Empires,nations,peoples

Looking back at Bandung

In order to situate in a longer historical perspective the relation today between empires and nations, I wish to begin by recalling a high point in the global history of anti-colonial nationalism. Speaking at the opening of the conference of Asian-African nations in Bandung in 1955, four years before Fidel Castro’s triumphant entry into Havana, President Ahmed Sukarno of Indonesia said: ‘We are often told “Colonialism is dead.” Let us not be deceived or even soothed by that. I say to you, colonialism is not yet dead.’ He went on to elaborate:

I beg of you, do not think of colonialism only in the classic form which we of Indonesia, and our brothers in different parts of Asia and Africa, knew. Colonialism has also its modern dress, in the form of economic control, intellectual control, actual physical control by a small but alien community within a nation. It is a skilful and determined enemy, and it appears in many guises. It does not give up its loot easily. Wherever, whenever and however it appears, colonialism is an evil thing, and one which must be eradicated from the earth. (AES, 1955: 19–29)

On the economic side, the Bandung conference stressed the need for economic development of the countries of Asia and Africa. ‘Development’ was, of course, a concept very much in vogue at the time, and along with it the idea of planned industrialization through the active intervention of the nation-state. The conference resolution shows that most countries in the region saw themselves mainly as exporters of primary commodities and importers of industrial products. This condition has substantially changed, at least for the countries of Asia. While large pockets of subsistence agriculture and poverty still remain in many countries, the main economic dynamic is now a rapidly growing, principally capitalist, modern industrial manufacturing sector that is quite diversified in its products and use of technology and that supports the growth of modern financial, educational and other tertiary sectors. Like capitalist growth in earlier historical periods, the recent growth in Asian economies is accompanied by the massive dissociation of primary producers from their means of production. What must be emphasized, however, is that this transformation has been brought about everywhere in Asia, not only in China or India but also in South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, Thailand, Malaysia or Indonesia, by the direct, systematic and active intervention of the postcolonial nation-state and its political leadership.

But the economy is also the one respect in which the historical trajectory in Asia seems to have diverged enormously in the last half a century from that in Africa. Sub-Saharan Africa today has become, in the popular media, synonymous with poverty, a blot on the conscience of the world, the last place where absolute poverty is not yet on the way to eradication. On the other hand, it is hardly insignificant that of the key players at Bandung 60 years ago, China, India, Indonesia, Malaysia and Singapore are now regular invitees to summit meetings of the world’s most powerful economies. That is a dramatic measure of how much the world has changed since 1955. No one talks of an Afro-Asian economic world any more.

On the political side, the main discussions at the conference were on the subject of human rights. It is particularly interesting to re-read these discussions today because they show how radically the context as well as the framework of debate on this subject has changed. In 1955 at Bandung, no one had any doubt about the principal problem of human rights in the world: it was the continued existence of colonialism and racial discrimination that stood in the way of human rights. The economically advanced and, for the most part, democratic countries of Europe (in addition to Spain and Portugal, which were under the dictatorships of Franco and Salazar) were the principal violators of human rights on a global scale. There was also little doubt about the chief instrument by which human rights were to be established: it was the principle of self-determination of peoples and nations. That was the principle the United Nations had enshrined. The leaders assembled at Bandung declared that the UN charter and declarations had created ‘a common standard of achievement for all peoples and nations’ (Appadurai, 1955: 8). Accordingly, the conference supported the rights of the Arab people of Palestine. It called for the end to racial segregation and discrimination in Africa. It supported the rights of the peoples of Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia to self-determination. It called for the admission to the United Nations of Japan, Ceylon, Nepal, Jordan, Libya, Laos, Cambodia and a united Vietnam.

Further, the Bandung conference reaffirmed the five principles of promotion of world peace, namely, mutual respect of all nations for their sovereignty and territorial integrity, non-aggression, non-interference in internal affairs, equality and mutual benefit, and peaceful coexistence. Amplifying on these principles, the conference affirmed the right of each nation to defend itself singly or collectively, but warned that arrangements for collective defense must not be used to serve the particular interests of the big powers. This statement is significant because among the participant countries at Bandung were Turkey, the Philippines and Pakistan, which had just concluded defense pacts with the United States, and China, which, of course, was then a major ally of the Soviet Union.

Looking back, it seems clear that in the two decades following the end of the Second World War the nation-state was established as the normal form of the state everywhere in the world. The normative idea was unequivocally endorsed by the principle of self-determination of peoples and nations. The fact that the norm had not been fully realized was pointed out as a shortcoming, something that had to be overcome. It presented to the peoples of Asian and African countries an object of struggle, a goal that had complete moral legitimacy. It also provided a criterion for identifying the enemy: the enemy was colonialism, the practices of racial superiority and the lingering fantasies of world domination by the old imperial powers. Indeed, anti-colonial nationalism was built on the premise that there were oppressor and oppressed nations.

As a matter of fact, the key normative concepts animating the struggles of anti-colonial nationalism were those of liberty and equality, but as rights claimed collectively by peoples. It is the idea of popular sovereignty as the only legitimate foundation of the modern state that was resoundingly confirmed at Bandung. This explains the overwhelming emphasis that was put on human rights as claims against racism and colonial rule. It also points to the massive shift that has occurred from the 1980s in evacuating human rights of their collective dimension and reducing them to the strictly liberal confines of individual rights.

The persistence of nation-states

How are things different today? There are still a few places where ‘national liberation’ remains an emotive object of political struggle. Perhaps the most intractable as well as the most justified of such national struggles has been that of the Palestinian people, but the reason why Palestinians do not yet have a state of their own is not because the principle of national self-determination is difficult to apply to their case but because every suggested solution has been blocked by one or the other big power having crucial strategic interests in the region. In this sense, the Palestinian case is somewhat unique. But the Kashmir question too has remained unresolved for almost 70 years. There is the question of the Kurds, a people whose claims as a nationality have, once again for unique reasons of colonial history, never been sufficiently recognized in the international arena. There has been a lot of bloodshed and bitterness in many of the regions of the former Soviet Union and former Yugoslavia over contending ‘national’ claims. Such identities and claims had been successfully contained for several decades within a complex, and authoritarian, federal structure of socialist government. With the collapse of the socialist regimes, the container appears to have shattered into pieces. But all of these examples of unresolved claims of national self-determination can be understood as remnants of an older order in which the nation-state had become the universal norm in the second half of the 20th century.

Proposals for a post-national order, of which the European Union was supposed to be a working model, were made with much fanfare until quite recently (Habermas, 2001: 58–112; Archibughi, 2003). Before we proceed to discuss the renewed wave of populist nationalism that is now sweeping Europe and the United States and seriously threatening such post-national imaginings, we should first look more closely at the structural changes that have been brought about in the global economy since the 1980s.

First, significant changes occurred in the structure of capitalist production and exchange in the last two decades of the 20th century. The most common name for this phenomenon is globalization. Superficially, this refers to the huge increases in international trade and flows of capital, in the movement of people across national borders and in the spread of information and images enabled by the new communications technology. It has been pointed out, of course, that as far as trade, export of capital and migration are concerned, the two decades before the First World War saw an equal if not higher degree of globalization. But the period from the 1920s to the 1970s, which is the period of consolidation of both the nation-state and the modern national economy, clearly produced a world-wide grid of economic activities defined over nation-states. Compared to the middle decades of the 20th century, therefore, the changes in the last two decades were dramatic.

However, what changed decisively in the last two decades of the 20th century was the emergence of a new mode of flexible production and accumulation and the rapid expansion of the international financial market. New developments in communications technology allowed for innovations in the management of production that could now disperse different components of the production process away from the centralized factory to smaller production and service units often located in different parts of the world and sometimes even in the informal household sector: significantly lower wage rates in those countries kept the products of western manufacturing companies competitive. Alongside this there was a huge rise in the speculative investment of capital in the international markets for stocks, bonds and currencies. These two developments jointly provided the basic economic push away from the old model of national economic autarky to one where global networks are acknowledged as exercising considerable power over national economies. It has meant that the emerging economies of Asia and Latin America have become the sites for rapid growth of industrial manufacturing, fueled by exports to the traditional capitalist economies of North America and Europe, while the latter have sought to profit from global financial speculation and a disorganized working class at home kept quiet by the import of cheap consumer goods.

While anti-colonial nationalism won its victories and created new postcolonial states in the second half of the 20th century, the old imperial powers also changed their global political strategies. The process of economic and strategic control over foreign territories and productive resources was transformed from the old methods of conquest and occupation to the new ones of informal power exercised through diplomatic influence, economic incentives and treaty obligations. A debate that was always part of the 19th-century discourse of imperialism – direct rule or informal control – was decisively resolved in favor of the latter option.

Did globalization at the end of the 20th century change the conditions of that choice? The celebratory literature on globalization in the 1990s argued that the removal of trade barriers imposed by national governments, greater mobility of people and the cultural impact of global information flows would make for conditions in which there would be a general desire all over the world for democratic forms of government and greater democratic values in social life. Free markets were expected to promote ‘free societies’. It was assumed, therefore, as an extension of the fundamental liberal idea, that in spite of differences in economic and military power, there would be respect for the autonomy of governments and peoples around the world precisely because everyone was committed to the free and unrestricted flow of capital, goods, peoples and ideas. Colonies and empires were clearly antithetical to this liberal ideal of the globalized world.

However, there was a second line of argument that was also an important part of the globalization literature of the 1990s. This argument insisted that because of the new global conditions, it was not only possible but also necessary for the international community to use its power to protect human rights and promote democratic values in countries under despotic and authoritarian rule. There could be no absolute protection afforded by the principle of national sovereignty to tyrannical regimes. Of course, the international community had to act through a legitimate international body such as the United Nations. Since this would imply a democratic consensus among the nations of the world (or at least a large number of them), international humanitarian intervention of this kind to protect human rights or prevent violence and oppression would not be imperial or colonial.

The two lines of argument, both advanced within the discourse of liberal globalization, implied a contradiction. At one extreme, one could argue that democratic norms in international affairs meant that national sovereignty was inviolable except when there was a clear international consensus in favor of humanitarian intervention; anything less would be akin to imperialist meddling. At the other extreme, the argument might be that globalization had made national sovereignty an outdated concept. The requirements of peace-keeping now made it necessary for there to be something like an empire without a sovereign metropolitan center: a virtual empire representing an immanent global sovereignty. There would be no more wars, only police action (Hardt and Negri, 2000).

Even though there was a certain weight of opinion in western countries in the 1980s and 1990s in favor of armed humanitarian intervention, the disastrous results of the wars in Iraq, Libya, Syria and Yemen have taken all credibility away from the argument. Despite the rhetoric of a so-called global war on terror, the policies of the western governments in pursuing these wars are perfectly explicable in terms of fairly old-fashioned calculations of ensuring national security and furthering national interests. Much of the resistance to US unilateralism, taking numerous forms from the diplomatic to the insurgent and cutting across ideological divides, also adopted the old logic of protecting the sovereign sphere of national power. Not only that, the recent wave of populist movements in Europe and the United States aimed against the economic and demographic consequences of globalization is demanding a return to national autarky. The only exception to this tendency is the resistance posed by militant Islamist groups such as Al Qaida and Dayesh which reject the nation-state form and call for the establishment of an Islamic Caliphate. The question we must ask, then, is: how are we to understand the relation between nation-state and empire today? If nations and empires were declared to be incompatible 60 years ago at Bandung, has that assessment changed?

Empire is immanent in the modern nation

I wish to propose a general definition of empire that does not tie it with annexation and occupation of foreign territories and, therefore, is able to capture the new forms of indirect and informal control that have become common in recent decades. The imperial prerogative, I suggest, is the power to declare the colonial exception.

The conceptual apparatus for thinking about modern empire was created in the 19th century, principally by English utilitarians such as Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill, who declared that all governments everywhere were comparable according to certain common measures. The laws and governments of all societies could be normalized. The norm acquired two senses – one, the norm as the empirically prevailing average (the statistical mean, for instance), and the other, the norm as the desirable standard (in the sense of the normative). Any country could be ranked in relation to the empirical global norm by measuring its empirical deviation, according to some common measure such as per capita gross domestic product or rate of infant mortality or female literacy, from the global mean. The country could then be evaluated normatively against the desirable global standard which would be set by the most advanced countries according to the selected measure. The comparison between the empirical and normative registers opens up a field of policy intervention. An empirical determination of inferiority in terms of infant mortality could be attributed to a cultural factor such as early marriage or resistance to vaccination. The policy intervention by an external power could then insist on measures to raise the age of marriage of women or aggressive methods of vaccination, by superseding customary or religious practices, if necessary. This could mean suspending governmental standards that would otherwise be considered universally desirable. In other words, the policy intervention would require declaring for that country a colonial exception to the universal rule. The most famous declaration of such an exception in liberal political theory was John Stuart Mill’s demonstration of the universal normative validity of representative government as the best form of government with the necessary caveat that it could not apply to dependencies such as Ireland or India which were best governed, for the time being, by paternal despotism. ¹

Declaring an exception, within the framework of normalization, immediately implies a pedagogical project. The imperial power must then take on the responsibility of educating, disciplining and training the colony in order to bring it up to the norm. There have been in history only two forms of imperial pedagogy – a pedagogy of violence and a pedagogy of culture. The colony must either be disciplined by force or educated (‘civilized’) by culture. The history of modern empires is largely about the combination, sequence and degree of application of these two pedagogical techniques. We have seen both of these forms in recent times, long after the era of decolonization and Bandung.

Formal equality of status among sovereign nation-states constitutes the normative foundation of international practice today. But using common measures of comparison has made the two senses of the norm part of the ordinary and globally circulating common sense of international affairs. Inter-state comparisons on a wide variety of economic, political and social indicators are now commonplace, not only in the discourse of experts but in ordinary public discussion. But, just as inequality of incomes is not in itself a violation of the right of equal citizenship in the modern state, so also inequality between nation-states is not in itself evidence of imperial domination by one or some nations over others. Thus, the empirical deviation in the position of a state from the average or normal measure according to some economic or social indicator (such as poverty rates or food shortages or infant mortality) is not by itself a sign that its sovereignty is either respected or violated by other states. The exercise of power over the sovereignty of states occurs when a connection is established between the empirical and the normative registers. That is when the empirical deviation is made the ground for declaring that the normative standard of relations between formally equal sovereign states must be suspended in a particular case and the nation-state in question be declared an exception.

It is interesting, of course, that it was precisely in the second half of the 19th century, when imperialism became an explicitly avowed policy objective of every recognized or aspiring great power and the moral rhetoric of civilizing liberalism became somewhat unfashionable, that the language of realpolitik came to dominate the fields of foreign and colonial policy. But realist policies too required moral justification, even if it was only to assert that imperial interventions and acquisitions were in the ‘national interest’, that is, good for the metropolitan nation as a whole. Not surprisingly therefore, the late 19th century was also when systematic critiques of empire were produced claiming to show that those policies were in fact in the interests of only some classes, whether feudal aristocrats or capitalist manufacturers or financial oligarchs, and against the interests of the many. Thus, alongside nationalist critiques of empire that became increasingly loud in the colonial world in the 20th century, there also emerged more complex critiques, such as those by Marxists, which connected class divisions in both metropolitan and colonial countries with imperialist and anti-imperialist politics.

Empire and nation today

These theories of imperialism that were much in vogue in the 1960s and 1970s have been made obsolete by the ability of the capitalist order to adapt, and indeed restructure, itself in order to cope with the crises that have dotted its history. It is true that the era of globalization has seen the undermining of national sovereignty in crucial areas of foreign trade, property and contract laws and technologies of governance. There is overwhelming pressure towards uniformity of regulations and procedures in these areas, overseen, needless to say, by the major economic powers through new international economic institutions. It is also evident that the close connectedness of national economies through massive volumes of foreign trade and the interlocking of financial markets across the world have made the performance of individual economies and the policies of individual national governments a matter of global concern. Can one then presume that there exists something like a global agency of capital with its distinct interests acting through a consensus of views among at least the major capitalist powers? Or is there competition and conflict among the great powers, not unlike the situation before the First World War, where international interventions of various kinds on the lesser powers are both common and legitimate? The answer, I suggest, lies in the variable and uncertain overlap between the economic and geo-political interests of the four important power blocs today – the United States and Britain, the major powers of Europe, China, and Russia – all of them now fully integrated into the global circuits of capitalist production and exchange.

The situation has become even more uncertain following the global financial crisis of 2008. The principal dynamic that drove consumption and growth in the world economy since the 1990s was provided by the predatory movements of speculative finance capital. The crisis resulted in recession and fears of large-scale unemployment in the advanced western economies and severe slowdown in growth in large developing economies dependent on exports to western countries. While the western countries have resumed a path of sluggish growth, the benefits have been distributed very unequally – those with higher education and skills enjoy better incomes, low-skilled jobs are performed by low-paid immigrant laborers, while the old working class, once used to middle-class comforts, have been left out in the cold. Faced with these contradictory pressures, there is now a resurgence in the sentiments of national autarky in many countries of Europe and in the United States.

This is the situation in which, I suggest, my general definition of the imperial prerogative as the power to declare the colonial exception is useful. Without discounting the specific and variable economic or geopolitical conditions that may sustain that prerogative, the definition grounds imperial practices on the political plane of national sovereignty. Equal rights of sovereignty constitute the norm. But exceptions are both plentiful and various. One exception is enshrined in the Security Council of the United Nations, which has five permanent members with veto power. The realist justification for this is that no collective security measure could be realistically expected to succeed if all the major powers of the world were not in agreement. But, of course, it is a justification that is perfectly in line with many realist justifications in history of the imperial privilege that claims more than is entailed by equal rights of sovereignty. A plethora of exceptional practices surround the place of Israel as the most recent European settler colony in Asia and the corresponding denial of the political rights of sovereign nationhood promised to Palestinians by the League of Nations mandate (every other mandated territory is now an independent nation-state and member of the United Nations). To take another example, everyone agrees that nuclear proliferation is dangerous and should be stopped. But who decides that India may be allowed to have nuclear weapons, and also Israel, and even Pakistan, but not North Korea or Iran? We all know that there are many brutally repressive regimes that are also sources of international terrorism, but who decides that it is not Saudi Arabia or Pakistan but the regime of Saddam Hussein in Iraq or Gaddafi in Libya that must be overthrown by force? American drones may be sent in to strike terrorist targets in Pakistan or Yemen without the willing approval of those states, but such action would be inconceivable if the terrorist targets were in, say, Russia or Spain. Public outrage over an oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico will induce the United States to demand that BP pay several billions of dollars to clean up the mess, while it would use diplomatic pressure, with the covert connivance of those in power in India, to ensure that Union Carbide pay no more than $2000 for each of some twenty thousand persons killed in Bhopal in 1984 in the worst industrial disaster in history. Those who claim to decide on the exception do indeed arrogate to themselves the imperial prerogative.

Speaking of economic prerogatives, special concessions or privileges not given to other states, if extracted under diplomatic pressure in a situation where the nation-state concerned would not otherwise have granted it, would be an example of the use of the imperial prerogative. Free trade is not necessarily characteristic of imperial domination, but it would be if it forcibly precludes a nation-state from imposing protective tariffs or restrictions on foreign capital if it wanted to. Insisting on spending cuts or administrative reforms as conditions for an international recovery package for Greece, even in the face of a popular vote by its citizens not to accept such conditions, need not mean the declaring of a colonial exception, but it would if the same conditions were not applied, let us say, to Italy when its debt situation is no better than the Greek. The criterion is, in all cases, the normative set of practices that apply between states that recognize one another’s sovereignty as equal. Deviations from that norm are the marks of imperial practices of power.

I should add that with the evident decline of US unilateral power, it is entirely conceivable that the imperial prerogative may now be shared among several big powers. There could well emerge regional hegemons claiming to declare the colonial exception within their own spheres of influence and seeking to discipline deviant states by the instruments of violence and pedagogy. China is poised to do so in Asia; Russia is doing it in Eastern Europe and the Middle East; and Germany has flexed its imperial financial muscles in the European Union. And there is no reason to believe that a postcolonial democracy such as India would not harbor ambitions of playing such an imperial role, just as democracies of the 19th century had done. That would resemble in some ways a structure of international politics familiar in the imperial age of balance of power in the 19th century.

Finally, there is one more possibility we need to worry about. The asymmetry between the economic troubles of the western powers and their overwhelming military superiority could open the field for a populist resurgence of imperialism, not unlike what was seen in the late 19th century. The economic decline of the once-privileged is fertile ground for the ugly display of naked power. There are signs already of a growing populist politics in the United States and Western Europe seeking to defend the global privileges of the core body of citizens of those countries against the assertions of lesser powers and the intrusions of alien immigrants. That form of politics could claim increasing resort to pre-emptive strikes, overthrow of regimes and military occupation of other countries. In that case, we would see, within the general political definition of the imperial prerogative, the use of imperial practices that were once quite ubiquitous but, in the wake of decolonization, rendered only temporarily obsolete.

The imperial prerogative to declare the exception has implied, ever since the 19th century, a range of alternative practices – from diplomatic pressure to secure differential concessions that would not otherwise be given, to the forcible occupation and annexation of territory. It is salutary to remember that all of those options remain open today, even though some are used more often than others. Just as we continue to live in the age of nation-states, so have we not transcended the age of empire.

Nationalism and populism

A discussion on empire and nation today would be greatly deficient if we do not relate it to the question of ethnic or identity politics. I think it is possible to do this by considering the governmentalization of the functions of the contemporary nation-state and the ground it creates for the politics of populism. In my earlier work, I have pointed out the distinction between the homogeneous conception of the nation based on undivided popular sovereignty and the heterogeneous conception of the social based on a congeries of populations. The connection between the two is established by contemporary political regimes through the instruments of governmentality (Chatterjee, 2004: 27–41; see also Chatterjee, 2011). One of the key features of modern governmental techniques is the flexibility they provide in the domain of policy – the ability to break up large agglomerations of demands and isolate specific groups of benefit-seekers from others. This, we could say following Ernesto Laclau, is the differential mode of responding to democratic demands. The techniques proved very successful in demobilizing the mass social bases of support of social-democratic and working-class parties in western countries in the last decades of the 20th century. But the politics of the governed has taken other forms in contemporary nation-states. It has sought to establish equivalences among various democratic demands and to bring them together into the form of a popular claim. It does this, Laclau says, through rhetorical and performative political acts that establish chains of equivalence over different demands. There is frequently no common substantive content to these equivalences; that is to say, it is not necessary for the various demands to substantively overlap with one another in order to assert their equivalence. Rather, the relation of equivalence is derived from the negative fact that they are all unfulfilled demands directed at an unresponsive governmental authority. Thus, the recent upsurge in Britain for withdrawing from the European Union or the victory of Donald Trump in the United States may be attributed to chains of equivalence that were successfully established between the varied demands of an entire range of population groups, all opposed to what was seen as the elite political establishment. It is already becoming evident in both countries that, apart from the perception of a common enemy, there was little substantive overlap between the different demands.

This rhetorical-performative operation in turn produces the second condition for effective populism, namely, the creation of an internal antagonistic border separating ‘the people’ from those identified with the institutions of power. As the chain of equivalences builds up into the form of a common popular demand, the commonness comes to be emphasized by the fact that the demands are all aimed at a common target, namely, the wielders of power, and is exemplified by the identification of such agents of power as the antagonists of the people. In the recent history of populist politics around the world, this internal antagonistic division has been drawn along lines of class or ethnicity or identification with a political regime or party.

Laclau emphasizes that the negative content of the relations of equivalence produces a vague and imprecise articulation of demands and that the assertion of ‘the people’ as the outcome of the chain of equivalences is indeed in the nature of an empty signifier. But that is precisely the strength of populism as a form of democratic politics. ‘The “people”, in this case, is something less than the members of the community: it is a partial component which nevertheless aspires to be conceived as the only legitimate totality’ (Laclau, 2003: 81). Not only that, the partial character of the notion of ‘the people’ may in fact produce the sense, even within the populist movement, of a deficient community – deficient because of the failures of the agents of power – and could project ‘the people’ as a fullness to be achieved as the horizon of political possibility rather than as its immediate ground. This is what frequently produces the affective force that congeals and pushes forward a populist movement based on an apparently transitory mobilization of diverse, ill-assorted and partial social components. The basic condition is that despite their utmost sophistication, the technologies of modern governmentality can never satisfy all differential demands that arise in a heterogeneous social space. Precisely, therefore, populism has emerged as an effective form of contemporary democratic politics within the nation-state.

But just as Marxists once distinguished between the historical significance of nationalism in advanced capitalist countries where it was imperialist and socially reactionary and that in colonial countries, where it could be anti-imperialist and socially progressive, it is possible to distinguish between different kinds of populism today. The populist nationalisms spreading across western countries today look back nostalgically on an age when they ruled the world and enjoyed mass prosperity at home. The populists there see their enemy in a globalized elite collaborating with foreign powers to skim off the profits of its control of global finance, enrich a small, privileged middle class and keep wages low by bring in immigrant labor. This populism is reactionary in every sense, seeking to return to a state of the world that is irretrievably lost. Its every move is hateful and destructive.

In the postcolonial world, the situation is quite different. Unlike the pure moment of promise when the new nation-states were born after the Second World War out of successful anti-colonial struggles, the contemporary postcolonial nation-states cannot avoid becoming entangled with the heterogeneous demands of ethnic identities. The ruling groups try desperately to keep these demands apart. But populist mobilizations often succeed in establishing the chains of equivalence that create the image of a people unjustly oppressed by the rulers. In such a situation, populist politics under a charismatic leader could often become the principal vehicle for masses of poor people to claim governmental support for their livelihood and well-being. On the other hand, populism could also become a state ideology justifying authoritarian regimes that claim to fight internal and external ‘enemies of the people’. Both possibilities are equally prevalent today in the postcolonial world.

Faced with the palpable, and often horrendous, failures of the postcolonial state, many have turned to imagining the possibility of a more benign empire where liberal colonized elites might share power with an enlightened imperial authority. Historians have thus begun to look afresh at proposals floated in the middle of the 20th century for imperial citizenship and shared sovereignty – proposals that were swept aside by the tidal wave of popular anti-colonial nationalism (Cooper, 2014; Wilder, 2015). Against such imaginings, my view is that because of a lasting legacy of Bandung and the history of decolonization, no future global order can be built by simply negating the historical achievements of popular anti-colonial nationalism.

Talking of Bandung and what it might mean to us today, I wish to end with one more quote from President Sukarno at the 1955 conference. ‘We are living in a world of fear’, he said. ‘The life of man today is corroded and made bitter by fear. Fear of the future, fear of the hydrogen bomb, fear of ideologies. Perhaps this fear is a greater danger than the danger itself, because it is fear which drives men to act foolishly, to act thoughtlessly, to act dangerously’ (AES, 1955: 19–20). It is not clear from his speech who specifically Sukarno thought might act foolishly out of fear. But speaking of our situation today, we hear daily of angry men from ordinary backgrounds with little power who choose to act dangerously out of fear and resentment. And we often forget how much more thoughtless and dangerous people in power can be when, driven by fear, they choose to arrogate to themselves the prerogative of declaring the colonial exception. The nation-state may not be at its healthy best any more, but empire too is certainly not dead.

That is a thought that occurs to me as I write this – just a few days after the death of Fidel Castro.