Worldmaking After Empire: The Rise and Fall of Self-Determination

"The book, as you mentioned, studies the global projects of decolonization spearheaded by black Anglophone, anti-colonial critics and nationalists after World War II . The really important part to note here is ‘global projects’. When we think of decolonization, we often think of it in national terms: a series of individual nation-building projects, which cumulatively bring an end to colonialism. And, colonialism itself is understood as a series of bilateral relations of direct domination by one state over another people. What Getachew does through her archival work is argue that we should, instead, see decolonization or decolonial nationalism as attempts at world-making. Attempts to reinvent institutions globally: juridical institutions, political institutions, and economic institutions that would enable the achievement of genuine self-determination, understood as non-domination. “We can understand decolonisation, the attempt to dismantle the colonial world, as simultaneously an attempt to build a new one in its place” Getachew thinks this is a valuable thing to do because we often now think of nationalism as this kind of parochial, anti-universal thing. And there are lots of examples of when and where that is true. But the archives and the thought that Getachew is working with show a very different attempt at understanding and instituting nationalist projects that sought, certainly in the beginning, to be anti-parochial, to be universal. They ultimately failed for a number of reasons, but they, in many ways, prefigure many of the questions and debates we’re having now about global justice in a political and economic sense. So, the term ‘anti-colonial worldmaking’ is exactly what it implies. If European imperialism and colonialism was world-constituting, in the sense that it made a particular kind of world, then we can understand decolonisation, the attempt to dismantle that world, as simultaneously an attempt to build a new one in its place. And, for the people that Getachew is studying, a new world order required more than simply the formal independence of colonies. It required that relations of economic dependence and inequalities of power between newly-independent states be dismantled, and that new political and economic institutions to foster this new non-dominating system be instituted. This history isn’t one that is usually taught to students of international relations, certainly when they first start. Political discourse now is full of references to challenges to the post-World War II order, usually in the form of the rise of China . But the post-World War II order itself was the subject of fierce debate and disagreement. For the European states, the dominant frame of reference for refashioning the world was World War II. For colonised peoples, it was colonialism. What it meant to remake the world, post-World War II, differed depending on where and who you were. So, I see this book more as a recovery of a history that isn’t often taught to our students."

"Of all my five books, I think this mentions the Non-Aligned Movement the least. It may even be only in half a page. But, nevertheless, the book is really important to our discussion because what she does is develop this notion of what she calls ‘counter-hegemonic world making’. Now that might sound pretentious and academic, but actually, it’s profoundly important because she breaks away from the idea that there was one kind of globalization and that that was the dominance of neo-liberalism and that’s how the world was made. What she does, largely through looking at the struggle for African self-determination, is argue that there are other prior ideas of how a world should look. So, the book is really criticizing the idea that this moment of de-colonial self-determination was essentially a nationalist moment. She argues beautifully that it was always internationalist and transnationalist, that it always had a sense that the nation state was important, but not the only important element of how you come to subjectivity on the world stage. She gives examples of pan-Africanism, particularly, but then the development of regionalism, the still current idea of a Caribbean unity, and the idea of the New International Economic Order. And what she does beautifully is to link this to its intellectual antecedents. So, she looks at the way in which Michael Manley, and Julius Nyerere had a very different kind of set of economic understandings than even Nkrumah, the president of Ghana. The New International Economic Order was about a collective self-reliance. It’s a beautiful contradiction, a beautiful oxymoron. But when you bring it together, it means we can’t wait for a new global consensus, because that will never happen. We need to build a new world order, which is about us cooperating amongst ourselves, and determining that we actually are not going to be subordinate to Western rules of the game. The oil crisis made that both more possible and more difficult. It made it more possible because it showed what could happen if a group of commodity producers got together—you can change the terms of trade. At the same time, it happened with oil, but it didn’t happen with coffee or copper and so on. And suddenly, even within the Non-Aligned Movement, you have the oil producers getting richer and the oil consumers in the Non-Aligned Movement getting poorer. Tito hoped that there would be an establishment of a Non-Aligned Bank. It never happened. When Yugoslavia was indebted, he hoped that the oil rich countries would bail them out, but that didn’t happen either. But what Adom’s book beautifully does is trace the intellectual histories, and the relevance of these intellectual histories to a politics of self-determination. For me it’s one of the most important books of the last five years. She really started looking at international law, but she’s gone into areas that are of importance in economics, and in terms of social welfare. She revisits the idea of whether you can have a global welfare state. It is such a rich and important book. I’m a sociologist, not a historian, but I think that evaluating it in terms of success or failure is perhaps not the right way to go. But there are certain phrases I keep using—afterlives, legacies, really important principles that we keep having to return to—and some of those are around, like the right to self-determination. I think there’s also the idea—although it didn’t fully succeed—of what the UN could look like, if you let it reflect the world rather than superpower hegemony. I think there are some really important social and economic ideas. And there’s a real idea of what non-alignment from below could achieve in terms of those circuits of de-colonial affinity. It was much more than just a talking shop. It may have been successful only insofar as it forced the hegemons to get more serious about imposing their hegemony. In a way, the articulation of a different voice that did not want to become a bloc, but was critical of those two blocs, actually made the importance of instigating a new world order that was neo-liberal even more important for the global hegemons. But we can certainly go back to the Non-Aligned Movement in its heyday, which for me is the 1970s, and we can find ideas that can be used for progressive internationalism now. When I started thinking about the book, and working with the Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung on bringing people together for a workshop , I was suddenly aware that there was a new group of people working on non-alignment, and particularly working on socialist Yugoslavia, or Yugoslavia in a global position. Because in the 1990s, and for much of the early 2000s, it was forgotten in public discourse, but also in academic discourse. So the idea was to make socialist Yugoslavia the centre of attention. Later, I wrote a text critical of Yugocentrism, you know, because we need other studies that don’t make Yugoslavia the centre . But it was very much the idea to bring together people that were looking at different themes. So, the book addresses the social, the political, the economic, and the cultural. We’re looking in different ways, using different genres, different styles, and coming to different conclusions. It brings together 15 people of different generations, many from the region, but not all. And it tries to be greater than the sum of its parts. I keep saying: this was a collective, not just a collection. And I’m really rather pleased with how many of the themes in the book are now things that are spinning off for the authors, for myself, and for other people, and the growth of scholarship produced. The growth of interest in this is very important. It comes out at the latest in January 2023 . And I’m hoping to use it very much as a dialogue to think about how we might see the Non-Aligned Movement from a number of very different angles."