Once heterodox, histories of anti-colonial federalism in twentieth-century Africa have reached an orthodox canonicity. Over a decade ago, revisionist Africanists began arguing that a teleological fixation upon nationalism and the nation-state obscured federalist alternatives that envisioned a different end to empire.Footnote 1 Scholars of the Caribbean, Europe, and South Asia have since joined them, knitting dispersed examples into a mid-century ‘global federal moment’.Footnote 2 From proposals to supplant the League of Nations with a world federal state, to constitutional debates over a potential federal union of France with its colonial territories, revisionists have argued that federalism experienced widespread popularity as a state form ideally suited to multi-national polities. If political historians have unearthed evidence of federalist state-building projects, intellectual historians stress federalism's broad sway over mid-twentieth-century thought. For many revisionists, this offers more than a lost form of imagining political space beyond the nation. They contend that federalism unsettles narratives of the Westphalian order, by proving the contingency of the nation-state right up until the late twentieth century, through the existence of staging points between imperial and national formations.Footnote 3 For critics, this ‘new revisionist mainstream’ is cosmopolitan hope in post-national roads-not-taken.Footnote 4 Chief among their objections is that despite the ambition to alter foundational historical understandings of state formation, revisionists have not answered a crucial question: ‘Why did the nation-state model win out, when the alternatives were supposedly so compelling?’Footnote 5
If an insistence on failure limits historical inquiry to successful outcomes, the revisionist emphasis on contingency also veers into unsustainable claims about the nation-state's sudden, late twentieth-century emergence. As this historiographical review sets out to demonstrate, by treating federalism and nationalism as ideologically distinct and oppositional, both camps have ignored their historical permeability. Moreover, refusing an antagonism between federalism and nationalism frees space to concentrate on the neglected half of the problematic – the state – since anti-colonialism was neither inevitably nationalist nor statist. As several scholars have argued, if anti-colonial thought was characterized by any single tendency, it would be neither nationalism nor federalism but prevailing anti-statism.Footnote 6 Yet while revisionists have deconstructed the nation, their work has rarely considered critiques of the state. By contrast, this historiographical review argues that we should treat debates over federalism as part of a wider engagement with the problem of state as such. Recasting federalist historiography this way allows us to preserve revisionists’ insistence upon contingency, while rejecting what I call their methodological republicanism. That is, the tendency to see constitutional, liberal democratic republican state forms and their attendant political imaginaries as the primary expression of anti-colonialism.
In order to convey the global scale of debates over the state conducted through the language of federalism, this review considers the historiography of mid-twentieth-century French and British attempts to construct federal imperial states, revisionists’ principal focus, alongside parallel efforts at regional federation in Europe and Africa. Knitting together these historiographies confirms a global turn to federalism, as part of mid-century efforts to achieve global governance in response to successive world wars and imperial fragmentation. The legacies of federalism are thus crucial for scholars of both decolonization and globalization. Secondly, integrating these cases also addresses the tendency to give federalism ideological coherence as an expression of ‘post-colonial cosmopolitanism’.Footnote 7 Indeed, variations on cosmopolitan themes animate much revisionist literature.Footnote 8 Here, it intersects with a broader concern in political theory with theorizing possibilities for, or recovering histories of, a supra-national commonwealth of citizens embedded in international constitutional arrangements. Scholars of post-colonial cosmopolitanism intervene in this scholarship by recentring imperial history within its intellectual genealogy. Imperial polities, they argue, show that state interdependence and pluralist citizenship arose far earlier than typical accounts which date the start of a cosmopolitan order to the 1970s. Historians have accomplished this by reframing anti-colonial claims upon imperial states as ones of ‘imperial citizenship’, which sought not to wrest national independence, but dissolve imperial inequalities by ‘democratizing’ empires into federated polities of equal metropolitan and territorial parts.Footnote 9 Constitutional histories of federalism, therefore, might furnish a new genealogy for contemporary debates on ‘cosmopolitan democracy’, ‘republican federalism’, and ‘postnational constellations’, while intellectual histories of federalist thought embed anti-colonial thinkers within a tradition of ‘ethical cosmopolitanism’ concerned with fostering principles of global community.Footnote 10
Federalist revisionists draw from cosmopolitanism's critique of the ‘methodological nationalism’ that typically shapes understandings of democracy, citizenship, and sovereignty, and both sets of revisionists have been subject to criticism of their utopianism. Accusing revisionists of latent utopianism, however, makes little sense if most claim it was a constitutive aspect of their subjects’ thought. Instead, I shall problematize a narrative which positions federalism as a democratic, pluralist, supra-national antecedent to the contemporary search for cosmopolitan governance. Though there were mid-century federalists whose proposals ought to be situated within a genealogy of supra-national cosmopolitanism, the conservative and white settler federalisms of the period undermine the over-riding democratic, republican gloss offered by most revisionists. Emma Hunter has written of revisionists’ ‘methodological liberalism’, which leads to a circumscribed understanding of anti-colonial freedom around unacknowledged liberal conceptions of individual freedom and democracy.Footnote 11 I would add that the tendency to see proto-republics sedimented in imperial formations has perpetuated methodological republicanism, a narrowing of imaginaries of political community around republican expressions of political belonging and statehood.
Revisionists have stretched definitions of anti-colonial sovereignty and statehood beyond national containers onto the previously uncharted supra-national scales of cosmopolitanism. Yet the work of French imperial historians in particular can mischaracterize debates over the state for which the language of cosmopolitan democracy or republicanism cannot account. Interpreting cosmopolitan projects as, to use the revisionist motif, ‘transcending’ the hierarchical arrangements of empire, mistakes the latter's supra-nationalism as potential for multi-national democracy. Such an analysis might denaturalize the transition from empire to nation, but it naturalizes a statist continuum from empire to federation which ignores how imperial and post-colonial cosmopolitans envisioned a whole range of different political outcomes after empire. Moreover, revisionists often elide debates over the state which transformed the meanings of citizenship, popular sovereignty, and political economy outwith standard republican conceptions.
Dispensing with a federalist/nationalist antagonism and complicating the definition of cosmopolitanism advanced by revisionists, I argue that the unifying thread of federalism from the 1930s to the 1960s was not a stable democratic or republican core, but its prominence across a range of contests over competing models of state and international society. Revisiting the classic division between federation and confederation, twentieth-century federalists wrangled over which presented the ideal form of governance at both the supra-national and sub-national levels. Their proposals overlaid federalist and confederalist structures with centralized and decentralized models of both the state and interstate relations, shedding greater light on how the centralized nation-state and international organizations became the keystones of a normative global order. It was federalism's plasticity, rather than its adherence to a democratic, republican statist imaginary, which explains its popularity. The oppositions between centralized and decentralized models of state eventually pooled sovereignty rather than disaggregating it, ultimately displacing federalism into the container of the nation-state.
In what follows, I sketch out this transition by unpacking the conceptualizations of citizenship, popular sovereignty, and political economy employed by revisionists to build their characterizations of the forms of state federalists envisioned. The cases cluster around African examples due to their over-representation in the literature and my own expertise, but the forms of federalism assessed here include schemes for federalism in French West Africa; British imperial federalism, using the Indian and the Central African Federation cases; and finally European and African federalism, which ranged from plans for world federal states to regional unions. The first section addresses the federalist/nationalist binary and methodological republicanism which originated in scholarship on French imperial federalism. The second illustrates the generative outcomes of integrating histories of anti-colonial federalism and nationalism, while also assessing the limits of federalist revisionism. The third centres on mid-century critiques of the state. The fourth examines more closely federalism's cosmopolitan underpinnings by focusing on two recent theoretical interventions, which leads to a final section which considers what histories of anti-colonial thought beyond cosmopolitanism might offer historians of twentieth-century political thought.
I
The work of Frederick Cooper and, more recently, Gary Wilder on French West Africa's relationship to the metropole, from the constitutional debates under the Fourth Republic (1946–58) and the formation of the French Union to confederal proposals for Franco-African community in the early Fifth Republic, has exerted a powerful influence on revisionist scholarship on federalism. These did not lead to the federal republic some clamoured for, but they were instrumental in reshaping French citizenship and republicanism. This section addresses two aspects of methodological republicanism that underpin this revisionist scholarship: the definition of ‘imperial citizenship’ to describe colonial peoples’ claim-making practices upon imperial states; and the tendency to see in empire embryonic multi-national republics beholden to such ‘citizens’. Both arguments reinterpret nationalist anti-colonialism, suggesting that anti-imperial politics sought, until the mid-twentieth century, not independence but inclusion. However, I argue it is possible to avoid methodological republicanism by excavating contingent conceptions of citizenship and statehood without an opposition between nationalism and federalism.
The supposed indivisible and unitary quality of the French republic and the abstract, universal category of French citizenship form the foundational ‘Jacobin myth’ of the French state. Yet as scholars have shown, there exist occluded traditions of French republicanism dating to the revolution that were particularist, communitarian, and anti-unitarist.Footnote 12 Converging with the late nineteenth-century development of pluralist thought which sought to disperse sovereignty away from the state, French corporatism offered mid-twentieth-century French federalists a language with which to make the case for a multi-national federal republic.Footnote 13 Véronique Dimier makes a useful distinction between opposed mid-century republicanisms. The dominant ‘unitarist, Jacobin’ model insisted on a centralized republic that recognized only one category of citizenship and required full cultural and political assimilation. By contrast, the ‘federalist, Girondin’ model pushed for a decentralized, federal, multi-national France, which acknowledged the social ‘rootedness’ of citizenship via cultural particularity.Footnote 14 In other words, one model demanded cultural and political uniformity, while the other made room for pluralism. At stake were contending visions of a post-imperial France, some nearer an egalitarian federated republic of metropolitan and overseas territories, others closer to maintaining the same hierarchies under inclusive-seeming republican guises.
Cooper's analysis is less concerned with excavating connections between pluralist thought and French federalism, however, than with contesting narratives of this period as a waystation to independence.Footnote 15 He situates twentieth-century anti-colonial claims to equality inside the French state within a deeper history of imperial statehood. In this vision, ‘empire states’ were inherently multi-national polities that ‘managed’ the ‘diversity of people they conquered and incorporated’.Footnote 16 While this ‘management’ coercively incorporated colonial subjects, it does not necessarily follow that anti-colonial resistance was driven by a desire for independence. In a polity in which inter-communal pluralism was the norm, anti-colonialists instead challenged empire's coercive foundations but retained its language of incorporation, insisting upon full equality within a diverse polity. In French West Africa, for example, Cooper argues that activists demanding labour reform and social services behaved as ‘imperial citizens’ even if they were not yet enfranchised in the early 1940s.Footnote 17 Their insistence on equality within the empire manifested a desire to transform the French republic into a truly equal, multi-national state. As a state form, then, federation supposedly shares the inter-communalism of empire but ‘transcends’ its constitutional inequality.Footnote 18 This claim has been echoed by other revisionists: for Gary Wilder, federalists ‘sublate’, ‘supersede’, and ‘elevate the imperial republic into a democratic federation’, while for Nick Nesbitt the ‘universal’ process of democratizing empire is even more specifically a search for Rousseauian popular sovereignty.Footnote 19
Such semantic choices reveal heuristic fault lines, disclosing the slippage between the desire, on the one hand, to provide conjunctural accounts of this period, and, on the other hand, the tendency to naturalize federalism and republicanism as the guiding ‘logic’ of decolonization. Twentieth-century French and British imperial federalisms exhibit not a centuries-long continuity with the imperial ‘management’ of difference, but rather the cultivation of difference. Reformist hopes were buoyed in the early Fourth Republic by the 1946 Lamine Guèye law extending citizenship to all territories, the first legal codification of what Cooper regards as a long-standing tradition of ‘imperial citizenship’. The decade-long contestation over this law is the subject of Cooper and Wilder's latest work, but the very debates they recount suggest the thin line that separated a supra-national federal republic from an ‘imperial nation-state’.Footnote 20 According to a coalition of Christian Democrats, imperial administrators, and settler lobbyists, former colonial subjects did not possess the requisite level of ‘civilization’ necessary to exercise the duties of citizenship.Footnote 21 To borrow Dimier's classification, this deployed a Jacobin interpretation of French citizenship, in which it was indissoluble from French nationality. Their opposition encoded a distinction in the Fourth Republic's constitution between metropolitan citizenship and that extended to the remainder of the French Union, with a bicameral legislature that would prevent equal representation.
To reformists, this model of republican citizenship represented outdated assimilationist imperial policies, out of step with interwar particularist conceptions of citizenship. As the work of Dimier and Martin Shipway has shown, reformist republicans among colonial administrators such as Robert Delavignette and Henri Laurentie argued that a policy of association preserved the integrity of indigenous societies by allowing them to maintain their traditions and ‘evolve’ within them.Footnote 22 For Delavignette, a federation based upon local assemblies in the overseas territories would pave the way for colonial evolution from pre-modern petites patries to full republican membership. The ‘Union Française could become an association of “civilisations” linked by a common social and political project, “one” politically, but “diverse” culturally’.Footnote 23 De Gaulle and his cabinet minister (later prime minister), René Pleven, also acknowledged the possibility of colonial political evolution toward citizenship, but as a process that required French guidance.Footnote 24 A corporatist approach to federation therefore did not imply a rejection of imperial values, and even a storied reformist such as the socialist Marius Moutet, minister of overseas France, believed France would retain a tutelary role in African political evolution.Footnote 25 In the meantime, strategies like a double electoral college were necessary, lest they risk changing, in the words of Pleven, the ‘physiognomy of French parliament into a parody’.Footnote 26
While Cooper gives considerable attention to debates among French politicians, it is African politicians whose interventions he most eagerly reconstructs, marshalling them as evidence of the way in which anti-colonialism could manifest not just through a politics of liberation but in contestations over the meaning of democracy. Léopold Senghor, the African politician most associated with federal hopes, delivered impassioned pleas invoking the ‘synthesis of civilizations’ that would be possible in a multi-national federated republic, with a system of territorial representation based upon the existing outlines of French West and Equatorial Africa. The Ivoirian Félix Houphouët-Boigny pushed instead for individual territories to be in direct federation with France, but when this plan was forestalled by conservative opposition he gave name to the relationship that would replace the French Union: Françafrique. Even Sékou Touré, who famously led Guinea to independence in 1958 when it became the only country in French Africa to vote no in the constitutional referendum, voiced an interest in some continued association with France. Over and again, Cooper's work demonstrates that Africans were crucial to the shaping of the post-war French state – not only symbolically but constitutionally – and dispels the presumption that a republican idiom could not have been an African political discourse.
What it does not dispel, however, is the notion that a discourse of imperial citizenship was incompatible with nationalist-autonomist claims. In the paradigmatic case of anti-colonial nationalism, Algeria, Malika Rahal has shown how ‘reformists’ like Ferhat Abbas and Ali Boumendjel were no less Algerian nationalists for demanding electoral reform and devolution within France.Footnote 27 In 1946, eleven members of the Union démocratique du manifeste algérien (UDMA) elected to the constituent assembly sought to redress continuing citizenship discrimination. By 1953, the party was still interested in co-operation with a ‘liberal and democratic France’ but within a north African federation. By 1955, it had turned fully towards independence.Footnote 28 This multivalent nationalism aligns somewhat with Cooper's argument that nationalists did not inevitably envision nation-states. Yet by emphasizing independence as a sudden rupture, Cooper fails to account for the processes which led nationalists to abandon imperial federalisms altogether.
France's bloody record in Algeria and Indochina has infamously illustrated the cost of resistance that sought complete separation from France rather than redistributive equality. Cooper minimally glosses Algerian nationalism in his telling, and neglects those territories in which autonomist nationalism existed long before the Second World War. This neglect, argues Michael Goebel, will end up ‘defining nationalism out of existence’, and he and others have queried federalism's status as a historical competitor to anti-colonial nationalism.Footnote 29 However, federalism's uneven appeal should not be confused for irrelevance. Goebel's own examination of anti-imperial nationalisms in interwar Paris provides insight into the transition from ‘reformism’ to separatism.Footnote 30 Of the post-war period, Adria Lawrence argues succinctly that ‘[e]xclusion produced nationalism’ – the experience of having citizenship demands repulsed spurring demands for independence.Footnote 31 Even in the stronghold of federalist thought, French West Africa, Guinea's extensive grassroots mobilization in favour of independence indicates the need for more work into the conditions under which nationalism evolved into demands for independent statehood.Footnote 32
While historians have shown that federalism had waned by the mid-fifties if not sooner, Cooper is unwilling to concede the ambivalent, uneven appeal of imperial incorporation long before 1960. While his work has engaged in a remarkable recovery of subjects who appropriated imperial republicanism to their own ends, we should continue to attend to the sheer variety of anti-colonial mobilization beyond inclusion into the imperial state. Cooper's insistence that ‘any serious competitor for geopolitical influence had to think and act like an empire’ reproduces immanent ‘logics’ of which he has elsewhere been among the most eloquent critics.Footnote 33
What motivates this attachment among some revisionists to arguing for the longevity of an incorporative federal politics, beyond the desire to push back against methodological nationalism? One factor appears to be a desire to push back against the perception that the late-twentieth-century politics of autochthony were the inevitable outcome of anti-colonial nationalisms – in Africa and elsewhere – a contribution with profound implications. However, as this historiography has become increasingly tethered to that of the French imperial state, it seems to be sustained by a belief in its ability to critique French republican universalism by recovering a lost anti-colonial republican particularism. It is possible, however, to foreground the collective metropolitan-colonial contestation of the French state by orienting a critique of ‘the limits of liberal citizenship around an axis more complicated than benevolent inclusiveness alone’.Footnote 34 Indeed, shedding revisionists’ methodological republicanism allows precisely such a critique to come into view.
II
British late imperial federalism has inspired less utopian revisionism than its French counterpart, in part because it revived legacies embedded in a long racialized history of imperial consolidation.Footnote 35 From the late nineteenth century, ideas for a supra-national federal commonwealth originated in fears about breakaway settler nationalism, which the British state hoped to discourage by absorbing settlers into ‘Greater Britain’.Footnote 36 In the 1930s, British colonial administrators drew upon this strategy to forestall imperial dissolution, this time by neutralizing white and non-white nationalisms. British imperial federation, however, was not by this stage a project of comprehensive constitutional overhaul to join metropole to colony. Rather, British imperial federations worked on a smaller territorial scale, to create centralized ‘big states’ out of economically and demographically diverse territories subject to differential governing arrangements.Footnote 37 Proposals for federation were floated in India from the 1930s until the fateful decision of partition in 1947, and thereafter as ways to create new bases for territorial governance and prevent independence, from the Malay Federation (1948–63), East African High Commission (1948–61), West Indies Federation (1958–62), the Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland, known as the Central African Federation (CAF) (1953–63), to the Federation of South Arabia (1962–7). The examples discussed here, India and the CAF, counter methodological republicanism by foregrounding forms of cosmopolitanism that imagined explicitly anti-republican forms of state.
While the historiography of British imperial federation is less developed than its French counterpart, it shares the latter's tendency to search for pluralist conceptions of the British state and civic belonging.Footnote 38 While the influence of French revisionism can be gleaned from citations of Cooper alone, it is notable that British revisionists have concentrated on a period half a century earlier, with Daniel Gorman's and Duncan Bell's studies of settler federalism and Sukanya Banerjee's work on Indian negotiations over imperial citizenship serving as the pioneering examples.Footnote 39 For advocates of settler imperialism, federation offered a means of reimagining the British state as a white polity larger than an island nation. In Gorman's characterization of British imperial cosmopolitans, they comprised two main camps: centralists wanted a unitary federal super-state representing a geographically extensive white Anglo-Saxon nation, while ‘cosmopolitan associationists’ conceived of the British state as a looser multi-national arrangement of confederal ties between white settler dominion states.Footnote 40 The latter conception of a British commonwealth won out. Yet though imperial cosmopolitanism never entertained a programme of non-white enfranchisement or representation, Banerjee and others have argued these debates created a lasting currency around dominion status and imperial cosmopolitanism which non-white subjects claimed into the late twentieth century.
Recent studies of African and Caribbean migrants to Britain from the Victorian era through to the Windrush generation by Anne Rush, Kennetta Perry, and Marc Matera adopt this flexible conception of British subjecthood/citizenship. While more work remains to be done on the mid-twentieth century, this scholarship is indicative of a wider historiographical shift. Where the ‘new imperial history’ asked ‘Who needs the nation?’, current revisionism tries to destabilize an island history by asking: who needed the state?Footnote 41 These historians argue that colonial migrants viewed their local nationalisms as compatible with a ‘Britishness’ which granted them the right to settle in Britain, for example, or agitate for a federated West African dominion.Footnote 42 Claims upon Britishness were not merely identitarian, therefore, but ones of ‘aspirational imperial citizens’ upon the British state.Footnote 43 While adopting some central revisionist premises, such work also suggests a way forward less beholden to stark dichotomies between nationalist and federalist thought. Rush, for instance, proposes one determining factor in understanding the uneven appeal of imperial citizenship: class. Working-class West Indians were far less attracted to Britishness than more prosperous islanders, which suggests ‘aspirational imperial citizens’ may have been a smaller group than revisionists have led us to expect.
This reiterates the uneven appeal of imperial citizenship, but historians of Indian constitutional debates and the CAF have also highlighted the disputed meanings of citizenship, statehood, and popular sovereignty far from republican inflections. In the Indian case, from the Round Table Conferences in 1930 until just before independence, Karuna Mantena, Kavita Datla, and Rama Mantena have shown that deep divides over monarchical and republican rule characterized debates over future Indian dominion. Federalism became here a tool either to accelerate or to stymy majoritarian sovereignty.Footnote 44 Monarchists from princely states like Hyderabad petitioned for a decentralized Indian state of confederal units, endeavouring to present themselves ‘as conservative islands in the ocean of democratic British India’.Footnote 45 This push to retain monarchical rule put them at odds with advocates for a centralized Indian republic like B. R. Ambedkar. He railed against the crown's compromise between these two visions in the Government of India Act in 1935, for deferring universal suffrage and ratifying what he considered a toothless state unable to institute rural reform or Dalit protection.Footnote 46
The calls of both Ambedkar and Nehru for a strong state apparatus ought to be seen, then, as the consequence of years of political impasse over the very possibility of an Indian republic.Footnote 47 Yet the multitude of competing federalisms displaced both earlier liberal anti-colonialisms and their anti-statist critiques.Footnote 48 Gandhi, for example, presented an alternative solution of decentralized federal democracy based upon an extended critique of what he considered the violent, amoral nature of the state.Footnote 49 These debates would be replicated in African contexts, where monarchists were attracted to confederal state-building to preserve their sovereignty, while regionalists cast centralized states as the mere replicas of imperial state designs. Such contests have been dismissed, in the Indian context as well as the African one, as ones between ‘traditionalists/tribalists’ and ‘modernists’, when in fact they remind us that challenges to the modern state form itself ran through anti-colonial politics.
The CAF's failure, meanwhile, has long made it a paradigm of doomed federal decolonization, paving the way for nationalist histories of what would become Malawi, Zambia, and Zimbabwe. The work of Michael Collins and Luise White, however, takes seriously federalist decolonization while also complicating typical revisionist assumptions.Footnote 50 The CAF originated in the Colonial Office's hopes that industrialization and a federation bringing together the self-governing colony of Southern Rhodesia and the protectorates of Northern Rhodesia and Nyasaland would reconcile the interests of a white settler minority and African subjects.Footnote 51 Imperial administrators thus revived the strategy of neutralizing breakaway nationalisms through federation: the possibility of future dominion status would at once entice settlers drawn to white nationalism and quell nascent African nationalists restive over labour exploitation and land theft. In the early 1950s, the CAF was billed as the liberal answer to the spectre of ‘race war’, but by its collapse in 1963 it had become a symbol of the racialized asymmetries of incorporation into the imperial state.
While Collins insists federalism remains an overlooked alternative to the end of empire, he recognizes that mid-century projects of ‘imperial reconfiguration’ – first fabian, then tory – incorporated African subjects only under terms of paternalist control.Footnote 52 Whitehall claimed ‘democratization’ would tamp down settler supremacy and enable African ‘self-government’ (never independence).Footnote 53 With echoes of French imperial paternalism, British administrators saw federation as a way of inducting Africans into citizenship, constitutional governance, and industrial labour. Instead, ‘multi-racial partnership’ instituted disenfranchisement, meagre parliamentary representation, and economic exploitation, not to mention outright violence.
Luise White also opts for calling British cosmopolitan ‘multi-racialism’ the spade it was: a ‘watered-down politics of inclusion’ bent on denying Africans a place in their governance.Footnote 54 Moreover, in her revisionist glance at the territory whose struggle for independence would be the most notorious – the settler state Rhodesia and its African successor, Zimbabwe – she shows how much monarchy, and not republican government, was the desired model of state.Footnote 55 In line with South Asianists, she also highlights the transformation required to secure popular sovereignty as the basis of state legitimacy rather than assuming it was a cornerstone of anti-colonial thought, though here settler demands for imperial citizenship and dominion status renewed the long-standing assumption that whiteness is what guaranteed ‘responsible government’ and British state protection. White's interest in adopting the revisionist emphasis upon citizenship and constitutionalism reveals the value of an approach that centres both nationalism and non-republican state-making. Future work might build on this by integrating it with forms of political thought not reducible to the simple dyad of citizen and state.
In the East African case, John Lonsdale has shown how Kenyan ‘ornamental constitutionalism’ was embedded in long-standing moral economies which posited the reciprocity of patron–client relations as the source of political legitimacy.Footnote 56 Nationalists across mid-twentieth-century eastern and southern Africa retooled this form of political thought as a means of repelling white settlers, by insisting upon their equal status as claimants to British patronage. Ismay Milford's work on East and Central African resistance to the CAF underscores the need to consider cross-regional political practices in assessing mid-century federalisms.Footnote 57 Indeed, her comparative study of anti-CAF mobilization demonstrates just how much revisionist scholarship remains hidebound by imperial geographies. This reluctance to venture across imperial borders explains the absence, for instance, of a revisionist study of discussions between Kwame Nkrumah and Sékou Touré of the proposed Ghana–Guinea Union, which flouted francophone–anglophone imperial borders. While integrating Lonsdale's insight into competing conceptualizations of constitutionalism and sovereignty may reveal much that is surprising about mid-twentieth-century federalist – and anti-federalist – thought, future scholarship should also strive for Milford's more expansive spatial approach. Together, these moves may enable historians to interrogate a cosmopolitan rubric that groups together federalist projects which sought to prolong empire with those that endeavoured to end it.
The final knife-wound in a white imperial Civis Brittanicus came in 1961 when Prime Minister Harold Macmillan disposed of most remaining federations in order to concentrate his energies on joining another: the European Economic Community. Britain's application to the EEC shocked the dominions most of all, and their investment in imperial citizenship took the longest to wane.Footnote 58 The interlinked decline of dominion and anti-colonial claims upon the British state suggests a need – as in the French case – for more research into how and when colonial nationalisms abandoned demands for self-governing status to call for independence. They also highlight the effects of often violent statist technologies on imperial dissolution.Footnote 59 Ultimately, British imperial federations push us to consider what was at stake beyond a nationalist/federalist binary. Revisionists are right to suggest that neither the nation nor the state had fixed meanings by the mid-twentieth century. But the clashes over their shape did not proceed, as French methodological republicanism might lead us to expect, from a shared premise that their legitimacy was founded on democracy or popular sovereignty.
It is worth reformulating Sukanya Banerjee's riposte to the recurrent question about failure: what would it have meant for federalism and imperial citizenship to have succeeded?Footnote 60 Revisionist scholarship often seems driven by the suggestion that federalism could have provided pluralist conceptions of British and French citizenship and statehood capable of rupturing the hegemony of their racialized, unitary expressions. But if the United States is an example of an ostensibly pluralist conception of citizenship and statehood wrenched from the state after violent, ongoing struggle, it offers no assurance that racial–imperial disparities are better overcome through imperial incorporation. Indeed, the history of imperial federalisms provides ample confirmation of the way in which pluralist, cosmopolitan versions of citizenship and statehood were equally capable of justifying undemocratic rule. This is not to argue that political languages have a self-actualizing capacity to generate reaction or revolution wherever they travel. The problem is rather that republican or liberal political languages often ‘misrepresented the nature and operation of the hierarchical nations they supported; correspondingly, the danger in trying to use such language to other ends is that…we will misunderstand the very phenomena we wish to criticize’.Footnote 61 While revisionists have been worried by the organicism implied in narratives of a swift transition from empire to nation, they have perhaps failed to see that their own work may be naturalizing inclusion into the state as the only horizon of anti-colonial politics.
III
Like historians of anti-colonial federalism, scholars of international thought stress decolonization's central role in shaping mid-twentieth-century imaginings of global order, while at the same time searching for ‘cosmopolitan’ imaginaries of supra-national governance. However, these scholars show a greater attention to political economy, treating the ‘global federal moment’ as a turn prompted by specific critiques of imperial and liberal internationalisms, rather than one rooted in the perennial search for multi-national democracy. Most of these contemporary complaints had their origins in the League of Nations’ perceived failure, and a wide swathe of intellectuals from the 1930s until the early 1960s believed only federalism could overcome what they viewed as the greatest obstacle to international order: state sovereignty. A steady stream of federalist tracts from the late 1930s on heralded unions of states, world states, or institutions of political and economic integration as superior designs for international order.Footnote 62 Federalism also appealed to pacifists: at the peak of its popularity in 1950, the World Movement for Federal Government counted 151,000 members in twenty-two countries.Footnote 63 Yet by the 1960s, the appeal of global or even regional federalisms had withered, and the Cold War had ensured the nation-state's geopolitical supremacy.
In Or Rosenboim's study of the origins of globalist political thought, the cosmopolitan search for democracy beyond the nation-state began in the 1940s.Footnote 64 In her telling, federalism played a prominent role in these efforts to articulate pluralism on a supra-national scale, which she argues represented a conceptual break in liberal democratic politics. Globalist federalists drew loosely from pluralist thought, emphasizing sometimes its constitutional appeal in dispersing sovereignty away from the state, at other times its potential to reconcile a range of social, cultural, and political interests.Footnote 65 Rosenboim recovers a range of liberal debates about the state, using examples like the British organization Federal Union. Founded in 1938, this organization had attracted 12,000 members by 1940, and continues to support global federalism today. Back in the 1940s, however, its prominent members – Lionel Robbins, Friedrich Hayek, and Barbara Wootton, among others – debated federalism's pluralist potential. For Robbins and Hayek, federalism's merit lay in its ability to check state sovereignty and secure a liberal international economic order.Footnote 66
By contrast, Wootton combined her fabian socialism with pluralist democratic theory to propose a global federal welfare state that devolved decision-making authority to communities.Footnote 67 While Rosenboim's generous reconstruction recovers overlooked liberal critiques of the state, she can often attribute to these thinkers more robust egalitarian commitments than their politics attest. Her chapter on the University of Chicago's Committee to Frame a World Constitution provides an illustration. Despite this committee's professed pluralism, its world federalist constitutional design reproduced the standard imperial solution to the question of post-colonial representation: a double, unequal electoral college.Footnote 68 Federal democratic pluralism, then, could just as easily become a political language for containing popular sovereignty – especially in its post-colonial form – as a true democratic break.
Quinn Slobodian's study of neoliberal globalists underscores this point, and some of the very same economists who feature in Rosenboim's story appear here as avatars of the economic cosmopolitanism of unrestrained capital.Footnote 69 Slobodian demonstrates that Robbins's and Hayek's critiques of the state were in fact representative of neoliberal cosmopolitanism, a vision of supra-national economic order which did not seek to free markets from oversight but institutionally ‘encase’ them beyond the reach of national governments.Footnote 70 The federalist blueprints of these ‘Geneva School’ neoliberals were shaped by their explicit nostalgia for those supposed economic paradises, the British and Habsburg empires. For Hayek and others, these empires had disaggregated nation and state in a borderless liberal order, which could serve as a template for a multi-national economic super-state. The federalist schema these men proposed between the late 1930s and the 1940s outlined a tiered global government allowing nations control over cultural and some forms of political policy, but reserving the co-ordination of economic policy in a supra-national institutional centre. Slobodian shows how such designs were guided by efforts to undermine social democratic redistribution and ‘inoculate capitalism against the threat of democracy’.Footnote 71 Despite Wootton's best efforts, this prevailing liberal federalism explains why European federalist projects were viewed with suspicion by socialists, who saw them as cover for anti-democratic and anti-distributive politics.Footnote 72
Third World observers were wont to comment upon European federalism's procedures of exclusion. Their own federalist mobilization, however, has yet to receive sustained scholarly attention. Scholarship on Africa suggests the shape this might take, but this can sometimes mischaracterize the forms of state – and thus the competition about the state – which defined debates both in Europe and elsewhere. Adom Getachew's study of anti-colonial ‘worldmaking’ reframes anti-colonial nationalists as internationalists who understood that overcoming colonial inequality would necessitate a new global order. Her chapter on federalism offers one example of what competing visions of anti-colonial international order looked like.Footnote 73 For Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana and Eric Williams of Trinidad, planned economies in tightly centralized Pan-African or Pan-Caribbean federations would enable post-colonial nations to overcome the economic and political precarity they faced at the global level.
Although Nkrumah and Williams saw federalism as a way to overcome an unequal global economy by fostering, if not autarky, then at least internationally competitive political-economic blocs, their critics worried over their unitarist conception of state power. In the debates surrounding what became the Organization of African Unity (OAU), for example, two visions of African integration emerged. Kwame Nkrumah's Ghanaian delegation proposed a federated Union of African States that would have a single foreign policy, defence force, and economic plan, while critics like Nnamdi Azikiwe supported a ‘miniature United Nations’ that would devolve this centralized authority by preserving the sovereign equity of emergent states. Curiously, Getachew characterizes Nkrumah's federalism as one that ‘restructured state sovereignty and created political authority that transcended the state’, while Azikiwe's ‘international institutions reinforced the state’.Footnote 74 In reality, both proposals reinforced the state. However, only Nkrumah's raised fears over the possibility of a continental super-state that would be dominated by individual states – or statesmen – an anxiety which paved the way for the adoption of Azikiwe's functionalist integration model for the OAU in 1963.
The clash between Pan-African supra-nationalists and sub-national regional federalists who wanted greater devolution further draws out the sovereignty-enhancing characters of both groups. Within Ghana, it was not Nkrumah but Asante nationalists who were most associated with federalism. The Asante National Liberation Movement's famous slogan ‘No Federation, No Self-Government’ stood for their efforts to ensure regional representation in a Ghanaian parliament, against Nkrumah's unyielding unitarism.Footnote 75 As Chris Vaughan's work on East African federalist debates has shown, some Kenyan and Ugandan nationalists similarly adopted the language of devolved (con)federalism to oppose the unitary East African federated state favoured by Julius Nyerere, Milton Obote, and others. When they did so, they were accused, like the Asante, of being ‘tribalists’ looking to tear apart visionary Pan-African unity.Footnote 76 In the francophone context, in which both Frederick Cooper and Sékéné Mody Cissoko have recreated the struggle between Senegal and the French Soudan over the Mali Federation (1959–60), there is little discussion of the divisive problem of sub-national regionalism.Footnote 77 Though Senghor argued for ‘supple confederalism’ at the level of relations with France, he was unequivocal in denying it within Senegal. Demands for regional authority in Senegal's Casamance region were continually subverted under the centralizing authorities of both the French and Senegalese states.Footnote 78 The region's political opposition to the Mali Federation and the Senegalese state that followed has typically been seen as motivated solely by minority ethnic Diola nationalist resentment against Wolof dominance in Senegalese politics. However, such an explanation overlooks the ways in which Casamançais grounded their resistance in the claim that the reliance of French and African federalists on unitary, centralized state forms exposed them as monopolists of power.
Such critiques of the state are obscured when struggles like these – and others elsewhere in the colonial world – are told as the jousting of autochthonous nationalisms. Focusing on federalism is a step toward puncturing this classic mode of narrating anti-colonial and post-colonial politics, by drawing attention to debates about, and not just over, the state. Among post-colonial leaders like Nkrumah and Senghor, federalism was another means of reorganizing late colonial ‘institutions of stateness’ to ‘induct a restive public into citizenship’.Footnote 79 Yet their challengers remind us that ‘the growth of state authority provoked alienation and dissidence, and did so even when engaged in as enlightened a project as the abolition of colonial rule’.Footnote 80 Federalist political thought's malleability and capacity to express competing political claims points to something we have missed – a lost critique, and sometimes outright rejection, of the state itself. As Jessica Krug's path-breaking history of a political community in West Central Africa known as Kisama shows, the illegibility of non-state politics has obscured counter-claims of political legitimacy and belonging. From the sixteenth century until the twentieth, Kisama developed forms of political thought and practice which never organized around statehood and resisted African and European state power alike. The post-colonial Angolan state, however, scornfully dismissed Kisama people as factionalists whose tribal atavism was responsible for their refusal of incorporation.Footnote 81 While revisionists have unearthed a greater range of minimalist and maximalist conceptualizations of the state among post-colonial leaders, far more work will be required to convey the complexity of African or anti-colonial politics, not least anti-state dissidence.
Ultimately, revisionist scholars of federalism have furnished an alternative morphology of the state, but though mid-twentieth-century schemes for supra-national belonging may have distended the principles of international society, it neither democratized nor transcended them. Globally, by the 1960s, regional federalism winnowed down to functionalist models of integration like the OAU and the European Economic Community. How, then, ought we to reconcile the wide ideological variety of critiques of state among European and African federalists with the post-colonial international order that emerged? The latter is unsurprising when one considers the tendency of most supra-national federalists to aggregate political and economic bargaining power into regional blocs. Again and again, such an orientation at both the supra-national and sub-national levels ended up centralizing state power, not dispersing it. Federalism and nationalism were both political resources with which to achieve this centralization – or to challenge it. Those challengers, whether liberal, neoliberal, and anti-statist, remind us that critiques of the state persisted long after the institutionalization of global norms of statehood.
IV
In this section, we come to the cosmopolitan theoretical scaffolding of federalist revisionism, which has seen its most comprehensive articulation by Gary Wilder and Adom Getachew. In his introduction to Léopold Senghor and Aimé Césaire's cosmopolitan political thought, Wilder enjoins us to suspend the notion that their thought ‘should be measured against their empirical effects’.Footnote 82 Preceding this section with the banished ghosts of federalism's effects may have spoilt the feast. But appreciating cosmopolitanism's ambivalent political valences should enable us to evaluate what it can and cannot offer in understanding anti-colonial federalism, or anti-colonial internationalism broadly writ. While Wilder's work exhibits the pitfalls of methodological republicanism's tendency to ascribe republican features to colonial and post-colonial politics, Getachew's study provides a more productive point from which to interrogate the principles of cosmopolitanism, though she adapts a republicanism of a different key. Getachew adopts another strand of republican theory to argue that post-colonial cosmopolitans developed a specific critique of international order which foregrounded external conditions that maintained global inequality.Footnote 83 Though I have expressed scepticism elsewhere about the merits of describing this critique as republican liberty, Getachew does capture anti-colonial thinkers’ normative contributions to cosmopolitanism.Footnote 84 In assessing the merits and drawbacks of Getachew's and Wilder's models, however, I end with what is missed when cosmopolitanism becomes the dominant heuristic frame for understanding the globalist dimensions of anti-colonial politics.
Gary Wilder uses the political thought of Léopold Senghor and Aimé Césaire to integrate them as interlocutors in a tradition of cosmopolitan political philosophy dating to Kant. Against accusations of insufficient radicalism which have haunted these figures, he rehabilitates Senghor's and Césaire's federalist projects as part of a more capacious, global understanding of political community that methodological nationalism has previously rendered imperceptible. He accomplishes this by reframing negritude, the movement for which they are famous, as a racially particular intervention into the universalist discourses of humanism and republicanism.Footnote 85 Negritude did not denote an essentialist call for racial identification, as critics have charged, but rather signified métissage, an ethical-political ideal of intercultural hybridity, what others might call ‘creolization’. To Senghor and Césaire, empire had launched violent métissage, but a post-colonial polity could enable ‘civilizational’ mixture under conditions of true freedom. In fighting for a post-colonial future of metropolitan and colonial interdependency, therefore, Senghor and Césaire attempted to realize a political community of multi-cultural hybridity. In doing so, Wilder argues, they challenged the ‘assumption that the universal is European property’.Footnote 86
Even after experiencing federalist failure, Wilder argues that Senghor's and Césaire's continued unwillingness to sever ties with metropolitan France ought to be understood as emblematic of their devotion to ‘postimperial republicanism’, which ‘attempted to awaken the self-surpassing potentialities that they saw sedimented’ in empire.Footnote 87 For historians who might accuse Wilder of loitering with metaphysical intent, his work should compel scholars to look at anti-colonial thinkers in the same universalist discursive space as Kant or Habermas. The problem is not with this worthy endeavour, but the manner in which methodological republicanism works to naturalize imperial polities as ‘self-surpassing’ proto-democratic republics. He argues that the ‘crucial question was not how France behaved overseas or how its populations experienced colonial rule’, but that empire was a ‘plural polity composed of multiple cultural formations’.Footnote 88 ‘Unthinking France’, as he describes this methodology, helpfully foregrounds the impossibility of separating metropolitan and colonial political developments. Yet it also displaces an imperial polity's hierarchical, violent governance for an ideal-type multi-national state form. Wilder sidesteps this problem by ascribing to his subjects the ambition of ‘transcending’ imperial realities. When Senghor, for example, laid claim to ‘the legacy of his revolutionary “ancestors”’, as a full member of the republican nation, he was not seeking imperial inclusion but articulating a radical claim about the cosmopolitan expansiveness of republican ideals beyond the unitary hexagon.Footnote 89
It is hard to see past the fact, however, that such republican cosmopolitanism radiated from the metropole outward. Senghor and Césaire did make demands that France live up to its republican ideals, and it is accurate to describe their politics as containing cosmopolitan, supra-national valences. However, it is necessary to acknowledge, rather than deny, that these were imbricated with their politics of imperial inclusion. Ultimately, Wilder's ‘universalist truncation and subaltern fulfillment’ paradigm does not subvert European universalisms, but reinstates them as transhistorically stable.Footnote 90 As for negritude, even if one disregards the biological connotations of ‘civilizational’ métissage, its political core, like other theories of creolization, ‘correlates cultural change with European contact’.Footnote 91 A negritude humanism of civilizational complementarity reads less like a vision of cosmopolitan possibility, and more like the paradox Joan Scott once identified among French feminists.Footnote 92 By exposing the hidden particularisms of French republicanism, feminists/negritudinists made visible the sexual and racial difference encoded within it. By arguing for recognition on the terms of these differences, however, they also reinforced the very distinction their politics sought to abolish.
Adom Getachew also begins her study by observing that anti-colonial interlocutors made hitherto overlooked normative interventions in debates about sovereignty, international society, and statehood.Footnote 93 Yet her interest is less on the moral-ethical side of cosmopolitan theory than with the institutional dimensions of post-colonial cosmopolitanism. We have already glimpsed how Getachew's worldmaking optic refuses the ‘alien rule’ thesis of empire by redefining self-determination as a demand for more than just sovereign statehood. Anti-colonial leaders insisted that a global order of sovereign equality had always been an imperial myth; in reality, ‘unequal integration’ into international hierarchy was maintained through colonial economic and political dependence.Footnote 94 Getachew then uses this summary of anti-colonial political economy to critique standard theories of international order, which ignore conditions of external inequality that structure international society. While her chapter on federalism dips into the revisionist mode of seeing it as a means of ‘transcending’ state sovereignty, overall Getachew is more capable of addressing post-colonial cosmopolitanism's weaknesses. She refuses the binary found in Wilder and Cooper between nationalism and cosmopolitanism, while also acknowledging that anti-colonial elites just as often reinforced norms of state sovereignty as they challenged them.
Overall, the best revisionist work has served as a permanent rebuke to scholars who ignore anti-colonial interventions into the search for a more equitable cosmopolitan order. Our remaining concerns with cosmopolitanism ought to be with the limits its critics have long identified: its subjects are typically mobile, literate, male, and elite; advocates of supra-national governance struggle to constrain state power without instituting new forms of despotism; most notably, cosmopolitanism might only dress empire and capital in new, constitutional clothes. It is clear even from a cursory consideration of imperial and regional federations that post-colonial cosmopolitans can hardly be seen as immune from these charges. Moreover, if we take these elisions seriously, we see that cosmopolitan conceptions of order, even at their most nuanced, were premised on distortion. They made it hard to even perceive forms of political resistance that desired systemic transformation outside of cosmopolitan principles, much less politics which renounced international society altogether. Scholars are attempting to recover these possibilities, but they will remain hard to see if our eyes stay trained on a cosmopolitan geopolitical horizon.
V
As this essay has shown, there was indeed a global federal moment from the 1930s to the 1960s. While the post-war and post-colonial context which gave rise to the specific projects of mid-century federalism waned, these debates live on in ongoing polemics over East African integration or the European Union. Until now, however, much of the divide between historians of anti-colonial federalism and anti-colonial nationalism has rested upon a false division of the analytical and historical spoils. Neither nationalist nor federalist political imaginaries led to a predetermined territorial end point, and anti-colonial nationalists who practised a politics of imperial citizenship understood their federal claims upon the imperial state to be compatible with autonomist demands. Revisionists have shown the forceful appeal of the politics of imperial citizenship that aligned with anti-colonial federalism, but by the mid-1950s, the political terrain began to shift toward nationalist independence. While some anti-colonialists continued to view a vector of post-colonial politics as necessarily imbricated with former imperial powers, more work will be required to explain the twentieth-century acceleration of separatist nationalism.
Moreover, suggesting the politics of imperial incorporation dominated anti-colonial thinking obscures a vast array of anti-colonial politics. Like the republicanism which briefly dominated understandings of American independence, a variety of French republicanism has threatened to overtake the history of twentieth-century federalism and even decolonization.Footnote 95 Recognizing the limitations of methodological republicanism, however, need not entail dismissing the valuable attention revisionists have given to contestations over and about the state. Federalism was, at best, ambivalent and could just as easily serve the ends of an imperial order as provide the means for its overcoming. Its enormous political variations belie the notion that democratic republics were always already hidden within imperial polities. Rather, federal debates often introduced thorny problems of popular sovereignty and raised possibilities for a global political economy in which competing models not just of democracy, but also centralized and decentralized forms of statehood, were precariously at stake. These questions have profound implications for historians of political thought broadly writ, since they push us to interrogate some of the foundational conceptual categories of the field.
While moving beyond methodological republicanism allows for new questions to emerge, benefiting from the conceptual space that cosmopolitanism has opened up also requires us to resist the temptation to allow it to overdetermine the trajectory of twentieth-century political, and especially anti-colonial, thought. Furthermore, despite the complexity which federalist revisionists have offered by disrupting a teleological transition to nation-states, this narrative of curtailed cosmopolitanism has abided by the convention that the nation-state's installation as the default form of political organization irrevocably closed off all alternatives. Scholarship on anti-statist thinkers like Gandhi working to abolish the state rather than reconfigure it, for example, or neo-liberal federalists like Hayek who sought to create an economic super-state that would render the nation superfluous, sheds light on a global pattern of resistance to the centralization of political and economic authority under the nation-state that maps precisely onto federalism's mid-twentieth-century high water mark. Acknowledging this can highlight the ongoing ambivalence about the nation-state after the supposed rupture caused by its arrival, answering puzzles which have continued to shape politics in its wake.
