Geopolitics and Imperial Incapacity

Realist variables pepper the literature on the nineteenth- and twentieth-century decolonization of Europe's empires. Two propositions are commonplace. First, it is claimed that colonies freed themselves from imperial control because of the support of rival great powers, often an emerging hegemon. Hager and Lake make the theoretical case for why great powers might find it advantageous to engage in the practice of “competitive decolonization,” arguing that it has been a viable, and repeatedly adopted, tactic in the great power strategy of “capability disaggregation,” a strategy designed to alter the balance of geostrategic power in favor of meddling states.Footnote ¹³ Second, it is argued that the declining material capacities of imperial powers have been an important factor in decolonization.Footnote ¹⁴

Few would deny that great powers have at times sought to enhance their power by undermining rivals' empires, and material incapacity has certainly contributed to imperial fragmentation. Yet neither was a consistent factor in the great waves of expansion. In the Latin American wave, Britain withheld diplomatic and material support for independence movements in the decaying Spanish Empire until these movements had gained de facto sovereignty. In the post-1945 wave, the United States failed to match its earlier anticolonial rhetoric with sustained practical support for decolonization. Hager and Lake advance nine hypotheses about when rival great powers are more or less likely to engage in competitive decolonization,Footnote ¹⁵ but while some of these predict British and U.S. reticence, others point in the opposite direction. Even if they did consistently predict this lack of competitive decolonization, one would need to look elsewhere for the factors driving these waves of systemic expansion.

The material incapacity of empires is similarly indeterminate. In some cases fragmentary forces emerged in empires at moments of relative material strength; in others materially weak empires have seen little demand from colonies for independence. The violent fragmentation of the Holy Roman Empire began in the first half of the sixteenth century when, by several measures, the empire under Charles V was at one of its historical high points. In contrast, the Spanish Empire was in a parlous condition from the beginning of the eighteenth century, and the Bourbon monarchs sought to reverse this decline by imposing punishing political and economic reforms on the Americas, sparking violent resistance. Yet the catch cry of these uprisings was not independence; it was “long live the King, down with bad government.”

Structural Change in the World Economy

World systems theorists identify two conditions under which the decolonization of empires is more likely: economic hegemony, and global economic expansion. Because hegemony is thought to reduce great power competition and encourage free trade, imperial powers are free to relax control over their colonies and the hegemon has incentives to promote decolonization.Footnote ¹⁶ Similarly, “when average economic production in the system is expanding, the structure of control is less direct and political domination by core states over peripheral areas is relaxed.”Footnote ¹⁷

The idea that economic hegemony encourages decolonization appears to be supported by the correlation between post-1945 U.S. hegemony and the wholesale dismantling of Europe's empires. Yet the connection is tenuous. For world systems theorists, under conditions of hegemony two things encourage decolonization: the hegemon's active anticolonialism, animated by an interest in free trade, and the decline of great power rivalry, which encourages them to loosen their grip on empire. But as already noted, after 1945 the United States failed to provide unambiguous or sustained support for decolonization. Moreover, there is little evidence that reduced rivalry among Western great powers encouraged them to relinquish their empires.Footnote ¹⁸ If connections are weak in this case, they are no more apparent in other waves of systemic expansion. Not only did the collapse of the Spanish Empire begin before the consolidation of British hegemony, British support for American revolutionaries was piecemeal. Furthermore, there is no indication that the Spanish interest in empire was declining. Indeed, the counterrevolutionary wars waged by Spain after the reinstallation of the Bourbon monarchy in 1814 were savage.

The relationship between global economic expansion and decolonization is no more compelling. For world systems theorists, growth in the world economy reduces the incentives for imperial powers to seek economic gains from colonies, and “the resources available to the lower classes increase and the coercion of the market decreases leading to a relative downward shift in power. Liberation movements are thus more likely and more potent.”Footnote ¹⁹ As with economic hegemony, a correlation exists between such expansion and the post-1945 breakup of Europe's empires. But this is belied by the imperial powers' continued, even heightened interest in empire after World War II, and by the strength of anticolonial movements during the period of global economic downturn that preceded the war. The connection is even more tenuous in other waves of expansion. Concluding his quantitative survey of decolonization trends since 1520, Strang argues that “periods of economic expansion (upswings in Kondratieff waves) are inconsistently related to decolonization across model specifications.”Footnote ²⁰

Incorporation into International Society

For the English School, the expansion of “international society” is conceived as a process of social incorporation in which established European states defined the norms of membership, aspiring polities were socialized to conform to these norms, adapting their domestic institutions and international practices, and the community of extant states ordained compliant polities with sovereign rights.Footnote ²¹

That dominant states have propagated norms of international recognition and policed the boundaries of international society is clear, as is the fact that newly independent states have been among the most vigorous defenders of the sovereignty norm. Yet the English School's model fits none of the great waves. Political struggles drove each, and in these struggles subject peoples appealed to ideas that challenged dominant interpretations of membership norms. Moreover, the great waves of expansion were inextricably bound up with revisions to prevailing norms of legitimate statehood. In the first half of the twentieth century, subject peoples challenged the hypocritical pursuit of liberal constitutionalism in the European core and the systematic denial of equal civil and political rights in the non-European periphery. After 1945 newly independent states worked within United Nations fora to graft a reformulated right of self-determination to emergent international human rights norms. In doing so, they delegitimated the institution of empire, universalizing the organizing principle of sovereignty, and helped construct one of the principal institutions codifying liberal norms of legitimate statehood—the international human rights regime.

Socialization into World Culture

According to sociological institutionalists, world society's modernist culture has encouraged the spread of sovereign states through the “transmission of the nation-state model from Western powers to their dependencies,” and the diffusion of decolonization by example, with early decolonization copied by later independence movements.Footnote ²²

This explains little about the Westphalian wave: the rational bureaucratic nation-state was an achievement yet to be realized, and nothing akin to decolonization had occurred to be imitated. In subsequent waves, however, the model of the sovereign state did exist as an institutional alternative. Yet the sociological institutionalist account of its “diffusion” is simplistic. Before subject peoples could be receptive to the sovereign state as an institutional alternative, they had to have an interest in institutional change—they had to have reached the limits of “voice” within empire. Sociological institutionalists suggest that the very existence of the sovereign model, and the example of other states seizing independence, generated this interest. In the Latin American wave, however, the example of the sovereign state was well established, and the independence of Britain's colonies in North America stood as an example to be emulated, but for three decades after 1776 the prevailing mood in the Spanish world favored autonomy within empire, not sovereign independence. The demand for institutional change clearly originated elsewhere. Added to this, the sovereign state model was more complex than sociological institutionalists assume. Again, in the Latin American wave the prevailing, normatively ascendant form of political organization was dynastic sovereignty at home and empire abroad. Lastly, once subject peoples developed an interest in institutional change, the growing number of sovereign states was indeed one reason why subject peoples took the sovereign turn. But, as I shall show, a more dynamic form of modeling was at work.

Empires as Systems of Imperative Control

An empire, Doyle argues, “is a system of interaction between two political entities, one of which, the dominant metropole, exerts political control over the internal and external policy—effective sovereignty—of the other, the subordinate periphery.”Footnote ²³ For Doyle, such control has five dimensions: domain, scope, range, weight, and duration.Footnote ²⁴ Of these, “range” is centrally important, as it concerns the principal means of imperial control. Doyle identifies three such means: persuasion, coercion, and physical force. The explanations earlier imply that empires are simply realms of material control, resting primarily, if not exclusively, on the exercise of coercion and force. But as Doyle observes, “persuasion” was always a vital means of imperial control, delivering relatively cheap compliance as “crucial collaborators' internalized metropolitan values and came to see imperial policy as “both ‘civilized’ and ‘correct.’”Footnote ²⁵

The centrality of persuasion points to the nature of empires as systems of imperative control. Imperative control, according to Weber, “is the probability that a command with a specific content will be obeyed by a given group of persons.”Footnote ²⁶ Weber was particularly concerned with the exercise of imperative control within “compulsory associations,” corporate groups in which the established order “has, within a given sphere of activity, been successfully imposed on every individual who conforms with certain specific criteria.”Footnote ²⁷ The quintessential example of such an association was, for Weber, the sovereign state. But the concept is no less applicable to empires, the authority of which is also compulsory. The key thing is that imperative control, whether exercised within compulsory associations or elsewhere, can never rest on coercion or physical force alone; it requires “a certain minimum of voluntary submission; thus an interest (based on ulterior motives or genuine acceptance) in obedience.”Footnote ²⁸ This interest can rest on a range of factors, including custom, affectual ties, purely material concerns, or ideal motives. Weber is clear, however, that none of these is sufficient.Footnote ²⁹ Successful and sustained imperative control rests on one additional thing, the belief on the part of those subject to such control in the established order's legitimacy.Footnote ³⁰

Traditional Entitlements and the Structure of Imperial Legitimacy

Empires are hierarchies; their defining features are the asymmetrical distribution of power between the metropolitan state and peripheral polities, and the unequal distribution of social powers between metropolitan “citizens” and colonial subjects.Footnote ³¹ The principal challenge of imperative control within empires has been sustaining the legitimacy of such hierarchy. Historically, two things have contributed to this. First, the legitimacy of imperial hierarchy has been sustained by institutional structures, the social norms of which exert a form of structural power, generating unequal subject positions and allocating them with differential capacities and entitlements.Footnote ³² These institutional structures serve to naturalize hierarchy, making the unequal distribution of social powers and the resulting social order appear both normal and rightful. Second, the legitimacy of imperial hierarchy, and its attendant institutional structures, have been rationalized by the legitimation practices of metropolitan elites and their local collaborators. Usually this involved discourses of civilizational superiority and inferiority, differences that justified the unequal distribution of social powers and imperial tutelage.Footnote ³³

Because of their different cultural and historical origins, the empires in this study developed idiosyncratic institutional structures. These were instantiations, however, of a generic institutional form. Each empire rested on a regime of unequal entitlements: the social powers of individual elites and subjects, and the relation between them, were defined in terms of socially sanctioned entitlements.Footnote ³⁴ These entitlements differed from the individual rights that animated struggles for institutional change in two respects. First, they were “special” entitlements, arising out of special transactions between individuals or out of special relationships in which they stood.Footnote ³⁵ Second, they were “differential,” allocated to individuals unequally on the basis of social role, position, or status. This was clearly apparent in the feudal structure of the Holy Roman Empire,Footnote ³⁶ as it was in the differential rights enjoyed by Peninsulares, Creoles, Indians, “free colored castes,” and slaves in the Spanish Empire.Footnote ³⁷ Even in the British Empire, where all “British subjects” were notionally equal, the superiority of imperial legislation, the restriction of the franchise of sectors of the metropolitan society, and institutionalized discrimination against the employment of colonial subjects in the imperial bureaucracy, established a clear hierarchy of social and political entitlements.Footnote ³⁸

The stability of these empires as systems of imperative control depended on the continued legitimacy of their regimes of unequal entitlements. This stemmed from three functions they performed in structuring imperial social relations. First, they helped constitute the different subject positions that comprised the imperial social hierarchy—one's social role was both reflected in, and constituted by, the entitlements one could legitimately invoke. Second, entitlements and interests were intimately connected. Traditional entitlements were the product of long-standing historical bargains, however amorphous, asymmetrical, and incremental these were. Moreover, actors came to see their traditional entitlements as fundamental prerogatives they had powerful interests in defending. Finally, traditional entitlement regimes institutionalized the unequal distribution of legitimate social powers within empires. Because entitlement regimes performed these functions their delegitimation was particularly threatening to imperative control within empires.

Imperial Crises of Legitimacy and Revolutions in Rights

In their latter histories, the Holy Roman Empire, the Spanish Empire, and Europe's nineteenth- and twentieth-century empires all suffered severe crises of legitimacy. A political institution commands legitimacy when those subject to its rule consider it rightful, when they see it as “desirable, proper, appropriate within some socially constructed system of norms, values, beliefs, and definitions.”Footnote ³⁹ It suffers a crisis of legitimacy when these perceptions erode, reaching a point where the institution must be adapted, through practices of relegitimation or coercion, or face disempowerment. The principal indicators of such crises are thus heightened dissent and social unrest, and imperial elites seeking to reestablish control through negotiation and/or coercion.Footnote ⁴⁰ The Holy Roman Empire experienced such a crisis in the century preceding the outbreak of the Thirty Years War, the Spanish Empire in the wake of the Napoleonic usurpation in 1808, and Europe's remaining colonial empires from the late nineteenth century onward.

In each case imperial legitimacy eroded as the regime of unequal entitlements that sustained imperial hierarchy came under challenge. While each story differs, new distinctly modern ideas about individual rights took root in each context. But unlike traditional entitlements, these rights were “general” not special; they were held by individuals not because of particular transactions or relationships, but because the rights-holders were thought to constitute integral moral beings.Footnote ⁴¹ Furthermore, these rights were equal not differential; all those considered integral moral beings held them without distinction. While the new rights all took this form, in different imperial contexts different rights were operative. In the crisis of the Holy Roman Empire, a negative right—the right to liberty of religious conscience—was critical. In the crisis of the Spanish Empire, a positive right—the right to equal political representation—was key. In the crisis of Europe's remaining colonial empires, a compendium of negative and positive rights was at work. In addition to this substantive variation, the “zone of application” of these operative rights varied as well.Footnote ⁴² This is the community of individuals who, at a given historical moment, were thought to constitute integral moral beings entitled to the new rights. In the Westphalian crisis, champions of the right to liberty of religious conscience believed that only individuals of particular Christian denominations qualified. In the Spanish crisis, advocates of Latin Americans' right to equal political representation believed that male Creoles, Indians, and freed slaves counted, but not women or slaves. Only in the last of the three cases did the perceived zone of application come to encompass all human beings, regardless of race, religion, gender, or civilization. At this point alone is it reasonable to speak of the individual rights discussed here as “human rights.”

A critic might respond that it is anachronistic to see the politics of individual rights at work in all three waves of expansion—that such rights, properly speaking, became important only after the American and French revolutions. But this mistakenly treats the prevalence of explicit rights terminology as a necessary marker of rights-based political claims, arguments, and struggles. Such terminology certainly became more prevalent in the eighteenth century, but it was present well before then, featuring prominently in the writings of Hobbes, Grotius, and Locke, among others. More importantly, irrespective of the terminology's prevalence, arguments about individual rights, and the conflicts they have engendered, were salient well before the “Age of Revolutions.” An argument is about individual rights if “it takes some individual's interest (or the interests of some or all individuals severally) as a sufficient justification for holding others (usually governments) to have a duty to protect or promote that interest.”Footnote ⁴³ It is about “general” individual rights if the interest in question is important—and hence constitutes a sufficient justification for others incurring obligations—because it is essential to the individual's integrity as a moral being. By this measure, the Reformation argument that individuals had a fundamental interest in liberty of religious conscience, and that this justified the imposition of duties on others (princes, emperors, and popes), was about individual rights.

It is tempting to see in the changing scope of operative rights and their shifting zone of application a linear, even teleological, dynamic underlying and linking the major waves of expansion. Yet I make no such claim. Honneth is correct that the contradiction between the idea of general rights—rights that individuals hold by virtue of their status as integral moral beings—and the systematic denial that certain individuals constitute such beings has been one of the principal factors driving struggles for the recognition of rights: by alienated religious groups, workers, women, colonial peoples, indigenous peoples, etc.Footnote ⁴⁴ This contradiction was at work in all three waves of expansion. Yet the struggles for rights that drove these waves all emerged and unfolded in contingent circumstances. Imperial contexts mattered. The new ideas that emerged in sixteenth-century Europe were indigenous constructions, a product of the Protestant Reformation. In the Latin American and post-1945 waves they were “imported” by colonial subjects, but they were also indigenized, melded with local knowledge to lend them new meanings. Because of this subject peoples' struggles for individual rights are evidence less of the linear unfolding of modernity than clashes between what Eisenstadt terms “multiple modernities.”Footnote ⁴⁵ International contexts mattered as well. As I shall show, the struggles for rights that undermined Europe's colonial empires in the twentieth century began in colonial societies but “migrated” after 1945 into the emerging human rights fora of the United Nations, where postcolonial states reconstituted the right to self-determination by grafting it to emergent human rights norms. They were able to do this, however, only because other factors, such as Hitler's genocidal war, had prompted international action to codify international human rights.

The Demand for Sovereignty

Individual rights are institutionally dependent; their protection and satisfaction requires an enabling or executing institutional framework.Footnote ⁴⁶ Without such a framework rights may well exist—metaphysically, or in social understandings, or in laws cast aside by tyranny—but they will be inherently weak. The struggles for rights discussed here were thus centrally concerned with the architecture of institutions that would uphold such rights. As already argued, in all three of the cases, the legitimacy of imperial institutions eroded as subject peoples came to see them as not recognizing or protecting their new rights. In each crisis, subject peoples first sought to reform imperial institutions, to renegotiate the social contract on which imperial hierarchy rested, as Lake puts it.Footnote ⁴⁷ Yet each time a “tipping point” was reached in which rights claimants lost faith in the capacity of “voice” to yield meaningful imperial institutional reform and decided to “exit” instead. In the first crisis this point was reached after the failure of the Diet of Regensburg in 1546, in the second during the constitutional negotiations at the General Cortes of Cadiz in 1812, and in the third in 1918 in British India and 1945 in key colonies in sub-Saharan Africa. Each time, subject peoples turned to the sovereign state as the institutional alternative to empire.

My argument here is an empirical one—subject peoples did in fact turn repeatedly to the sovereign state. But why this institutional form and not some other? Three mutually reinforcing factors were at work. First, integral to each struggle was a universalizing yet bounding political imperative. Each of the general rights pursued by subject peoples required a political space, and matching institutional architecture, that was universalist, if not universal. If, for example, all those recognized as integral moral beings have a right to liberty of religious conscience, then the recognition and protection of this right requires a political space that encompasses all said individuals, and an institutional architecture, conterminous with that space, that recognizes that right and has some prospect of providing for its authoritative defense. This universalizing imperative was matched, however, by an equally strong imperative to build fences. In all three waves, those claiming new rights had a deep distrust of transnational institutional formations, a distrust born of their experience of empires as suboptimal rights providers. Together these factors pushed toward the sovereign state—“Westphalian” sovereignty promised the desired freedom from external authorities; “domestic” sovereignty a universalist regime of law.

Second, as anticipated above, in all but the Westphalian wave a process of dynamic modeling was at work. The nascent sovereign states that emerged out of Westphalia were products of endogenous political struggles, institutional by-products of the curtailing of transnational authorities and the transfer of political powers to local princes. But, as sociological institutionalists observe, as the number of states increased, and institutions sustaining sovereignty took root, the sovereign state came to be seen as the institutional alternative to empire. But as noted earlier, it is wrong to describe this as a simple process of diffusion. While the organizing principle of sovereignty existed at the core of the system from the seventeenth to the eighteenth centuries, it was conjoined to ideas of legitimate statehood that changed dramatically over the ensuing two centuries. Furthermore, until the latter half of the twentieth century, sovereignty was not a universal organizing principle. Subject peoples did internalize sovereignty as the institutional alternative to empire, but their political struggles helped transform the norms on which sovereignty rested, challenging prevailing conceptions of legitimate statehood and pushing for the universalization of sovereignty as an organizing principle.

Third, if the above two factors help explain the “turn to sovereignty,” they do not explain why particular states, in particular locales, with particular boundaries emerged with the collapse of particular empires. Here Roeder's observation that empires have tended to fragment along preexisting administrative lines is useful: the Holy Roman Empire splintered into its principalities, the Spanish Empire into its vice royalties, and Europe's African and Asian empires into their colonies.Footnote ⁴⁸ But while preexisting institutional structures undoubtedly provided opportunities and resources for revolt, they do not, in and of themselves, explain why a demand for institutional change emerged in “segmented states” in the first place. For this to occur, there needs to be the struggles for individual rights.

The Causal Role of Rights Struggles

In this argument struggles for the recognition of individual rights were a necessary but insufficient cause of the fragmentation of particular empires into sovereign states, and as a consequence, of key waves of international systemic expansion. They were “insufficient” because a multitude of factors were implicated in each historical transformation, and each had its own particular cocktail of causes. But they were “necessary” because in their absence history would have been different. The issue of liberty of religious conscience lay at the heart of the confessional conflicts that wracked the Holy Roman Empire, and dealing with this issue was a centerpiece of the Westphalian settlement, significantly affecting the nascent sovereign order it produced. Without this issue, and the struggles it animated, the empire may well have collapsed, but the timing and nature of this collapse would have been different. Similarly, the issue of equal political representation was the central Latin American concern in attempts to negotiate a reformed post-Napoleonic Spanish Empire, and the refusal of Peninsulares to grant such representation turned Spanish Americans from reform to revolution. Had the Cortes of Cadiz granted Spanish Americans the representation they sought, the radical case would have been greatly weakened, and the empire may well have limped on, much as it had for over a century. Finally, the perceived hypocrisy of Europeans embracing civil and political rights at home while denying such rights to their colonial peoples was a key grievance of prominent twentieth-century independence movements, and the post-1945 delegitimation of empire as an institutional form resulted from the successful grafting, within key United Nations fora, of the right to self-determination to emergent human rights norms. Take away the politics of individual rights, and the collapse of empire—in its particular manifestations, and as an institutional form—would, in all likelihood, have a run a different course.

Within each of these struggles, new ideas about individual rights performed three roles. First, they helped ferment imperial crises of legitimacy. As these ideas spread and were interpreted, reconstituted, and embraced as legitimate, subject peoples reimagined themselves as moral and political subjects. In doing so these peoples acquired new political interests in the recognition and protection of their new rights. In pursuit of these interests, they challenged prevailing regimes of entitlements and sought institutional reform. Because, in each case, the spread of these ideas was a transimperial phenomenon, they undermined the structural capacity of metropoles to divide and rule their peripheries, overcoming “peripheral segmentation” by providing subject peoples with a common sense of entitlement and grievance.Footnote ⁴⁹ Second, ideas about individual rights, and the arguments they informed, provided justificatory resources in struggles over legitimate political authority. Political elites used them to mobilize subject peoples and as a moral basis on which to critique established imperial norms and practices. As ideas about individual rights took root in metropolitan societies, they were used to highlight the hypocrisy of the imperial order. As human rights norms came to be codified at the international level, newly independent postcolonial states used them to graft a reconstituted norm of self-determination. Finally, ideas about individual rights constituted “deal-breakers,” principles that had to be recognized if attempts to resolve imperial crises of legitimacy were to succeed and subject peoples discouraged from “exiting.” Yet time and again attempts to reestablish imperial legitimacy through negotiated settlements foundered because they failed to recognize the new rights claims. This was the case at the Diets of Regensburg in 1541 and 1546, and at the General Cortes of Cadiz in 1812.

In all three waves ideas about rights performed each of these functions. Yet there is a significant difference between the Westphalian and Latin American waves, on the one hand, and the post-1945 wave, on the other. In the first two, crises of legitimacy occurred within single empires, and the broader institution of empire was questioned only at the margins.Footnote ⁵⁰ In the latter, multiple empires fell into crisis, and the institution was challenged directly. This has two implications. First, while strong claims can be made that new ideas about individual rights fermented imperial crises of legitimacy and served as deal-breakers in the first two waves, these are harder to sustain with the post-1945 wave: too many empires spanned too many diverse societies for generalization. My claim regarding this wave is thus more qualified. Ideas about individual rights did not ferment all anticolonial struggles, or constitute the principal sticking points in all attempts to reestablish imperial legitimacy. They did, however, in key struggles, most notably in British and French sub-Saharan Africa and British South Asia. Such ideas were also at work in Egypt, but this was not the norm in the Middle East, where Arab and Islamic cultural politics were important.Footnote ⁵¹ Second, as noted above, the emergent human rights institutions of the United Nations enabled newly independent postcolonial states to challenge the legitimacy of the institution of empire in general. Ideas about individual rights were thus particularly important here as justificatory resources in debates over legitimate political authority. The upshot of all of this is that the balance between the roles ideas played varied across the three waves of expansion, with the diversity of imperial contexts, and new institutional opportunity structures, privileging their justificatory role in the post-1945 case.

Individual Rights and Nationalism

Of the five great waves, only the Westphalian occurred before the eighteenth century rise of nationalism as a salient political force.Footnote ⁵² It is well to ask, therefore, what role I attribute to nationalism in the remaining waves. I follow Gellner in defining nationalism as “a political principle that holds that the political and national units should be congruent,” and a nationalist movement as one designed to bring about or preserve such congruence.Footnote ⁵³ I distinguish, however, between aggregative and communal forms of nationalism.Footnote ⁵⁴ In the former, the “nation” deserving its own political unit is imagined as a collectivity of free and equal individuals; in the latter, as a cultural community bound together by bonds of language, religion, race, etc. As I shall show, only in the post-Versailles wave did communal nationalism predominate, characterizing both the European nationalist movements and the international criteria for self-determination. In the Latin American wave, and key anticolonial struggles of the post-1945 wave, varieties of aggregative nationalism predominated. This was in part a consequence of the cultural conditions of revolt—for the Creole elite in the Americas, not only did the denial of individual rights fuel their grievances, their Spanish ancestry and the need to mobilize Indians and freed slaves meant that a cultural conception of nation was not an option. A similar situation existed in most of Europe's African, Asian, and Pacific colonies, where cultural heterogeneity was the norm.

The key thing is, however, that in the Latin American and post-1945 waves of expansion struggles for individual rights and nationalism were deeply entwined—indeed, the former helped constitute the latter (and in the subsequent histories of most postcolonial states, the latter would in turn shape the former). In each, the metropole's denial of equal rights was a catalyst for political mobilization. But as Calhoun observes, one can only be a free and equal right-bearing individual within a community of reciprocity, where the recognition of your rights is matched by your recognition of others.Footnote ⁵⁵ In the reform phase of colonial campaigns for equal rights, this community was the imperial populace, with subject peoples seeking recognition of their rights as “full citizens of the empire.”Footnote ⁵⁶ But when these campaigns failed, a new community had to be imagined, and this was the “nation,” the bounds of which were determined not by the extent of cultural affinities, but by the territorial limits of colonial administrations. In the Latin American wave, and in key anticolonial movements of the post-1945 wave, struggles for individual rights thus had a collectivizing dynamic, the result of which was emergent aggregative nationalisms. Aggregative conceptions of the nation as a collectivity of free and equal individuals informed the early republican constitutions of the newly independent Latin American states,Footnote ⁵⁷ as they did the constitutions of states such as India. True Indian nationalism, Nehru argued, was “something quite apart from … [the] religious and communal varieties of nationalism and strictly speaking … the only form which can be called nationalism in the modern sense of the word.”Footnote ⁵⁸ Very often, these nationalisms remained inchoate at the time of independence. As Chiaramonte observes, for example, in Latin America ideas of nationality and nation were not the root cause of independence, “they were the result of a long-drawn-out process sparked off by it.”Footnote ⁵⁹

Rights by Other Means

The argument advanced here contrasts with two others that also draw links between the politics of individual rights and the development of the system of sovereign states. The first argument, advanced by both Tilly and North, stresses the role that “revenue for rights” bargains played in the development of European states. Desperate to secure the financial resources needed to sustain their war fighting, rulers struck deals with their propertied subjects, granting them political rights in return for taxes.Footnote ⁶⁰ While this undoubtedly captures a significant dimension of European state formation, Tilly and North are both concerned with a different category of individual rights to those emphasized here (special not general rights), and they are concerned solely with intra-European state formation (not the extra-European processes that characterized the Latin American and post-1945 waves of systemic expansion). More than this, the politics of rights that drove the principal waves does not fit their causal model in which the prevailing social order is undermined by material forces, the key agents are nascent rulers and propertied classes animated by material interests, and individual rights enter the equation as political outcomes not interests. The second argument, proffered most notably by Ruggie, stresses the constitutive power of ideas. Specifically, he argues that the shift from medieval to modern conceptions of property rights (from nonexclusive and conditional to exclusive and unconditional rights) cognitively enabled the shift from the heteronomous system of political authority to modern sovereignty (from nonexclusive to exclusive rule).Footnote ⁶¹ As with the first argument, Ruggie is concerned with special rights and intra-European state formation, not general rights and extra-European state formation. More importantly, Ruggie neglects the additional role that individual rights played in concrete political struggles: how new conceptions of rights came to inform subjects' fundamental understandings of their civil and political entitlements, how they undercut the legitimacy of imperial orders, and how they were used to justify the pursuit of sovereignty.

The Westphalian Settlement

At the beginning of the sixteenth century, Europe's political order was “heteronomous;” it comprised multiple centers of authority, the jurisdictions of which were nonterritorial and nonexclusive, overlapping in complex and often contradictory ways.Footnote ⁶² Within this order, the hierarchical institutions of the Holy Roman Empire provided the closest thing to a transnational, if partial and nonexclusive, political architecture.Footnote ⁶³ This political edifice, and the wider heteronomous order in which it was embedded, was held together by a framework of traditional entitlements and correlative obligations. The emperor, the pope, the princes of the empire, local lords, churchmen, knights, and even serfs frequently, and legitimately, invoked these entitlements. But these were differential not equal—different individuals had different entitlements because they occupied different positions, with different social statuses.

The ideas of the Reformation challenged this order fundamentally.Footnote ⁶⁴ Beneath these ideas lay a distinctive conception of the individual as an integral moral agent, whose capacity for faith gave them direct access to the grace of God, and through this salvation. For Protestant intellectuals, it was this moral individualism that differentiated Protestantism from Catholicism.Footnote ⁶⁵ Because the individual could gain salvation only through faith, these Protestants considered freedom of religious belief a fundamental right. In Luther's words, “belief and unbelief is a matter of everyone's conscience, and since this is no lessening of secular power, the latter should be content to attend to its own affairs and permit men to believe one thing or another, as they are able and willing, and constrain no one by force.”Footnote ⁶⁶ The political implications of this were profound. They not only undercut the authority of the Catholic Church, with its purported role in mediating the relation between the individual and God, they undermined the Holy Roman Empire's principal rationale, its status as the guardian of a Catholic Christendom. Spread by evangelical preachers, pamphlets, woodcuts, satirical pictures, and communicated rapidly through growing urban centers, the Reformation had a revolutionary impact on the empire. By the middle of the sixteenth century, over half of the free imperial cities, and all three of the empire's lay electors, were Protestant, and the territories of the “reformed princes stretched from the Baltic to the borders of Switzerland.”Footnote ⁶⁷

Attempting to resolve this political crisis, Emperor Charles V convened the 1541 and 1546 Diets of Regensburg. The main point of contention was the doctrine of “justification,” the way sinners established righteousness before God. The Protestant principle of sola fide held that only faith could demonstrate righteousness. For Catholics, however, righteousness was also dependent on doing “good works,” which gave the Church a mediating role in the process of justification. Negotiations at the 1541 Diet focused on “The Book of Regensburg,” a compromise document designed to foster conciliation.Footnote ⁶⁸ The article on justification was vigorously contested, however, and although a fragile agreement was reached, it soon collapsed when neither Luther nor the pope agreed.Footnote ⁶⁹ The 1546 Diet was the emperor's last attempt at reunification through negotiation. Tensions were high, however, between Charles and the Protestant Schmalkaden League, and the Diet competed with the pope's Council of Trent (first convened in 1545). Not surprisingly, the delegates would not even renew the previous Diet's vetoed agreement on justification. War soon broke out between Charles and the league, resulting in the latter's defeat at the Battle of Muhlberg in April 1547. Emboldened, Charles tried to compel unity by imperial decree, issuing the 1548 “Interim of Augsburg.”Footnote ⁷⁰ Protestant forces responded by invading Augsburg and the Tyrol, forcing Charles and his successor, Ferdinand I, to flee. Charles sued for peace at Passau in 1552, with the religious issues addressed at the Diet of Augsburg in 1555.Footnote ⁷¹

The Peace of Augsburg was the first step on the road toward a European system of sovereign states. The Empire's institutions survived, but the “Augsburg principle” of cuius regio, euis religio (whose rule, his religion) transferred significant authority from the Holy Roman Emperor to the princes, and swept away the ideal of a unified Latin Christendom, replacing it with a statist, confessionally restricted form of religious pluralism (only Lutheranism and Catholicism were recognized). The peace was inherently unstable, though, as it failed to deal with the key issue animating the preceding decades of religious conflict—the individual's right to liberty of religious conscience, the root of the divisions over justification. The peace gave only a tiny minority of the empire's population such a right—the lay princes of the empire (the ecclesiastical princes were forbidden to change their confession).Footnote ⁷² The peace's fragility was apparent all too soon. Its pluralism was challenged by the Counter-Reformation,Footnote ⁷³ and the limits of its statism were quickly exposed as princes moved to assert their right to dictate the religion of their territory and alienated Protestants and Catholics rebelled. It was Emperor Ferdinand II sixty years later, however, who sparked the Thirty Years War. In their personal territories, his predecessors had applied the principle of cuius regio, euis religio with moderation, granting their Protestant subjects the right to worship instead of forcing them into exile.Footnote ⁷⁴ Ferdinand reversed this practice, revoking the religious liberties of his Bohemian subjects, sparking a Protestant rebellion in 1618.

The Peace of Westphalia ended the Thirty Years War and thereafter religion declined as a primary source of European conflicts.Footnote ⁷⁵ It succeeded where Augsburg failed because it combined two things, which together addressed the central issue of liberty of religious conscience. First, the treaties reaffirmed the principle of cuius regio, euis religio but went further in licensing the creation of a host of confessionally independent states, endowing them with political rights now associated with sovereignty. Second, and in a significant departure from Augsburg, the treaties “compromised” the emerging states' sovereignty, heavily qualifying the Augsburg principle by granting individuals freedom of religious conscience. They did this in part through their “minority rights” provisions. Protestants living in Catholic states, and Catholics living in Protestant states, were to “be patiently suffered and tolerated, without any Hindrance or Impediment to attend to their Devotions in their Houses and in private, with all Liberty of Conscience, and without any Inquisition or Trouble, and even to assist in their Neighbourhood, as often they have mind, as the Publick Exercise of their Religion.”Footnote ⁷⁶ But the treaties' protections went beyond this, granting all subjects religious rights against their princes. Under the Peace of Augsburg, if a prince changed his religion, he could (and frequently did) require his subjects to change theirs. The Treaty of Osnabruck explicitly proscribed such practices. A prince who changed his religion, or acquired a territory where a different religion was practiced, could practice his own faith but he could not “oblige his Subjects under pretext of Right of Territory.”Footnote ⁷⁷ By doing these things, the Peace of Westphalia produced the first great wave of systemic expansion, creating nascent sovereign states across Germany, Switzerland, and the Netherlands. But the sovereignty these states gained had a particular meaning, one in which the sovereign's authority did not legitimately extend to the prescription of religious belief.Footnote ⁷⁸

The Independence of Spanish America

Between 1808 and 1825 the Spanish Empire imploded, producing fifteen new sovereign states. In seeking to explain this collapse, scholars agree about two things: its rapid, dramatic, and universal nature, and the fact that it was catalyzed by an external shock—Napoleon's usurpation of the Spanish crown. Beyond this, numerous factors have been identified to explain the Empire's demise, including the reforms to colonial governance instituted by Spain's Bourbon monarchs in the eighteenth century, the growth of nationalist sentiments among Creole elites, the failure of peninsular elites to find common ground and adopt consistent policies toward insurgent politics, the varied responses to dissent by royal governments in the Americas, the erosion of traditional means of social control and integration, the Empire's failure to meet Spanish American demands for extra-imperial free trade, the examples of the American and French revolutions, and the influence of the scientific, economic, and political ideas of the Enlightenment.Footnote ⁷⁹ While these factors were no doubt implicated in the Empire's collapse, they leave one key question unanswered: Why, in response to the Napoleonic usurpation, did Spanish Americans eventually choose independence? Prior to the crisis of 1808 there was little demand for Spanish American independence. In the wake of the crisis a range of other viable options existed,Footnote ⁸⁰ and Spanish Americans, even after the usurpation, were slow to pursue sovereignty. The answer lies in the struggle by Spanish Americans for equal political representation in a reformed, post-Napoleonic empire, the failure of which was a critical factor in turning them from voice to exit.

Like the Holy Roman Empire, the Spanish Empire rested on a hierarchical regime of differential political entitlements. Because Pope Alexander VI granted title to the Indies to the Kings of Castile and Leon, the Americas became the personal patrimony of the Spanish monarchy, not possessions of the Spanish state. This had a profound impact on colonial governance structures. The principal political institution became the viceroyalty, the appointee being “the king's alter ego, holding court in his viceregal palace, and carrying with him something of the ceremonial aura of kingship.”Footnote ⁸¹ Because the papal grant had been to the monarchs of Castile, a kingdom with historically weak and underdeveloped Cortes for the representation of the nobility, clergy, and towns, such bodies were never established in the Americas.Footnote ⁸² A clear hierarchy of political rights was thus established, one that placed the monarch, and Peninsulares, above Spanish Americans. This hierarchy was accentuated during the eighteenth century by the Bourbon monarchs, whose imperial reforms removed many of the informal avenues of Spanish American influence that had evolved under the Habsburgs, their “decreolizing” of the imperial bureaucracy being the most notable example.Footnote ⁸³

In May 1808, Napoleon occupied Spain, forced Charles IV, and then Ferdinand VII, to abdicate, and enthroned his brother as Emperor Joseph I. In understanding these events, Spaniards across the empire drew on the traditional Spanish theory of sovereignty. Articulated most notably by de Vitoria and Suarez, this theory held that political authority derived from God. But unlike French theorists such as Bodin, they held that God invested sovereignty first in “political community,” and this community then ordained monarchs with authority.Footnote ⁸⁴ Napoleon's usurpation provoked an insurgent war across the empire, and the majority of those who rebelled against the French believed, in accordance with this theory, that in the absence of a legitimate monarch, sovereignty had returned to the people.Footnote ⁸⁵ While this appeal to traditional understandings of sovereignty successfully undercut Joseph's authority, it begged two key questions that ultimately divided the Americas from peninsula Spain: What is the nature of the “people” to which sovereignty reverts? And how is this “people” to be politically represented? Did the inhabitants of the empire constitute one or more peoples, and were their interests to be represented through some form of democracy, through traditional estates, or by a benevolent, all-seeing monarch?Footnote ⁸⁶ Peninsula Spaniards were united in answering the first of these questions: the Spanish Empire was one; a single kingdom, a single people. Spanish Americans, in contrast, rejected this view, arguing that the empire comprised several kingdoms or peoples, each with an independent relationship to the Spanish monarchy, a position they defended by appealing to the original papal grant. The Spanish Americans were divided, however, between reformers and radicals. For the former, the separate status of the Americas did not foreclose membership of the empire under a common, reformed, institutional framework—the key issue was equal political representation within such a framework.Footnote ⁸⁷ For the radicals, equality within the empire was a chimera, and the return of sovereignty could mean only one thing: political independence.

In the aftermath of the usurpation, the reformers were ascendant. But debates at the insurgent General Cortes were a tipping point, radicalizing the Spanish American insurgency. Convened between September 1810 and May 1814, the Cortes focused on the negotiation of a constitution for a reformed, post-Napoleonic empire. The 1812 “Constitution of Cadiz” was the most liberal constitution yet promulgated in Europe, and became the bete noire of Absolutist regimes. Its liberalism was tainted, though, by how it dealt with the question of political representation, the central issue of debate at Cadiz. Liberals from the peninsula and the Americas dominated the Cortes, and all embraced the new, distinctly modern idea that individuals, not traditional estates, had the right to political representation.Footnote ⁸⁸Peninsulares and Spanish Americans were divided, however, over who among the inhabitants of the empire constituted “individuals” entitled to such a right. For the Spanish Americans, the vast majority of Spanish Americans—Creoles, Indians, and freed slaves (but not slaves)—were rational adults, all entitled to equal political representation. The Peninsulares, in contrast, held that only Americans of Spanish blood constituted rational adults; Indians and the “free colored castes” were considered irrational children, ruled by their passions.Footnote ⁸⁹ They eventually dropped their opposition to the representative rights of Indians, as this conflicted with the rights “Indians” enjoyed under the Law of the Indies.Footnote ⁹⁰ Even with this concession, the Peninsulares held that only a minority of Spanish Americans were entitled to political representation.Footnote ⁹¹

Despite the Spanish Americans' persistent and impassioned arguments, at each crucial juncture they were outvoted by their peninsular counterparts, who commanded a sizable majority on the Cortes.Footnote ⁹² The final text of the constitution reflects this domination, systematically denying Spanish Americans equal political representation in a post-Napoleonic empire.Footnote ⁹³ When defining who constituted “Spaniards,” it was comparatively inclusive, granting such status to “All free-men born and bred up in the Spanish dominions,” including freed slaves (Article 5). It took a discriminatory turn, however, when defining who, among these Spaniards, qualified as citizens. Citizenship was granted to all “Those who, by both lines, are of Spanish parents, of either hemisphere, and have resided ten years in some village in the Spanish dominions' (Article 18). If the Article 5 definition of “Spanish” had applied, this too would have been relatively inclusive. But Article 22 excluded freed slaves from citizenship; their children could, as individuals, petition a future Cortes for a “Letter of Citizenship,” but they would have to demonstrate “meritorious services to the fatherland,” a tall order for peoples of disadvantaged castes. A large proportion of the Spanish American population was thus disenfranchised, but the discrimination did not stop there. Not satisfied with denying freed slaves citizenship, the Peninsulares also succeeded in excluding freed slaves from the electoral count. Article 29 included only “the people composed of those inhabitants who, by both lines, are natives of the Spanish dominions,” and since the ancestry of former slaves was traced to Africa not the Spanish dominions, they were excluded by definition.Footnote ⁹⁴

One might respond that the Spanish Americans and Peninsulares were driven more by electoral self-interest than by deeply held views about who constituted an individual entitled to equal political representation. If the Spanish Americans had successfully enfranchised freed slaves they would have dominated any future Cortes of the empire, something Peninsulares greatly feared. Moral inclusivity on the part of the former, and exclusivity on the part of the latter, thus served their respective political interests. Yet this would misconstrue their positions. The Peninsulares' fear of Spanish American domination and their denial that freed slaves constituted rational adults worthy of equal representation were deeply entwined—they feared Spanish American domination in part because they considered most Spanish Americans culturally inferior. As for the Spanish American delegates, if their cultural attitudes had in reality been as discriminatory as their peninsular counterparts, and their goal had simply been electoral domination, they could have adopted a different negotiating position. They could have supported, instead of opposed, Articles 18 and 22, which together denied freed slaves citizenship, while continuing to oppose Article 29, which excluded free colored castes from the electoral count, arguing as they did that all Spaniards (as defined by Article 5) should be included.Footnote ⁹⁵ This would have ensured Spanish American domination of any future Cortes, but restricted political representation to Creoles and Indians.Footnote ⁹⁶

The Cortes's failure to recognize the rights of Spanish Americans to equal political representation turned them from reform to revolution. For the radicals, the paltry Spanish American representation at Cadiz was already evidence that reform could not deliver equal representation. This is clearly apparent in the Venezuelan Declaration of Independence of 5 July 1811, which proclaimed the most famous of the early, if ill-fated, revolutions. The Peninsulares had, it declared, “promised us liberty, equality, and fraternity, conveyed in pompous discourses and studied phrases, for the purpose of covering the snare laid by a cunning, useless, and degrading Representation.”Footnote ⁹⁷ After the constitution was adopted, these sentiments became the norm. As King observes, “the denial of an equal basis of representation, more than any other act of the Cortes, encouraged and justified the incipient revolt in America, and the deliberate adoption of racial discrimination provided revolutionary leaders with a powerful appeal to numerous colored elements of the population.”Footnote ⁹⁸ The Venezuelan Declaration was followed by revolutionary proclamations by local juntas across the Americas.Footnote ⁹⁹ This initial revolutionary phase was halted, however, by Ferdinand VII's return to the Spanish throne in 1814. Ferdinand abolished the General Cortes, annulled the constitution, returned Spain to absolutism, reinstated Bourbon institutions in the Americas, and his viceroys launched a series of savage counterrevolutionary wars. While initially successful, these wars failed to crush the insurgents altogether, and by 1818–1819 the tide had turned against Spanish forces.

Post-1945 Decolonization

After World War I, a third great wave of systemic expansion occurred, a consequence this time of the defeat and collapse of the German, Austro-Hungarian, and Ottoman Empires. It was here that the rights of ethnically defined “nations,” not individuals, were crucial. In carving up the territories of the defeated empires, the victorious powers upheld the principle that all “nations” had a right to self-determination. In his “Fourteen Points” speech, U.S. president Woodrow Wilson proclaimed “the principle of justice to all peoples and nationalities, and their right to live on equal terms of liberty and safety with one another, whether they be strong or weak.”Footnote ¹⁰⁰ While not enshrined in the Treaty of Versailles itself, the principle was instituted in a series of postwar accords, the net result being the creation of more than twenty new sovereign states. In determining who constituted a “nation” worthy of self-determination, a communal conception of nation was applied. As Emerson observes, “the people involved in the Wilsonian period were ethnic communities, nations, or nationalities primarily defined by language or culture.”Footnote ¹⁰¹ This reflected the prevailing view that successful states were ethnically homogeneous. For Wilson, democracy could function properly only when a population was bound together by linguistic and cultural affinities.Footnote ¹⁰² For Vladimir Lenin, “multinational” states were “always those whose internal constitution has for some reason or other remained abnormal or underdeveloped.”Footnote ¹⁰³ Not all ethnically defined nations were entitled to self-determination, however. Ethnic minorities “trapped” inside the new European states had no right of secession,Footnote ¹⁰⁴ and the principle did not apply to peoples living in Europe's overseas empires.

This approach to the disaggregation of empires into sovereign states did not survive World War II. The idea that ethnically defined nations had a right to sovereign statehood, and that this provided the basis for a stable international order, was undercut by two things. First, it was shattered by the Nazis' genocidal war for a culturally homogeneous greater Germany. As Hobsbawm observes, “the logical implication of trying to create a continent neatly divided into coherent territorial states each inhabited by a separate ethnically and linguistically homogeneous population, was the mass expulsion and extermination of minorities.” In this respect, Hitler was “a logical Wilsonian nationalist.”Footnote ¹⁰⁵ Second, the post-Versailles self-determination regime was of little practical use to those peoples seeking independence from empires after World War II. As noted earlier, most of Europe's colonies in Asia, Africa, and the Pacific were culturally heterogeneous, unhelped by a principle that conferred sovereignty on ethnically homogeneous nations alone. Furthermore, the post-Versailles regime applied only to those within the “civilized world.” It was generally assumed that “barbarian” and “savage” peoples would have to remain under European tutelage for the foreseeable future.

Struggles for recognition of individual rights were central, once again, to the fourth, post-1945 wave of systemic expansion, in significant part because of the moral collapse and emancipatory deficiencies of the post-Versailles self-determination regime.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ Subject peoples began agitating for the recognition of their civil and political rights in India in the late nineteenth century, and similar campaigns began in key African colonies after World War I. As frequently observed, Western-educated “indigenes” internalized liberal ideas about the individual's rights to liberty and challenged the hypocrisy and injustice of Europeans embracing these at home while denying them to their colonial subjects. In both India and sub-Saharan Africa, however, these were initially movements for imperial reform, not sovereign independence. Their leaders “were not revolutionaries and they did not always aspire to independence, at least, not in the immediate future. One of their main grievances in this earliest phase was the restriction of the right of entry of their fellow countrymen into the civil service that ruled the country on behalf of the foreign sovereign. They also desired that legislative institutions should be a little more representative of persons like themselves.”Footnote ¹⁰⁷ Founded in 1885, the Indian National Congress had just such a reform agenda;Footnote ¹⁰⁸ and after World War I, Nigerian nationalists were similarly concerned with gaining recognition as “full citizens of empire.”Footnote ¹⁰⁹ It was the experience of world war that radicalized these movements, “tipping” them from reform within empire to sovereign independence. Indians believed that their aid to Britain during World War I had earned them greater respect of their civil and political rights, a belief quickly disabused by British intransigence. Africans had similar expectations during World War II, only to find that the Atlantic Charter's stated “respect for the right of all peoples to choose the form of government under which they wish to live” applied solely to Europeans.Footnote ¹¹⁰

The independence struggles that emerged out of these moments of disillusionment had notable successes—Britain's retreat from the Indian subcontinent in 1947 being the most prominent example. Yet such successes were far from the norm and did not result in the wholesale dissolution of Europe's colonial empires between 1945 and 1970. To understand this collapse, we need to consider a second level of the struggle for individual rights and then self-determination: the struggle waged by postcolonial states, in the name of subject peoples, in the fledgling human rights bodies of the United Nations.

Contrary to common wisdom, newly independent postcolonial states played a key role in the negotiation of both the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, taking positions diametrically opposed to the Soviet Union and more liberal than Western powers.Footnote ¹¹¹ These states consistently argued, for example, that civil and political rights had priority. When, in debates on the Universal Declaration, the Soviet Union tried to subordinate these rights to social and economic concerns, India replied that it would “never agree to restricting political rights in order to realize social aims, however notable those might be.” Three years later, when the Soviet Union called for a single international covenant that would prioritize social and economic rights, India and Lebanon supported proceeding with two treaties, arguing that “civil and political rights were more important than economic and social rights because the former provided the essential conditions for the enjoyment of the latter.”Footnote ¹¹² Postcolonial support for the international codification of civil and political rights was also consistently stronger than that of their Western counterparts. They successfully opposed an attempt by Britain and France (supported by Australia, Canada, and the United States) to limit the covenant's application in “Non-Self-Governing and Trust Territories,” arguing that this would undermine the universality of the treaty.Footnote ¹¹³ Most importantly, postcolonial states insisted that protecting civil and political rights was an international obligation that could compromise states' domestic jurisdiction, leading them to support stronger implementation mechanisms. In particular, in opposition to Australia, Canada, France, New Zealand, Britain, and the United States, leading postcolonial states insisted that individuals, in addition to states, should have the right to petition United Nations human rights bodies.Footnote ¹¹⁴

It was in this context that postcolonial states reasserted and reformulated the collective right to self-determination.Footnote ¹¹⁵ Their strategy was to graft this latter right to emergent international human rights norms, portraying it as a necessary prerequisite for the satisfaction of individuals' civil and political rights. In 1951 leading postcolonial states called on the General Assembly to compel the Human Rights Commission to insert an article on self-determination into the two draft covenants, arguing that “No basic human rights could be ensured unless this right were ensured.”Footnote ¹¹⁶ In response, the commission not only inserted the requested articles in both covenants but asked the General Assembly to pass a separate resolution encouraging states to uphold the right. Adopted in 1952, Resolution 637 (A) explicitly tied the right to self-determination to individual human rights—“the right of peoples and nations to self-determination is a prerequisite for the enjoyment of all fundamental human rights.”Footnote ¹¹⁷ Not surprisingly, these moves were opposed by leading Western states, including the United States. A collective right to self-determination had no place in covenants on individual rights, they argued, and establishing such a categorical right contradicted the “sacred trust” that the UN Charter placed on states responsible for nonself-governing territories, a trust that required administering powers to nurture colonial peoples, raising them up to the point where they were ready for independence. All of these claims were rejected by postcolonial states. In particular, they insisted that the charter's provisions on nonself-governing territories had to be interpreted in the context of Articles 1.2 and 55, the first of which upholds “the principle of equal rights and self-determination of peoples,” while the second mandates “universal respect for, and observance of, human rights and fundamental freedoms.”Footnote ¹¹⁸ Such arguments persisted throughout the 1950s, but a fundamental normative shift occurred during that period. In 1960 the United Nations adopted the Declaration on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples, a document that declared that “subjection of peoples to alien subjugation, domination and exploitation constitutes a denial of fundamental human rights.”Footnote ¹¹⁹ But where in 1952 most Western states voted en mass against Resolution 637 (A), many now voted in support of the Declaration, and the remainder (including Australia, Belgium, France, Portugal, Spain, Britain, and the United States) abstained, unwilling to pay the reputational costs of opposing a declaration supported by 90 percent of member states.

These events produced a tectonic shift in international legitimacy.Footnote ¹²⁰ By pushing for the strong international codification of individual civil and political rights, and by grafting the right of self-determination to these emergent norms, postcolonial states not only reasserted this right in universal terms, they successfully undermined the institution of empire. In 1945, the imperial powers were greatly weakened, but instead of abandoning their empires, they considered them central to political and economic recovery. While the UN Charter gave gestural support to an amorphous “principle” of self-determination, it established a trusteeship system that licensed continued imperial tutelage. By 1960, however, postcolonial states had successfully rehabilitated the previously discredited right to self-determination, redefining it as essential if the newly codified human rights of colonial peoples were to be respected.Footnote ¹²¹ From this point onward, empire became an internationally illegitimate institutional form, a “crime” as UN Resolution 3103 declared in 1973. This “external” delegitimation simultaneously empowered colonial peoples in their struggles with particular imperial powers; placed a moral burden on all imperial powers to hasten decolonization while discrediting “Algerian” style strategies of forcible retention; aided metropolitan opponents of empire; and licensed a UN role in negotiating decolonization. In fifteen years, empire as a system of imperative coordination had collapsed, and in the decade following the 1960 declaration, forty-five colonies gained sovereign independence.