This is a book about history: the ‘historical turn' in international law on the one hand, and the ‘international turn' in the history of political thought on the other.

Yet the arguments explored here matter not just because they change the way we understand the past, but because our readings of the past are fundamental to all critical perspectives on the present and the future.

According to a dominant narrative, both popular and scholarly, the states which were established in mid-twentieth-century Africa were imposed from outside. Basil Davidson's description of the state in Africa in his book The Black Man's Burden as an ‘alien' imposition which has never fully taken root has struck a powerful chord.^[506] Decolonization and independence, for Davidson, did not constitute ‘a restoration to Africa of Africa's own history, but the onset of a new period of indirect subjection to the history of Europe'.^[507] In this perspective, decolonization was characterized by continuity as much as change, as ‘[t]he fifty or so states of the colonial partition, each formed and governed as though their peoples possessed no history of their own, became fifty or so nation-states formed and governed on European models, chiefly the models of Britain and France'.^[508]

Recent histories of international law adopt a similar framework in which the independence of most African countries in the mid-twentieth century appears as a powerful illustration of a pattern in which, far from marking the dramatic transformation for which nationalist leaders had hoped, independence from colonial rule in the 1960s saw the imposition of Western forms of political organization on non-Western societies, and made little difference to the global political order established under imperialism. Siba N'Zatioula Grovogui, echoing older arguments about the limits of mere ‘flag' independence, under­stands decolonization to have been a missed opportunity to ‘fully restore African sovereignty and self-determination'.^[509] Instead power was simply trans­ferred from departing colonial elites to their chosen successors who ‘appropri­ated Western political and juridical idioms, which they attempted to adapt to their own struggle'.^[510]

For Grovogui, this is not simply a state of affairs to be accepted.

This is a powerful call to arms. It rests, however, on a particular historical view of independence: as something that was done to Africa from outside, and in which international society acts upon Africa as an external force. It sets up a normative model of statehood which African states are seen as having failed to attain.^[512] As such, while it speaks to a broad truth about the continuation of colonial boundaries after independence, it somewhat jars with our developing understanding of the political thought of decolonization from the perspective of the African intellectuals and politicians who sought to create new political societies in the mid-twentieth century, and of the place of the international in their political thinking. As this chapter will show, the building of new states went hand in hand with new formulations of international society.

The growing body of work on the political thought of decolonization takes as its starting point the need to decentre the nation-state, both in our assump­tions about the possibilities open to contemporary actors and in our own analysis. Doing so first means situating the arguments for independent state­hood in context, but there are different ways in which this has been done. In this chapter, I shall first briefly set out the problems with a view of independence as characterized simply by the export of a modular form of statehood, and argue that by starting from local spatial and temporal contexts we can better see the ways in which a homology of language masked locally specific arguments over what sort of state should be created.

I shall then turn to consider the place of the international in this story. The history of international political thought can be understood as the history of how people in the past increasingly came, in David Armitage's words, ‘to imagine that we inhabit a world of states'.^[513] But the focus on states as the building blocks of international society has often obscured the fact that people have never imagined that they live only in a world of states. In the past as in the present, people have considered themselves not only to be citizens of a state, but also members of wider communities that transcend the boundaries of states. In the twentieth century, such wider communities included religious, regional or pan-African communities, as well as membership of a universal human community. An alternative way of approaching the history of international political thought is therefore to focus on the relationship between these coexisting conceptions. I do so here by combining a history of how individuals might conceive of themselves as citizens or subjects of individual states, subject to the positive law of those states, with one of how they might simultaneously think of themselves as members of a universal human community, subject to natural law or, in the twentieth century, to the positive law of new international institutions.^[514]

Although the mid-twentieth century marked a new phase in the history of states, this new phase emerged in the context of a new phase in the history of conceptions of a universal human society, as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights seemed to establish in 1948 ‘the universalistic inclusion of all humanity in the set of morally relevant subjects of political concern and action'.^[515] Recent work by Samuel Moyn and others has sought to downplay the significance of this moment, arguing that the 1940s was characterized as much by the resurgence of the nation state as by the dawn of an era of human rights.^[516] Yet the novelty of articulating the right to elect one's own government as a universal right owing to all by virtue of their humanity should not be overlooked.

After independence, a conception of rights which transcended individual states continued to serve as an intellectual and political resource for political thinkers and actors. Annabel Brett has argued that, viewed from the perspec­tive of early modern Europe, the ‘sharp break between “inside” and “outside” upon which the modern state in theory rests' was a product of ‘tense negoti­ation' rather than a ‘settled conception'.^[517] We might helpfully think about the mid-twentieth century as constituting a new phase in this ‘tense negotiation' over the limits of the state and its jurisdiction. This helps us both to under­stand the contingency of the states established in the past, in Africa as elsewhere, and to identify from where change has come before and from where, potentially, it may come again.