8.1 MAKING POLITICAL SOCIETY IN AN INTERNATIONAL AGE

For a long time, the assumption that the nation-state was the natural basis of the international political order dominated approaches to writing the history of twentieth-century decolonization.^{^[518]} Since the nation-state was understood as the inevitable end point, the central question to be asked was how colonies came to arrive at the position of being independent nation-states.

Until very recently, much writing about African independence and the post-colonial state in Africa followed this pattern. As for other parts of the post-colonial world, the history which tended to be written was either one in which decolonization was constituted by a simple transfer of power from colonial authority to post-colonial elite, or one in which the rise of nationalist movements and euphoria of independence was swiftly followed by disappointment, as post-colonial states proved unable to deliver the promises which had been made to their citizens or to assert themselves internationally. As Jeffrey Ahlman has recently written, ‘[t]he narrative that arose in these world regions was therefore one centered on not only the foundation of the twentiethcentury postcolonial nation-state, but, just as importantly, its political, economic, and civic demise'.^{^[519]} Held up against a model of the Westphalian state, African states were found wanting, and writing about post-colonial states has tended to focus on explaining their perceived weakness. For the authors of a recent handbook of African politics, for example, the central element of the post-colonial state in Africa which warranted explanation was precisely this weakness, evident both in states' inability to project their power internally and in their unequal position in the international system.^{^[520]}

As we have seen, the critical lesson that has often been drawn, both by scholars and in popular writing, was that the states which had been formed at independence were somehow unsuited to African realities.

Yet by the late twentieth century, it no longer seemed so obvious that the global triumph of the nation-state was permanent. The nation-state everywhere seemed to be under pressure from what was labelled ‘globalization', a catch-all term for a range of economic, political, legal and material challenges to the ability of nation-states to assert exclusive control over their territories. In this context, historians increasingly revisited their earlier assumptions about the naturalness of the nation-state and took up the question of why it was that, by the mid-twentieth century, it had come to be taken for granted as the core building block of international society.

One answer was to suggest that the globalization of the nation-state was a product of a history whereby ideas first developed by European jurists in the eighteenth century which envisaged an international order made up of free and equal independent states gradually attained global reach. The foundational text here is often taken to be Emer de Vattel's 1758 The Law of Nations, which redefined ‘independence' as a positive good.^{^[521]} The text travelled the world in the later eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.^{^[522]} For David Armitage, while it would be ‘anachronistic to see the origins of a world defined by states as early as 1648 and the Peace of Westphalia which is often held to have inaugurated a “Westphalian order” of mutually acknowledged independent states', he argues that ‘it is not inappropriate to see events of the late eighteenth-century and early nineteenth-century Atlantic world as an anticipation of what would come to much of the rest of the globe 200 years later'.^{^[523]}

The relative uniformity of political languages about states and sovereignty over a long period and across a wide geographical range is certainly superficially striking. As David Armitage has shown, the very words which had been used to claim independence in eighteenth-century America were translated and redeployed to similar ends by anti-colonial nationalists across the world in the twentieth century.

Yet the words of the American Declaration of Independence meant very different things in 1940s Indonesia or 1950s Tanganyika to what they had meant in 1770s America, as did understandings of the nature of the international order which those advocating independence sought to join. We should therefore resist the temptation to see the world that emerged in the mid-twentieth century as nothing but the final realization of a process which had begun much earlier, and should think more carefully about the specific context in which mid-twentieth-century arguments for independence were made.

At the same time, focusing only on how we came to live in a world of states obscures a much messier historical reality in which the jurisdiction of states has always coexisted with other sorts of authority. Modern colonial states sought to confine their subjects within individual territories and within empires. Empires were ruled in a way which differentiated between different categories of colonial subjects and, crucially, imperial governors insisted on their right to determine who could possess which rights within their jurisdiction.^{^[524]} This they claimed on the basis of a model of statehood which defined statehood in terms of the ability to reject external interference in internal affairs.

Yet the insistence of colonial powers on the rejection of external interference was always a rhetorical claim more than settled fact. As Lauren Benton and Lisa Ford have emphasized, the ability of colonial states to maintain exclusive jurisdiction over those living within their borders was constantly challenged in practice by the movement of peoples across the world, and by the multiple allegiances held both by peoples on the move and those who might not move physically but were nevertheless part of religious, ethnic, national or racial communities which transcended the borders of states and empires.^{^[525]} In the nineteenth century, the porousness of the internal and the external often served to extend the reach of empires. In the twentieth century, it also served as a means of challenging them.

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Source: Brett Annabel, Donaldson Megan. History, Politics, Law: Thinking through the International Cambridge University Press,2021. — 450 p.. 2021

8.1 MAKING POLITICAL SOCIETY IN AN INTERNATIONAL AGE

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