Abstract
Adom Getachew’s Worldmaking after Empire: The Rise and Fall of Self-Determination (Princeton University Press, 2019) is the winner of the 2019 best book of the year award presented by the Theory section of the International Studies Association. We are pleased to convene this forum on the book, which features four scholarly engagements and a reply by the author. In this introduction to the forum, we briefly introduce Getachew’s main argument, and situate the book within some contemporary debates in international theory, global intellectual history, and international law.
Getachew’s point of departure is what we might call the standard story of how the form of the sovereign territorial state came to dominate the organisation of international affairs. This story begins with ‘Westphalia’, the supposed origin point of a principle of government and governance based on the formal equality of discrete political units that recognised one another as the legitimate rulers of their particular territories. 1 With the rise of nationalism during the 19th century, the grounds of legitimate statehood were supplemented with the principle of national self-determination, epitomised in the formation of the League of Nations after the First World War. 2 From this point onwards, the principle of sovereign equality among states gradually diffused to other parts of the world, as those polities were incorporated into ‘international society’ as members of the club – even if that process was uneven and did not immediately result in all of the newcomers enjoying exactly the same legal or political status. 3 The last chapter of this tale comes with the end of formal empire and colonialism, when the former colonial possessions of European powers gain sovereignty themselves, largely by assuming governing responsibilities from – and modelling themselves on – their former colonial overlords, sometimes relatively peacefully, sometimes more violently. Thus, the gradual universalisation of an international system of formally equal states depends on the successful imposition or appropriation of a European political form across the globe, and the simultaneous abolition of hierarchical and imperial relations between Europe and the rest of the world.
But this standard story, Getachew argues, is deeply misleading. European sovereign states were always founded on the ‘unequal integration’ of the non-European parts of the world into a hierarchical system, such that the very condition of possibility for mutual recognition among European states was inextricably connected with a lack of full recognition of other polities. As she argues, ‘[u]nequal integration conceives of international society as an internally differentiated space that includes sovereign states, quasisovereigns, and colonies, which are organized through relations of hierarchy’ (2019: 18). 4 International society should thus be understood not as growing up between equals, but as part of a strategy of imperial dominance: European states tacitly agreed among themselves on the criteria that a polity had to meet before it could be recognised as a fully equal member of that society, and this in turn justified various forms of dominance over other polities precisely because they did not meet those criteria. This is beyond a ‘standard of civilization’, inasmuch as those other polities were not so much excluded as given a ‘partial and burdened membership in international society’ (2019: 19). And they were then held in this subordinate position by ‘global white supremacy’, an articulation of racial difference that all but ensured that non-white peoples would never be able to achieve the equality nominally promised by the principle of sovereign equality (2019: 22).
As such, we cannot understand the spread of the sovereign territorial state form beyond Europe as a process of socialisation or diffusion, insofar as that form was itself predicated on the subordination of the non-European parts of the world. Instead, Getachew argues, we need to revisit the end of European colonialism, and the supposed birth of the principle of national self-determination that preceded it. Where the standard story understands the end of colonialism as a process whereby non-European parts of the world merely emulated principles that had been created in Europe by Europeans, Getachew argues to the contrary that we can only understand that process if we recall the broader project within which such notions were placed. Against the hierarchical, unequal world of sovereign European states surrounded by subordinate polities, anticolonial thinkers juxtaposed ‘the principle of nondomination’ as a way to move beyond the global imperial system. Against global white supremacy, thinkers like W.E.B. Du Bois and Kwame Nkrumah called attention to the global colour line and called for the development of post-colonial states – and state federations –that could ensure an end to European dominance of the rest of the world. Anticolonialism, Getachew suggests, is a rejection not just of alien rule, but a rejection of unequal status built into the international system as a consequence of prior imperial projects: ‘Central to this combination of nation-building and worldmaking was the view that the global project of European empire had radically transformed the economic and political condition of the modern world in ways that required a similarly global anticolonial project’ (2019: 24).
Along the way, anticolonial thinkers and activists actually created the ‘vision of an international order, premised on the independence and equality of states, which are to be free from domination’ (2019: 74). They did so by creatively and strategically appropriating notions like sovereign equality and national self-determination, giving these notions an operative content that went far beyond what their original authors had intended. In the process, self-determination was elevated from a vague political principle to an inalienable right of postcolonial peoples. The United Nations resolution 1514 on the right to self-determination, which Getachew gives an account of in Chapter 3, thus looks less like the rest of the world emulating a European standard, but more like a trenchant criticism of European practices and a quest for real self-determination in both political and economic terms, understood as freedom from domination. Similarly, in Chapter 4, Getachew examines the critique of sovereignty by a number of postcolonial thinkers and activists, arguing that the call for federations of postcolonial states needs to be understood not as an emulation of European integration efforts or American federal arrangements, but as part of a broader project of transforming the entire world order so as to prevent former colonial powers from re-establishing their dominance in informal ways despite – or possibly because of – the formal equality of sovereign states. In Chapter 5, Getachew extends this reading to the calls for a New International Economic Order, which she characterises as a global welfare world designed to redress the structural inequality that was the historical legacy of colonialism and which was indicative of the remarkable endurance and flexibility of hierarchy and empire.
At the same time, Getachew is keenly aware of the ‘central contradiction of anticolonial worldmaking’, a contradiction that ultimately proved too difficult to finesse in political practice:
what made anticolonial nationalism distinctive as a project of worldmaking was not only that it imagined nationalism and internationalism as compatible commitments but, more importantly, that anticolonial nationalists believed national independence could be achieved only through internationalist projects (2019: 170).
Like other internationalists before them, anticolonial nationalists both wanted to strengthen the state as a hedge against future foreign intervention and influence, and weaken the state through international arrangements dedicated to producing globally transformative outcomes. That tension, Getachew argues, left postcolonial states in a precarious predicament, which was exploited by parties and persons both internal and external to those states, and led to the decline of the overall project within which those tensions could be provisionally reconciled. Recovering that project, and rethinking the ways that the close of that project meant a re-inscription of global hierarchy, is thus the book’s primary contribution to debates about the structure of contemporary international affairs. 5
When situated in the context of contemporary international theory, Getachew’s book provides an important corrective to the Eurocentric stories that the field of international studies all too often likes to tell itself. 6 Instead of thinking of ‘international relations’ as a system of interactions and a corresponding field of study that emerged endogenously in Europe and then was diffused into the rest of the world, we should instead be examining how multiple encounters between Europeans and non-Europeans resulted in the negotiation of practices and principles that shaped not only their future engagements but the entire makeup of world politics. The current global order is a legacy not of the imposition of arrangements from a European core outward and downward, but instead results from the ways that European powers sought to establish their dominance and were met with resistance. 7 Therefore the resulting global order is incontrovertibly hybrid, and we do ourselves a great disservice by trying to comprehend and evaluate it with theoretical tools that reflect, both in terms of their origin and their conceptual content, the coloniser’s view of the world. The search for ‘worlding beyond the West’ 8 and for international theory crafted from non-European conceptual materials 9 is thus a way of displacing accounts that reproduce the very unequal integration that Getachew calls our attention to. As such, Getachew’s book is a landmark achievement, not only because of its theoretical sophistication and contextual sensitivity, but also because it draws our attention to episodes in modern international history which have received only cursory or biased engagement by scholars of international relations.
In the context of global intellectual history, Getachew’s book not only indicates what can be achieved by studying the dissemination of ideas across time and space regardless of national contexts, but also, and perhaps more importantly, to what extent the very idea of distinct ‘national contexts’ depends on a prior international context for its spread and universalisation. In order to understand how the national and the international were constituted as distinct yet inseparable spheres of thought and action, we need to step out of both spheres and ask how this particular way of viewing and organising the world was produced and globalised in the first place. By pursuing this quest into the 20th century and attending to a wide variety of sources whose importance hitherto has been downplayed, Getachew contributes greatly to extant scholarship in this area as well as to the booming field of global intellectual history in general. 10
Finally, when seen in the context of contemporary debates in international law, Getachew speaks to a generation of scholars who have been busy rewriting the history of modern international law from postcolonial or contextualist perspectives, and adds important nuance to that body of scholarship in the process. By extrapolating insights of the path-breaking works of Antony Anghie, Matthew Craven, and Arnulf Becker Lorca into new temporal and cultural contexts, Getachew not only offers new and stunning evidence of how an international legal order premised on positivist principles could be recalibrated by means of a creative appropriation of international norms, but also how much the geopolitical and economic context mattered to those attempts at resistance. She thereby adds a welcome layer of empirical complexity to the understanding of international legal change. 11
By integrating many of the core concerns of contemporary international theory, global intellectual history, and international law into a coherent narrative of the emergence of the modern global order, Getachew’s work testifies to the many intellectual benefits that come from this confluence, and perhaps even to its indispensability to a vibrant and dynamic study of international relations.
The four contributors to the Forum raise important questions in dialogue with Getachew’s book. Jenna Marshall questions whether Getachew’s account downplays questions of class and gender, and whether in consequence, Getachew minimises the more subtle reinscriptions of hierarchy even during anticolonial struggles. Marshall also wonders whether Haiti should have been more central to the historical narrative. Sandipto Dasgupta interrogates the tension between regional particularity and universalism in Getachew’s account, and suggests that Getachew’s conclusions might be different if the history of the Black Atlantic were read more directly in the context of other anticolonial struggles. Lucia M. Rafanelli presses on the tensions between sovereignty and nondomination, and suggests the possibility of a cosmopolitanism both individualist and postcolonial – a combination that may have particular resonance for contemporary politics. Randolph B. Persaud argues that Getachew’s account would benefit from a clear engagement with Gramscian theories of hegemony, as this would lead to a different account of the relationship between local and global struggles. Getachew herself replies in a concluding piece.
