Books reviewed: Fantasies of Federalism - dilemmas of the Nation-state
Citizenship between Empire and Nation: Remaking France
and French Africa,
1945–1960 - by Frederick Cooper
1945–1960 - by Frederick Cooper
Freedom Time: Negritude, Decolonization, and the Future
of the World - by Gary Wilder
Reviewed by Samuel Moyn
The nation-state has always been exclusionary and has often
been violent, offending the cosmopolitanism of liberals and the desire of
Marxists for solidarity beyond borders. The nation-state has also been a severe
disappointment to postcolonialists, who believe that new nations succeeded
mainly in creating new elites and perpetuating the suffering of their
populations at large...However, for the history of federalism to be more than
trivia, it has to be shown that it was actually possibile and that it might
have yielded better results than the nation-state.
As Arendt observed in 1946, in Eastern Europe “the
restoration of national states, which insist more than ever before on national
homogeneity” was the universal norm—a process only abetted by the disappearance
of the Jewish people. To complete this picture, Germans who remained in Eastern
Europe were brutally forced west. And the nation-state, once declared a relic,
emerged from the ashes of the Second World War as a galvanizing and ultimately
victorious aspiration far beyond Europe. Rather than reforming to retain
pluralistic unity, the British empire gave way to bloody partition in South
Asia very quickly...
********
In several essays written in the midst of the Second World
War, Hannah Arendt advocated federalism as a replacement for nationalism, which
she believed had been rendered obsolete. Adolf Hitler had demonstrated the
limits of ethnic homogeneity as a basis for political organization. The idea of
“the nation” that had set the world on fire had definitively revealed its
shortcomings: it failed to hold up when mapped onto territory shared by
different peoples and so often ruled by a permanent majority. “Nowhere in
Europe today,” Arendt remarked in 1945, “do we find a nationally homogeneous
population.” Furthermore, political federalism of some sort had worked for
Americans for a century and a half. Why not Europe? Why let nation-states
remain the rule? A federation could grant rights to nationalities dispersed
amidst and athwart one other.
Arendt’s federalism—recently recovered by historians Gil
Rubin and William Selinger—also applied to the Middle East. It would make Jews
and Palestinians equal members of some larger political entity, in which each
group would have a measure of self-government in their own affairs and a role
in collective decision-making. A land of two peoples within the same state,
Arendt wrote in wartime, would in the long run merely reverse the Zionist
result of Jewish dominance over Palestinians in the area, substituting one
hierarchy for another. By contrast, a larger federation would put the two
nationalities on par for good, locking in a measure of autonomy and parity of
voice. Perhaps the federation would take shape through a decolonized but
worldwide British empire, Arendt and others mused. Or, perhaps, at the already
vast scale of the Mediterranean region alone. The point was that, there and
elsewhere, humanity could transcend the divisive quest for nation-states for
good.
Such creative thinking did not bear fruit. The brief
enthusiasm for federalism was born out of a loss of faith with interwar
democracy, which had been founded in Eastern Europe on the basis of majority
rule. But this principle made Jews and others perpetual losers, even though the
international regime of the League of Nations was supposed to offer minorities
some recourse. Any new configuration would have to respect human beings in
their various groupings and go beyond the old solution of protecting minorities
from majorities through constitutional mechanisms or international law. But
soon enough, it was clear that East European Jewry was dead, and with their
destruction, Jewish geography and geopolitics also shifted.
Yet it was not just in Europe and the Middle East that the
nation-state—so often viewed in wartime as outmoded or even blamed for the
entire conflict—triumphed after the war. As Arendt observed in 1946, in Eastern
Europe “the restoration of national states, which insist more than ever before
on national homogeneity” was the universal norm—a process only abetted by the
disappearance of the Jewish people. To complete this picture, Germans who
remained in Eastern Europe were brutally forced west. And the nation-state,
once declared a relic, emerged from the ashes of the Second World War as a
galvanizing and ultimately victorious aspiration far beyond Europe. Rather than
reforming to retain pluralistic unity, the British empire gave way to bloody
partition in South Asia very quickly.
A powerful wave of historians insist, however, that
federalism was no flash in the pan. They contend that the nation-state was not
inevitable, especially when it was time for France to decolonize in Africa.
These historians have presented tremendous evidence of what some call a
“federal moment”—one which, thanks to the distended process of decolonization,
lasted surprisingly long into postwar history. Frederick Cooper is the leader
of the group, but several other historians like Todd Shepard and Gary Wilder
have buttressed his findings. The implications of their way of thinking are
profound. After millennia of imperial arrangements that incorporated different
peoples into the same polity, Cooper and others say, there is no reason to
regard the nation-state of our time as much more than a historical accident and
political mistake—one that perhaps ought to be undone.
In an era of revulsion towards nation-states, and especially
nation-states in postcolonial circumstances, we can appreciate why the story of
federalism might be worth recalling. Is there anything else besides the nation
that otherwise implacable enemies—liberals, Marxists, and postcolonialists—can
more easily agree about, if only to agree in what they hate? The nation-state
has always been exclusionary and has often been violent, offending the
cosmopolitanism of liberals and the desire of Marxists for solidarity beyond
borders. The nation-state has also been a severe disappointment to
postcolonialists, who believe that new nations succeeded mainly in creating new
elites and perpetuating the suffering of their populations at large.
However, for the history of federalism to be more than
trivia, it has to be shown that it was actually possibile and that it might
have yielded better results than the nation-state. Neo-federalist historians
rarely take it upon themselves to solve what ought to be the central puzzle:
why did the nation-state model win out, when the alternatives were supposedly
so compelling?
In 1945, the defeat of the Nazis provided a window of
opportunity for the colonized world. This was especially true for the French
empire, since its metropole had fallen and a new republic had to be crafted
from scratch. And debts were owed to colonial subjects who had served in the
war: a black colonial official from Guyana, Félix Éboué, had kept French
Equatorial Africa out of the clutches of the Vichy revolution at home, and he
was praised for saving the honor of the empire.
Charles de Gaulle attempted to ratify the continuation of
the French empire at the Brazzaville conference in 1944, where he flew to meet
with his Free French compatriot Éboué. But events and new pressures for a fair
deal periodically shook arrangements. Among others, Senegalese politicians
Mamadou Dia and Léopold Sédar Senghor exploited these opportunities, first in
1946 when the Constitution established the Fourth Republic, and then again in
1958, when the Algerian war prompted the creation of the Fifth Republic, with
its own new constitution.
As the constituent assembly for the 1946 charter loomed, it
was revolutionary for colonial subjects to enjoy political representation. Men
like Senegal’s Lamine Guèye and Côte d’Ivoire’s Félix Houphouët-Boigny—after
whom laws abolishing colonialsubjecthood in favor of republican citizenship and
criminalizing the common colonial practice of forced labor were later
named—could now express their interests. Although they were no longer imperial
subjects, however, Africans were still second-class citizens. Almost no
Africans could vote on the constitution, which called for detailed laws establishing
different rights and responsibilities depending on where one stood in the
federation or “French Union,” which had replaced the empire. When that
constitution was voted down, it became a matter of preserving the basic
formulation of formal citizenship without real equality in the next
constitution, which was finally ratified in late 1946.
For ten years, and then after the passing of the fateful
“framework law” of 1956, which in retrospect created the basis (including
territorial lines) on which decolonization took place, Senghor and others
maneuvered for a fairer and more egalitarian federation. Later, with the advent
of the Fifth Republic in 1958, the French Union became the “French Community.”
Dia and Senghor understood that the result of nationalism would be to sever the
old colonies from the wealthy metropole and to leave them free and sovereign
but poor and isolated. So they entertained various schemes and experimented
with different visions of federalism that would preserve the relationship of the
old imperial territories with metropolitan France as well as with a more local
“confederation” for French West Africa.
And then it all quickly came to an end. By 1958–60, the very
maneuvers that had aimed at crafting a fairer hierarchy between France and its
“community” ended up undoing the federalist structure. Summoned to the
presidency to save the republic from the Algerian war, Charles de Gaulle
ultimately decided to let Algeria go in 1962. De Gaulle was initially desperate
to maintain sub-Saharan Africa as a federation for the sake of France’s
grandeur. But he was unable to do so on terms that Africans—now empowered by
the federation—found acceptable. Africans were allowed to vote on the 1958
constitution, but two years later, they declared sovereign independence.
(Sadly, Senghor soon became an autocrat and purged Dia, among other former
allies.)
Frederick Cooper’s Citizenship between Empire and
Nation—which painstakingly reconstructs this narrative—is the culmination
of a long historiographical campaign. Initiated years ago with Empires
in World History (written with Jane Burbank), its goal is to show how
late and contingent the rise of the national form to global dominance really
was. Cooper has another new book out, Africa in the World, which
presents the argument in its most abbreviated form. But Citizenship
between Empire and Nation is where to look for the details, and it is
nothing short of a masterpiece... read more:
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