbarism a month before its invasion, Italy prepared for the use of overwhelming violence, illegal use of mustard gas, indiscriminate killings of noncombatants, the torture of captured soldiers, and other war crimes.”

The case of Italy’s ‘humanitarian intervention’ in Ethiopia illustrates one of the persistent difficulties in international relations, viz., can one or more nation-states wage a just, i.e., legally defensible, war against another recognized member of the international community based on the egregious violations of human rights? Obviously, given the reality of international affairs, if the human rights violator is one of the Great Powers or a permanent and unconditional ally of a Great Power, then the question would need to be phrased ‘should’ instead of ‘can.’

An additional issue surfaces when comparing divergent opinions on collective versus individual human rights. Here, Getachew believes that there is a split between former colonial states and former colonized states. The former tend to advocate for the priority of individual human rights while the latter argue that collective human rights must be established first. For that to happen, the former colony must have complete sovereignty over its internal affairs. Getachew looks for support from Hannah Arendt’s critique of the enumeration of the rights as, for example, in the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, from which she quotes “the moment human beings lacked their own government and had to fall back upon their minimum rights, no authority was left to protect them and no institution was willing to guarantee them.” This, however, leaves it open for nation-building to proceed apace regardless of domestic human rights abuses—a result Arendt would not have tolerated either. At issue are two fundamental principles of international law—sovereignty of the nation-state and the universal entitlement to human rights—principles which are in no way mutually inclusive.

In addition to external threats to the integrity of the newly-created states, there are powerful internal forces that imperil their unity. Getachew cites two examples where the fracturing of the nation-state occurred from within: the Katanga province’s secession from the Congo and Biafra’s secession from Nigeria. In both cases, the demands for self-determination were made by groups with these countries, but the secessions were short-lived. In essence, the roles of former colonizer and colonial had been re-staged with the former colonies playing both roles. This is yet another unsettled area of international law: just how granular can the principle of self-determination be?

A significant and common view that Getachew takes issue with is that there is an inevitable trend towards the Westernization of the world. (This was famously proclaimed by Francis Fukuyama at the end of the Cold War.) She states that

[T]he alien rule thesis, with its view of decolonization as the diffusion of the nation-state, positions anticolonial nationalists as agents of expansion who appropriated Western ideals of self-government. This globalization is largely celebrated as the realization of the universal ambitions of Western modernity but often also raises concerns that the appropriation of Western ideals is either premature or inapplicable in non-Western societies.

Naturally, this is offensive to anticolonial nationalists in two senses: first, the suggestion that non-Western societies are destined for a derivative, as opposed to authentic, form of self-government, and second, that Western ideals may be forever out of reach. The second sense suggests a fundamental and unbridgeable gap, as Antony Anghie put it, between the West and the rest or the civilized and the uncivilized or the developed and undeveloped. Here is where Getachew observes the Western racial hierarchization that characterized Western colonialism.

One of the more interesting contrasts among anticolonial nationalist views is recounted in the debate in Africa and the West Indies over the nature of the new nation-states. There was significant disagreement. Federalism in the West Indies and Africa pitted some anticolonial nationalists (Trinidad, Ghana, Mali) for strong central government and against those (Jamaica, Ethiopia, Nigeria) favouring some form of union of strong nation-states. Kwame Nkrumah, the first prime minister of independent Ghana, advocated for the former, while Nnamdi Azikiwe, the first president of independent Nigeria, supported the latter, even suggesting the term ‘miniature United Nations.’

Getachew concludes with the verdict that the neoliberal agenda, sometimes in the form of neocolonialism (colonialism with indirect controls, e.g., by international organizations), defeated the aspirations of the anticolonial nationalists who sought a strong and assertive form of self-determination as their nations joined the international community.

Though Getachew does not assert as much, the hanging question is obvious. Given that U.S. foreign policy and the economic doctrine of neoliberalism were both instrumental in forestalling the Global South’s ambitions, what was the nature of the connection between government policy and economic theory? Was one devised to serve the other? And which one was preeminent? Moynihan’s comment noted earlier gives a hint.

The following extended quote from Getachew brings the matter to a close . . . for now.

In formulating his strategy of opposition, Moynihan had hoped that the United States would recapture the UN and reassert a liberal rule-based international order. However, owing in part to the backlash against this anticolonial appropriation and the loosening of the Cold War’s restraints, what gradually followed was an American defection from postwar international institutions. Rather than reclaim international institutions, American policy makers embraced “a new sovereigntism” that rejected the incorporation of international norms and advocated military intervention without international authorization.